The Final Cut (A Brit in the FBI 1)

“Is that all?”

“No. I want to be there when you unite the three stones. I want to see the legend come alive before my eyes.”

She heard his breath catch, but when he spoke, his tone was cool. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Saleem Singh Lanighan, son of Robert Lanighan, grandson of Alastair Lanighan. Four generations back, your great-great-grandmother lay with the son of the last Lion of Punjab and got pregnant. She passed the child off as the son of her husband, but her maid knew the truth, and she talked.”

“You simply recount the scandal the British rags have sensationalized.”

She continued, her voice calm and slow. “Blood runs true, Saleem. Unless I am totally mistaken, you already have one-third of the great stone, the largest piece, kept hidden by the males in your family for hundreds of years. I have another third, the Koh-i-Noor. May I assume you hired another thief to steal the last third of the diamond from that piece of rotted horsemeat known as Andrei Anatoly?”

He didn’t answer.

“I thought so. You should have hired me to steal both parts of the diamond, but you didn’t. You hired Mulvaney. And then what did you do? You repaid him with treachery. Of course you always planned to betray me as well. You’ve already proved that.

“You are beneath contempt, Saleem. Your father would be disgusted at what he spawned.”

He held silent.

“As I said, I want to see you unite the three stones.”

Saleem said, “I do not know what you’re talking about.”

She said,

“He who owns this diamond will own the world,

but will also know all its misfortunes.

Only God, or a woman, can wear it with impunity.

“That is the curse passed down, the curse all know, but it isn’t the end to it, is it, Saleem?” And she softly spoke the two sentences he thought he was the only living person to know.

“When Krishna’s stone is unbroken again,

the hand which holds it becomes whole.

Wash the Mountain of Light in blood,

so we will know rebirth and rejoice.”

“How do you know my family’s legend, Kitsune?”

She laughed softly. “I told you when we first met I knew everything about you, Saleem. I meant it. You are not the first Lanighan I’ve done business with who sought the diamonds. You know I worked for your father. I know he must have told you of me—the Fox. He needed the stones as well, and like you, he was running out of time.”

She heard his breathing become hard and fast as he realized the truth.

“He hired me to find the third stone, but he died before I could locate it. He also told me why having the three stones was so important to him.”

Saleem couldn’t take it in. Why hadn’t his father told him what he’d done? He’d told Saleem about the Fox, but not that she was a woman, that she was Kitsune. He tasted his father’s deceit, his betrayal, and it was hot and rancid. His own father, sharing their precious family secret with a common thief. He could do nothing to his father, but he would kill her with his bare hands.

Kitsune said, “You should know by now I am a woman of my word. It is a simple bargain. You will share the moment with me, and I will walk away, with my money, and my friend, and I will be satisfied.”

He realized then that his father had not told her about needing a woman’s blood. Why hadn’t he? He smiled into the phone. Her request was too good to be true. He no longer had need of Colette.

He said, “Meet me at Gagny at midnight, and we will both gain what we want.”

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