Lanighan answered on the first ring.
Kitsune said, “Change of plans. I want to meet at the warehouse in Gagny where you’re holding Mulvaney. Meet me there at midnight. I will bring you the stone, and I will take him out with me.”
He showed no surprise, not that she’d expected him to, because he knew by now she’d been the one to break into his office and found where he’d hidden Mulvaney. A showdown, then, not an exchange. She knew he would try to kill both her and Mulvaney and take the diamond. No doubt in her mind.
He said, “Aren’t you the clever one? No more tricks, Kitsune, or he dies slowly, one piece of him at a time.”
“I want Mulvaney released first, then I will give you the diamond. You must show me proof, Lanighan, that he is alive. Then I want the remainder of my money.”
“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.