Earlier, she’d done a quick reconnaissance of the castle’s rooms, based on her Internet research. She’d selected the study in the oldest part of the castle for two reasons. One, like Ian had said, it was off-limits. Whoever owned or ran the castle (probably England’s National Trust) had roped that section off to discourage guests from traipsing into the area.
And, second, the room boasted a secret passageway.
In truth, that wasn’t uncommon in the older, historic households throughout Great Britain. The country had a long, bloody history filled with political intrigue and religious persecution. Priest holes and secret passageways had come in handy for many of England’s aristocrats. And, if anything went wrong, it might come in handy for her.
Kendra approached the velvet rope that cordoned off the private area, shooting a furtive glance around before ducking under it. Despite her best efforts, her heart began to race as she moved down the corridor.
This far away from the party, the castle was silent. The only noise was the whisper of her skirt and muffled footsteps as she walked the length of the burgundy and brown hall runner. The rug looked old—but then again, so did everything else in the castle. Still, she knew this section was older by centuries. If a castle had a heart, this would be it. These cold stone walls had been silent witnesses to both birth and bloodshed. It was a moody thought for a moody atmosphere. Adding to it were wall sconces, carefully spaced and cleverly designed to look like flickering candles, making shadows leap and dance.
Kendra suppressed a shiver. Even though she told herself that she was being fanciful, she was still relieved when she arrived at the door of the study. It had been locked earlier, and she’d made sure that she’d locked it again when she left the room two hours ago. Better to be safe than sorry.
Her heart began to hammer in her chest, so loud that the uneasy staccato filled her eardrums, but her hands were steady as she reached into her purse and withdrew two thin wires. Lock-picking wasn’t a skill one learned at Quantico, but she’d studied it when she’d tried to get into the head of a perp who’d been entering homes in the middle of the night.
She held her breath as she worked the wires, then let it out in a rush of satisfaction as the tumblers fell into place. It had taken less than a minute, much less time than when she’d first entered the room. She dropped the wires back into her bag and slipped through the door, switching on the lights—more cleverly designed wall sconces.
She looked around. Nothing had changed, she thought. No one had entered this room since she’d been there earlier. The claret, in its cut crystal decanter, was exactly where she’d placed it on the elegant sideboard.
It was an interesting room. Octagonal in shape, it had high walls paneled in mahogany and papered in green silk, the same dark hue as the velvet-upholstered furnishings around the room. There was a fireplace here, too, as big as the one in the servant’s hall, but the mantelpiece was more ornate, carved in a neoclassical design. Above it was an elaborately framed oil painting depicting a woman and child dressed in what looked to be late eighteenth-century garb. On the opposite wall were Grecian fitted bookcases, flanked by two breast-high Chinese vases with a blue dragon motif against a pearly white background. The mahogany desk—Chippendale, if she wasn’t mistaken—was positioned in front of an enormous medieval-looking tapestry embroidered with a hunting scene. Behind the material, cunningly hidden in the wall’s paneling, was a door.
She’d studied it earlier, had found the mechanism that sprang the lock. Behind the door was a claustrophobic space and stone stairs that spiraled upward. The steps led to a large room with enormous mullion-paned windows on the north and east wall. She didn’t know what the space had been used for, because it was empty now, but there was another door that opened to the hallway not far from the servant’s stairs that could take her all the way down to the ground level.
She’d take those stairs before anyone noticed Sir Jeremy had disappeared. Of course, he might not even be discovered until morning, and she’d be on the plane to Rome by then.
Kendra pulled her thoughts back to the present, and went to work. Opening her purse, she slipped on latex gloves and withdrew a small jar of face cream. Briskly, she unscrewed the lid, and fished in the cream for the small plastic packet, which contained exactly one gram of white powder.
Her heart thumped now for an entirely different reason. Her palms, inside the latex gloves, began to sweat. She wanted to be calm, but there was something terrifying about handling one of the most deadly toxins known to mankind. Ricin. One fourth of a teaspoon, and it could wipe out a population of 36,000.
She didn’t want to think what it would do to one man.
Cautiously, Kendra tapped out the white powder into the Waterford crystal wineglass she’d brought. Her hands trembled only slightly as she lifted the decanter and poured the claret into the glass. In the soft light, it gleamed like blood.