Alice stared down into her glass of water. "You never mentioned any of this. No letters, emails, phone calls. Nothing."
"No. That was half the point of going out West, wasn't it? You kept telling me that I had to stand on my own two feet. Learn to fight my own battles, without you and the House to back me up. The all-powerful Haskell Witch can't ever rely on anyone but herself."
"Jeezum. Nothing says you can't ask for help. Can't accept help when it comes along. I've got Kate . . ."
Time to break this off before it dissolved into tears and words regretted in the morning. "Speaking of Kate, what are we supposed to be plotting behind her back?"
Alice shook herself and then looked up from her glass. "Plots? Nothing dark and sinister, girl. I just want you to comb through those papers for any mention of a stone circle up on Dyers Ridge. Any mention at all. That thing is old and powerful and tied somehow to Kate. It isn't Naskeag — its roots have to be Welsh, damn near as old as the Morgans in this land. We've got to find out more about it. Ask your father to help, if he isn't too busy stealing something from a museum in Bangkok. Ask Gary."
Gary Morgan, the half-brother she'd always thought was a cousin until Alice sorted out some of the local tangles for her. Ben Morgan had the morals of a tomcat. Damned awkward that the only boy in three townships who caught her fancy turned out to be her half-brother. Cousin wouldn't have been so bad. Half-brother was . . . tacky.
But maybe her hormones were just missing Kenny Grayeyes. Damn few Haskell women had much use for celibacy.
Caroline grabbed her wandering thoughts by the scruff of the neck. Back to business. "Ummm. Aunt Alice, you still haven't told me what this is all about. What the hell did you and Aunt Kate get into?"
"Eh? Girl, you've got to work on your mind-reading skills if you're ever going to amount to something as a witch. We've got a problem. A big problem."
Oh, shit.
Chapter Four
Ben Morgan double-checked a computer screen, reached out one gloved finger to tap "Enter" and send his last message, waited until the transmitter LED quit blinking and the screen confirmed reception, and then pulled CDs from three computers. One by one he fed the disks into a heavy-duty shredder, wrinkling his nose at the buzz-saw snarl of the blades and the stink of tortured plastic.
Encryption algorithms and some rather specialized radio control software, the CDs were "one-use" items. To finish his cleanup, he set all three computers to overwrite their deleted files, repetitions that went rather beyond the current NSA standards for secure computing. He flipped his jeweler's loupe down, stared into the bared microcircuitry of a standard UHF ham radio transceiver, and pulled out the jumpers and control board that allowed the synthesizer to transmit on blocked frequencies never intended by the manufacturer. He fed those into the shredder, as well. The machine screeched annoyance at him but did its job.
Then he stood up and stretched. His back and shoulders complained about the morning's work, but he overruled their protests and smiled. Hacking communications satellites could be fun.
And profitable. Alice Haskell now commanded another million bucks, fully laundered and legal, as guardian and trustee for the kids. And Alice wouldn't ask from whence the money came. She knew better. Granted, Ben had started the morning with nearly three times that much on paper, but the wastage served as insurance. Various officials and semi-officials and private bankers and businessmen scattered across twenty countries had a serious reason to keep their own mouths shut. Grease.
But every dollar of that million now owned a paper trail, taxes paid and all. Governments were a pain in the ass. A few generations back, Morgans could just bring home their booty as foreign coin and goods, profits from a trading voyage, and nobody asked questions. Now every government, everywhere, wanted their cut. Call it taxes, call it graft, call it whatever you wanted, they all claimed a monopoly on robbing their citizens and corporations. And they talked to each other.
Damned bureaucrats got in the way of earning a decent dollar. Or stealing one. On the other hand, governments made it possible for an enterprising man to make real money in the import/export business. Declare something illegal and the price for it jumped into the stratosphere, whether you dealt with Shan poppy growers or Guatemalan grave-robbers. And in either case, the middlemen took the lion's share.
Ben grinned again. Make something illegal, and the man who lost it couldn't even call the cops. One major chunk of his morning's work related to a single Mayan "eccentric flint," illegally dug and illegally exported and then stolen and stolen and stolen again.
He stared at the wall, the ancient rough granite curve of the tower called Morgan's Castle, and saw the flint hanging there in his mind's eye, glinting. "Eccentric" didn't even begin to describe it.
God, it was a beautiful thing, ceremonial staff ornament or pole ax or totally unusable knife. Whatever it was. You had to hold it to believe it, as long as a man's forearm and broad as his spread hand, the body a flat openwork no thicker than his thumb and chipped into a delirium of fantastic curves and angles, flake by microscopic flake, the tang thin and sharp as a scalpel, without a single crack or stain or blemish to show the millennia since it had left the artist's hand.
Collectors gibbered and drooled over a piece like that. To be able to hold it and examine it rather than stare at a ghost of the thing locked behind laminated glass in a museum case, feel the contrasting weight and delicacy that stretched the bounds of craft and broke through them into art, turn it in your hands and stare
