I couldn't state that he'd outright lied, but he'd certainly misled me. For starters, his every remark in the past twenty-four hours had seemed to imply that he'd never met Rodo or Galen even as far as this morning, when he'd deciphered the latter's code name and had pointed out how the two might be linked through Charlemagne and the chess set.

This picture of blissful ignorance certainly shifted, once you squinted a bit closer at a few un.o.btrusive facts. Like the fact that Rodo had known right where Nim was staying in D.C., when no one else had, including me. Or the fact that Nim had footed the multimillion-dollar bill for a worthless Colorado ranch purportedly owned by Galen March.

Once you read a bit of that fine print, it might well appear that my uncle had been well acquainted and well before today with everybody here in the room, with the possible exception of Sage Livingston.

Of course, that's only if you a.s.sumed that Sage herself was telling the truth.

'Clearly, we seem to have been protecting the wrong person all along,' said Nim to the room in general, when everyone had been refreshed with refreshments. 'Cat outwitted everyone with that disappearing act of hers, though I've no conception of why. Any ideas?'

'Just as clearly,' Rodo volunteered, 'she didn't trust any of us to protect either her or Alexandra. Why else would she have taken such critical matters into her own hands, as she has done?'

But even as he talked, I knew I couldn't take this for even one teensy second longer. I was all but sure I'd explode.

'Um, I thought none of you had ever met before?' I said sweetly, my eyes all the while shooting daggers at Nim across the room.

'We haven't,' he said, in disgust. 'We were kept apart for a purpose. This was all your mother's idea from the very beginning. I should say, it really began from the moment of your father's death. This is what comes of dealing with a woman who's let her maternal instincts seize control of her mental faculties. She'd had a fine brain before you were born. What a mess.'

Great. Now I was responsible for whatever wild scheme these folks had been up to, while I myself had been kept completely in the dark.

'Perhaps you can explain,' I said to Nim, as I motioned to Galen. 'Are you the owner of Sky Ranch, as Sage says you are? Or is he?'

'Cat asked me to purchase the place,' Nim said. 'A kind of buffer zone from the land speculators, as she explained it. She had someone act as a "front" to deceive the local residents as to our involvement. Though I never knew who, I now a.s.sume that would be Mr March. Apparently, it was Miss Livingston here who helped instrument the sale in privacy.'

Sage? Why would Mother involve her? She hated all the Livingston clan. Though it might explain how Sage had learned who the real owner was, this scenario was making less sense by the moment, even less than inviting them all to her b.l.o.o.d.y birthday party. I felt like screaming.

And there were still a few large chunks missing. But I didn't need to ask: The Potemkin of the Pyrenees was about to volunteer.

'Your mother and I have been friends for years,' Rodo told me. 'I don't believe that she would like me to discuss the precise nature of our relationship here, since she has taken such pains to keep us all apart for so many years. Nonetheless, I shall say that she did request me to employ you, once you'd abandoned that awful CIA place, and she told me she would provide excellent references. In answer to your earlier question, that is all I have known of your uncle here until this moment. I hope this explains everything.'

It did explain one thing very neatly perhaps too neatly. If Nim was right and Mother had been in the driver's seat all this while, if we were in danger, it would certainly make sense to keep the troops apart as she had or at least in the dark, with respect to her overall strategy, that is, if they were being orchestrated from behind the scenes, as in a chess game.

Only, my mother didn't play chess.

But I did.

And I clearly knew one thing better than anyone in this room: There was definitely a game going on. But somebody other than my mother was calling the shots. It was my job to find out who.

So while 'the group' carried on about my missing mother, trying to put the pieces together so they could unravel her motives and modus, I privately did a bit of unraveling of my own.

I started by revisiting that tidy packet where everything had been wrapped up so neatly. A group of people who'd never met, who had now discovered their common interests here at the Four Seasons. They'd all been called upon by a woman who was now conveniently missing to render services, purchase land, employ her daughter, and act as a 'front.' And that tied the last knot in the parcel.

I stood up and walked over to Sage Livingston. Everyone stopped speaking and turned toward me.

'I figured it out,' I told Sage. 'I don't know what took me so long. Maybe because my boss, Mr Boujaron here, led me astray by telling me I played a different role than I actually do. But a new Game has definitely begun. And I've realized that everyone my mother invited to her party is a player, including all of us here in this room. But we aren't all on the same side, are we? For instance, I think your mother, Rosemary, is the one who has started this Game again. And despite the fact that Rodo said I was, I think she's the White Queen-'

Rodo cut me off. 'I said the people at that dinner believed you were,' he corrected me. 'And how could Madame Livingston believe that you are something if, as you've just maintained to us, she is that same something herself?'

'It must be,' I a.s.sured him. 'The Livingstons moved to Redlands on the Plateau just after my father's death, when they learned that we were settling there ourselves. Because Rosemary had discovered who my mother really was-'

'No, you're mistaken,' said Sage. 'We did know who you were as soon as you moved there that's why Mother asked me to befriend you. But we lived there first. Rosemary a.s.sumed you'd come to Colorado for that express purpose because we were there. After all, as you've just learned, it was your mother who secretly arranged to buy land ab.u.t.ting our property.'

This didn't make sense. That uncomfortable feeling was creeping up once more.

'Why would my mother do that?' I said. 'And why did your mother ask you to befriend me?'

Sage looked at me with an expression somewhere between disdain and complete astonishment at my ignorance.

'Just as Rodolfo Boujaron has told you,' she said. 'Mother has always believed you would be the new White Queen. With your father dead, she hoped she might penetrate the shield at last, break down the defenses. As I said, she knew from the first instant who your mother was, what role she played. And more important, she knew what your mother had done.'

The feeling had grabbed me by the nape of the neck, like someone yanking me back from the cliff off of which I was about to step. But I couldn't help it. I had to know.

'What had my mother done?' I asked her.

Sage glanced at the others, who seemed just as amazed at the course this conversation was taking as I.

'I thought you all must know,' she said. 'Cat Velis killed my grandfather.'

The Question.

Questions are what matters. Questions, and discovering the right ones, are the key to staying on course... The wave of information threatens to obscure strategy, to drown it in details and numbers, calculation and a.n.a.lysis, reaction and tactics. To have strong tactics we must have strong strategy on one side and accurate calculation on the other. Both require seeing into the future.

Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess.

I could see why intelligence agencies and spy rings might have a few problems trying to sort out wheat from chaff not to mention fact from fiction. I felt like I'd just stepped through the mirror into the looking-gla.s.s universe and found that everyone here was walking around on his hands.

Sage Livingston, my familiar nemesis ever since our dark grammar school days, had just informed me that her mother, Rosemary, had 'sicced' her on me from day one. And why? In order to retaliate against my mother for a highly unlikely homicide and to 'plant' someone like me a purported White Team player from birth within the evil empire that the Black Team had constructed practically at the Livingstons' front door.

Needless to say, I had a few problems sifting through the mythological debris that seemed to be littering this scenario.

Most obvious among these droppings was that my mother, a born-again recluse, had never, that I'd witnessed or even heard tell of, had truck with any of the Livingston clan in the whole ten years of her residence in Colorado.

So how could she have been pursuing them across the board? Far from it.

And as for encouraging daughterly friendships, it seemed to me that would be more of Rosemary's bailiwick. Mother had always disliked Sage just as much I did.

But the biggest drawback to her story was the one with which my uncle was about to take exception. He immediately confronted Sage on her last remark.

'What on earth could possibly bring you to the conclusion that Cat Velis killed your grandfather? She wouldn't harm a fly,' Nim snorted with disdain. 'I've known Cat since before Alexandra's birth, even since before her marriage! This is the first I've ever heard of such a preposterous presumption.'

My sentiments precisely. And Galen and Rodo seemed equally dumbstruck by the notion. We all looked at Sage.

For the first time that I'd ever seen her in the presence of a nearly all-male audience, she seemed at a loss for words, sitting there primly on her satin brocade chair, still toying with that silly diamond tennis bracelet. I noticed it had a little racquet dangling from it, outlined in emeralds. I mean, really.

When it became clear that she would make no reply, Rodo said, 'But I am sure that Mademoiselle Sage Livingston did not mean to suggest that Alexandra's mother had harmed anyone on purpose? If such a thing did occur, it was surely an accident or a grave misfortune?'

'Perhaps I've said too much,' Sage admitted. 'I'm really only a messenger, and the wrong one at that, it seems. After all, as you've just explained, a new Game has begun with new players. That's why my parents had me help Galen try to find Cat when she went missing and why we came here to D.C. to meet with Alexandra. They were so certain that all of you here understood the situation, that you knew about Cat Velis's past actions, that you opposed her plans most especially Alexandra. After all, everyone knows they've not spoken in years. But now it appears we must have been mistaken...'

Sage let her words drift away as she looked around at all of us helplessly. I'd like to say that I'd never seen her look so vulnerable, but the truth is I'd never suspected that the 'V-word' even existed in Sage's vocabulary. It was more likely a ruse. And though I resented her inference about my relationship with my mother, I guess, as she said, it wasn't exactly a secret to anyone.

But more important, if a new Game had begun, as everyone agreed, and if Sage's mother wasn't the new White Queen and I wasn't either then who was it who'd started this new ball rolling? And where was it headed?

I thought it was time to reinsert a few dangling participles.

'I think what Rodo and my uncle were trying to find out,' I told her, 'was why Rosemary would think my mother responsible for her own father's death, accidental or not. When or where could something like that have happened? After all, Cat doesn't get around much; she's led a pretty insular life-'

'But she got around to Ain Ka'abah,' Sage snapped, through narrowed lips.

Come again?

She added, 'It's a town in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria. That's where my mother and yours first met, at the mountain home of my grandfather. But it was at his home at La Madrague, a seaport on the Mediterranean coast not far from Algiers, where she killed him.'

The room was so hushed it seemed to have been smothered. You could have heard a pin drop on the thick carpeting. I felt my horror deepening and congealing, as if I were being sucked down to the bottom of a well filled with mola.s.ses.

I knew this story, of course, and I recalled exactly where and from whom I'd heard it: from Lily Rad in Colorado. She'd told us that she herself was there in Algeria with my mother. Lily was kidnapped at that seaport by a guy who was after those pieces that the girls had retrieved from the desert. Lily had referred to him as the Old Man of the Mountain.

She'd told us he was the White King!

But your mother, Lily had gone on to recount, brought reinforcements to my rescue, and coshed him over the head with her heavy satchel of chess pieces.

Was that how it might have happened? Could my mother have killed this man? Could Rosemary Livingston's father really have been the White King?

But there was something else: something about the fellow's name, too, which suddenly seemed important, something that had to do with the events of these past few days. I racked my brain to recall it, but my thoughts were interrupted.

'El-Marad,' said the liquid voice that I could never mistake. It was coming from near the door. 'That was the name short for Nimrod, so I've been told the king of Babylon who built the Tower of Babel.'

There, in the open door of my uncle's suite, stood Nokomis Key.

She was looking directly at me.

'Hope you got my note,' she told me. 'You're a hard babe to find. And believe me, toots, I've really been looking.'

She came over and grasped me by the arms to pull me up. As she moved us both, double-time, toward the open doorway, she whispered in my ear, 'We've gotta blow this pop stand, and fast, before they figure out who I am.'

'We've already guessed who you are,' Sage called after her.

She must have satellites for ears, I thought.

But then came another voice Galen March, who'd hardly spoken a word all this time. 'Alexandra, please stop. Both of you,' he said with a real sense of urgency. 'You mustn't leave yet. Don't you see? Nokomis Key is the new White Queen.'

'Good lawdy, Miss Clawdy!' said Key, as she shoved me through the door.

Once outside in the corridor, before the others could react, she'd yanked the door shut and wedged a bit of metal the size of a credit card into the lock. Tossing her yard-long ma.s.s of black satin hair over her shoulder, she turned to me with a grin. 'That oughta hold 'em till the rescue posse shows up,' she said.

Key knew all the ins and outs of hotels; she had worked her way through college as a sometime chambermaid and porter. But right now she seemed to have nothing but 'Out' on her mind. She was motoring me toward the fire escape stairway, puffing like a choo-choo train.

But in my mind, I was still back inside that suite, almost reeling with confusion. What had Galen meant?

'Where are you taking me?' I said, attempting unsuccessfully to halt her momentum by digging in my heels.

'I thought that was supposed to be your motto "Theirs not to reason why"?' she quipped. 'Just trust me and keep moving. You'll be thrilled that I bailed you out.'

'Wherever it is,' I said, as she shoved me into the stairwell, 'I've only got the clothes on my back. We just left my backpack locked in that room with all my money, my driver's license-'

'We'll get you new ones,' she told me. 'Where we're going, babe, you're gonna require new camouflage, anyway. Don't you get it? Bad folks are lookin' for you, gal.'

She'd clattered me down the few more flights of steps to the lobby. Before opening the door, though, she turned to me for an instant.

'Just ignore that White Queen bit of Galen March's,' she said, reading my mind. 'As far as I'm concerned, Galen's just another "spy in the ointment." The guy has a major crush on me. He'd say anything to get my attention.'

She might not be far from the truth there, I thought, given the excessive attention Galen had paid her at that birthday dinner. But all this did little to address the immediate problem.

I had just left a roomful of people locked upstairs, who'd lured me there and then lied to me in a variety of colorful ways, while tossing disclaimers at one another's stories stories, I might add, that all appeared to be large souffles of inflated mythology, spa.r.s.ely sprinkled with a cherry-picking of facts.

Then, in waltzes Key Almighty, turning everything topsy-turvy once more by high-handedly kidnapping me and jamming the door. If my previous abductors hadn't already managed to escape through the ministrations of my uncle's legendary ingenuity, then they could surely have phoned hotel security by now to let them out. They might be hot on our trail at this very moment.

That raised the even more immediate problem.

Was there n.o.body I could trust?

I pushed past Key and slammed one hand flat against the storm door to the lobby, while I grabbed the handle and held it firm with my other.

'We're going nowhere until you answer some questions,' I informed her. 'Why the dramatic surprise entrance to my uncle's suite? What are you doing here, anyway? If you're not a key player, what did you mean up there when you said "Who I am?" I need answers. I'm afraid that I really must insist.'

Key shrugged and smiled. 'And I'm afraid that this is a command performance,' she told me. 'You see, we've been invited to pay a visit to the Queen of Cats.'

'Road trip!' said Key as we drove past the former Thirty-fourth Street residence of her namesake, Francis Scott Key. 'Just like the old days!'

After she'd hung a left, in her rented Jeep Cherokee, onto the bridge also bearing his name, she added, 'Do you have even the vaguest clue how very difficult it has been to orchestrate and to launch this whole escape of yours?'

'Escape? Looks more like an abduction from where I sit,' I commented drily. 'Was all this really necessary? And have you really found my mother?'

'I never lost her,' said Key with a private smile. 'Who else did you imagine helped her set up that dinner party for her birthday? After all, she couldn't have done all of that all by herself. "No woman is an island," as they say.'

Of course! I knew someone must have helped Mother. At the very least, just to effect that difficult exit.

I'd snapped my head sideways to stare at Key, awaiting more detail. But she was concentrating on the road, still wearing that enigmatic smirk.

'I'll explain everything when we're on our way,' she added. 'We have plenty of time, a few hours at least, to reach our destination. We're taking the scenic route since, naturally, we're being followed.'

I wanted to check in my side mirror, but I decided to take her word for it. We were on the George Washington Parkway now, headed south toward the airport. And though I desperately needed to hear what Key had to tell me about Mother and that party, there was just one thing first.

'If someone's tailing us, what about those listening devices they can point at your car as you drive?' I mentioned. 'Can't they hear everything we say?'