The Stolen Read Free Page A

even so, Yojo was nervous as he turned into the lanes of the medieval town.
    The faint drone of a machine made him swing round; a mechanised street cleaner was slowly making its way down the In Gassen. The driver would be wondering what a gypsy was doing right outside one of the most exclusive watch companies in Switzerland. No, he wouldn’t wonder – he would think him a thief. Yojo knew it. He’d lived his whole life trying to stay invisible; sometimes he’d succeeded, but not always. Instinctively, the Kalderash slipped an olive-skinned hand, hardened by decades working gold and copper, into a jacket pocket to touch the amulet his sister Keja had given him. It wasn’t there. Blessed with second sight, she hadn’t wanted him to go, but for once he knew he had to ignore her warnings. Without the amulet he felt particularly vulnerable.
    Ever since he’d visited the records office two days before, he’d had the uncanny impression his shadow had another shadow skipping just behind, breathing behind his breath. He knew this fear. He knew it from the time of the
gadjé
war: the war that had pulled his people into her black mouth, seven hundred thousand of them – seven hundred thousand souls now without a voice.
    â€˜If my time has come, I cannot fight it, it is written,’ he whispered in Romanes. The sentence hung in the light of the setting moon then vanished with his courage. Easy to talk, hard to act – Yojo tried to stop his old heart from beating like that of a frightened stallion.
I am here for her
, he told himself;
she belongs to my people; my father was murdered protecting her
.
    Yojo looked back down the street. The cleaning machine had come closer, the driver obscure behind a cloudy shield of plastic, the brushes whirling madly against the cobblestones.
    He reached up to the panel beside the entrance and traced the logo with his fingers. He knew the clue to finding her lay somewhere inside this building, but where?
In the past, present and future.
The answer seemed to be spun from the very air itself, as if She, the Goddess, had answered him, as if Time itself had begun to collide with Memory.
    A wise gypsy would run now, but he didn’t want to be wise, he wanted to be brave. He’d waited too many years. But the heavy door with its many locks was impenetrable. He needed another way of getting in, a trickster’s way. Just then he heard a slight sound and, before he had a chance to turn, the bullet went cleanly through the side of his head. He fell heavily, the yellow kerchief stained with blood, one arm stretching out, the tattooed number on the inside of his wrist clearly visible.
    The cleaning machine came to a halt and the assassin disembarked casually, whistling as he strolled to the body. He knelt and carefully laced a raven’s wing between the middle finger and the forefinger of the dead gypsy’s left hand. After a few minutes the machine disappeared round a corner. The assassin didn’t even bother to accelerate.
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    By the time Matthias turned off the Rämistrasse and into the quiet backstreets it was seven o’clock and the sky was the dull metallic grey of a winter dawn. Looking forward to losing himself in his research and escaping Liliane’s troubles, he parked his battered Citroën outside the nineteenth-century building that housed the laboratory he’d set up ten years earlier.
    Sanctuary
,
he thought. One would never guess the classic bourgeois Swiss building with red-tiled turrets and large windows contained a research facility and this anonymity was exactly what Matthias wanted, even though setting up the laboratory with its expensive equipment had forced him to become dependent on financing from the family’s company. It was a dependency he loathed, knowing it gave his father control.
    Matthias had staffed the facility with the brightest physics graduates he could find and in ten years the Kronos