Kira

Just landed. On way to the hotel. Message received. I’ll be careful.

Really, this news just made her more certain she’d been smart to leave Virginia and DC. Freya’s reply showed she didn’t share Kira’s assessment.

Freya

They could plan to follow you to Malta. To catch you off guard.

Don’t worry. I am on guard.

You aren’t a Valkyrie, Kira. You need to be extra vigilant.

She frowned at the screen. Everyone was so damn eager to tell her what she couldn’t do. What she wasn’t capable of.

Get kidnapped once and you’re a victim forever.

Maybe she wasn’t being fair, but she was pushing forty and being treated like a child who needed to travel with a guardian. Yes, she’d been immature in high school when she and Freya knew each other, but that had been more than twenty years ago.

Not for the first time, she wondered if Freya had seen the letter she wrote to Apollo back then. Was Kira forever locked in Freya’s mind as the pathetic teenager who was so easily manipulated and fooled?

Again, twenty years had passed. But some things were so bitter, so painful, that she could still feel the sharp bite of betrayal to her young heart.

She was about to tuck away her phone when another message landed.

Freya

I want to send someone to protect you. I might be able to get an operative from Raptor. We also have a few FMV assets in the region.

Kira

I’m fine. This isn’t work for FMV.

But aren’t you looking into your dad’s work hunting down missing WWII art?

Maybe. If I get lucky.

Let me send someone.

Anyone you send will just get in the way. People won’t talk to me if I’ve got a bodyguard hanging around.

What about a client? Someone interested in Maltese art. Or a collector of some kind. If you’re facilitating a deal, you could get better access to sellers.

That might work, but we’d need time to set up. Maybe next week we can try that if I’m getting nowhere.

At least tell me what meetings and events you’ve lined up. I can vet the people you’re meeting.

The extra vetting would be useful. Kira had done what she could ahead of time, but she’d have more to go on now that she was here.

Tomorrow evening, I’m attending a private reception at an art gallery where my father was a consultant and client.

She gave the name of the gallery, then closed the conversation with Freya and moved on to the last unread message, this one from her step-cousin who lived in Germany but would be arriving in Valletta tomorrow, in time to attend the reception with her.

In all the years her father had been traveling to Europe, he’d never mentioned relatives from his stepfather’s family. Just his parents’ extended families. The cousin’s father had been stepbrother to Kira’s dad, but the two hadn’t grown up together. Conrad Hanson’s widowed mother—Kira’s grandmother, whom she’d never met—had remarried when he was in his twenties.

Still, it was odd that he kept in regular touch with his deceased stepfather’s family but never mentioned them. He had far too many secrets. Just about the only thing she knew for certain was he’d been born in Pennsylvania in 1951. Because it was on his passport.

Chapter Eleven

Three months ago

Virginia

The day after her father’s sudden death—after he’d shown all signs of being on the mend—Kira finally stopped crying long enough to face the legal tasks that were bound to get worse the longer she put them off. She entered his study, carefully avoiding looking at the recliner that faced the hearth where she’d found him the day before. Instead, she grabbed the key to the fire safe from her dad’s desk drawer.

She knelt in front of the credenza and opened the cabinet, then pulled out the sturdy rolling tray that held the small fireproof box. A twist of the key and lift of the lid, and there were the files containing the house title, last will and testament, and other documents that made up his legal existence.

The folder marked “passports” brought envy, and a hint of anger. He’d lived his life freely, while Kira had been restrained even after her mother’s death. She remembered the argument two years before, when she demanded he help her get a copy of her birth certificate. Her mother was dead. Who would be hurt now?

But he’d denied her. Said it was impossible. She suspected he was protecting himself—as if somehow, her traveling would harm him. But he traveled freely, so how could that be the case?

Now she reached into the file and found four well-used passports covering the last four decades of his life. She flipped through the most recent one. Stamps for foreign countries were few—she suspected many countries just scanned the documents these days and didn’t bother with a stamp—but there were stamps for Malta. Several of them.

She knew he’d been to Malta, but had no idea he’d gone there that often. He’d always said Germany was his destination.

She pulled out the other passports and found the same thing, but the older books also had stamps for other European countries. The UK, Germany, Spain, France, Italy. Older still, she found West German stamps. The former Yugoslavia. Poland. And Malta. Nine times over ten years. Seven more trips in the oldest book.

She counted twenty-three trips in thirty-eight years. Kira would turn forty in August.

Why had he rarely spoken of Malta, the country he’d visited most in her lifetime?

Loose in the safe was a stack of envelopes with Maltese postmarks, letters sent to her father at an address in Malta. It wasn’t a hotel; it was a residence in Birgu.

She was back to wondering if he had another family. A wife. Children. Did Kira have half siblings? But how was that possible when he spent most of his time in the US?

Around her tenth birthday, they’d moved to the town where she would eventually graduate high school. Her father had taken a job at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. The job forced him to limit his travels to the summertime, when he wasn’t teaching. He mostly taught art history, but his expertise was also in the Cold War politics of a divided Germany. Kira had sat in on some of those lectures when she was an undergrad at the same school, and he gave a fascinating and very personal account of what it was like to be a German-American living in the BRD—Bundesrepublik Deutschland, better known as West Germany to Americans—in the final decade of the Cold War.

Of course, even the use of BRD as the abbreviated name was controversial, because nothing at that time was without strife or political implications in a divided Germany, but that was why her father used the abbreviation in his teaching. He’d been living there, doing historic research, in what would become an historic time.

It was where he’d met her mother, according to them both, but they’d never described their courtship, and later, she realized that, given her mother’s Russian background, there was a reasonable chance her father had access to East Germany—aka Deutsche Demokratische Republik, abbreviated DDR.

With his death, how Conrad Hanson had managed to enter DDR—what must have been several times—and help her mother escape was destined to remain a mystery.

She stared down at the letters. Eighteen of them. The first was dated around the time of unification, the last was postmarked mid-January. It had been sent ten days before her father’s stroke.

He must’ve hidden these somewhere in the house, because when he first went to the hospital, she’d gone through the fireproof safe, looking for medical power of attorney, and these letters hadn’t been here then.