What’s she got Sophia’s brooch for? he thought. What, were they all part of this evil cult Harper had told him about? That was crazy. It didn’t make sense. Her mother’s brooch. Which she’d never worn before the other day. She wouldn’t have loaned it to this other girl, would she? A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck. He heard Harper speak to him as if she were standing at his shoulder: Something is terribly wrong.

“Two hundred, two hundred, I have two hundred from the rear, do I have two hundred and fifty, do I have two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, two-fifty, two-fifty …”

Now the murmur of the crowd was clearly audible. The swanny dame at the phone bank, Storm saw, gave a short, level chop of her hand in the air. The buyer on the line had withdrawn from the fray. It was between the blonde and the weird guy in the white suit now. The blonde’s small hand trembled upward like a leaf on the wind.

“I have two hundred fifty thousand—three hundred,” the auctioneer said instantly. “Three hundred thousand from the gentleman in the rear.”

As the excited murmur of the crowd grew louder, Storm began to move, to edge through the standing buyers, to feel his way behind the backs of the last seats towards the left-hand aisle.

The lights of the toteboard fluttered up front. Three hundred thousand pounds. Four hundred fifty thousand dollars. Nearly seven hundred thousand deutschmarks. Yen beyond imagining. Storm could see the blonde against the wall practically spastic with terrified indecision. Her lips trembling, her eyes filling, her hands hovering before her, unsure.

Then he lost sight of her in the crowd as he moved closer. He heard the auctioneer say, “Three hundred, three hundred, three hundred, three hundred and fif—Four hundred thousand. The bid is four hundred thousand pounds from the gentleman in the rear.”

Jesus, thought Storm, as he started pushing down the aisle. This white-suit guy is a killer. He looked over his shoulder and saw him again. Got a closer look at him now. A killer, no question. Something in the brutally cut facets of his face—something in the weirdly smoky depths of his eyes—made Storm shudder, made his collar go clammy. He turned away, glanced up blindly at the toteboard. Noticed the clock instead: five minutes to eight. Something is terribly wrong.

Making terse excuses, Storm wedged himself between two people blocking the aisle. Squeezed between two more. Pushed out to see the blonde at the wall just ahead of him. He was near enough now to see her nostrils flare in panic as her hand jerked up again like a marionette’s.

“Four hundred fifty thous—Five hundred thousand pounds from the gentleman in the rear.”