A Triple Thriller Fest (99 page)

Dmitri snarled something in Russian and the guard went limp. Dmitri had a knife in his hands. Tess hadn’t known he was armed.

She fumbled through the man’s pockets but only came up with a cell phone. “Where’s your gun?”

“In my cabin,” he said. “Down below, but it’s no good, they’ll be back any minute. They’ll kill you.”

“You’re lying,” she said. “We saw them fly off five minutes ago. Get up, take us inside. Try anything and my friend will shove a knife through your kidney.” She switched from English to French in hopes that Borisenko’s man wouldn’t understand. “Lars, go for the boat, we’ll get the first box.”

“I’m stronger, let me help with the boxes.”

She hesitated, then nodded and turned to Dmitri. “Give Lars the knife, go get the boat.”

After Dmitri disappeared, Lars and Tess led the guard into the upper cabin. There was a bar and a lounge with an enormous plasma television mounted on one wall, and a staircase that led below. “Take us to the goods. You know what I’m talking about.”

Lars waved the knife to emphasize the point.

“You’re idiots if you think you’re going to get away with this,” the man said, but he pointed to the stairs.

She went down first, followed by Borisenko’s man and then Lars. When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she stopped, drew short. There was a woman in the room.

She sat on a couch with her legs stretched out, speaking intensely in Russian into a cell phone. The woman looked up and met Tess’s eyes, then blinked with surprise. It was Yekatarina Borisenko.

The bodyguard turned suddenly on his heel and grabbed Lars’s wrist, then slammed his fist into the man’s stomach. Lars tumbled the last couple of stairs and sprawled on the carpet. Too late, Tess recovered from her surprise. The bodyguard had the knife.

”
Nyet!”
Yekatarina snapped, followed by a string of words in Russian. She stood up, flipped the phone closed. The bodyguard took a step back, asked his own question, before he nodded, then went upstairs with Lars’s knife. Lars climbed slowly to his feet, a grimace on his face and hand clenched at his gut.

“Tess Burgess?” Yekatarina said. “What are you doing here? Wait, are you supposed to be this Tunisian woman, Sabine? The one with the Roman mosaics, it is you, isn’t it?” She laughed. “Too bad I was sick last night, all those damn octopus, I was going to join you for dinner. That would have been a fun surprise for the both of us.”

“Where is it?” Tess asked. “Where did he hide it?”

Yekatarina walked to the wall, where she stood by an intercom. “My man went for his gun, so don’t bother trying anything.” She shook her head. “I told Sasha someone knew he had the Mesopotamian artifacts. Never dreamed it was you.”

“They’re stolen, you know that.”

“Not by us, they weren’t. Besides, why do you care?”

“If you don’t understand already,” Tess said, “then there’s no way I can explain it to you.”

“Sasha will be disappointed that the mosaics weren’t real. He’s on a Roman kick at the moment.” A smile. “And by Peter’s girlfriend, too, that will shock the hell out him. Only I heard that you broke up with Peter, is that true?”

Yekatarina had her own history with Peter, some years back. They’d met on some oil project in the Gulf. The breakup, as much as Tess could piece together, was nasty. Yekatarina wasn’t all that beautiful, but she had no problems snaring powerful men, and she’d shortly connected with Peter’s slimy friend, Alexander Borisenko, the Russian Oil Minister.

“Yeah, we broke up.”

“Sorry to hear it,” she said, sounding not sorry at all. “Come upstairs, I’ll show you the goods. They’re not down here.”

Lars leaned forward, “Tess, let’s get out of here.”

“You can show us some other time,” she said to Yekatarina. “And can tell your husband that he’s a bastard.”

“You can tell him yourself. That sounds like his helicopter.”

Tess and Lars hurried upstairs and onto the deck to see a helicopter landing on the helipad. She thought about running, but the bodyguard stood next to the gangplank with his hand tucked into his jacket. He flashed an unpleasant smile.

Dmitri idled in the fishing boat below the yacht, just off the front deck. He gave Tess and Lars a look of alarm. She tried to wave him off, but he didn’t move.
Get out of here, you idiot.

The helicopter chopped to a halt. Borisenko and two more bodyguards stepped out and approached, together with a handful of other staff, who entered a door on the back deck. Some carried bags, one man hefted a fish by the tail.

Yekatarina had followed Tess and Lars to the deck and now she met Borisenko for a passionate kiss. You’d never know they were married, or that she was not particularly beautiful. Guys like Borisenko usually consorted with vacuous models and Valkyrie-like tennis stars.

He spotted Tess and Lars. “Hello, hello.” He held out a meaty, ring-covered hand for Lars to shake. His shirt opened two extra buttons to reveal a tuft of hair. A strong odor of cologne hung around him. Lars took the hand, but passed a look to Tess.

“I see you met my wife. Katenka, did you invite Sabine and Mr. Nilsson for lunch? We got a bonito, and some octopus, come, join us.”

“Unfortunately dear,
Sabine
was just telling me that she was in a hurry to catch the ferry to the mainland. A problem has come up with your mosaics, it would seem.”

“Problem? What kind of problem?”

Tess recovered just as Borisenko fixed her with a frown. “Nothing serious, but I must rush to Tunis,” she said in her affected Arabic accent. Yekatarina gave her a half smile from behind her husband’s shoulder. “The curator at the Bardo is asking an extra twenty thousand dinar, greedy man, so I am afraid I must decline your invitation while I resolve matters.”

While searching North Africa and the Middle East for the looted goods from the Baghdad Museum, she’d discovered a rotten curator who wanted to sell artifacts from the Bardo Museum, in Tunis. She passed his name to the Tunisian government, who arrested the man, but quietly, so as not to harm the museum’s reputation. It had been the perfect cover when she came up with the plan to pose as a Tunisian. She’d used the curator’s name and list of artifacts as bait.

“Pay what you need to,” Borisenko said. “But if he pushes too much, you tell me. I have ways of pushing back.”

“Yes, of course, but I do not think that will be necessary. Salaam. We shall be in touch.” She nodded to Yekatarina. “Salaam.”

To her relief, the bodyguard at the gangplank stepped aside to let them go.

“My god, what just happened?” Lars asked when they were on the gangplank. “Did she really just let us go?”

“Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

Moments later and they were on the fishing boat with Dmitri, who sped away from the yacht and through the harbor with his hat pulled low to hide his face.

They passed beyond the breakwater and followed the curve of the island, south toward Sfax on the Tunisian mainland. The yacht receded in the distance and Tess’s fear subsided even as her frustration grew.

“I hate that man,” Dmitri said after Tess and Lars explained what had happened. “I can’t tell you how much.”

“So frustrating,” Tess said. “So goddamned frustrating. It was right there, on that boat. Why did she have to be there?”

“I don’t understand why she let you go,” Dmitri said. “She’ll tell him soon enough.”

“The faster we get out of here, the better,” Lars said. “We’ll go straight to Sfax, then drive to Tunis and catch the first flight out of here, doesn’t matter where. That’s it for the Damascene then, it’ll disappear into his collection and never be seen again. And the Akkadian King, sorry about that.”

“It’s not over,” Tess said. She pulled her hair back from her face with one hand and held it against the wind. “He’s still got to get the artifacts back to Russia. Until he’s there, we’ve still got a chance.”

“Are you kidding?” Lars asked. “Go back to the States, where you’ll be safe.”

“I can’t walk away now, when we’re so close.” She turned to Dmitri, who knew her better. “You know I can’t.”

“You told me he said something about Marseille,” Dmitri said. “You could wait in La Baux, do your castle thing, while I hang out in Marseille, see if Borisenko shows up.”

After the breakup with Peter, she’d called in her sabbatical year and gone to La Baux to write her next book and build medieval siege engines for the castle museum. Getting out of Manhattan would let her forget Peter and Nick, or so had been the plan. Dmitri was right, it would give her good cover.

“It’s an idea. Lars, can you take another week off work, until we know how this plays out?”

“I could,” Lars said in a skeptical voice. “But why push our luck? If his wife had said something, we’d be octopus bait by now.”

“Come on Lars, be a Viking for me.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means grow a backbone already, will you?”

Chapter Three:

One of the tourists looked wrong. He was the only one watching Tess and not the trebuchet. It made her nervous.

It was two days after the meeting in Tunisia and she was at the castle in La Baux, doing a demonstration. Four sweating men cranked the wheel to lift the trebuchet’s counterweight. She’d had no shortage of volunteers, some pushed forward by wives and children as they feigned reluctance.

”
Plus rapide,
” she said to the sweating men at the wheel, then, in English, “Faster. Remember, anyone on trebuchet duty gets first spoils when the castle is sacked.”

A mixed crowd of tourists—French, Italian, German, Japanese, American—gathered outside the ropes. The sight of the trebuchet arm dipping, the counterweight creaking skyward, drew them, together with Tess in jerkin and breeches, a sword at her side.

Lars was down in the village, waiting to hear from Dmitri in Marseille.

The men finished lifting the counterweight and she ushered them to the other side of the safety rope while family members snapped photos. Others took pictures of Tess.

“You can see what kind of work it would be to mount a full scale attack,” she said. “And your enemy is shooting back, mounting sorties. But if you get this thing going, that six thousand kilo counterweight can batter down the strongest wall, given enough time.”

She spoke easily, confidently, but was unsettled by the man who stood by himself, out of place. He wore a tailored suit and expensive looking shoes. Looked French, not Russian, but that didn’t mean anything. Borisenko could have hired a local to do the job.

“Is everyone ready to fire the trebuchet?” Scattered applause mingled with cheers from the children. “Any ideas how far the stone will fly?”

Answers to her question ranged from a few tens of meters, to over the side of the hill, to the ludicrous: the mountains on the far side of the valley. Hah. It was a siege engine, not a rocket launcher.

“This is the biggest working trebuchet in Europe,” she said. She picked up the rope. “I’d love to smash some real walls, show you what damage we can do, but the people up at the castle don’t like it when we attack their pretty ruins.”

The sun had chased away the chill of a late fall morning at La Baux, Provence. The village was a cluster of houses and steep, narrow roads that grew from a rocky ledge that overlooked the plains to the south. Just above the village, the ruined castle and the museum where Tess demonstrated the trebuchet. Most tourists were helpless to do anything but snap pictures or run camcorders when they first climbed above the village, in an attempt to capture the magic of the place for friends and family back home.

The crowds were half the size they’d been just a few weeks earlier and some of the shops in the village had trimmed their hours to match the shorter days. But the late-season visitors were Tess’s favorites. They were attentive, more likely to be families or small groups, rather than the massive, frantic groups dropped off for 90 minutes from tour busses on their way to the Pont du Gard or the Roman theater at Orange.

“One more question,” Tess said in French. She looked through the crowd, as if at random, before focusing on the suspicious-looking man in the suit. “Sir, do you speak French? English?”

He answered with what sounded like a Texas accent. “English is fine.”

“What else could you fire with a trebuchet instead of stones?” Tess asked.

“Flaming pitch,” he answered without hesitation. “A castle’s interior buildings would be made of wood. Or bodies. Korybut of Lithuania hurled corpses into enemy cities to spread disease. The Turks tried it, too. Or so I read in a book.”

Yeah,
her
book. She had a whole chapter about the incident.

“Very good,” she said and forced herself to look away, make eye contact with others in the crowd. “A big weapon like this is not just about battering down walls, it’s about terrifying an already frightened castle garrison.”

She picked up the rope and shooed them back from the rope barrier.

The tourists stared, leaned forward as she took the rope and gave them one last warning. It wasn’t just her words, but the tension of the machine, cranked into its unstable position and ready for a violent release.

“And a trebuchet could be enormous,” she continued. “Imagine something three times this big. It’d take fifty men and a team of draft horses just to move the machine into place.” A pause for dramatic effect. “Are you ready?”

A few kids shouted in the affirmative. The others leaned forward, stretched the safety rope taught.

As soon as it fired, nobody would care what she had to say. They’d continue to the castle or be off to see Michel and his falcon. Climb the tower, get the view of the Provincial countryside from the edge of the cliff.

Except the tourist who was not a tourist. He’d come for something else.

Tess pulled the rope. The counterweight dropped, the arm punched at the sky. The stone hurled itself into the blue. Camcorders and phone cameras tracked its flight. A collective “ooh” went through the crowd.

The stone landed near the edge of the cliff with an audible crack of stone on stone. The crowd cheered.