Pawn’s Gambit (38 page)

Lydia looked at Nick in horror. “No! They
can't
.”

“They will.” Alberich pointed to a jagged rock in the middle of the river, barely visible above the surging water. “That's their rock, and they're already on their way. But there
is
an alternative.”

“What is it?” Lydia asked.

“Forget it,” Nick snarled. “He's just playing another angle.”

“I'm as strong as they are,” Alberich told her. “For another twenty percent I can keep them away from him.”

“I said forget it,” Nick said again. He could see something in the water now, moving toward him just below the surface. “Even if it costs my whole arm, it'll be worth it.”

“Nick, that's insane,” Lydia said urgently. “We're in the middle of nowhere, with our car fifty feet up a hill. You'll bleed to death before we can get you to a hospital.”

And then, abruptly, three slender bodies surged out of the water onto the shore, and six hands grabbed at his clothing.

“Back!” Alberich snapped, leaping to Nick's side and pulling his right arm away from the grasping hands.

“The Ring!” the Rhinemaidens called in unison, their voices thin and ancient and terrifying. One of them shoved her way beneath Alberich's grip; and suddenly there was a tug-of-war going on for Nick's right arm.

“Give us the Ring,” one of the Maidens said, her hand wrapping like a vice around Nick's ankle and tugging him toward the river. “You retain it at your peril.”

“I know,” Nick said. “I want to give it to you—really I do.”

“Only the waters of the Rhine can wash away the curse,” the third Maiden said, her hands on Nick's jacket, her face up close to his. Over the smell of fish he caught a glimpse of sharp barracuda teeth.

“It won't let go,” Nick pleaded.

“It likes him,” Alberich said, pushing the first Maiden's hands off Nick's arm. “Don't be a fool, Nick. I can still save you.”

Nick blinked.
It likes you.
Alberich had said the same thing the first time Nick had set eyes on the Ring.

Only the Ring didn't like Nick. All it liked was his money.

His money.
“Lydia!” he shouted, shaking his left arm free long enough to dig his phone from his pocket. “Here,” he said, tossing it awkwardly toward her.

For a second she fumbled, then caught it in a solid grip. “Who do I call?” she shouted back, flipping it open.

“Phone list one—second entry,” Nick said, stumbling as the third Maiden got a fresh grip on his left arm and pulled him another step closer to the river. The one who'd been tugging on his ankle abandoned that approach and moved instead to Nick's right arm, and now Alberich had two sets of hands and teeth to fight off. “Input trader passcode 352627.”

Lydia nodded and leaned over the phone. The Maiden on Nick's left arm shifted one hand to his belt. He kicked at her legs; it was like kicking a pair of oak saplings. “I'm in,” Lydia called.

“There are five funds listed.” On Nick's right arm, one of the two Maidens opened her mouth and lowered the pointed teeth toward the Ring. Nick cringed, but Alberich slapped the creature's cheek and shoved her back again. “Transfer everything in the first four into the fifth.”

“What are you doing?” Alberich demanded, frowning at Nick in sudden suspicion.

“The Ring doesn't like
me
,” Nick said. “It just likes my money.”

“What?” The dwarf spun toward Lydia. “No!” Abandoning Nick's arm, he charged toward Lydia.

And suddenly Nick was fighting all three Maidens by himself. “Alberich!” he shouted as they dragged him toward the river. “Help me!”

“For what?” the dwarf spat, lunging for the phone. But Lydia was faster, twisting and turning and keeping it out of his reach even as she continued punching in numbers. “Seventy percent of nothing? She's throwing it all away, isn't she?”

“She's transferring it into my charity distribution account,” Nick said. His feet were in the icy water now, the Maiden on his left arm already in up to her knees. “All the Ring cares about is money. And as of right now—”

“You're broke!” Lydia shouted in triumph. “You hear me, Ring? He's broke.”

Spinning away from Lydia, Alberich threw himself back at the Ring. “Get away from the Ring!” he shouted.

“The Ring is ours,” the Maidens chorused in their eerie unison.

“It's mine!” Alberich snarled, grabbing Nick's wrist.

Something cold ran up Nick's back, something having nothing to do with the water swirling around his feet. Lydia was right—with all his money now in the irrevocable trust fund, he had nothing left in the world.

But the Ring still wasn't letting go.

“Is this how you want to die?” Alberich demanded, pulling at Nick's arm with one hand as he shoved at the Maidens with the other. “Drowned in the Rhine by ancient creatures who have nothing left but hate and greed? There's still time for us to make a deal.”

“I don't want a deal,” Nick said. He was knee deep in the river now, the numbingly cold water threatening to cramp his calf muscles. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Lydia doing something with the phone. “I don't want money. All I want—”

And without any warning at all, the Ring came loose.

Nick's arms were still pinioned, but for the moment no one was gripping his hand. With a desperate flick of his wrist, he sent the Ring arcing into the air toward the center of the river and the Rhinemaidens' rock. “No!” Alberich screeched, diving toward it.

But the Maidens were ready. Two of them twisted their arms around the dwarf's neck and dragged him into the river, swimming backwards toward their rock. The third Maiden dived into and then out of the water like a dolphin, reaching up and catching the Ring in midair as it fell. For a moment she held it triumphantly aloft, then turned and disappeared with her sisters beneath the waves.

And then Lydia was at Nick's side, pulling at his now aching arms, helping him back to the shore. “What did you do?” Nick asked, shivering violently. The storm, he noticed, was starting to abate. “How did you get it to let go?”

“You had no money,” she told him, wrapping her arm around his waist and leading him toward the cliff where their car waited. “But you still had the potential to earn it all back.”

He nodded in understanding. “So you fired me.”

“I text-messaged your resignation to Sonnerfeld Thompkins,” she confirmed. “I guess it'll never be Sonnerfeld Thompkins Powell now. I'm sorry.”

Nick blinked a few lingering drops of water from his eyes. “I'm not. Thank you.”

“I'm glad it worked.” She paused. “Nick … your phone list. Number two was your on-line investment number, three and four and five were Sonnerfeld and your office. Number one …”

“Is you,” Nick confirmed with a tired sigh. “You've always been number one. I just forgot that for awhile.”

She squeezed his hand. His aching, ringless,
free
hand. “Come on,” she said softly. “Let's go home.”

Trollbridge

Traffic seemed lighter than usual tonight, Kersh thought from his toll booth as he watched the lines of cars and trucks streaming through the George Washington Bridge's toll plaza.

Or maybe it was that the traffic the past two nights had been unusually heavy. Kersh could never tell about those things. All he knew was that the lines of headlights and tail lights stretched all the way to the horizon, the headlights streaming in from New Jersey, the tail lights returning again from Manhattan.

In the old days, he thought wistfully, every one of those incoming vehicles would have had had to stop at booths like his. An endless stream of people giving Kersh money to cross his bridge.

But those days were long gone. First had come the automated bins where the drivers simply tossed in their coins. Far worse was the abomination called the E-Z Pass. Those drivers still paid, of course, but they paid from their homes, without Kersh or anyone else in the plaza ever seeing or handling that money.

Which meant that sitting as he did in the booth marked E-Z Pass/Cash, Kersh had to endure the frustration of sitting idly while most of the cars drove through without even slowing down.

Sometimes the drivers waved cheerily as they passed. That just made it worse.

A movement at the corner of Kersh's eye snapped him out of his gloomy reverie. A late-model Chevy was slowing down as it approached his booth. An E-Z Pass user being extra cautious? Or someone with actual, real cash?

Kersh focused on the car. The driver had two hundred and eighty dollars on him, he saw, plus another four hundred in traveler's checks. The woman beside him had seventy dollars cash and two hundred in traveler's checks. Tourists, then, on their way to a grand adventure in New York City.

And tourists almost never had E-Z Passes.

Sure enough, the car slowed to a stop, the driver's window sliding down as it did so. “Evening, sir,” Kersh said politely, his heart pounding with anticipation. “Six dollars, please.”

They were a young couple, tired but still showing that spark of ­anticipation as they thought of the museums and plays and nightlife awaiting them. The driver's expression slipped at bit as he caught full sight of Kersh's wide face and shaggy brown hair, but the Midwestern courtesy that came with the Wisconsin tags quickly asserted itself. “Good evening,” he said politely to Kersh as he handed over a ten dollar bill.

“Thank you,” Kersh said, handing over the four singles he'd pulled from his cash drawer as soon as he'd sensed the ten in the other's hand. “Enjoy your visit.”

“Thanks,” the young man said, and drove off.

Kersh gripped the ten-dollar bill, savoring the feel of it between his thick fingers. Then, carefully, he slid it into the proper slot in the drawer. Watching the Wisconsin car as it climbed the long stretch of the bridge, he silently wished the young couple a pleasant trip to the Big Apple.

And wished them safety, as well. Not all the people in New York were friendly to strangers.

Not all the people in New York were even people.

He turned back to the lines of cars streaming across the toll plaza, feeling a sudden surge of loneliness for central Europe and the old wooden bridges where he'd grown up so many centuries ago. Did his fellow trolls still live beneath any of those bridges, he wondered?

Probably not. The deep places of the world had been vanishing for centuries, and with them the beings who had once lived and thrived there. As far as he knew, he was the last troll in this part of the country. Possibly in the entire United States.

Possibly even in the entire world. Someday, he would be gone, too.

But until then, at least he still had a job that allowed him to cling to the old ways.

Another car was slowing down as it approached his booth. The driver was alone, with sixty-eight dollars in his wallet and a twenty ready in his hand. Feeling his heartbeat again speeding up, Kersh pulled a ten and four ones from his cash drawer and waited.

Seventeen more cars stopped and gave Kersh money before his shift ended five hours later. The day-shifter took over the booth, and Kersh headed toward the lot where the toll plaza employees parked their cars. From the lot it was only a short walk down to the Palisades Interstate Park stretching along the Hudson River where he made his home. The park was closed at this hour, of course, but over the years Kersh had found lots of ways to get in and out.

As he walked through the darkness, savoring the smell of trees and dirt and water, he found himself gazing up at the underside of the bridge. For all his trollish tendencies toward self-pity, he
did
realize know how lucky he was to have a bridge he could call his own. Even if he could only work it for a third of each day.

And not just any bridge, but a magnificent bridge, spanning a magnificent river. Kersh smiled, his eyes tracing the familiar lines and angles—

His large, flat feet stumbled to a halt. He knew every inch of that bridge, and there was something different up there tonight. Two somethings, in fact: a pair of cylinders about half the size of the orange barrels the Port Authority used when they needed to block off a lane for repairs.

But these barrels weren't orange, and they were fastened to horizontal girders where no orange barrel had any business being. Had the workers begin some maintenance on his bridge that he hadn't heard about?

And then the wind shifted slightly, and he caught a faint whiff of something he'd smelled once before. It had been two years ago, when the Department of Homeland Security had run a nighttime test on the bridge. A test that had included anti-terrorist agents, bomb-sniffing dogs … and bombs.

For a long minute he stared upward at the barrels. Then, squaring his massive shoulders, he turned and retraced his steps back toward the toll plaza.

The man seated behind the supervisor's desk was middle-aged, with the slightly greasy hair and unshaven cheeks of a man who'd been hauled out of bed at five-thirty in the morning. But for all that, his eyes were bright and alert. “Mr. Kersh,” he said politely as Kersh entered the room. “Please sit down.”

“Thank you,” Kersh said, lowering his bulk cautiously onto the office's single guest chair. It wasn't nearly strong enough to support his weight, but over the years he'd learned how to keep his legs angled backward so that he wasn't so much sitting on the chair as he was squatting over it.

“I'm Special Agent McBride,” the man went on. “I'm investigating the bombs we removed from the bridge an hour ago.”

Kersh felt a lump form in his throat. So they
had
been real bombs. He'd asked several people over the past couple of hours, trying to find out for sure. But no one had been willing or able to tell him. “Is the bridge all right?” he asked.

“It's fine,” McBride assured him. “The bombs weren't very big, and they weren't positioned with any expertise. They would have made a couple of very big bangs, and scared the hell out of a lot of people, but the damage would have been minor.” He raised his eyebrows. “Of course, that's only
relatively
minor,” he amended. “You say you spotted the bombs after your shift?”

“Yes, that's right,” Kersh said, feeling a flow of relief wash through his tension. His beloved bridge was safe.

“May I ask how?” McBride asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You left your booth at five this morning, supposedly heading home,” McBride said, his eyes steady on Kersh's face. “Yet ten minutes later, you were back with the news that you'd seen something under the bridge.” He paused. “In pitch darkness. From a spot you shouldn't have been in if you were actually on your way home.”

Kersh swallowed, his tension suddenly back. “It wasn't really
pitch
dark,” he pointed out carefully. “There are a lot of lights from the bridge and the city. And I've got good eyes.”

“Good enough to pick out two small anomalies among all those girders and braces?”

“I know the bridge,” Kersh said, forcing his voice to stay calm. He wasn't very smart, but it was abundantly clear where Agent McBride was going with this. “I spend a lot of time in the park just looking up at it.”

“Really,” McBride said. “You like bridges, do you?”

“I like them a lot,” Kersh said. “They're kind of in my blood.”

“Mm,” McBride murmured. “Why were you there when you were supposed to be going home?”

Behind his bushy beard, Kersh grimaced. What could he say? That the address he'd given the Port Authority was only a mail drop, and that he actually lived in a hole below the bridge, the way trolls had for centuries? “I like to take a walk along the edge of the park before I head home,” he improvised desperately. “It helps me unwind.”

“Your job requires a lot of unwinding time, then?” McBride asked, not quite sarcastically.

“I just like looking at the bridge,” Kersh said. Even to his own ears, it sounded pretty lame.

“Mm,” McBride said again. “Well, I think that's all I need right now. Thank you for your time.”

“You're welcome,” Kersh said, standing up and backing toward the door. “Will you be finished in time for me to work my shift tonight?”

“You'll need to call in later this afternoon,” McBride told him. “We should know by then when we'll be reopening the bridge.” He hesitated. “And thank you for your warning.”

“You're welcome,” Kersh muttered again, and escaped.

He headed down toward the park, barely even noticing all the Federal agents and Port Authority people milling around, his mood and eyes darkened with grief and loss.

Because it was over. All his years with the bridge. McBride would dig into his background and find out that he didn't live where he said he did. Someone else would notice that the age on his old employment record was all screwy. Someone else would find out that he didn't have a birth certificate or immigration papers, just the Social Security card he'd been issued when the program first began in 1935.

They would probably blame him for the bombs and put him in prison. They might even figure out that he wasn't really human.

But if it was over, it wasn't over quite yet. Maybe there was still time for him to find out who had put those bombs on his beloved bridge.

And he had a pretty good idea where to start looking.

Kersh spent the day wandering through town, visiting shops, historic sites, and parks. He had a big lunch, considered going to a movie so he could get a little sleep, decided instead to continue his walk.

He had company, of a sort, throughout most of the day. McBride had apparently assigned someone to follow him and report on his activities. The man was pretty good at his job, with a bagful of tricks that included a roll-up hat, sunglasses, a reversible jacket, and even a false mustache that he could quickly put on or take off.

Not that any of it helped him any. The man had exactly forty-four dollars in his wallet, which made him very easy for Kersh to pick out of the crowd.

At two o'clock he called his supervisor and was told not to come in, that the bridge wouldn't be opening until the start of morning rush hour. Kersh thanked him, and continuing his wanderings.

An hour after sunset, he slipped away from McBride's agent and returned to his bridge.

Normally, Kersh spent most of his time at the south end of the park, in the hole he'd dug beneath his bridge. Tonight, though, he had another destination in mind. Somewhere along the river, he knew, lived a group of water goblins.

He was nearly to the north end of the park when he finally found their nest, hidden among the stones and grasses at the edge of the water. “Goblins!” he called softly but firmly. “Goblins! I would speak with you.”

For a long minute the only sounds were the soft lapping of the river against its banks and the distant whooshing of the city traffic. Then, with a sudden rippling of the water, a small wizened figure pulled itself up onto the shore. “What do you want, Troll?” he demanded in a grating voice.

“I want to know what you did to my bridge,” Kersh growled back.

“
Your
bridge?” the goblin sneered.

“Yes,
my
bridge,” Kersh said. “You set two bombs to try to destroy it.”

Three more goblins popped up out of the water beside the first. “And if we did?” the first goblin challenged. “What are you going to do about it?”

The four of them took a menacing step toward Kersh. “I don't want any trouble,” Kersh protested, taking a long step backwards. There were more goblins gathering back there, he knew—he'd heard them leave the water, and he could smell their dank odor on the light breeze. If the four in front of him would take just one more step …

“Go away, Troll,” the first goblin demanded as they moved in unison toward Kersh. “Leave us or you will die, wrapped in waterweeds like a newborn.”

“I don't want any trouble,” Kersh said again. He took another step backward.

And threw out an arm behind him to grab the nearest lurking goblin squarely around his thin throat.

The goblin gave a startled gurgle, which changed to a high-pitched squeak as Kersh hauled him off his feet and swung his body across the half dozen other goblins who had thought they were sneaking up on the big intruder. There was a flurry of squeaks, gasps, and curses as bodies went flying into the reeds or rocks or back into the river itself.

Kersh spun back around just as the four original goblins charged. Three of them managed to stop in time; the fourth went flying into the river as Kersh swung his makeshift club across his torso. “But if
you
want trouble,” he added, lowering the squirming goblin to his side, “I can do that, too.”

“Enough,” a new voice rumbled from somewhere inland.

Kersh turned to see a much larger goblin emerge from concealment in the grasses. “You're their king?” Kersh asked as he spotted the crown of water plants entwined around the other's hairless head.