The Artifact (26 page)

“Follow me,” Eddie said.

Five men pulled pistols out of their pockets or shoulder holsters, save one man with an AK-47, another a shotgun, the sixth man remaining with the cars. Eddie lead the single- file procession up the furrowed path, his .38 revolver drawn, stepping along the edge of the woods lined with thick boughs of broad pines, stopping several yards ahead of the Peugeot, where the first floor lights of the otherwise darkened farmhouse enabled him to see the silhouette of a presumably armed figure in a second floor window. A slight turn of his head reassured him that Sal Zannelli was running crouched to the back of a peaked roof barn to approach the rear of the helicopter squatting off to its right.

The thin soles of Johnny Shiv’s city shoes were soaked through to his socks as he picked his way through the knee-high brush and towering trees, stepping high over the uneven ground screened by snow covered branches fallen from deciduous trees and needles of conifers, pushing at stiff branches with outstretched arms thirty yards from the access road behind him as he followed the tiny beam of his halogen flashlight.

Johnny froze in mid-step as a second rifle shot split the air, its strobe-like flash illuminating the head and shoulders of the shooter some thirty feet off toward the edge of the woods. He doused his light and slipped off his shoes, stepping gingerly over unseen rocks and tree roots toward the muzzle flash of the rifle. He stood behind the dim shadow of a man kneeling against a tree, his shouldered weapon apparently loaded, sighting down the barrel, his finger inside the trigger guard. Johnny shook his forearm to slide the sharply honed blade into his hand from its resting place strapped to his right arm inside his coat sleeve. He took several careful steps, then a flying leap, knocking away the Iraqi’s trigger finger and slitting his throat in a single motion.

Sammy tensed again when the second shot rang out from the perimeter woods, starting a turn toward Samarri that was met by a quick thrust of the Uzi, the pain in his kidney bending him forward with an involuntary grunt. “If your goon hurts that woman,” he gasped, “I’ll strangle both your scrawny chicken-necks with my bare hands!”

The Iraqi pushed Sammy toward the troopers on the floor and backed a few feet toward the foyer for better coverage of all five captives, waving the Uzi at them menacingly, yelling at Callaghan: “Get up to feet!”

The general had changed from his dress uniform to mufti, a navy turtleneck under a wool shirt of red and black squares and khaki trousers tucked into polished black jump boots. “I have men in the woods,” he said, as he stood. “You won’t get out of here alive.”

The Iraqi’s grin was mirthless, his manner nervous. “As do we. The treasure immediate or woman in helichopper die.”

Callaghan and Sammy stood together, the three soldiers still prone, their pistols holstered, rifles on the rug where they had dropped them.

Callaghan raised his hands in resignation. “OK, OK. Palagi, get the document.”

“Document?” Samarri said.

“It wasn’t a trunk of gold icons,” Callaghan told him wearily. “Just an old papyrus scroll in some ancient language we can’t even figure out. You went to a hell of a lot of trouble for nothing.”

Samarri seemed uncertain. “Get.”

The general nodded to Palagi who moved to a stout gray safe squatting in the corner of the room. He dialed the combination and extracted a battered leather briefcase.

“Give it to him,” Callaghan said.

Samarri hesitated as Palagi extended the case. “Open.”

Palagi unlatched the clasp on the worn leather flap, spreading it open for the Iraqi’s inspection of the contents. Samarri shifted the Uzi from his right to left hand to extract one of the pages as Callaghan raised his voice, “OK?!”

The closet door in the hallway burst open as a tall man with a thick brush mustache and horn rim glasses took a single step to press his M231 port firing rifle against the back of Samarri’s head, simultaneous to Palagi swinging the briefcase at the Uzi, knocking it out of the Arab’s grip.

“Stalemate,” Callaghan said, drawing his .45 automatic, as the others stood and picked up their rifles from the floor.

“The woman will die!” Samarri shouted, then began screaming in Farsi until the mustachioed ex-Sergeant Hector Alvarez bashed his skull with the butt of his rifle, and the Arab crumpled at his feet.

Eddie DiBiasio walked in the front door of the farmhouse, through the foyer and into parlor, Zannelli wheeling Andrea behind him, his snub-nosed revolver pressed to the back of her head, followed by two brawny thugs armed with Glock 19mm automatics. “Put ‘em down, gents. Maybe we aren’t as ruthless as the A-rabs, but you don’t drop the weapons now, my friend with the broad is going to get nervous.”

Eddie had gambled that the rifleman in the second story window would not fire on them while they walked from the helicopter in a tight group led by a bruised Razzaq, with Zannelli pushing the female reporter through the snow . Eddie canted his head at the briefcase Palagi was holding. “Is that it, General?”

Callaghan had dropped his pistol on the floor, after gesturing for his troopers to do the same, shaking his head in apparent resignation. “I’ve been a damned fool with this. We don’t even know what it is, yet. These ragheads killed poor Mitchell and now it doesn’t look too bright for any of us.”

Eddie laughed. “Bullshit, General. You wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if you thought it was worthless.”

“You’re welcome to reach your own conclusions.”

“So the experts you hired to authenticate the so called treasure were really translating a document. It’s not that pile of paper you were gonna pass off on the A-rabs. Where is it?”

Callaghan sounded desperate. “It hasn’t come back yet!”

“I’m going to count to three,” Eddie said, “like the bad guys do in the movies.” Zannelli pressed his pistol onto Andrea’s crown. She jerked her head away angrily, but said nothing.

“One....”

“All right!” Callaghan said. He turned to the stairway leading to the second floor, shouting, “You heard the man, Gerlach. Leave your weapon up there and bring it down.”

A short, swarthy man with broad features came down the stairs in navy watch cap, the bulk of layered flannel shirts cinched beneath a wide leather belt and heavy gray trousers bloused into black leather jump boots. He held an aluminum case in both hands at waist level as though presenting some precious offering to royalty.

“Open it up,” Eddie demanded, handing his weapon to one of the men behind him. Eddie thumbed through the sheaf of typescript, scanning the Arabic paragraphs quickly. “Where’s the translation?”

“It’s incomplete. Still being assembled from the individual segments from the translators.”

“Bullshit,” Eddie told him. “It’s almost over, General. Give us the goods, we take care of the A-rabs, you live happily ever after.”

Palagi returned to the safe, lifted a false bottom and withdrew a second metal case identical to the one Gerlach had brought downstairs. He dialed the combination on the case, popped the latches and handed it to Eddie, who opened the lid and extracted a thick scroll of yellowed parchment in a plastic sleeve and more than one hundred pages of double-spaced English text spiral bound between plastic covers. Eddie frowned at the faded words in the undecipherable script, then flipped through the translation. “How do I know this is really the right goods?”

“You tell me,” Callaghan answered. “Steal an Arab dictionary. Get these clowns,” nodding at Samarri and Razzaq, “to verify it for you.”

“You could have faked these and hidden the real ones anywhere.”

“You want to search the house?”

Eddie seemed torn between doubt at having achieved his objective, and elation at attaining it. The original and translated documents looked real, but how could he tell? And how many ploys to mislead his adversaries could the general create?

Callaghan spread his hands before him in apparent resignation. “Look, you caught us off guard. I don’t know who the hell you are or how you found us, but we were trying to figure out what to do with the damned thing. You think we had the time or resources to create a whole raft of phony documents?”

Eddie seemed skeptical. “You must have read some of the translation, what does it say?”

“We just received the translated document back and got it reassembled. I haven’t had time to give it a thorough read or figure out how to prove its authenticity without getting the entire paleographic community in an uproar. At first glance it seems to be some historical text about the Jewish uprising against the Romans in the first century.”

Eddie slipped the bound translation and ancient scroll in its protective plastic envelope back in the metal case and retrieved his pistol from the thug covering Sammy. He instructed his men to collect the soldiers’ rifles and frisk them all for hidden weapons and cell phones, then sent a man outside to cut the phone lines.

“We’re going to leave you tied up, but not so tight you won’t squirm loose in a couple of hours. Don’t try any heroics, ‘cause we got a pretty long reach. Around the world, even.” He lifted the aluminum case toward Callaghan. “Same goes for this. If you’re pulling my leg.
Capice
?”

They forced the troopers to lie on the floor, then bound their hands and feet with plastic ties, securing Andrea’s wrists to the arms of her wheelchair. Two of the mafia thugs prodded Samarri toward the front entrance, dragging a battered and groaning Razzaq unceremoniously out of the house as Eddie threw a mock salute at Callaghan and closed the door.

The local Mafiosi stood behind the bright patch of rutted drive reflected in the Peugeot’s headlights with Samarri and Razzaq standing warily beside them, four inert forms lying in the trampled snow at their feet, another in the driver’s seat of the Peugeot leaning over the steering wheel.

“Did you get them all?” Eddie asked.

“Seven,” Johnny Shiv answered. “One inna woods, one at the chopper, two covering the back of the house. Plus the two you got inside. This one,” Massoub winced as the Italian jabbed his ribs with his gun barrel, “drove up the road while you was in the house, seems like the leader.” “Claims he called in some locals with the Peugeot and SUV, then flew up from Boston.”

“How convenient,” Eddie said, peering into the rear compartment of the Peugeot where several artillery shells stenciled “ME Nat. Guard” were wired to a car battery and detonator. “Wow! A car bomb!” A few Mafia soldiers took a couple of steps backwards. Eddie turned to Massoub. “How do you activate this friggin’ thing?”

Eddie stood holding the metal case at his side, waiting for the men to return from dragging the Arab corpses up the porch stairs.

“Who wants to do this?” he asked them.

The tall youth grinned as he shrugged out of his long overcoat, handing it to an associate. Eddie walked away toward the Jeep with the document case followed by the rest of his men, one preceding them with a flashlight probing the dark path ahead.

Zannelli turned his tweed cap backwards, walked around to the passenger side of the Peugeot where he opened the door and slid into the front seat beside the wide-eyed Iraqi driver with a stream of blood coagulating down his neck and chest from the gash in his throat. Zannelli started the motor, pulled the automatic transmission in gear, jammed the dead Arab’s foot on the accelerator and rolled out of the car into the snow as the Peugeot gathered speed up the drive toward the farmhouse front porch steps.

Eddie had barely shut the entry door, when Callaghan shouted, “Stay low, get in the cellar!”

Their wrists and ankles bound with plastic ties, the ex-army grunts began crawling on their stomachs, drawing their knees up to push across the parlor rug with their boots, toward the threshold of the doorway that lead to the kitchen.

“What about Andy?” Sammy asked.

Callaghan’s reply was breathless as he crawled toward her wheelchair. “We’ll never get her untied and down to the basement before they set fire to the house or whatever else they have planned. Push her into the pantry.”

“Like hell!” Sammy muttered, as he struggled to his feet with the aid of a chair.

A black man sporting a thick brush mustache burst in the back door, grabbed the knife strapped to his calf on the run, quickly slitting the bonds of his comrades slithering across the kitchen to the door to the basement.

“If those pectorals are more than show,” Geoff told Sammy, “you take her and I’ll get the chair.” He sliced through Sam’s plastic ankle cuffs, then freed Callaghan.

Geoff struggled folding the motorized wheelchair, then gave up, dragging it half-open behind him as he dashed down the cellar steps just as the Peugeot crashed into the front steps of the farmhouse at thirty-five miles an hour with enough momentum to flip it hood over trunk against the front door, skidding through the foyer into the parlor, where the exploding shells leveled the old wooden structure in a burst of flames and flying debris that blew the second story and roof soaring a hundred feet into the night sky.