The Bari Bones
Page 16
Sam responded by pulling his arms back against their joints, causing the Fang member to squirm with pain.
“Are there more?” Sam’s tone was harsh.
“No,” the man moaned in reply.
“Where’s the manna?” Sam continued.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on! You really think we’re going to believe you after you’ve spent hours at this woman’s side?” Alex called him out.
“It’s the truth. I don’t know where it is,” the man responded; his attention held firm under gunpoint.
Alex swung the back of her gun across his cheek, sending the gangster back into unconsciousness. He was of no use to them anymore. Finally able to let go of the mobster, Sam dropped his body to the floor.
Alex allowed her eyes to scan the room. Sam did the same.
“It’s got to be here somewhere. I can’t imagine she’d have left it upstairs in one of the labs.” Alex thought out loud while she slowly moved through the room.
“My old man always says it takes a thief to catch a thief. We need to get inside her head,” Sam suggested, as he rummaged through the vials on her laboratory table.
“Spare me! She’s a cold-hearted killer who sought nothing but acclaim and money. All she cared about was herself, even to the point where she betrayed and killed her own flesh and blood. It’s despicable.”
Sam closed the door of a small incubator and turned to face Alex.
“All I’m saying is that she was a scientist. Scientists are convergent thinkers as opposed to most people who are divergent, like us.”
Alex was back at Xun’s desk, staring at it in the hope that her eyes would find a clue.
“I have no idea what that even means, Sam. All I know is that she had the manna and that she’d have hidden it somewhere out of sight, considering it formed the cornerstone of her discovery. Wang’s office operated with the dragon. She might have something similar.”
“See, that’s my point exactly,” Sam said.
“What? Sam we don’t have time for this,” Alex snapped.
“Xun and Wang couldn’t have been more different. Polar opposites. He was creative, a divergent thinker while she on the other hand, was analytical, logical, a convergent thinker. She’d have hidden it in a logical place. Like a safe,” Sam explained, from where he now stood over the remains of her body.
“Okay, assuming your theory is correct, where would her safe be? I don’t see anything that looks like a safe or anywhere she’d conceal one. There’s not even one single picture on the wall, nothing.”
Sam sat down at Xun’s computer desk, slowly skimming his eyes over the objects on the surface.
“Unless she hid it in plain sight. How genius?” Sam said triumphantly as his hand moved to a thermos flask directly in front of him. The steel object was cold to the touch.
“She was drinking a cup of tea,” Alex noted, shoving her hands into her pants’ pockets.
“Indeed, but wouldn’t the tea flask be hot? This is as cold as ice.”
“Only one way of finding out.” Alex encouraged Sam, who didn’t hesitate to unscrew the cup off the top.
“Interesting,” Sam remarked as he stared down at the bright red electronic lock on the flask’s lid. “It appears we require a password.”
A grid of twelve small Chinese calligraphy squares glowed against the stark black background of the thermos’ lid. Apart from the asterisk and the hashtag sign, they couldn’t interpret any of the other ten.
“It has to be numbers, right?” Alex asked Sam
“I’d assume so, yes.”
“She was a Fang. Let’s try forty-nine.”
“And how are we supposed to do that when neither of us can read or write Chinese?” Sam said playfully.
Alex fell quiet.
“There! In the school,” she yelled out when a poster on the wall displayed a bilingual number chart.
Sam’s fingers copied the numbers across, pressing the hashtag at the end. Nothing happened. He tried again, this time without the hashtag, but again nothing happened.
Alex started pacing the space behind him.
“She might have had a different number. It was an identifier, perhaps they’re hierarchical and her identifier was different.”
She dashed over to Xun’s body and used a pen to lift the watch away from her wrist. Cursing under her breath when she recognized the identical markings as with the other Fang members, she moved back into position next to Sam.
“We’re missing something,” she said in frustration as she sat next to him on the desk and dug her hands back into her pockets. Her fingers touched the now familiar patch of fabric. Distracted by her efforts to figure out the numeric password she rubbed the fabric between her fingers much like she’d been doing since they found it. While deep in thought it suddenly hit her.
“She was a scientist, right? And how do scientists communicate?”
Sam shrugged his shoulders.
“Through chemical elements, the periodic table and scientific jargon. The manna is a liquid, like water—the water of life— and water is otherwise known as H2O.”
“Yes, but we’re looking for numbers, not alphabetic letters, besides, water doesn’t consist of a single element so it’s not on the periodic table.”
“True, but water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.” She paused, allowing Sam to finish her sentence.
“And those are chemical elements with atomic numbers. Alex you’re a genius.”
“Not quite. That’s as far as my knowledge of science goes. You’re the one with the degree. Do you know what their atomic numbers are?
Sam placed his palms on his temples as if he wanted to squeeze his brain into recalling the numbers.
“I think it’s one for hydrogen and eight for oxygen,” he eventually said.
Alex tracked it on the school poster while Sam copied it across and a split second later the red screen turned green to mark their success.
With their hearts pounding hard against their chests, Sam twisted the lid off the flask and pulled out a glass cylinder containing the cloudy liquid extracted from the bones of Saint Nick.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The hot white powdery sand forced its way into their shoes and in between their toes as Alex and Sam walked along the winding road to the blue and white taverna on the hill in Mathraki. Alex recalled the last time they had walked the path with Stavros and how crushed he was when all he had risked to save his mother turned futile in a blink of an eye. She wished with all her heart that they could have reached the island sooner, before his life changed forever.
Alex threw a sideways glance at where Khalil silently walked beside them. The bruises on his face and body remained prominent as did the braces that held his jaw in place, and whilst the sounds from his mouth were nothing but unrecognizable mumblings for the most part, they somehow knew exactly where his heart was at. At the core of his courage and humility lay a man whose own heart had been broken and who’d fought his own sorrow. A loss no man should ever have to endure.
As they neared the top of the hill, the recognizable blue window shutters of the taverna came into view against the majestic backdrop of the Adriatic. But unlike the quiet surroundings that had welcomed them to the island the first time, they were instead greeted by blaring traditional Greek folk music intermingled with cheers of laughter that bellowed across the dunes around them.
“Well that certainly sounds festive,” Sam said. “Seems we’re in time for a party.”
“Let’s hope Doudous is in a better mood so we won’t get thrown out of his restaurant again,” Alex giggled as the trio walked through the taverna’s front door.
Inside, the mood was far removed from that of their last visit, something Alex gladly welcomed. Her eyes searched for Stavros through the fully occupied restaurant where groups of locals were singing and dancing to the festive melodies of an accordion while they joyfully smashed dozens of plates to the floor. A long table draped in a cr
isp white tablecloth with dozens of delectable traditional dishes stood out of the way along one wall, seemingly the gathering place for the younger crowd. It was nearly impossible not to be swept up by the jubilant atmosphere that surrounded them. As the mingled aromas of fish, lemons and barbecue smoke drifted through the open windows on the tailcoat of the fresh sea breeze, Sam found Stavros on the other side of the taverna where he was surrounded by several motherly women. Wearing a light blue dress shirt and thin black tie his dapper look made him almost unrecognizable. Moments later Doudous burst through the kitchen door pushing a four-tiered birthday cake, illuminated by sixteen flickering candles, on a small trolley. While the partygoers clapped and cheered, and the accordion’s music transformed into a celebratory tune, they watched as Stavros blew out the sixteen candles on his birthday cake.
“How about that?” Sam smiled. “It’s our boy’s sixteenth birthday today. Something tells me his mother had a lot to do with bringing us here today. I cannot imagine a better gift for the lad. Shall we?” Sam nudged Alex and Khalil toward Stavros whose face lit up the moment he spotted them.
“Happy Birthday, Stavros,” Sam wished him first when the boy’s arms flung around him in joyous embrace.
“We brought you a little gift,” Alex announced and slipped her hand into her satchel to retrieve a small red box wrapped in a big white ribbon.
Stavros said something in Greek they couldn’t understand but assumed to be expressing his surprise.
“Go on, open it,” Sam encouraged as Doudous and his wife suddenly appeared by his side.
Hastily Stavros untied the bow and as the white ribbon fell to the floor and Stavros lifted the lid off the box, his face instantly declared what the gift meant to him. As his eyes settled on the hand-sized antique glass carafe with its decorative pewter covering, it took every bit of restraint to contain the emotions that flooded Alex’s insides. And although they knew the manna wouldn’t bring his mother back to life, it was, at the very least, a reminder of his courage and that he had done everything he could to save her.
As if to remind him not to linger on his sorrow, his mother’s invisible spirit intervened when a group of sprightly men and women yanked Alex and Sam into their folk-dancing circle.
“No-no, I don’t dance.” Alex attempted to stop a man from pulling her into the circle, but the man ignored her and she found herself forced to bounce up and down along with a ring of cheerful Greeks who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Once Alex finally surrendered, the dance steps became easier, and both her and Sam settled into the rapid rhythms of the Sirtaki. It wasn’t long before Stavros and his newfound family joined in and Alex found herself slowly letting go of the world and all the troubles that surrounded her.
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Book List
ALEX HUNT Adventure Thrillers
**Also suited as standalone novels**
The PAPUA INCIDENT - Prequel (sign up to get it FREE)
The RHAPTA KEY
The GILDED TREASON
The ALPHA STRAIN
The DAUPHIN DECEPTION
The BARI BONES - New Release
About the Author
Urcelia Teixeira is a mystery and adventure thriller author of clean, fast-paced archaeological action-adventure novels.
Her Alex Hunt Adventure Thriller Series has been described by readers as 'Indiana Jones meets Lara Croft with a twist of Bourne.'
She read her first book when she was four and wrote her first poem when she was seven. And though she lived vicariously through books, and her far too few travels, life happened. She married the man of her dreams and birthed three boys (and added two dogs, a cat, three chickens, and some goldfish!) So, life became all about settling down and providing a means to an end. She climbed the corporate ladder, exercised her entrepreneurial flair and made her mark in real estate.
Traveling and exploring the world made space for child-friendly annual family holidays by the sea. The ones where she was forced to build a sandcastle and barely got past the first five pages of a book. And on the odd chance she managed to read fast enough to page eight, she was confronted with a moral dilemma as the umpteenth F-word forced its way off just about every page!
But in a strange twist of fate, upon her return from yet another male-dominated camping trip, when fifty knocked hard and fast on her door, and she could no longer stomach the profanities in her reading material, she drew a line in the sand and bravely set off to create her own adventure!
It was in the dark, quiet whispers of the night, well past midnight late in the year 2017, that Alex Hunt was born.
Her philosophy
From her pen flow action-packed adventures for the armchair traveler who enjoys a thrilling escape. Devoid of the usual profanity and obscenities, she incorporates real-life historical relics and mysteries from exciting places all over the world. She aims to kidnap her reader from the mundane and plunge them into feel-good riddle-solving quests filled with danger, sabotage, and mystery!
For more visit www.urcelia.com or email her on books@urcelia.com
Contents
Special Thanks
Preface
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Behind The Bari Bones
Book List
About the Author
Disclaimer & Copyright
Disclaimer & Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Urcelia Teixeira
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The Bari Bones is a work of fiction. Characters, events and dialogue found within are of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, either living or deceased, is purely coincidental.
Copyrighted material
Paperback © ISBN: 978-0-6398434-1-4
Independently Published by Urcelia Teixeira
www.urcelia.com
books@urcelia.com