Order of the Black Sun Box Set 3

by Preston William Child

  Nina looked around for her phone. She had no idea what she would find and she wanted her cell on hand if anyone was looking for her while she was upstairs or in the basement—anyone . . . like Sam.

  The house smelled musty, as expected. But there was an underlying odor that bothered her senses. It smelled like stagnant water, or the green obscurity of a garden pond. With this salty, damp weather it was to be expected that the place would smell unless it was aired out and it had been standing shut for some time before she liberated it from its purgatory. The house was built from old rock and mortar, like a lot of the castles and fortresses in the Highlands. Nina was just grateful that the previous owners did not spoil it with paint.

  Gretchen was like a child in a candy store.

  “Look at this! It looks like a shrine!” she exclaimed from one of the rooms ahead of Nina in the corridor.

  “I’m not sure that that is something I want to hear, Gretch,” she replied, glass in one hand and phone in the other.

  She entered the first guest room. Like the others, it was void of any furniture, but had curtains hung on the windows. The wooden floors were a bit battered, but it was nothing a little TLC and a restoration crew could not fix. Gretch stood in front of a magnificent piece of wrought iron work as tall as the ceiling.

  “Wow!” she whispered at the sight of it. Shaped like a grid, it was bolted to the stone wall of the room. It consisted of six vertical bars reaching from the top of the frame to the bottom, with two horizontal bars crossing it diagonally. The edges of the grid ended in ornate curls and Gothic arrow points, asymmetrical and crude. It appeared as if the artisan just welded the lot together to give it a sense of disorder, like the vines of a creeper.

  “Reminds me of the head of Medusa,” Gretchen grinned, running her hands over the network of beautiful twists and points. Her hand suddenly jerked back and she winced in pain.

  “Ouch! Jesus, what is on this thing?” she whined loudly. Her finger was bleeding. Nina was intrigued.

  “Don’t touch the pointy things,” Nina advised, but on examination she noticed that the entire piece’s iron bars consisted of tiny protruding slivers that made up its texture. Like tiny thorns on a rose’s stem they faced upward so that any downward movement of one’s hand would result in injury.

  “My God, what a savage work of art!” Gretchen remarked through her teeth as she sucked on her wounded finger. “It is kind of cool, though. Don’t you think?”

  “Aye,” Nina smiled, “if you have a mean streak.”

  “There’s a waxy substance on some of the curly bits, see?” Gretchen said, pointing it out to Nina without touching anything again. Nina stood on her toes to see.

  “Oh!” she smiled, looking enlightened. “I think this was intended to be a giant chandelier, Gretch! Look, the waxy stuff is candle wax and some burnt wick residue caught in the white bits.”

  “It must look amazing filled with candles,” Nina’s mildly inebriated friend agreed. “Then it will really look like a shrine.”

  Nina gave her a stern look that made them giggle, and they continued on to the rest of the house. It was a beautiful old place with few rooms, yet each room was large and presented a pleasant view, in all directions. The kitchen boasted an antique black coal stove and a modern AGA cooker on the other wall. In the middle of the room stood a heavy oak table that had seen decades of cooking, peeling, and clearly even painting, but it was sturdy and large.

  “Look how they damaged this table,” Gretchen said, shaking her head. “They did some art here too, I’m sure. Paint stains and some hardened clay embedded in the cracks. I think the previous guy was an artist, eh?”

  “Looks like it,” Nina agreed, checking out the deep sink under the window. It was the only window in the house not dressed in some fabric and the darkness outside was so black that Nina could see their reflection in it. The exposed window made her feel vulnerable, similar to the feeling she got when the crowd congregated in front of her house. She kept feeling as if she was being watched, and now, with no visibility outside, someone could easily be standing right on the other side of the thin layer of glass and she would never know it. The thought made her feel naked, fair game; and she quickly turned and moved to the middle of the room at the table with Gretchen.

  “Let’s get out of the kitchen. I want to see the last room at the end of the hallway. Tomorrow I’ll draw up a diagram of the house to see where I want what before the movers come,” Nina told her friend as she finished her wine. It helped to talk about normal things right now and she tried to get her mind off the impending discomfort she felt.

  “Okay, but first more wine, yes?” Gretchen giggled.

  “Aye, of course!” Nina smiled.

  After a quick refill, the two of them stole down the broad corridor to the last room that sat on the right of the T-junction. To the left was the bathroom. Nina only used the uncharted room as an excuse to leave the kitchen, but now she realized that it was indeed a corner of the house that intrigued her.

  “Look at this!” she gasped, pulling Gretchen by the arm to join her in the doorway.

  “Easy! Spilling my drink here,” her friend complained. She stopped and looked where Nina pointed. “Wow!”

  Nina had to smile for the quaint and interesting idea of the room. At first it looked like a regular bedroom, but to their left, in the corner a spiral staircase coiled upward through the ceiling. It was wrought from the same black metal of the grid in the other room, and equally intricate in careless design.

  “Cool, huh?” Nina groaned in glee. “Let’s go check it out!” Again Gretchen was being dragged along, staggering over her loose-fitting shoes as she went. They started up the steps, where no trapdoor was fitted. The staircase just continued on up through the ceiling and into another room. Supposedly the attic, the room was the entire length of the east side of the building.

  “This is magnificent, Nina!” Gretchen said, her face lit in awe as she looked around.

  “It is almost like a whole new floor above the other,” Nina replied, properly fascinated by the omitted feature of her property. “I was not made aware of this extra space, you know. I wonder why she didn’t tell me about this!”

  “You can do so much with it. Personally, I would make this my bedroom, all concealed and huge,” Gretchen told Nina. She was right, Nina thought. It was a good idea to make this her bedroom, away from the rest of the house, and with all this space it was hard to resist.

  “The previous owner must have been a lot like you, old girl,” Gretchen said from halfway through the room where she sat on her haunches with her glass, fiddling with something in the wall.

  “Why?”

  “Come look at this. He was a bibliophile of note,” Gretchen said with a touch of suspense and mystery, like the narrator of a fairy tale. Nina rushed over to see what she was meddling with and to her astonishment she found a hidden bounty of old books, stacked within the wall. Nina reached out to the odd collection and noticed something peculiar.

  “Gretch, why don’t they have titles?”

  “Maybe they are ledgers or something. If they were printed books, they’d surely have titles on the spines, right?” Gretch weighed in, but she did not want to just pull one of the books out, in case they were stacked to support something. She grabbed Nina’s arm as Nina started to remove a book.

  “No! You never know what they are doing here. What if you pull it out and the wall caves in?” Gretchen warned.

  Nina scoffed and took one, opening it after dusting it off. The first page was indeed handwritten, but what it said unsettled Nina as much as it perplexed her.

  “What is it?” Gretchen asked from her crouched position.

  Nina examined the old ink scribbling on the first page, and with a quivering voice she read it out to Gretchen, “It says . . . Mein Kampf.”

  9

  Sam was clean shaven, at least, when Patrick picked him up.

  The office in Glasgow had planned the mission and debrie
fed Patrick that afternoon before he left for Edinburgh to collect his partner for this assignment. They were to travel to Rotterdam, locate Jaap Roodt and collect reconnaissance on his daily routine. Photographs, video footage, and a phone tap to his business office would be required so that the Secret Service could determine the extent of his involvement in an antigovernment conspiracy to infect the larger population of western Europe with a highly contagious biological agent that had a 100 percent mortality rate and a twenty-four-hour window of efficacy.

  Patrick told Sam what he expected from him, but other than that all details were classified. Sam Cleave was the best at recording clandestine dealings and the assignment was of such high importance and urgency that they could not afford to use an amateur to get them their evidence. All he knew, though, was that Jaap Roodt was the mark. Patrick did not tell him why MI6 was after him, or that he had been associated with some shady names that Nina Gould was also tied to. They did not know how the lot tied in together, but with Sam in his company for the next few days, Patrick Smith could do some of his own intelligence gathering and assist the home office in the apprehension of anyone linked to Roodt’s insidious plan.

  There was already talk of several hospitals and drug companies across eastern Europe and parts of Asia who had begun to run trials on innocent civilians in remote towns. But ultimately this was just rumor, for now, and being of such a nature that ignoring it could cause cataclysmic problems, the British Secret Service elected to probe.

  Sam and Paddy boarded a plane to Amsterdam, from where they would travel by rental car to Rotterdam and stay with a local agent as house guests. It was just before 9:00pm when they arrived at the home of Anneke Roebeeck, a forty-year-old wife and mother of two teenagers. “The children are away on holiday in Greece with my parents, thank God,” she smiled, as she led Sam and Paddy through the house to their rooms.

  “So you get Elka’s room, Sam. Paddy gets Barend’s pad . . . I’m not allowed to call it his room,” she jested with an elbow gesture and a cocky pout that amused the two men no end. Anneke was the furthest thing from a secret agent, but then again, that was what made her an efficient operative, they reckoned. She was a typical mom with her blonde hair in a ponytail almost all the time, and dressed in sweats and sneakers. Coaching the affluent families’ children in swimming was convenient, especially when she needed to probe into the lives of businessmen manipulating the stock exchange or investigate illegal or fraudulent buyouts that would influence the international market negatively. Like Sam, she had even exposed a drug running syndicate in Eindhoven a few years back, but in her line of work, thankfully, she was a ghost. Nobody would ever know she was involved and her name was as inconsequential as the color of her eyes.

  “Now, have you eaten yet?” she asked.

  “On the plane just before we landed in Amsterdam,” Sam answered.

  “So . . . no,” Anneke said. “Come, my husband will not be home until morning, so it’s just the three of us tonight.”

  “What does he do?” Paddy asked.

  “He is a filmmaker. Director, mostly, so he is out on shoots for days at a time,” she explained cheerfully.

  “Any films we might have seen?” Sam asked with much interest, being a camera lover himself.

  Anneke took a moment before a coy smile painted her face and she leaned forward on the table to answer Sam with a soft, “You might have, if you are into pornography.”

  Paddy burst out laughing at Sam’s rapidly ensuing blush at her answer. He just shook his head and chuckled, his embarrassment more from the unexpected red on his cheeks than the actual subject.

  After a solid meal of wine, garlic bread, and chicken salad, Sam and Paddy set off to do their first night’s stalking of the residence of Jaap Roodt. According to MI6, Roodt was a ruthless banker and financial genius who made his first million at 24 years of age. Although they had never been able to pin anything illegal on him, his name did surface in some depositions from The Hague to Antwerp, even as far as Moscow and Tokyo, throughout the past ten years.

  And if there was any dirt on the man, Patrick Smith and Sam Cleave would discover it.

  “Now, be prepared for a very dull evening mostly, old boy,” Paddy told his friend when they found the perfect place to park from where they would run their vigil.

  “I have done this before, you know,” Sam reminded him, lighting another cigarette.

  “And that,” Paddy pointed at the cigarette, “is not going to happen in this car.”

  Sam got out. The night was cool and crisp and the slight breath of fresh wind played with his hair. Sucking hard on his fag, the orange glow floated in the dark behind the hedge where Sam stood. It was late evening, just before midnight. Sam flicked off his cigarette butt and went to get his camera, armed with. among others, infrared capability. A block and a half from them, slightly down the hillside slant from where they were parked, Jaap Roodt’s mansion stood in the midst of a flower garden his wife tended compulsively. By the standards of his wealth, the huge three-story manor was quite modest, with only the azure eye of the swimming pool breaking the smooth carpet of green lawn that was beautifully illuminated by garden lamps everywhere.

  Not a bad gig, Sam thought as he peered through the lens of his Nikon D750. He kept his Testo 882 IR camera on hand and adjusted perfectly for this investigation, just in case. This is almost too easy, but I’m not complaining.

  Paddy had his earpiece in one ear, his radio contact with the base center. On his lap in the car he was busy preparing the electronics they needed to plant on the premises they were watching. He never showed it, but he was feeling unusually nervous about the task ahead. Paddy was an even-tempered operative with decades of law enforcement experience behind him, not to mention a few missions already successfully completed as an agent for the Secret Service and its affiliates. Maybe he was more concerned about Sam and how he would handle the pressure of the assignment. Paddy hoped it would not remind his friend of that night when his fiancée was killed in front of him.

  But from their conversation during the briefing and the trip, he surmised that Sam was dealing well with his past. After all, it had been half a decade since he lost Trish, not to mention meeting the feisty, intelligent historian. Sam had always been taken by Nina’s beauty and her independence, yet he still felt obliged to protect her through those situations Sam referred to as the “I still have to tell you about the time . . .” times. Paddy was very curious about those times and he knew every time Sam came back to collect Bruichladdich from the Smith household, he seemed somehow changed.

  All Paddy could do was speculate on the effects Dr. Nina Gould had on Sam’s heart, and how she always came with a life-threatening situation attached. He assumed that it must have been so frustrating for Sam to never have her separate from the dark world of whatever they always chased after, and Paddy was too polite to ask.

  Their wait was not too uneventful. Shortly after Roodt came home, Sam and Paddy heard him and his wife, twenty-five years his junior, having a huge argument. The silent intruders crept up to the ground-floor, back room that served as Jaap’s home office to tap his phone and modem and, if possible, set up some CCTV lenses too. Sam did not understand Dutch too well, but Paddy told him that they were arguing about her drinking problem and she was defensive about Jaap’s “puppet.”

  Sam frowned, “Who the fuck is his puppet?”

  Paddy shrugged and gestured for Sam to be quiet. The argument got rough on the other side of the reed-woven garden screen where Sam and his best friend were hiding while the couple were outside at the pool. They could hear the sound of Jaap shoving his wife into the plastic poolside furniture with some force, and it spurred Sam into action. Paddy grabbed his friend and pulled him back so hard that Sam fell on his ass into a brush of hardy branches and tiny leaves that did not ease his fall at all.

  Paddy motioned irately for Sam to stay out of it as the abuse went on among shouting, threats, and eventually a slamming door and silence.
They could hear her sobbing softly a few meters from them, but they could not betray their presence. Paddy figured the place would have some security measures, but with a fenceless yard the financier did not seem too concerned with security—and that was cause for concern.

  “People who hold such positions in society and are celebrity-level rich, who don’t bother with security, obviously have peace of mind about their possessions, Sam. Be careful tonight. No security guards, no alarms, no fences, or dogs. I have a bad feeling about this,” he told Sam under his breath as they moved lower, under the window where the light had just gone on.

  “So let’s leave it for now,” Sam suggested in a whisper.

  “No, we can’t. We need the information,” Paddy protested. “What I can do is pretend the neighbors called the cops and while I have them occupied, you plant the devices in his office.”

  Where is Purdue when I need him to rig communication devices? Sam thought, but then he remembered where he put Purdue in the first place. “Paddy, I’m not sure I know how

  to—”

  “Okay, listen. We have to get in somehow, so we will have to resort to embarrassing measures,” Paddy sighed. As the two of them sat propped with their backs to the external wall of Jaap Roodt’s office, they discussed the plan.

  Inside the office the landline phone rang. Jaap picked up a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels, his shirt torn where his young wife ripped it holding onto him not to fall after he pushed her. His gray chest hair stood wild under the shirt where two buttons were missing, and he poured a glass of whisky to down while the phone rang relentlessly, driving him crazy. This time of night, phone calls on landlines could only mean emergencies. He knew he had to take it this time, purely on the latter assumption.

  The front doorbell rang. Jaap abandoned the phone for the door, pulling a sweater on as he walked through the lobby to cover the scratch marks on his chest and shoulder. He opened the door without even checking first if it was safe. In the door stood Sam Cleave with Paddy’s dark blue sweater over his shoulders with the sleeves tied over his chest, his shades on his head, and his shirt tucked in to show off his relatively tight-fitting jeans. He used his camera bag as a sling bag. As he did many times before he put on the cheesiest American accent he could muster and pushed out his left hip, pulling off the most homosexual persona he could. It would be easy with Sam’s good looks, but he hoped that his C-type celebrity as a journalist and writer of late would not have traveled to the Netherlands.