Order of the Black Sun Box Set 3

by Preston William Child

  Without warning the TV died, and the screen blackened. The intruder froze and surveyed the sudden power cut by fumbling with the switches of the television, but there was no response from the appliances. Paddy stood waiting for the figure to pass him where he was tightly tucked in the niche where the circuit board was. He was so alert that he almost lamented the loss of his mind-numbing inebriation that was so unceremoniously taken from him. On the other hand, finally Patrick Smith, self-assumed bad husband and drunk, would be able to trap and arrest the bastard who had turned the loving Cassandra into a bipolar victim.

  Paddy heard the footsteps approach. It was a sound he was used to—a rush he knew well. Still, the impending confrontation with any unknown assailant never waned in its fear factor and Paddy hoped that he would make it through the next few minutes without getting killed at least. As the figure passed him, Paddy lashed out, striking the intruder against the temple. His target fell instantly, immobilized by the powerful blow he had suffered.

  “Broke into the wrong house, fucker!” he screamed, lodging a few hard kicks into the body of the burglar. Every grunt of agony spurred Paddy on to land another and another like the long-gone days in schoolyard brawls and pubs on Saturdays. But as he aimed another kick the figure rolled over onto his back. All Paddy saw was a blinding flash of white light splashing out of the intruder’s barrel. Twice the suppressed shots struck the agent, the third missed when he dove out of the way, landing next to the shooter.

  Paddy’s Makarov clipped him in the throat, even though he tried to hit the skull. His hands could simply not take aim from the shock of the bullet wounds and the rapid gushing of his wounds. Unfortunately, the alcohol only promoted the speed of his hemorrhage. He had to do something quickly or he would die. Paddy rolled over on his stomach and crawled for the kitchen, leaving the limp body of the attacker in his wake. There would be enough time for the agent to determine his identity when death was removed from the equation. When he reached the kitchen, Paddy bit his lip, trying to reach his landline on the wall, as his cell phone was at least three rooms away. One of the bullets had penetrated his thigh and the other his side. Under his pants he could feel the hot liquid running out of his body and wetting the fabric. With the time he had left it was imperative that Paddy made it to the phone. Laboriously he forced himself up on one leg and grabbed at the yellow phone on the wall.

  “Thank God I let Cassie buy the hideous color of phone she wanted, or else I would never have been able to see it in the dark,” Paddy said out loud, groaning in anguish, remembering the debate over the color of the phone between him and his wife a year or so ago. “Thanks, baby!”

  He dialed his local precinct, the very people who had just that day withdrawn the arrangement to have a squad car at the premises every night. “Yeah, this is DCI Patrick Sm– this is Agent Patrick . . . oh, Christ, Tammy, can you just send an ambulance to my house quickly?”

  “Right away, Pat.”

  Tammy, the operator at the station, knew Patrick Smith’s voice well and promptly dispatched the emergency vehicles to his address in Blackford. Patrick collapsed, more out of relief than blood loss. His breathing slowed a bit as he relaxed, but it revealed an unnerving sound from the corridor where he thought he had left the burglar.

  A guttural groan sounded like words, suppressed by the carpet on which the man had turned his face down to crawl. Paddy felt his adrenaline rush at the newly emergent danger. His weapon was lying in the doorway, just out of reach unless he crawled to it, but such an action would make him visible to the attacker. Again the wheezing grunt formed a word, as if the intruder was saying something. Paddy sat dead still, taking deep breaths as not to hyperventilate and bleed out sooner.

  The chafing of the black figure’s clothing on the carpet announced his presence not a foot away from Paddy’s gun. It was now or never for Special Agent Patrick Smith. Waiting for the EMTs felt like an eternity, and now he had a dangerous intruder to protect them from when they arrived. Trying to ignore all the pain and discomfort to move, Paddy lunged at the gun and landed hard on his side, screaming from the blunt ache that shot through his hip and torso on impact. But this time he did not shoot, he only held the barrel level to the figure’s head.

  “Don’t move or I’ll finish ya off!” he roared, trying not to lose consciousness. Again the intruder mouthed something inaudible that sounded remarkably like a name. “What? What are you saying?”

  “Pat-rick,” came the word clearly, and Paddy’s face turned pale.

  “Who are you?” he asked the struggling man.

  “Nev-nev-ille,” he replied, his throat drenched in blood and his voice box ruptured.

  “Oh, God!” Paddy gasped, but his head felt heavy as a boulder and he knew he would not be able to stay awake for much longer. “Why did you shoot me? What are . . . why are you here? Did you come to finish what you did to my wife?” he screamed, regardless of the excruciating pain it caused in his contracting abdomen. Paddy inched himself nearer to Neville and pulled off his balaclava, revealing the torturous contortion of the Indian man’s face.

  “I thought you were out. All I wanted wa- . . . I-I wanted the gener-rer-rator . . . or they kill me,” he uttered a disturbing chuckle at his last statement. “Looks like you d-did it for them.”

  “Who? Who wanted the generator?” Paddy asked with his last good breaths.

  Outside the house the ambulance came to a screeching halt. Through the thin drapes of the living room, the lights pulsed while the EMTs hammered the door down.

  “You could just have contacted me! But you destroyed my poor wife, you fucking pig. She is forever changed because of what you did! You should have killed me when we were in that cavern, because you just fucked with the wrong man’s family!”

  “Patri . . . Patrick, beware the Vril.”

  Paddy tried to squeeze the trigger, but an officer swiftly grabbed it from his grasp.

  “He’s dead, Smith! He is dead, all right?” shouted Detective Williams, an old colleague of Paddy’s from their days at the precinct.

  “Vril,” Paddy repeated, afraid he would forget the word spoken by the only man who knew what faction of criminals would attack a man’s wife to obtain the dreaded object.

  “What is he saying?” Detective Williams asked the medical technician.

  “It sounds like Vril or something,” the young lady told the detective.

  “Is that the name of the attacker, Smith? Smith! Who is Vril?” the detective repeated loudly as he watched Patrick Smith lose consciousness.

  Paddy was taken to the same hospital as Cassandra. Now, with their home unoccupied, the place was open to be ransacked. Detective Williams did consider this and asked the station commander if they could perhaps keep watch there until the investigation was concluded. But still, nobody knew what had happened in the Smith household, or what Patrick Smith was mumbling about. One thing was certain—the two incidences at the house within a week of each other were no random house robbery. The level of violence perpetrated was evidence to something far more grave and substantial that only Smith had knowledge of.

  “Whatever it is, it is probably somewhere in this house. And I bet you a year’s rent money that there will be more intrusions in the next few days,” Detective Williams told his officers. “I want an ID on that bloke and what he had to do with the Smiths.”

  He checked the rest of the house for any other unauthorized presence and then walked through the crowd of residents to get in his car. “Oh, and officers, contact me as soon as Smith wakes up.”

  25

  Just before nightfall over the Gulf of Finland the police and coroner pulled out of Osmussaar, unaware that Sam, Nina, and Purdue were still traversing the island to the farthest edge from the location of the lighthouse. Thomas and his men had traveled to the island by boat, so obviously Purdue decided to use their vessel to return to Helsinki. On his tablet he searched the island for moored vessels and found only three by the time the sun began to fade. One of
those had to be the vacant boat their pursuers used.

  “How will we know which one it is?” Nina asked.

  “It doesn’t matter, really,” Sam replied, looking at the snapshots he took of the crude etching in the wall paint. “When we find an empty boat with fur everywhere, you know, cat hair, dog hair, ape shit, we’ll know it’s theirs.” He loved playing with Nina’s yeti theory, especially now that he had seen these men firsthand and agreed that the famous yeti sightings were precisely what they resembled.

  “What do you think is happening back there, Purdue? Is there a way your tablet could log into some satellite camera and show us if the coppers discovered the bodies in the lighthouse yet?” Nina asked Purdue as they reached the last few yards of the island’s landmass. Two fishing boats were moored there, both unattended.

  “They must have found them by now,” Sam reckoned, and he jogged ahead to the light blue boat nearest to them. On the side, in cursive white, it said Kullervo. A bit farther away there was somewhat larger trawler called Tuonelan Joutsen, a red and white fiberglass boat with twin engines fixed to the stern. Under the name it was written in Russian as well.

  “Either way we have to get off this island. And we have to match Nina’s underground railroad theory with the inscription on the wall. What was the exact line again?” Nina asked.

  “It said, ‘to the Grave of Odin will no compass yield. But his Wisdom lies beneath where the white eye looks.’ Once we find where the white eye looks from the three clues on the symbol, we’ll know to dig under it,” Purdue affirmed.

  “But for now we have to get a ride out,” Sam said, leaping up on the blue boat.

  “Why not the better, faster boat?” Purdue asked Sam, as the journalist checked the controls of the small blue trawler.

  “We don’t want to be conspicuous,” Sam explained.

  “We don’t want to be slow either, Sam,” Purdue contested. “At least if we are going to get chased, we had better have the best kind of horsepower.”

  “I’m with Purdue,” Nina stated categorically. “And while we cruise back to the Finnish coast we can figure out where to go next to find Odin’s grave. I want to get out of Scandinavia altogether.

  “We have to get out now,” Purdue said, looking down on his tablet’s screen at the approaching weather system. “There is a storm coming in over the Gulf.”

  “Let’s go then,” Sam agreed, jumping off the smaller fishing trawler and heading for the larger vessel with Nina and Purdue.

  “According to this map we should head for Hanko, a port town to the west of Helsinki. It’s the only way we can get onto the mainland without questions about the ownership of this boat and what we were doing on the island where they just found several bodies,” Nina supposed. With Purdue behind the wheel they braved the rising waves and darkening skies over the Gulf of Finland toward Hanko.

  Nina and Sam had a look at the details on the scratchy emblem they photographed on the interior wall of the light room at the lighthouse. As they held on every now and then, thrown by the erratic weaving of the vessel over doldrums of cold gray water, Purdue and Sam prepared for the next trip with discussions on which route to take to quickly get to Helsinki’s airport. If those enormous killers could find Nina, anyone else could be on their trail as the three of them fled, not to mention that the boat they had stolen would soon be sighted by authorities. For once the wet weather and dangerous waters were on their side, making it difficult to identify and pursue them.

  “Looking at the stuff on the Triple Horn, boys, and, I have to say, it is child’s play to decipher,” Nina smiled. Her fear for being caught by either the police or Thomas and whoever would aid him was overshadowed by her excitement of unraveling the clues about the pictures.

  “That’s wonderful news, Dr. Gould,” Purdue grinned, pouring them some wine he found in the bar fridge. “And what have you discovered then?”

  “This sigil here,” she pointed to the one Purdue could not place before, “is the Valknut. Three triangles interwoven, it is much like the Triple Horn, which mainly represents Odin and his penchant for wisdom and poetry. But the Valknut is more widely used as far as I know.”

  “Nevertheless, what matters is that it represents Odin, which is what we are after,” Sam nodded. “So, what does this one say? Hiid?”

  “Right, that must be the name of a place in Finland? It’s double-vowel usage sure looks Finnish,” she guessed.

  “That sounds awfully familiar to me. I know that abbreviation. Let me see,” Purdue offered. He punched in the word to see what his tablet would yield. “Of course! HIID is the Harvard Institute for International Development! That makes sense.”

  “Cambridge, Massachusetts?” Nina marveled. She frowned, “How would they have anything to do with Nazi prisoners of war?”

  “What we are looking for is below that, isn’t it? It is supposed to be under HIID, not the institute itself,” Purdue explained. “Any takes on the other marker, love?”

  “This is obviously coordinates,” she remarked. “But I have to concede that my geometry or map reading savvy is meager at best.”

  “Let me have a look,” Sam said, coming to join Nina at the bolted-down table.

  She pointed out, “46 degrees, southwest. That much I can figure out, but . . . where and what . . .” Nina gestured wildly with her hands to show her ineptitude with a roll of her eyes.

  “That, I assume, would be 46 degrees southwest from the lighthouse, but how far away?” Sam contemplated, resting his chin on his hand.

  He pulled out a folded map and some nautical navigational gear next to Purdue where he stood piloting the boat, surveying the droplets that started to patter on the vessel. Sam and Nina opened the world map and used a sextant to determine the bearing from the lighthouse to wherever direction the oversimplified clue pointed. Nothing was certain, not with Josef’s ham-fisted approach to nautical navigation or geography in general. But it was clear that the measurement did not point to HIID in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  “For fuck’s sake!” Nina seethed after the umpteenth attempt at figuring out the real clue on the careless indication. “I give up. I just don’t see what he is trying to say here.”

  Sam had another glass of wine and shook his head, “Purdue, can you find a parallel line between Massachusetts and the lighthouse that could have something to do with Odin?” He gave his question some thought, “Jesus, it even sounds nonsensical!”

  Nina frowned at both of them and said, “Seriously? HIID in Cambridge wasn’t around when all this was set up. How in the—”

  “Who are you?” an unfamiliar voice cut through their discussion with a firm tone of reprimand. The three jumped at the sight of the woman who stood at the entrance of the cockpit, dressed in a bikini and a man’s loose shirt. She was small, like Nina, and about the same age, but she had blonde hair and huge green eyes that accentuated the freckles on her nose. In her hand she held a flare gun pointed at Purdue, who promptly raised his hands in surrender.

  “What are you doing on my boat?” she shouted.

  “Um, we thought the boat was empty,” Sam tried.

  “So you stole it?” she raged. “You just steal things in Scotland too?”

  “How do you know where we are from?” Purdue smiled charmingly, but his suave nature had no effect on the stranger.

  “Your accents, your choice of words . . . good God, you might as well be wearing kilts!” she shouted with a frown that only made her look cute instead of threatening.

  “Is this your boat, madam?” Nina asked. “Sorry, we had to get off Osmussaar. Our lives were in danger.”

  “They are in danger now, girly!” she warned Nina.

  Nina got up from her chair.

  “Oh, shit,” Purdue and Sam said in unison.

  “Stay where you are,” the woman snapped at Nina.

  “Listen, we just want to get back to the coast of Finland and then we’ll leave you alone,” Nina explained, surprisingly keeping her feisty f
ighting spirit well subdued.

  “I’m not Finnish! I don’t want to go to Finland! I was diving at Neugrund. I took a sleeping pill to help me sleep and was going to return to Tallinn when I woke up, you creeps!” she hissed. The diminutive blonde was not threatening at all, but she was clearly upset, as she rightly should have been, at finding hijackers stealing her boat.

  “I tell you what, madam,” Purdue smiled cordially, taking note to move in a docile manner, “I will reimburse you for this detour if you allow us to take your boat to Hanko.”

  “Yeah, right,” she scoffed.

  Nina slapped Sam. He was totally spellbound by the lady’s physique, as her shirt lifted in the gusts and showed off her body, that he had to be jolted back to reality. He looked at Nina with a boyish shrug, reluctantly provoking a smile from her.

  “No, really,” Purdue insisted. “All I need is your banking details and I will transfer the money from my tablet in the next five minutes.”

  Nina and Sam stared at her while Purdue smiled uncomfortably, all waiting for her to make a decision. Her eyes jumped from the pretty, dark-eyed woman to the sexy, fair-haired man who was trying to buy her. She ignored the smug dark-haired man at the table. He annoyed her for some reason.

  “Okay,” she said. Relieved, they sighed.

  “I’ll transfer your funds right now,” Purdue said.

  “Your names?” she asked as she sat down next to where Nina had reclaimed her seat.

  They introduced themselves by first name.

  “Why don’t you have your own boat?” she asked Nina.

  “We did,” Nina told the stranger, “but he left us behind on Osmussaar and we had to get to Finland or we would miss our flight.”