Order of the Black Sun Box Set 8

by Preston William Child

  “You believe them?” he shrieked at her as they shoved him toward the front door.

  “No, I do not, but you have to hold your tongue until I send someone to represent you, Norman. Do not be stupid. Just hang on and I will get someone to you as soon as I can,” she assured him in a softer tone. They did not allow her hand to rest on his shoulder much longer before they ushered him out and into a squad car.

  Hoping to comfort him in a small way, Nina remained in the door of her home, making eye contact with her stepbrother all the way, until his face disappeared from sight. “Oh my God, Norman,” she moaned. “I have to call Jane again!”

  As soon as the police had left, Nina locked her door and bolted back into the house to get her phone. Purdue would know what to do. Purdue would send someone. In great haste, she skidded around the corner of the bannister post on the ground floor landing and skipped stairs to get to her bedroom. Although she had not seen her stepbrother in ages, some things about his personality had not changed – things that would jeopardize his case irreparably, if she did not get a lawyer out to him soon. He folded easily to pressure. If the interrogating officers pushed him even slightly she knew he would screw up his defense.

  The clouds wept for hours already, and by the sound of the thunder there would be no cessation anytime soon. Nina did not have her glasses with her and the state of the weather had darkened her bedroom so that she could not locate her phone upon entering. Rushing to reach for her bag, she switched on her bedside lamp in the same feat.

  “No lawyer is going to help that boy, you know,” a man spoke from the corner of her bedroom.

  “Jesus Christ!” Nina yelped, clasping her chest. In her reed peacock chair sat Terry Jones, leg crossed over the other. His dark blue eyes pinned her in her place, but her heart throbbed with the cadence of a steam engine. “What are you doing here?” she shouted.

  “You and me is going to take a trip, Dr. Gould. If you refuse, our young friend will pay a hefty price indeed,” he explained.

  “You,” she seethed, trading her fear for anger. “You framed him, you son of a bitch!”

  He merely scoffed and smirked. “Prove it.”

  14

  Flotsam and Jetsam

  Terry Jones did not have a gun on Nina, as he did before when he intruded, yet she knew that she would have to agree with everything he instructed. The past three days had been so trying for her that she regretted the boredom she lamented before the chasing of Blanca and the sudden, subsequent re-acquaintance with her long absent stepbrother. It only proved her old maxim that things can go very bad, very quickly.

  “What do you want me to do, Mr. Jones?” she asked, although she had a vague idea that he wished to know more about the archives she had sworn to keep secret.

  “I want you to take me to where you keep the Templar records,” he said casually, “if you are indeed the keeper.”

  “And what do you wish to find there?” Nina wanted to know. “Specifics. Are you after relics? There are no significant relics harbored there, so, sorry.”

  “What we want is not relics, Dr. Gould,” he grimaced. “We know who has the Holy Grail, but we need you to tell us where he is.”

  “And then? You kill me and leave Norman to take the fall for a murder he did not commit?” she anticipated with no small amount of disdain in her tone.

  “If that is what you choose,” he replied in a cold tone that felt quite indifferent to her. He was clearly not a negotiator, just an enforcer, which posed the next question she had for him.

  “You keep saying ‘we’ every time, Mr. Jones,” she sighed. “The Meisters? Are you their foot soldier? See, I need to know before I help you locate this man.”

  “Why? If you do not comply we just end this relationship and leave old Kingsley at the mercy of the law, hey?” he answered. “It does not matter who we are, love. What matters is that you steer me in the right direction to find the man we are looking for. Once we know where he is, you and me can negotiate how far we are going to trust each other and such, hey?”

  It was a raw deal. Nina knew she had no choice in the matter, really. To be honest, she figured that the hardened thug showed her a great deal of tolerance thus far and she was not about to pick the scab. “Alright,” she finally said, “but the records are not kept here in my house.”

  “I guessed that much, Dr. Gould,” he replied. “You drive.”

  “Wait, how do you know it is not in another country?” she pried, trying to arouse reluctance in him, in vain.

  “Is it?” he asked. His question came far too quickly, dressed way too plainly.

  ‘Nice try, idiot,’ she rapped herself for it. ‘I do not think he gives a damn where it is, as long as you take him there.’

  Nina sighed and shook her head. “No.”

  “You drive. Let’s go, Dr. Gould,” he said, standing up.

  Now she could not notify Purdue of Kingsley’s plight and she was officially a captive, watched by the very people who framed her stepbrother for the crime. As of now, she would have to keep a clear mind and hope that Kingsley would understand why she did not keep her promise of counsel. She hoped that he would not say anything in any event and keep his cool until she could find a way to contact Purdue.

  The drive was not far at all, but Terry had many questions.

  “So, how did a woman become the keeper of the archive? I still have trouble really believing it, but I guess you will not go through all this trouble just to deceive me,” he confessed.

  “The former custodian was a local priest, who happened to be a friend of mine,” she explained. Looking slightly jealous and very amused, Terry turned in the passenger seat to face Nina completely, giving her his full attention. “I thought they did not do the girlfriend thing, love.”

  “I was not his girlfriend,” she defended. “He was just…fond of me.”

  “I bet he was. Cannot say I blame him,” Terry flirted, but this bite of information was just too good to abandon yet. “And was he fond of you because you were a good girl who came to regular confession?”

  “Shut up, Terry,” Nina blurted out. Inadvertently, she had exclaimed the phrase normally reserved for Sam when he teased her. Immediately she feared that Terry would be aggravated by it, but he laughed.

  “Did I hit a nerve, Saint Nina? Met him for communion? Even on Thursdays?” he burst out in roaring laughter. To his surprise, Nina was smiling a little too. “No, no, seriously, though,” he sniffled, “why did he name you as successor?”

  “I have no idea, really,” she admitted, “but, lame as this may sound, I think the man was trying to save my soul.” She waited for another bout of mockery but found him quiet. Nina peeled her eyes from the road to look at him. He just stared at her and asked, “Did your soul need saving?”

  “I did not think so, but he was extremely adamant to get me involved in church affairs. I suppose he wanted me to convert or something,” she speculated.

  Terry gave it some thought before hitting her with a very intriguing conjecture. “Or maybe he was trying to get you trained to succeed him from the beginning. Maybe there was some sort of clandestine prophecy that there would be a female Templar to take over and he knew it was you all along.”

  Nina raised an eyebrow and pouted. It was obvious that she was not ready for such hazards from a brand-new foe, but her skeptical expression had a hidden wonderment. Terry was deceptively deep, it appeared, which made him slightly more difficult to predict. She had never considered that Father Harper may have chosen her for it. In fact, she always thought it was pure coincidence. True to her nature, she elected to smash the possibly wonderful sentiment and bring it to the floor.

  “Maybe he just did not like that I was a heretic,” she remarked.

  Again, the big thug gawked at her. “You are not religious?” he gasped. At first Nina thought he was being facetious, but his face did not flinch from the exclamation.

  “No,” she frowned, thinking it was obvious.

&n
bsp; “How can you not be religious? You are a Templar keeper! That is sacrilege!” he complained. Terry was truly shocked.

  “Are you a Christian?” she asked a little too surprised.

  “Catholic, all my life,” he said proudly.

  “Says the guy who orders the murders of children,” she retorted. “Telling me off?”

  Terry could not believe what he had learned. “Oh, why am I surprised that you would order the killing of children?” she smirked. “That has been done before – Exodus 12, if I am not mistaken.”

  “Watch your mouth, lady,” he warned.

  “Or you will smite me?” she snapped back. “Oh, please, spare me the sermon. When are you people going to realize that there is no good or bad? There is only the intentions of gods and people, selectively using a plethora of excuses dressed up as God or the devil. When are you going to wake up and see the true nature of your scriptures?”

  “What do you mean?” he shrieked.

  Nina cleared her throat as she turned off the main road and headed for the old paint factory off the A85, through the thick trees past Pennyfuir. “I have handled and encountered many so-called holy relics, Terry, both officially and on expeditions. One thing I learned was that the ‘powers’ that made these items holy to ancient people, were simply based on their scientific structures.”

  Terry tried to keep an open mind while the pretty historian was ripping his religion apart. She did not sound disrespectful or condescending, leaving him with the idea that she was simply reporting what she knew from experience. Dr. Nina Gould was no fool. He knew from her eloquence and assertive nature that her opinions were formulated from what she knew as facts.

  “Scientific structures?” he frowned. “How?”

  Nina sighed. She was not in the mood to lecture right now, let alone do it for free.

  “Terry, if you showed up in the Middle Ages in Spain and made a call on your cell phone, what do you think those people would make of it?” she asked impatiently.

  “Probably be burned at the stake,” he grinned.

  “Why?” she persisted.

  “Well, they would think my phone is supernatural, that my pictures were people caught in the phone,” he shrugged.

  “And they would think it is magic, it is devilry, or…they might think it is holy,” she said. “Many of the artifacts I have seen simply projected frequencies. Some were charged with magnetic fields. Others consisted of certain metals or chemicals that reacted in a certain way that gave them the illusion of having healing powers. The human body consists of intricate chemical reactions, Terry. Even our moods and thoughts come from fluids conducting electricity, just like some vessels of antiquity contained minerals that reacted with our biology, healing us. Holy? No. Evil? No. These are the claims of people too primitive to have understood what we have discovered in the meantime.”

  Terry was speechless, and deeply unhappy. For a while after Nina parked in front of the old paint factory, he just looked at her. Eventually he drew a deep breath. “Did you ever throw this stuff at Father Harper?” he asked.

  “Aye,” she smiled. “He understood.”

  “He did not reprimand you for blasphemy?” Terry gasped.

  Nina looked at Terry with a warm smile that came from reminiscing about Father Harper. And then she answered with Father Harper’s very excuse. It was his perpetual excuse whenever he did something un-priest-like. “He was not always a priest,” she winked.

  Before Terry could ask the myriad of questions that sprang up in his mind, the dark rain clouds slid open in patches to reveal the powerful light of the full moon. The night was here and Nina was alone with a stranger of very low repute. As Terry got out of the car, he gaped at the steel mass that darkened the woods. An out of place thing of monstrous proportions, overtaken by the foliage. It was barely discernable as a building. Among the black thickness of the woodland, the abandoned paint factory lurched over the car which was now reduced to a pale speck in the aging night.

  “The rain will be back soon,” she remarked. “Better get in there.”

  He winced and pointed at the massive mess of steel and brick. “In…in there?” he gasped.

  “Aye, you wanted passage to the archives, did you not?” she asked, smelling a little reluctance in her hijacker.

  Terry looked oddly fearful. Leaning with his forearms on the roof of Nina’s car, he gave the place a long hard look. “In there?” he repeated.

  “Shall we go back to my house? I have a tampon for you, Mary,” Nina mocked him. She could hardly hide her amusement. Terry leered at her patronizing expression, but she did not flinch at his desperate intimidation. He looked at the building and then back at Nina. “Is this a trap?” he asked suspiciously.

  “That is right, Terry. I somehow arranged an ambush during the time you kidnapped me to bring you to said trap,” she wailed, throwing up her hands. “Geez, do you need a helmet?”

  “Hey, fuck you, lady,” he grunted. He slammed the door and looked away. Terry Jones could not look the historian in the eye, because he knew that she was right. Darkness made him scared and fear made him stupid.

  15

  Chum on the Harbor

  Purdue tried calling Nina back as soon as Jane had relayed the message to him, but her cell phone was set to voicemail. He could not understand it. Apparently Nina’s call sounded urgent, yet she did not leave her phone on for him to return her call.

  “Still no answer, sir?” Jane asked.

  “No,” he replied. “No answer. Should I be worried?”

  “I honestly cannot tell you that, Mr. Purdue. Should I get my brother to drive out to her house in Oban? He is up in Scone, out in Perth for the week. He could go and check on her?” Jane suggested.

  “No, no,” Purdue waved the idea off politely as he redialed. “Let me try once more. If she does not answer her landline, I will send someone from my Inverness branch to call on her. My security people will be in contact with me at all times during tonight’s party, so they can get in touch with me at the yacht.”

  “Very well, sir,” she smiled. Jane got her bag and threw on her coat. “I will see you there, sir.”

  “Dress in red, my dear. You always look ravishing in red and we need to raise some solid funds tonight,” Purdue jested with a wink. He knew that Jane’s meticulous sense of propriety would clash with her exquisite sense of humor, making for a great experiment.

  “Oh, Mr. Purdue, the last time I wore a red dress at one of your business parties, I raised more than money in that room,” she returned the suggestive joke elegantly. “I would hate to steal your thunder.”

  “Touché!” he cried happily, chuckling heartily as he dialed Nina’s home phone number. His smile gradually disappeared as the rings became endless and repetitive. Each ring unanswered left him feeling more apprehensive, but his fundraiser was starting in thirty minutes. He hanged up the call and called his security people.

  “Hey, Jason, this is David Purdue. Could you send a car to Dr. Gould’s residence in Oban, please? We have not been able to reach her all day and I am just concerned. I would feel a lot better once I knew she was safe,” he said. It was a relief to know someone would check on Nina. All that was left was to hit the shower and get dressed for the lavish evening ahead. There were two types of invites sent out. There were honorary invitations to those Purdue trusted, although this criteria was not common knowledge. These were reserved for the businessmen and women who did not withdraw their investments from his companies when he was indicted a few years ago. Purdue knew that this handful of strong investors and affiliates would support Scorpio Majorus in the doldrums.

  Other invitations were for prospective members of the Round Table associations and those in general public who wished to contribute to the fundraising effort of the Round Table charges. For these, there were a limited amount of tickets available. Two of those tickets were sold to the principal of a Glasgow school and one of its faculty.

  Purdue’s driver had the car re
ady by nine o’clock sharp. He parked the black limousine in front of Wrichtishousis and waited for the master to emerge from the front door. Dugal Henry, the driver, was surprised to see Mr. Purdue unaccompanied for the first time since he had started employment there several years before.

  “Dugal! My good man!” Purdue cheered as he descended the wet steps, dressed in a perfectly tailored tuxedo.

  “Good evening, Sir,” he greeted merrily as he opened the door for Purdue. “I see the clouds have stopped their nonsense for a bit, right?”

  Purdue surveyed the clearing sky before giving the chauffeur ‘n nudge. “I see, yes, but let us not tempt fate under these tumultuous mood swings of Mother Nature, Dugal. You know how moody she can get. Being on a yacht tonight, of all things, might prove a less than sensible idea.” Purdue laughed, but he was genuinely concerned that the weather would turn on them all on this important night.

  He had not heard word back from the security man he sent to Nina’s house, but he gave it a few more hours before he would drive through himself. Inside the limousine it was nice and toasty, with the soft serenade of Enigma’s antique music and a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Purdue considered the two glasses, but Dugal filled him in soon enough. Sounding rather apologetic, the chauffeur remarked, “I am sorry, Mr. Purdue. I thought Dr. Gould, or perhaps Miss Jane would accompany you tonight.”

  “No worries, my friend,” Purdue dismissed the matter with a smile. “I find that life is much simpler these days without ladies at every turn.” He leaned forward and smirked at the driver in the rear view mirror and added, “Besides, this way I have more possibilities for bringing some morsels back from the party, don’t I?”

  Dugal could not help but cackle with his jovial boss. “You are a master of the game, Mr. Purdue! A master!”

  On their way to the yacht club at Granton Harbor, Purdue was quiet. Dugal was well aware that Purdue only required responses, not needless chatter initiated by staff, so he kept quiet until spoken to. It was clear to him that Purdue was in a state of deep contemplation, and he had not even bothered with the champagne, as he used to when Dugal drove him to all his grand engagements.