The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel

by Michael Yudov

  I finished the dining room, but found nothing, as usual. The house wasn’t going to give up its secrets willingly, that much I could tell by now. I was convinced that there was something here, and I was determined to find it. We ended up back in the kitchen, and we sat down to take a break and think. Suddenly, Therese spoke.

  “You are looking for some secret, yes?”

  “Yes, I am. The problem is, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, just that it’s here somewhere.”

  “Umm. Like in the movies, n’est pas? A secret room, yes?”

  “Something like that.”

  I started thinking. I’d checked every inch of the ground floor. Except the wall behind the table we were sitting at. It was large enough that you wouldn’t have to move it to seat six. That was pretty large for a kitchen table.

  Ronnie walked into the room, freshly cleansed, with a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt on. Her hair was still wet, brushed straight back and looking darker than it was because of the water. I had to admit, she looked good. I love a natural look, and Ronnie didn’t even have any shoes on. That was pretty natural.

  I got up as she came in, and so did Therese. I think she had read my intentions. Both of them watched in curiosity as I pulled the table away from the wall. Except that it didn’t pull. All I got for my efforts was a strain on my muscles. Interesting. I got down on my hands and knees and checked underneath the table. Against the wall, and hidden by the inner ledge running around the entire underside of the table, was a small white button. Even more interesting.

  I got back up, and brushing off my knees, I spoke what I was thinking.

  “Ronnie, we’ve got a hidden space here, I’m sure of it. I’ve found the button that activates it. I believe. Now I have to determine if it’s safe to push.

  Once again, the shower noise stopped, and it was Therese’s turn for the shower. She handed over the launcher to Ronnie, and headed upstairs. The wall, the table was bolted to, was an outside wall, so there couldn’t be a door there. But maybe the button was wired to open a door somewhere else. The one thing that had bothered me from the start was the fact that there was no basement to speak of in the house. There was a door that led down a tight set of stairs and ended at the furnace room. That was it. There should be more, but it seemed there wasn’t. If the button was an ‘open sesame’ type of affair, the question was, where would the door be? If it was wired the way it appeared to be, then the door could be anywhere. If there was a room, then I also had to consider that it might contain more than contraband, or the good wine stash. If it was large enough to walk into, that meant that there could be an enemy in it as well. That meant that we couldn’t take the chance of not checking it before hitting the sack.

  I explained to Ronnie everything that I’d been thinking, and we decided that it had to be tried, but we would wait for Evie. Ronnie sat down, and I fixed another round of hot chocolates, this time I threw a dash of cognac in them. Well, it was in the cupboard, what the hell. We both sat and waited. We didn’t wait long.

  Evie came downstairs in much the same state that Ronnie had. Her hair was toweled dry, so it was still wet, and she had let it go curly and fall wherever it wanted to. She had a pair of faded jeans on, and a pullover V-neck sweater. The sweater stopped just short of her jeans, showing a line of midriff that looked flatter than mine. And her navel. I had to make an effort to refocus on the issue at hand.

  We filled her in and decided that we would wait until Therese was out of the shower and dressed before we tried anything. A fast retreat is difficult when you’ve got team members in the shower. We knew nothing of what the outcome would be when the button was pushed. For all we knew, it was a silent alarm, but I didn’t think so, and neither did Evie. That was enough to convince Ronnie, so we waited. The sound of the shower stopped, and I went upstairs to talk with Therese. Evie had offered to go, but I had insisted. Was that a clue to what was making Evie so edgy? I couldn’t tell.

  Upstairs, I found Therese in one of the bedrooms, rummaging through her things looking for something to put on. She was wearing a towel around her, and one on her head. Folded up into a turban. That was one of those things that women did naturally, and men couldn’t figure out even when they tried. Her back was turned to me as I stood in the doorway of the room. She looked less than ever like a little girl, and more like a woman than at any time I’d seen her so far. I held my ground in the doorway, and cleared my throat.

  “Therese?”

  “Oui?”

  She didn’t turn or stop what she was doing. She’d known I was there all along.

  “We need you downstairs with us. You need to put on something you can run in, if we have to.”

  “D’accord.”

  She stood, finally, and my eyes left the curve of her legs, only to meet her eyes. The eyes were smiling. In one hand she held her jeans and her panties.

  “Is this good?”

  I felt a little jump in my stomach that had nothing to do with what I’d had for supper.

  “Uh, yes. Yes, that’s fine. I’ll see you downstairs, then.”

  “Deux minutes, je descend.”

  I stood in the doorway, knowing that I should turn around right now and go downstairs, but I didn’t. Therese dropped the towel, and threw the jeans onto the bed while she stepped into her panties. She was sideways to me, and I couldn’t move. She said nothing, but when she straightened up, the sight was almost overwhelming. Her panties were pale blue, and bikini style. She walked the two steps to the bed and picked up a loose fitting pale blue silk blouse that had been chosen before I arrived. As she put on the blouse I watched her every move. She was doing it on purpose, for me. Her breasts were small but shaped well, and I could see plainly that her nipples were hard. Maybe it was cold. I felt a sweat breaking out, but I don’t think it had anything to do with the temperature in the house. Once she had the blouse on, she picked up the jeans and sat down on the bed to put them on. Then she stood up and made little hops as she pulled them up all the way.

  What I wanted to do was in extreme conflict with what I knew I should do, what I knew was the ethical thing to do. She was young, and very beautiful, but she wasn’t mine. She seemed to be attaching herself to me, but it was up to me to make sure that attachment stayed within the boundaries of the mission.

  “Je suis prête.”

  I breathed a long slow deep breath, in then out.

  “Right, come on, then.”

  We came downstairs and into the kitchen, where Ronnie was making some amusing conversation with Evie, because she was laughing softly when we walked in. Ronnie, not Evie. Evie looked even more pissed off than before. I think I was beginning to get a handle on what was going on, but it would all have to wait for the end of the tasks at hand.

  We talked it over for a few minutes, and then Ronnie and Therese went into the front living room. Ronnie was packing that cannon she carried, and Therese had refused to give back the Glock. Under the circumstances, I’d agreed, but I had taken it out of ‘condition one’, and emptied the chamber before giving it back to her. I really didn’t need to come home with a material witness that had shot herself by accident with my gun.

  The last thing she had done before leaving the bedroom was to take the Glock out from under her pillow and stick it behind her back, just inside the waist of her jeans. They were tight enough to hold it firmly in place. Believe me, there was nowhere for it to fall to. She fit those jeans like they’d been sprayed on. But they looked perfect on her.

  Evie and I were going to make the move on the button. She retreated to the far corner of the kitchen, sank down in a crouch, and held the launcher at the ready. I think she was itching to fire the damn thing.

  I took a position to the side of the table, and reaching out a full stretch I could just put my finger on it. I looked at Evie, and she nodded. So, now or never. I hit the button.

  The first second seemed like a very long minute, but the second and third and fourth went by just like that, tic
k-tick-tick-tick. Nothing. I looked Evie, but she shook her head. What to do? I reached out and hit the button again, twice. Still nothing. I straightened up and waited for five seconds, then gave up on anything happening in the kitchen. As I turned away from the table I saw Evie’s eyes go wide, and that meant that it was something under the table, because I could see everything else that she could see, except for under the table.

  Immediately I fell to the floor, with my Colt in my right hand. There was nobody there. But there was a hole where there had been a floor. I quickly crawled to the edge and risked a look. A small ladder, maybe three rungs, and then a stairway hooking to the right, back under the house. This was exactly what I had been looking for. There was a light on down there, the illumination lighting the stairway up to the turning point. The lights from the kitchen were all that were needed to get down. The mechanism had been virtually silent, so the expectation was that everything would be technically cutting edge. Or ‘bleeding edge’, as engineers referred to it. I made a motion to Evie to keep my rear covered, and I slid down into the hole, head first.

  On the first landing I moved into a crouch. So far so good. I continued down the stairs now, still going head first. I wasn’t having anyone shoot my legs out from under me before I even saw them. Once I was around the turn in the stairs I was out of sight of the entryway. I kept going, and found myself rounding the turn, and staring at a large room, maybe thirty by thirty feet, with wooden crates stacked neatly against the walls, and another stack of them right in the middle of the room. None of the crate stacks was large enough to hide a man. Or woman.

  I signaled the all-clear, up the stairway. Evie was beside me faster than I thought she’d be. She must have climbed down to the first landing while I went around the bend in the stairs. Right away, she saw the same thing I did. It was as if the boxes were transparent. They were all stenciled on the top and sides with ‘U.S.A.F.’, and ‘U.S.M.C.’, like that. Weapons. But there had to be records somewhere. Probably with the papers that would grant passage for the goods as well as the people carrying them.

  We were looking at a large cache, relatively speaking. Depending on what was inside the boxes, it was impossible to determine any kind of accurate value. Look we must.

  I asked Evie to get Ronnie and Therese from the living room, and pass the launcher to Ronnie, so she could secure the kitchen. Who knows if Mark was automatically paged every time that trap-door opened. She hopped to it, and I went down the last few steps into the room. I did a walk-around, trying to determine if any section of the cache was more important than another. I stopped when I spotted a box at the bottom of a stack of three, with NSA stenciled on the side. That was more than unusual, that was next to impossible. Even the Joint Chiefs had trouble when the NSA was in the picture. They always had the budget they needed, and the ear of the President to boot. God alone knew at this stage how Mark had come across anything marked with the NSA logo.

  The back wall was a tool rack of sorts. There were several crowbars resting on bolts drilled into the wall, which was cement. Everything was cement. The floor, the ceiling, the walls, and I’d bet my bottom dollar that it wasn’t only reinforced concrete. There had to be at the least a Faraday cage built into it. The chance of stray radiation interfering with the neighbours television or shortwave sets would have put the kibosh on even attempting to turn on any advanced circuitry. The Faraday cage would contain that.

  I had a crowbar in my hands when Evie came back, sans launcher.

  “What? Did you find something?”

  Under other conditions that might have been funny, but I played it straight.

  “Yeah, I think so. There’s an NSA box at the bottom of that stack right there.”

  I pointed to the stack to Evie’s left. She looked at it, but didn’t get it for a few seconds. Then the penny dropped.

  “The NSA! Who the hell has access to that stuff? I mean nobody. The President himself would have a hard time getting anything out of them.”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  I handed her my crowbar and went back for another one.

  “We’re going to look in that one first, but I think we might need to empty the two on top before we can move them.”

  “I agree that these kinds of boxes are normally too heavy to lift just like that by hand, but…” She grabbed one end of the first box in the stack, and heaved a bit, testing its weight. As she lifted upwards, the box moved with her. “… I was right. These aren’t as heavy as we think. It’s a different sort of materiel than we’re used to. We can lift this one, anyway.”

  We put down our crowbars and took positions at either end of the boxes. I tested the weight the same way Evie had, and she was right. I could have moved this one alone if I had to.

  “Okay. On the count of three. One, two, three.”

  The box came off the top of the pile easily, and we set it down just a few feet from the stack. The second box was just as light as the first, maybe one hundred pounds, tops. Then the only box remaining was the NSA box. When we checked it, it turned out to be lighter than the other two. We picked it up and put it at the top of the new stack we’d made. Time to have a look-see.

  We eyed each other across the box.

  “Well, ladies first.”

  She grinned and picked up her crowbar, hefting it a few times in her hands before finding a point of purchase to get the lid started. Once there was room for both crowbars at the same corner it went faster. We had the top off in less than a minute. In the bottom of what was essentially an almost empty box, was a binder, a manual, and a suit just like the gray men wore when they did their bank jobs. This one was still in the original packaging. I had to admit, it didn’t look too good for Mark right about now.

  “Good. Now we have three suits. And a manual. Let’s leave this one open, and check the rest. What we want to take with us, we’ll put in here.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Okay, let’s start opening. If it’s standard issue stuff, just keep going. I want the gear that goes with these suits. If it looks interesting, we call out. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Before I could tell her to stop calling me ‘sir’, she was opening a box on the stack next to the first one, marked ‘U.S. NAVY’. What the hell. There was a job to do, and a lot of boxes to open. I started on the next stack on my side. This one was marked ‘U.S. GOVERNMENT - JPL’. The Jet Propulsion Laboratories of California. I worked the top off.

  Inside I found what I never would have believed, if someone had been telling me the story. There was only one item, but it was a whopper. A jet pack. Not the kind astronauts used, but the kind you strapped to your back so you could leap small buildings in a single bound. I stopped right away.

  “Evie.”

  “What?”

  “What’s in your box?”

  “I can’t say for sure, but it looks like programmable missile guidance circuitry. What about you?”

  “A bloody jet pack. The real thing.”

  We both stopped at the same time, thinking of the implications here. Was this all on the up and up? Was Mark doing a favour for some U.S. covert ops team? It didn’t fit. The Americans are always the last to share anything that gave them an edge. We were already looking at millions of dollars, and we’d only opened three boxes.

  “I’d say that, conservatively, we’re in trouble. There’s no way that this wasn’t alarmed. Get everyone to pack our gear and put it in the kitchen. We’ve got a ten-minute departure time on my mark.” I checked my titanium cased Omega. “Mark.”

  Then I went back to opening boxes with a vengeance. I went around the room popping the tops of all the top boxes in the stacks. Evie was back in two minutes.

  “Check all the contents as I open them.”

  I kept on going, and Evie started pulling out a handful of stuff here and a heavier piece there, and so on. When I’d done the whole room, I was sweating like a maniac, but it had only taken three minutes. Then I dived in to help a
t Evie’s task. I started at the opposite end of the room from her, checking for ‘Super Tech’ in every box. We found some. We found things that we had no idea of. There were several more cases of the launchers and ammo. I kept going. Evie had as much ammo for those launchers as she’d ever need. I hoped. If she didn’t, we were probably looking at WW III, so it wouldn’t really matter.

  I noticed that she was filling small black knapsacks near the stairway. She must have brought them down with her on the second trip.

  Then I found it. I just pulled back the matting sitting on top of it, and there it was. A medium-sized lead container. No lock. It didn’t need one, because this was the kind of box you only get your hands on within certain branches of the government and a few researchers at universities across the nation. No one researcher being allowed to know more than the scope of his/her mandate. I knew, because I’d been specifically shown. I opened the latch, and using both hands I opened the lid. Barely. Man, that was a heavy lid. But no wonder, after all, if you’re going to go to all the trouble of building a device like this one, then the investment in a custom-built lead container with exterior steel bracing was a mere fact of the process. And the least bother by far. It was a nuclear device trigger. I scanned it from all sides, crouching and jumping around it at the same time.

  A nuclear trigger. That’s one of the first things you learn in Anti-Terrorism 101. What in the hell does a nuclear trigger look like? They make sure you know. For certain. This one was very new, and clocked in under the maximum level of both ‘Super Tech’ and ‘Highly Illegal’. Even for a government. There were global laws for this sort of thing.

  I checked my watch. It had been too long already. Now I knew for sure that the button was rigged for notification. It could be a special number, but most likely it just set off a pager. Probably again and again until it was shut off. Nine minutes. Too long. I could feel the change coming over me. I had to deploy this group before I went all the way into my special little world. I shouted.