“I didn't realize the Order of the Black Sun were such sadists,” Purdue said.
Sasha showed him a crooked smile. “There's a lot you don't know about the Black Sun.”
7
Air
The plane waiting for them wasn't nearly as lavish as Galen's had been. It wasn't nearly as comfortable or accommodating of a flight, either. They were handcuffed to their seats with armed Black Sun foot soldiers staring at them, just waiting for them to make some stupid attempt to get away.
None of them were stupid enough to try. There was no point. They were in the middle of the air with nowhere to run. Purdue, Sam, and Nina all knew better than to try and resist at this point. It was better to wait it out and find a possible better opportunity in the future.
Galen, however, proved once again to be lacking in some of their more intelligent qualities. He writhed and flailed in his seat, trying desperately to slip out of the cuff around his wrist. Maddox tried to tell him to calm down and shut up but Galen refused.
“There's no need to tether me here like a dog! Just take this thing off me, eh?”
Sasha came over with a crutch in her hand. She set it in between Galen's legs where he was sitting. “Here.”
“Is this supposed to be some sort of apology, because it's shit, you crazy b—”
“I'm not apologizing,” Sasha said and slapped Galen's wounded knee, causing him to rock about his chair even more, almost in tears. “It just might make it easier for you to walk. Maddox lugging you around everywhere would slow us down. And at this point, we're not slowing down. We're closing in on the Spear of Destiny.”
“We don't know that for sure,” Purdue said. “But of course you saw the first possible clue and are now treating it like it’s law. Those etchings in the tomb could have meant anything.”
He wanted to believe that they were significant—part of him really did—but he didn't want to convince Sasha of that. If only he could convince her that it was a goose chase and they turned the plane around. But no ... Sasha and the Black Sun had already set their sights on Rhodes, and Purdue knew that no amount of charm he had was going to sway this particular woman.
“We'll know soon enough,” Sasha said.
Purdue decided to try and gather as much information as he could about the enemy. “So, what's a lovely lady like yourself doing hitched up with the Black Sun? Good paycheck? Health benefits?”
Sasha ignored his prying. She didn't owe him any answers, and maybe had even been instructed to not tell him anything more than she had to.
“Come on. You don't seem overly interested in the history of it all. That's a shame but I understand. I've usually been in it for the thrills, curbing my boredom, but I've really grown to love where it all comes from. How can you not? It's very interesting once you give it a chance.”
“I see why they all can't stand you,” Sasha said, “You're just so damn annoying.”
“But seriously, is it just a job for you or something more?”
“I don't really feel like sharing my life story with you, Purdue.”
“Why not?” Purdue looked out the window at the open air. “We've got time to kill and I always like getting to know fellow passengers on plane rides. It's a chance to meet new people, see new viewpoints.”
“Who are you kidding?” Sasha cackled, leaning forward. “Stop pretending. You've never been on a commercial airplane. You've never sat next to strangers on a plane before. The only people you have ever flown with were your personal guests on your private jet. You'll have plenty of time to chat all about the Order of the Black Sun once we reach our destination. We'll be meeting a friend of mine at the island. He's been looking forward to meeting you for a long time.”
“I bet,” Sam said with a chuckle. “I've been denying friend requests online from Black Sun members for months now.”
“You can keep joking as much as you want for now. I don't think you'll be laughing when you meet him, though. He's something of a boogeyman in our organization. Even the top brass are afraid of him. Someone who makes all of our other operatives you've met look like nothing, including myself, frankly.”
“And does this boogeyman of yours have a name?” Purdue asked, hoping he'd recognize it.
Sasha didn't respond, flashing one more smile before walking back up to the cockpit.
The way she looked at them made Nina uncomfortable. It was like she was looking at prisoners on death row awaiting their execution. A final glance before they were snuffed out and taken from this world. It was probably the same way Sasha had looked at her former mercenary comrades before she had them all riddled with bullets, and left to rot in the desert.
Whoever this boogeyman of Black Sun's was ... he wasn't anyone good.
INTERLUDE 1: PLAYING KING
Even as a boy, Julian Corvus loved kings. All of his friends would pick up sticks and swing them around, imaging they were brave knights defending their homelands or slaying dragons. Julian always preferred to put on a make-believe crown and play as the king. He'd make a rock or a tree stump his throne and command his imaginary legions of loyal soldiers and servants.
One of his friends, Robert—or as he liked being called in the game, Sir Robert, slayer of trolls—once asked him why he never wanted to be a knight with everyone else. Julian gave him a very honest answer. “I don't want to settle for what everyone else is doing. I want to be better than that.”
Julian had always been smart for his age, carried himself with a wisdom that didn't come from any sort of life experience. It just came naturally to him.
There was something about monarchs. He could care less about the butterflies; he liked the real monarchs. Kings held so much—almost absolute power over dominions.
Who wouldn't want that? It would be amazing to do whatever you wanted. People tending to your every whim and desire. His friends idolized people like Freddie Mercury, Robert Redford, Martin Luther King. They were all fine, he supposed. But they weren't Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, or William the Conqueror. Those were the people he revered. They all had real influence and real undeniable power; power that most people could never attain no matter how successful they became.
Even at that young age, Julian understood the concept of hierarchy. He knew that no matter how much he wanted to be a king, he never could be. A king had to be born into royalty and he certainly hadn't been. As much as he liked to pretend or dress up, there was no crown or throne in his future and probably no real power either.
Julian grew a little older, and while his fascination with kings hadn't faded, he'd also become quite intrigued by the notion of gods. It didn't matter which religion or culture they came from, almost all gods were respected to one degree or another.
His family raised him to be Jewish but he never had much interest in the faith, much to his parents' and teachers' chagrin.
“Lazy.”
“Such promise is wasted on him.”
“Disappointment.”
He heard all of it but none of it bothered him. Not even when his parents would scold him for his utter lack of ambition. He knew they were wrong so their disapproval slid off of him very easily. The truth that they didn't understand was that he had too much ambition, which is why he wanted more than the mundane life they had already charted out for him. Just like when his friends wanted him to stop playing king and be a knight, he didn't want to settle for something so inconsequential.
And that's what his family was to him: inconsequential.
He didn't care much for his own religion but took up an interest in another: Christianity.
He didn't plan to convert. Absolutely not. He didn't buy into the religion itself. Any of its rules and commandments. Like all organized religion, there was a lot of hypocrisies and contradictions in the religion itself. It was Christianity's figurehead that interested him. The symbol for the faithful followers' salvation—the man nailed the cross.
A dying man claiming to sacrifice himself for humanity. Julian had alway
s been taught during his tutelage in Judaism that Jesus of Nazareth was just a man, not the Messiah that the Christians believed he was. The Jewish were still waiting for their savior; they didn't believe that the messiah had already come two thousand years ago.
Julian didn't believe in saviors. He always figured that with all of the atrocities in the world, one would have shown up by now. Since one didn't for any of the number of genocides and massacres and bloody wars, then one probably wasn't coming ever. It was just people’s hopes that their lives could be fixed so easily.
Julian liked to strip away the savior aspect and only look at Jesus Christ as a man. When he did that, then all of the mythic parts of him went away and he became so much more interesting. A simple, mortal man. A poor carpenter praised by his peers and hailed as God made flesh. He would be worshiped for thousands of years after his death.
That was true power. That was real influence.
Jesus of Nazareth didn't just become famous. He didn't gain status or wealth. That single man had become God in the eyes of millions of people for thousands of years. How could one person attain that kind of influence? It was incredible and always made Julian a little jealous.
Christ had become his idol but it had nothing to do with faith or even God. He was the most influential man who ever lived and wasn't unlike the kings Julian always idolized. A king of man who transcended all of them and was believed to be man's creator. A king of life itself.
Jesus even had a crown.
8
The Cold Man On The Island
Their luxurious hostage plane landed and they were transferred into a small helicopter. Their handcuffs remained tightly shackled around their wrists and each were escorted to the helicopter by an armed guard, making it just about impossible to make a run for it during the transfer between air crafts.
There was no escape or going back now. They were on their way to the island of Rhodes, home to the castle once belonging to the order of Hospitallers—and the possible location of the Spear of Destiny.
The island of Rhodes housed one of the only Gothic structures in all of Greece. The Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes. It was a mouthful, but it had functioned as the headquarters for the Hospitallers centuries ago. And perhaps it had been protecting the real Spear of Destiny for almost just as long.
Nina tried to ignore the large man sitting beside her holding a gun. She tried to forget about the bindings around her wrists. She just looked out the windows of the helicopter at the island that was coming into view.
Rhodes.
After everything she'd read about it, she half-expected to see the towering form of Helios on the shoreline—the fabled Colossus of Rhodes that had once been erected in the times of ancient Greece. It would have been an amazing sight, but unfortunately it was brought down by an earthquake mere decades after it had been constructed. The sun god, Helios, must really have hated how they had represented him. The nose was too big. The eyes too close together. Maybe they messed up the width of his thighs, made him look fat.
Or perhaps it was just time showing that some things weren't built to last. Since then, centuries later, the Hospitallers made Rhodes their home and fortified the island into a formidable defensive position. Nina had a vague recollection that they'd even been able to fend off the Ottoman Empire, at least for a time ... before being defeated in another siege of the island.
Here it was. All of that history surrounded by the seas.
She tried to imagine the Hospitallers' ship landing near shore. The knights bringing home all of the things they'd collected in foreign lands. Their feet splashing in the shallows as they lugged all of their prizes off of their ship.
The crusades may have been a war about religion and faith—at least that's what everyone claimed at the time—but there were still plenty of spoils to be won, like any other war. Even throughout thousands of years of human history, war changed very little, no matter what the cause of it was.
Maybe the Hospitallers knew what it was that they found in that tomb.
Maybe they didn't. They may have just taken it as an extra spear to have in case they needed one.
There was even a chance that they didn't take the spear home, especially if they weren't aware of what they possessed. It could have just been used as an ordinary spear in battle and been lost in the sand. They could have just discarded it as junk.
If that was the case, then the island of Rhodes wouldn't be giving them any answers that they wanted. At least the Order of the Black Sun would be just as disappointed as her. They would be back to square one, probably back to searching through endless tombs, or dead if the Black Sun decided they weren't worth keeping around anymore.
But what if the knights knew what it was they had discovered?
Then it could very well have been taken back home to Rhodes—and that meant they could be so close to it.
After all, why would the Hospitaller knights carve their cross into that casket? It was a message that they had claimed what was inside. Why would they do that if they thought it was just a regular spear inside?
They wouldn't have.
That was the argument her mind made every time she doubted their progress. The only way that symbol in the tomb made sense was if the Hospitallers were aware that their discovery was the Spear of Destiny.
“You look nervous,” Sasha snickered. She was looking at Nina with mocking pity.
“I'm not nervous,” Nina said. “I'm just excited to make sure that Black Sun loses yet another artifact. We've gotten in your way so many times. Can't let that record break now.”
They landed a short distance from the Palace of the Grand Master, and then walked the rest of the way to the old castle. It was a sand colored structure that stood firm and strong, having survived hundreds of years. Nina was a bit in awe of it. Despite all of the other old architecture she'd seen, it was always so inspiring to see something that withstood the test of time.
As they approached the entrance, Nina noticed the large plaque with Benito Mussolini's name on it.
“The hell?” Sam was looking at the plaque too and turned to Nina for a logical answer.
“It was one of his holiday homes,” Nina answered, recalling everything she remembered about the island. “It had served as a getaway for a few different leaders before him too. After the war, the island was given to Greece.”
Sam shook his head in disbelief. “You think Mussolini found the Spear of Destiny here?”
“I think if he had, he wouldn't have ended up on the wrong side of World War II, don't you think?” Purdue answered.
Sasha and her men led Nina, Purdue, and Sam through the large rectangular courtyard into the castle itself. It had been well renovated over the years and Nina remembered reading that the Hospitallers had done a number of modifications to it after an earthquake in the fifteenth century. And there were no doubt further renovations done since then, considering the castle had been transformed into a museum.
She looked around at the many groups of tourists roaming the castle. It was a piece of history, and she hoped they all were finding it just as fascinating as she was. Part of her wished she could really relish and enjoy her time here, but nothing ruined a museum visit quite like being there under threat of death and held against your will.
They continued down the halls and Nina was glad to have some plaques on the walls she could read as they walked. Reading about the history of the castle calmed her down, and she carried the small hope that maybe the Spear of Destiny would be mentioned somewhere, but she didn't see it. There was the earthquake on the island in 1481. The capture of the island by the Ottoman Empire in 1522. An ammunition explosion in 1856. Even an exhibit about Mussolini's time there. She didn't see the words ‘spear’ or ‘destiny’ even once.
Sasha brought them upstairs to the second floor where they went into one of the castle's many rooms. A large rug bearing the cross of the Hospitallers covered the floor and there were a couple of chairs spread about.
They all stood there for a few moments and Purdue couldn't figure out why they had been brought there. “So? We just going to stand here or are we going to actually look for the spear?”
“Be quiet,” Sasha said. “We'll start looking for it soon enough. There's someone that wants to meet you.” It might have just been Nina's imagination but Sasha didn't look happy that they were here either. She looked nervous, maybe even afraid.
“Well you tell 'em we're busy trying to finish this job,” Galen said. “And this is a waste of time just standing around here.”
“Be happy to be standing at all,” Sasha hissed. “I could have easily made it so you'd never walk again.”
Galen was no doubt preparing a well thought out retort but didn't get the chance to verbalize it.
“It seems fitting, doesn't it?” A tall, slender man in a jet-black suit descended the steps. “Holy knights finding a holy weapon. They must have thought their discovery was the will of God himself. A reward for their faith. Maybe it was. But what about ours? When we find the spear, will it be divine providence? Luck? Or just our own will and intelligence?”
Sasha spoke but sounded uneasy. A far cry from the defiant confidence she had displayed prior.
“Julian.”
The name slipped out of her mouth, like she didn't mean to actually say it out loud. She was tense, and all of that control she had evaporated.
“Sasha. You look as radiant as ever.” The man didn't even look at her. He walked right past her like she was hardly there at all.
Instead, his icy gaze was on Purdue.
“David Purdue. The billionaire with too much time on his hands. The fly that refuses to be swatted. That just keeps on buzzing ... and buzzing ... and buzzing ... and...”
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