Silver

by Brian January

  He twisted the knob. April was standing in the corridor, wearing only a T-shirt that reached down to mid-thigh. His eyes widened.

  Taking him by the hand, she closed the door and led him to the bed, pushing him down gently on his back and climbing on top of him. Then she bent forward and pressed her mouth against his, her long, dark hair cascading over his face. Their tongues mated and stabbed.

  She rose up, staring into his eyes, her thighs straddling him and pinning him in place. “I was thinking you might be too smart to be interested in girls,” she said.

  A tumult of emotions flew across his face. Then he smiled, a bit sheepishly. “I may always have my nose in a book, but I’m still a man.”

  Arching her back, April pulled off her shirt and looked down at him. “Yes...you are.”

  SEVEN

  SKARDA had the dream again.

  Sarah...her eyes wide open in horror, her flowing hair wrenched back by the riptide like it was in the grip of a massive invisible fist...blood gushing from the gash on her throat like black squid ink...her mouth gaping open in a silent scream as the tide sucked her out to sea, both hands reaching out to him in helpless supplication—

  In a torrent of sweat he lurched awake to April’s touch. She was stooping low next to his bed. Silently she held out two fingers, then jerked her thumb towards the living room.

  He nodded wordlessly, then threw back the covers and pulled on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt.

  She pressed her lips against his ear. “Get Nathaniel. Boat.”

  ___

  April glided like a shadow over the oak floor of the living room. Minutes before, lying next to Nathaniel, she had awakened with her senses jangling, alert as a hunted prey animal in the forest. Emerging from his room, she’d seen two men dressed in black forcing open one of the terrace windows.

  Now, as she entered the room in a crouch, she saw the first man, a broad-shouldered silhouette in the diffused moonlight, disappearing into a corridor that led to the back of the villa. Behind him, a shorter and more heavily-built man was crossing toward her position, his head swiveling left and right. Moonlight glinted a dull sheen on the steel blade of the Ka-Bar fighting knife he held in his right hand.

  She stopped, merging with the deep shadows. The intruder still hadn’t seen her. When he was just a step away, she charged out into the open, reaching for the hand that held the knife. But some subliminal clue had warned him and he was already twisting aside, at the same time stabbing at her chest with the seven-inch blade. With a darting lunge she angled her body and stepped into the thrust of his arm, slashing at his bicep with the knife-edge of her hand, paralyzing the median nerve. His eyes slitted with pain. The knife dropped from his fingers.

  Before he could react again she scythed at his throat with a Dim Mak strike, crushing his larynx.

  He sank to the floor, croaking out gurgling noises.

  Alerted by the sound of the struggle, the second attacker ran into the room in a low crouch, his eyes widening a bit when he spotted his partner’s corpse on the floor. April stooped, snatching up the Ka-Bar. She held it outstretched in her right hand, blade turned up. Seeing the glint of honed steel in the moonlight, the attacker froze, his eyes calculating. It was a dangerous opponent who held a knife like this—it meant she was thinking of an upward thrust into his crotch.

  But it didn’t stop him.

  Snaking around furniture toward her, he burned his eyes into hers, tossing his knife from one hand to another. It was a classic distraction technique, designed to draw her gaze away from his eyes and shoulders, where he would be most likely to telegraph his moves.

  April kept her eyes focused on his chest.

  In a sudden burst of speed, he lunged at her. Almost bending in half, she took a step backward as the blade tip sliced through the air half an inch from her abdomen. Her thoughts raced at lightspeed. She knew the man could easily outreach her, making it difficult to step inside his arms for close-up work. And he was very fast and very skilled.

  Again he slashed, the tip ripping her shirt and drawing a thin arc of blood across her stomach.

  Another lunge—

  With blinding speed, she pirouetted out of his way, but she wasn’t quick enough and the blade grazed her bare arm. Blood gushed, flowing down to her fingers.

  Calculating her odds, she watched as the attacker’s mouth curve into a confident smile—

  Then, smiling back, she backpedaled a couple of paces and dropped the knife.

  ___

  Skarda all but dragged Nathaniel down the stone staircase toward the boathouse.

  “We can’t leave April—“ he cried out.

  “Don’t worry. She’ll be coming.”

  Skarda had arranged for a local boatyard to patch up the bullet holes in the Sea Ray and now it was bobbing in a boathouse hewn from the natural limestone at the end of a sandstone jetty.

  “Climb aboard,” Skarda ordered. “Keep your head down. I’m going back up.”

  Without another word, he swung around and hit the steps two at a time.

  ___

  As the knife clattered against the floor, April watched the man’s eyes widen in surprise. Then they narrowed to half their size and he took a confident step forward, his arm arcing out in a killing blow.

  In a blur of motion, she shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, then deliberately fell on her back in perfect sync with the onward thrust of his body, forcing the attacker to stumble, driven forward by his own momentum. Her foot lashed out, the kick hammering his groin as he flew over her head. He grunted in pain, twisting in the air. Snapping her foot back, she double-kicked him in the face, breaking his jaw, then sent him flying against the stone wall.

  There was an audible crack as his neck broke.

  Outside on the drive she heard the muffled slam of a vehicle door. Shoving to her feet, she raced to the window. More men dressed in black were piling out of a gray-colored van, heading this way. Her eyes narrowed as a tall, hawk-faced man strode confidently forward toward the house.

  And then she froze.

  One of the approaching men had the unmistakable hump of flamethrower tanks strapped to his back.

  She grabbed the Ka-Bar and took off running.

  ___

  Skarda was halfway up the staircase when April burst out of the house. He paled when he saw the blood streaming down her arm and soaking the bottom of her shirt.

  “You okay?”

  “I’ll heal. I took out the two in the living room,” she said, showing him the Ka-Bar. “Three more coming. Flamethrower. We’ve got to go.”

  He winced at the news, then followed her down the steps to the jetty. Untying the lines, he stepped aboard while she jumped into the pilot’s seat and fired up the engines.

  Nathaniel lifted his head up, yelping as he saw the blood.

  April showed him a terse grin. “No time for that now.”

  Then from above came the scrape of metal against stone. Skarda looked up to see a hard-faced man leaning over the terrace railing, shoving the snub-nosed barrel of a flamethrower down at the boat.

  “Over the side!” she yelled.

  Grabbing Nathaniel by the bicep, Skarda plunged over the gunwale, dragging the scholar along with him. April launched herself backward, arching her spine and letting the Ka-Bar fly just as the man’s finger tightened on the flamethrower’s trigger mechanism.

  With a violent wrench of his body he tried to twist away, but the flamethrower was too cumbersome. The Ka-Bar sank into the soft hollow of his throat, burying itself to the hilt.

  He toppled over the rail—

  But not before his finger twitched on the trigger—

  As April’s back slapped the water a gout of searing flame erupted from the nose of the weapon, spewing blazing napalm over the deck of the speed boat. With a meaty thunk, the corpse slammed against the flying bridge, the flames engulfing him.

  She hit the water in an explosion of bubbles, seeing Skarda on her left towin
g a struggling Nathaniel under the surface toward the dark bulk of the jetty. Beyond this the sloping shoulder of an underwater arch rose up to merge with the natural rock of the cliffside.

  Moments later Skarda shot to the surface in the dense shadow of the arch, sucking in oxygen. Beside him, Nathaniel was gasping and making strangled noises as he spit out salt water. He clutched the rough edge of the arch like it was a life preserver.

  The stench of jellied gasoline seared Skarda’s nostrils. He glanced around. A few feet away, April’s head showed, her dark hair streaming out around her on the surface of the water, her face burning with reflected light.

  Crackling noises came from the Sea Ray. It was a fiery hulk now, the flames lighting up the night and casting lurid rippling reflections on the sea. On the flying bridge, the flamethrower operator was a black, charred cinder.

  Then there was a ripping screech as the fuel lines exploded and the stern of the Sundancer erupted in a hot, white flash. Seconds later, an orange-red fireball rolled skyward, spewing flaming debris. Skarda dove, dragging Nathaniel with him. Under the waves, the concussion battered them like a tsunami.

  When he finally surfaced, Skarda hacked out spasmodic coughs. His lungs felt like they were full of greasy oil. Nathaniel sputtered, coughing noisily. All around them pools of blazing napalm and marine fuel flamed the darkness, sending swirling black clouds into the night sky. The water was littered with burning wreckage.

  The Sea Ray was gone.

  April swam up next to them, her eyes grave. “I recognized one of them,” she told Skarda. “Krell. He’s a merc. Ties to paramilitary outfits. Nasty. He likes to work with the Bad Guys. Always well-funded. If he’s in this thing, then there’s somebody very powerful who wants that silver.”

  Skarda made a face. “Well, that’s good news. Now what else can go wrong?”

  For a moment, the night seemed to hush.

  Then the villa exploded in a huge blast of flame.

  ___

  It took them almost twenty minutes to scramble up a rock-strewn, slippery cliff that finally leveled out to meet the snaking coast road before rising up again into the foothills of a distant mountain.

  Wet and bedraggled, Nathaniel looked around at the dark, empty landscape, defined only by the pale light of the moon. “Now what?”

  The snarl of an engine shattered the still of the night. A minute later a Ford F-150 roared around the shoulder of the cliff, braking to a halt a few feet in front of them.

  The passenger door popped open and a tall, dark-haired woman jumped out, a Scorpion submachine gun steady in her hands. Thrust into a baldric around her shoulder was a carbon-steel cutlass.

  Her teeth flashed in the darkness. “Hello, people. Going somewhere?”

  EIGHT

  London, England

  HE called himself Solomon. That wasn’t his real name, but he liked the sound of it, and it was his way to indulge himself with the things he liked. Alone in his study, he stood staring out a floor-to-ceiling window at his rear garden, grayed to obscurity by a blanket of fog, his nose so close to the rain-sheeted glass that it almost touched. From this vantage point he could see the soot-colored roofs and sullen brick chimneys of the flats on Earl’s Walk and Pembroke Square, where pedestrians with black and red umbrellas trotted along huddled against the weather, their bent figures limned by the glow of the street lamps. As he watched an unbidden memory tugged at him: the image of himself as an eight-year-old boy, standing in front of a similar rain-blurred window, his nose pressed against the glass, staring down at the crush of taxis and buses on Central Park West.

  It was a memory that made him cold inside, like the cold chill of death.

  Solomon was a collector—of anything rich and rare and valuable and old—and he didn’t mind paying for it. Or paying to have it stolen, which in many ways was a lot more satisfactory to him. At times he also acted as a go-between for wealthy clients around the globe, orchestrating the theft of precious objects to be shut up in private vaults until the end of time. His most prized acquisitions were classical Roman statues, particularly marble and bronze sculptures of gods and heroes, but his collection housed art from all ages: gold and silver torques, a bronze labrys from Minoan Crete, Mayan scrolls, Egyptian gold and faience jewelry, Etruscan terra cottas, Greek marble statues, Chinese vases, medieval tapestries, a Michaelangelo drawing, two Vermeers, a life-sized Rembrandt, and dozens of Impressionist sketches and finished paintings.

  A discreet bell chimed, interrupting his thoughts. Tearing himself away from the window, he secured himself behind his period Horner Brothers oak library table, from whose legs grotesquely-carved gargoyles leered up at him with gaping, mocking mouths. He glanced at the feed from the gate security camera and scowled: Krell, at the wheel of his black BMW, on time to the millisecond.

  A lightning strike of anger flared through Solomon at the sight of the man. Krell always reminded him of everything he wasn’t: tall, brutally confident, totally at home in a world he had forced to submit to his will, but one that terrified Solomon to the roots of his soul.

  Buzzing him through, Solomon summoned his housekeeper Martha to unseal the door. Exactly six minutes later Krell wrenched open the study door without knocking and entered, gliding over the lush Persian rug like a black shadow, a force of malevolence in the elegant chamber. Behind Solomon’s head a life-size equestrian portrait of Charles V gleamed with varnish, a tacit reminder to all petitioners of the owner of this room’s wealth and power.

  But Krell didn’t even bother to glance at it. He set the Minoan silver plaque on the gleaming desk. “Phaistos.”

  The older man nodded, showing him a razor-tight smile. The aura of abrupt violence emanating from this man terrified him, but he willed his emotions into submission. He barely looked at the plaque. Instead he studied Krell with a deliberately callous expression, the pitiless appraisal of a reptilian predator.

  “Have the intruders been dealt with?” His voice betrayed heavy tones of accusation. He already knew the answer would be negative.

  “No.” Krell showed no emotion, made no apology.

  Solomon’s eyes locked on the tall man’s face, greedily searching for the slightest twinge of weakness. And found none. He scowled. “We have a contract,” he warned. “And a constrained time frame. The silver must not be found.” His lips twitched in a death’s-head grin. “At least until this is over. And anyone trying to find it must be eliminated. Do I make myself clear?”

  Krell just stared down at him with leaden, soulless eyes.

  Solomon struggled to match his stare, but finally dropped his gaze. The man had won again, stripped Solomon of all his imagined strength and bravado. With a scowl he reached into a drawer and pulled out a thick packet of banknotes, shoving it across the desk.

  “Your pieces of silver.” His tone hinted of a sneer. Money was the only real power he had over this man.

  The tall man picked up the packet and turned away.

  There was a sharp click as the door latched shut on Krell’s departing back.

  When he was finally alone again, Solomon slumped in his chair. A bead of sweat trickled down his flank from his left armpit and he realized the back of his shirt was damp. Damn that man! He glanced at the security feed screen, seeing Krell just reaching the front door. Solomon thumbed on the intercom. It was much less emasculating to bare his weakness to this man through the insulation of walls and wires.

  “I need another one. Dark hair this time.”

  Krell’s step didn’t falter. But his head moved in an all but imperceptible nod.

  Watching the man leave, Solomon shuddered. But then his lips curled into a smile of sadistic cruelty. The conviction of power was already surging inside of him, fueling him with imagined confidence. He was already envisioning the dark-haired girl lying on his bed, her wrists and ankles tied to the four posts, completely under his control, unable to stop him from doing anything he wanted to do to her.

  NINE

  Herak
lion, Crete

  IT was like being inside a stone box. A single bulb dangled from a chipped and discolored plastered ceiling, casting harsh white light over four square walls constructed of irregularly-shaped limestone blocks. There were no windows to allow more illumination, only a heavy metal door that looked like it was made out of battered bronze.

  Skarda shifted in the scarred wooden chair he was sitting on. He winced. Hundreds of spiked hammers pounded inside his skull and sweat matted his hair—the aftereffects of whatever drug the woman’s accomplice had shot into him.

  Gritting his teeth, he moved his head to his left. April was sitting in a matching chair with her eyes closed and her legs crossed yoga-style. In a third chair Nathaniel sat with his legs thrust out in front of him, his feet turned outward, his arms hanging limply at his sides. His head lolled against his shoulder.