by P. W. Child
MYSTERY OF THE
AMBER ROOM
Order of the Black Sun—Book 13
Preston W. Child
Heiken Marketing
Copyright © 2016 by Preston William Child
All rights reserved. No part of this publication might be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Edited (USA) by Anna Drago
PROLOGUE
Aland Islands, Baltic Sea – February
Teemu Koivusaari had his hands full with the illegal product he was trying to fence, but once he managed to get a buyer it was all worth the trouble. It had been six months since he had left Helsinki to join two of his associates on the Aland Islands where they pursued the lucrative venture of counterfeit gems. They flogged anything from cubic zirconia to blue glass as diamonds and tanzanite, sometimes passing off – quite skillfully – base metals as silver and platinum to unsuspecting amateurs.
“What do you mean, there is more?” Teemu asked his associate, a corrupt African silversmith by the name of Moola.
“I need another kilogram to fill the Minsk order, Teemu. I told you that yesterday,” Moola complained. “You know, I have to face the clients when you screw up. I expect another kilogram by Friday or else you can go back to Sweden.”
“Finland.”
“What?” Moola scowled.
“I’m from Finland, not Sweden,” Teemu corrected his partner.
Wincing, Moola stood up from his desk, still wearing his thick cutting glasses. “Who gives a damn where you are from?” The glasses magnified his eyes to a ridiculous fish eye shape that had the Fin screaming with laughter. “Piss off, man. Go get me more amber and I need more raw materials for emeralds. That buyer will be here by the weekend so move your ass!”
Laughing aloud, the scrawny Teemu walked out of the hidden makeshift factory they operated.
“Oi! Tomi! We have to get to the coast for one more haul, pal,” he told their third associate who was busy chatting up two Latvian girls on holiday.
“Now?” Tomi wailed. “Not now!”
“Where are you going?” the more extrovert girl asked.
“Uh, we have to,” he hesitated, looking at his friend with a pitiful face. “Need to get some work done.”
“Really? What work do you do?” she asked, suggestively sucking spilled Cola off her finger. Tomi looked at Teemu again with his eyes rolling back in his head from sheer lust, surreptitiously begging him to abandon work for now so that they both could score. Teemu smiled at the girls.
“We are jewelers,” he bragged. The girls were instantly intrigued, conversing excitedly in their mother tongue. They locked hands. Teasingly they begged the two young men to take them with. Teemu shook his head profusely, and whispered to Tomi, “There is no way we can take them!”
“Come on! They can’t be older than seventeen. Show them some of our diamonds and they will give us anything we want!” Tomi growled in his friend’s ear.
Teemu looked at the gorgeous little kittens, and it took him all but two seconds to reply, “Okay, let's go.”
With cheer Tomi and the girls slipped into the backseat of the battered old Fiat the two drove on the island to stay inconspicuous while they transported stolen precious stones, amber, and chemicals for the production of their counterfeit treasures. At the local harbor, there was a small business that stocked imported silver nitrate and gold dust among other things.
The crooked owner, an obsessed old sailor from Estonia, normally assisted the three con men in reaching their quotas and hooking them up with prospective clients for a generous cut of the profits. When they skipped out of the small car they saw him rush past them, shouting zealously, “Come boys! It is here! It is here right now!”
“Oh my God, he is in one of his crazy moods again today,” Tomi sighed.
“What is here?” the quieter girl asked.
The old man briskly glanced back, “The ghost ship!”
“Oh geez, not that again!” Teemu moaned. “Listen! We have some business to discuss with you!”
“Business is not going to run away!” the old man clamored as he headed for the docks' edge. “But the ship will vanish.”
They ran after him, amazed at his swift and spryer movement. When they caught up with him, they all stopped to catch their breath. It was an overcast day, and the icy ocean breeze chilled them to the bone as the looming storm drew nearer. Every now and then the sky flashed with lightning accompanying distant growls of thunder. Every time the lightning pulsed through the clouds, the young people recoiled a little, but their curiosity kept the upper hand.
“Look, now. Look,” the old man said with glee, pointing toward the shallows off the bay to the left.
“What? Look what?” Teemu said, shaking his head.
“Nobody knows about this ghost ship but me,” the retired sailor told the young women with old world charm and a glint in his eye. They seemed interested, so he told them about the apparition. “I see it on my radar, but sometimes, it is gone, just,” he said in a mysterious voice, “ – just gone!”
“I see nothing,” Tomi reported. “Come, let’s go back.”
The old man looked at his watch. “Soon! Soon! Don't go. Just wait.”
The thunder clapped, startling the girls into the arms of the two young men, at once making it a very welcome storm. With the girls wrapped in their arms, they watched in stunned shock as suddenly a sizzling magnetic charge was hovering over the waves. From it, the bow of a shipwreck appeared, barely visible above the surface of the water.
“See?” the old man screamed. “See? It is low tide, so this time, you can finally see that godforsaken vessel!”
The young people behind him stood in awe at what they were seeing. Tomi got his phone out to take a picture of the phenomenon, but a particularly vicious bolt of lightning shot down from the clouds, sending them all cowering. Not only did he not capture the scene, but they also did not see the bolt clash with the electromagnetic field around the ship, which caused an infernal crash that almost popped their ear drums.
“Jesus Christ! Did you hear that?” Teemu screamed against the cold gust. “Let's get away from here before we get killed!”
“What is that?” the extroverted girl cried and pointed to the water.
The old man crept closer to the edge of the jetty to investigate. “It's a man! Come help me get him out, boys!”
“He looks dead,” Tomi said with a spooked expression.
“Nonsense,” the old man disagreed. “He is floating face up, and his cheeks are red. Help me, you deadbeats!”
The young men helped him pull the man's limp body from the crashing waves to keep him from getting smashed against the pier or sinking. They carried him back to the old man's workshop and laid him on the work bench in the back where the old man had been melting down some amber for reshaping. After they had ascertained that the stranger was indeed alive, the old man covered him with a blanket and left him until he was done concluding his business with the two young men. The back room was delightfully
warm from the melting process. Finally, they departed for their little flat with their two friends and left the old man in charge of the stranger's fate.
Chap ter 1
Edinburgh, Scotland – August
Above the steeples, the sky had turned pale, and the weak sun was immersing everything in a yellow glow. Like a scene from the looking glass of a harbinger of ill omen, the animals seemed restless, and the children fell silent. Sam wandered aimlessly through veils of silk and cotton, hung from somewhere he could not determine. Even when he raised his eyes and looked up, he could not see any anchor point for the whipping fabric, no railing, no thread and no wooden supports. It was as if they were hung from an invisible hook in the air, stirred by a wind that only he could feel.
Nobody else who passed him on the street seemed to be subjected to the dusty gusts carrying desert sand. Their frocks and the hems of their long skirts were only moved by the movement of their legs when they walked, none by the wind that drowned his breath every now and then and tossed his wild dark hair into his face. His throat was dry and his stomach burned from days without food. He was heading for the well in the middle of the town square where all the citizens gathered for market days and to catch up on news from the past week.
“God, I hate Sundays here,” Sam mumbled inadvertently. “I hate those crowds. I should have come two days ago when it was quieter.”
“Why didn't you?” he heard Nina ask from his left shoulder.
“Because I was not thirsty then, Nina. There is no use coming here to drink when you are not thirsty,” he explained. “People will find no water in the well until they need it, didn't you know?”
“I did not. Sorry. But it is strange, don’t you think?” she remarked.
“What?” he frowned as the whipping sand grains stung his eyes and dried his tear ducts.
“That everyone else can drink from the well, except you,” she replied.
“How so? Why would you say that?” Sam snapped defensively. “No-one can drink until they are parched. There is no water.”
“There is no water for you. For others there is plenty,” she chuckled.
It infuriated Sam that Nina was so nonchalant about his suffering. To add to the blow, she continued to rouse his fury. “Maybe it is because you do not belong here, Sam. You are always interfering with things and end up drawing the shortest straw, which is fine, had you not been such an insufferable whiner.”
“Listen! You have…,” he started his retort, only to find that Nina was gone from his side. “Nina! Nina! Vanishing will not win you this argument!”
By now Sam had reached the salt-weathered well, pushed and shoved by the people congregated there. Nobody else wanted to drink, but they all stood like a wall to block off the gaping hole where Sam could hear the splashing water in the dark below.
“Excuse me,” he muttered as he pushed them out of the way one by one to peek over the edge. Deep inside the well, the water was dark blue, even in the blackness of the depth. The light from above refracted in glittering white stars on the rippling surface as Sam was yearning for a mouthful.
“Please, can you give me a drink?” he asked no-one in particular. “Please! I am so bloody thirsty! The water is right there, and yet I cannot reach it.”
Sam stretched out his arm as far as he could, but with every inch his arm won forward, the water seemed to recede deeper keeping the distance, eventually lying farther down than before.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” he shouted furiously. “Are you kidding me?” He recovered his stance and looked around the strangers who were still unperturbed by the incessant sandstorm and its dry onslaught. “I need a rope. Does anybody have a rope?”
The sky grew lighter. Sam looked up at the burst of light that shot from the sun, barely disturbing the perfect roundness of the star.
“A solar flare,” he mumbled perplexedly. “No wonder I’m so bloody hot and thirsty. How can you people not feel the unbearable heat?”
His throat was so dry that it refused his last two words and they came out as nothing but whispered grunts. Sam hoped that the raging sun would not dry up the well, at least not until he had had a drink. From the darkness of his desperation, he resorted to violence. If nobody paid attention to a polite man, perhaps they would take note of his plight if he was acting out.
Wildly throwing urns and breaking pottery as he went, Sam screamed out for a cup and a rope; anything that could help him get the water. In his gut, the lack of liquid felt like acid. Sam felt his entire torso course with burning pain as if every organ in his body had been sunburned to blisters. He fell to his knees, keening like a banshee in the throes of agony, gripping the loose yellow sand in his clawing fingers as the acid spurted up into his throat.
He grabbed their ankles, but they only kicked carelessly at his arm without paying much attention to him. Sam wailed in pain. Through narrowed eyes, somehow still pelted by the sand, he looked up at the sky. There was no sun, no clouds. All he could see was a dome of glass from horizon to horizon. All the people with him stood in awe of the dome, frozen in fascination before a loud clap blinded them all – all but Sam.
A wave of invisible death pulsed from the sky under the dome and turned all the other citizens to ash.
“Jesus, no!” Sam cried at the sight of their horrific demise. He wanted to take his hands off his eyes, but they would not move. “Let my hands go! Let me be blind! Let me be blind!”
‘Three…’
‘Two…’
‘One.’
Another clap like the pulse of destruction echoed in Sam’s ears as his eyes shot open. His heart raced uncontrollably as he surveyed his surroundings with widened eyes filled with terror. Under his head was a thin pillow and his hands were gently restrained, testing the strength of the light rope.
“Great, now I have a rope,” Sam noted when he looked at his wrists.
“I suppose the call for a rope was your subconscious mind recalling the restraints,” the doctor speculated.
“No, I needed a rope to get water from a well,” Sam countered the theory as the psychologist freed his hands.
“I know. You were telling me everything as you went, Mr. Cleave.”
Dr. Simon Helberg was a forty-year veteran of the sciences, with a particular affinity for the mind and its trickery. Parapsychology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience and oddly enough a special inkling for Extra Sensory Perception floated the old man’s boat. Thought by most to be a quack and a shame to the science community, Dr. Helberg did not allow his tainted reputation to faze his work in any way. An anti-social scholar and reclusive theorist, Helberg thrived only on information and practice of theories typically perceived as myth.
“Sam, why do you think you did not die in the pulse, while all the others did? What was it that set you apart from the others?” he asked Sam, sitting down on the coffee table in front of the couch where the journalist was still lying down.
Sam gave him a borderline juvenile scoff. “Well, it is rather obvious, isn't it? They were all of a similar race, culture, and country. I was a complete outsider.”
“Yes, Sam, but that should not exempt you from suffering an atmospheric catastrophe, should it?” Dr. Helberg reasoned. Like a wise old owl, the overweight, bald man stared at Sam with his huge pale blue eyes. His glasses rested so far down his nasal bridge that Sam felt compelled to shove them back up before they would fall off the tip of the doctor's nose. But he kept his urges restrained to consider the points laid out by the old man.
“Aye, I know,” he admitted. Sam's large dark eyes scanned the floor as his mind searched for a plausible answer. “I reckon it was because it was my vision, and those people were merely extras in the scene. They were part of the story I was watching,” he frowned, unsure of his own theory.
“That makes sense, I suppose. However, they were there for a reason. Otherwise you wouldn't have seen anybody else there. Perhaps you needed them to understand the effects of the death pulse,” the doctor suggested.
/>
Sam sat up and ran his hand through his hair. He sighed, “Doctor, what does it matter? I mean, really, what is the difference between seeing people disintegrate and just watching an explosion?”
“Simple,” the doctor answered. “The difference is the human element. Without witnessing the atrocity of their deaths, it would be but an explosion. It would be nothing more than an event. Yet the presence, and ultimately the loss of human life is meant to impress upon you the emotional or moral element of your vision. You are meant to perceive the destruction as a loss to life, not just a victimless cataclysmic occurrence.”
“I’m too sober for this,” Sam groaned, shaking his head.
Dr. Helberg laughed and slapped his own leg. He pressed his hands down on his knees and pushed himself up laboriously, still chuckling away as he went to stop his recorder. Sam had agreed to be recorded during his sessions for the interest of the doctor's research into psychosomatic manifestations of traumatic experiences – experiences that originated from paranormal or supernatural sources, ludicrous as it may sound.
“Poncho’s or Olmega?” Dr. Helberg grinned as he opened his cleverly hidden liquor cabinet.
Sam was surprised. “I never took you for a tequila man, doc.”
“I fell in love with it when I was in Guatemala a few years too long. Sometime in the seventies I lost my heart to South America and do you know why?” Dr. Helberg smiled as he poured the shots.
“Nope, do tell,” Sam urged.
I became obsessed with obsession,” the doctor said. And when he saw Sam's most befuddled look he explained. “I had to know what caused this mass hysteria people usually refer to as religion, son. Such a powerful ideology to have subjected so many over so many eons, yet yielded no concrete excuse to exist but for the power of men over others, was indeed a good reason to probe.”