The Montague Portrait

by Matt Drabble

  Just as they reached the centre of the library powerful flashlights exploded into life and swung in their direction. The beams were steady and tracked them in a careful arc. It was the controlled nature of their new companions that concerned her. Without speaking she grabbed hold of Travis’s jacket and threw him to the floor behind a long oak table that dominated the centre of the hall. She just managed to slide over the top of it before the soft pops rained down. The silenced automatics spat fire and small explosions thudded into ancient texts as the bullets flew over their heads.

  She glanced around, desperately looking for an escape route. Their attackers were covering the exit at one end of the long hall and they were crouching down behind a table right in the centre. The exit at the other end looked a million miles away and to reach it they would have to run for it with no cover. For now the gunmen were approaching carefully; they obviously respected her work at the B&B and didn’t know if she was armed or not. She figured that if they were to trust Vargas, then it had to be Lochay’s people who were firing, and despite their slow approach, they could reach them in a matter of seconds. Her mind raced for a plan, but she had nothing.

  Suddenly the far exit door burst open and two people rushed in, drawing weapons as they ran. Charlotte saw immediately that one was a man and one a woman, and her eyes connected with the woman’s just as she raised her gun. Charlotte had nowhere to hide and braced herself for the inevitable, then realised that the woman’s aim kept rising until it was pointing well over Charlotte’s head. The woman fired with slow and careful aim and she was soon joined by her companion. Charlotte instinctively held Travis’s head down as the bullets flew both ways. She heard a sudden cry of pain from one of Lochay’s people and the man and woman she presumed belonged to Vargas looked towards her. The woman waved her forward. Grabbing Travis’s hand and yanking him up, Charlotte instantly followed her instructions, half running, half stumbling towards the exit door and the safety beyond. As they passed them, Charlotte didn’t bother giving thanks. These were no saviours in shining armour; they were just bad guys serving a different master.

  ----------

  Sage Adderley walked forward carefully. Her finger took the trigger’s pressure but she held off firing. She had hit at least one of Lochay’s men but didn’t know if it was fatal or not. She nodded towards her partner and as they circled in, he moved further away to her right.

  Lochay’s men were not firing anymore but she nevertheless kept her guard up. As they drew closer she heard the wet rasps of someone struggling to breathe. She rounded one of the bookcases and found a man in a black suit and a balaclava lying on his back. A fine crimson mist occasionally emanated through his woollen mask. She quickly scanned the area for the other Lochay man and saw a thin blood trail leading towards the doors through which they had entered. She nodded to her partner and he lumbered off through the door in pursuit of the escaped Lochay man.

  Meanwhile, she knelt down and placed her hand over the dying man’s nose and mouth, sealing off his breath. She waited until his chest grew still and quiet before she released him and wiped the blood off her exquisitely manicured hand. Satisfied that he was dead, she took his gun and looked up to see her partner shuffle back through the door. She raised her eyebrows in question, but he shook his head. She held on to her temper, but only just, and only on the surface.

  The big ox lumbered up to her. ‘At least they didn’t hit us,’ he said.

  ‘Not quite,’ Sage replied as she swiftly raised the dead man’s gun and fired point blank into her partner’s face. At close range his features were obliterated and chunks of red and grey matter flew out from the back of his head and splattered on the wall behind him. She shuddered in pleasure at the sight. It was a relief not to be burdened with his incompetence anymore. He’d been killed by Lochay’s man’s gun, wasn’t he, so she was free, with the ballistics to back her up no matter what Vargas might think.

  She was congratulating herself on her ingenuity when her thoughts were shattered by approaching sirens and the clatter of police car doors.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  MOTION ON THE OCEAN

  Travis watched the calming seas outside their cabin window. The journey so far had been somewhat arduous, to say the least. He and Charlotte both suspected that Vargas would have installed their phone with GPS tracking. He also agreed that dumping the phone earlier would have been pointless due to their protection detail.

  After the library in Florence however, he saw it as the perfect opportunity to get a little alone time and they started crisscrossing train routes leading back to France. Always using cash and never leaving a trail.

  After they burst out of the library he flagged down a police car, feigning a stricken state of panic and terror. He used what he hoped was a convincing southern American accent to tell the officer that there was a shootout inside the building. It wasn’t his best acting but he hoped the accent was strong enough for them not to be found again.

  Vargas’s people and Lochay’s would be either dead in the shootout or detained by the police. Either way it was a window for Travis and Charlotte to slip through.

  They headed up to Cherbourg in France in order to take the ferry across to Ireland. He figured that if they flew straight from Florence then all it would take was for one of Vargas’s people to spot them and they would be found. This way they could keep their final destination a secret.

  His online detective work had been slow and clumsy and he wasn’t lying when he told Charlotte that at that point he was missing Chris more than ever. Chris would have been a short blur of motion before plucking the juicy morsels from the net. But he was successful in running a family tree trace on the Wheeler’s. Fortunately there were not too many to fog the issue. There was a divorcee, Gemma Wheeler, whose name had made the news when she was murdered by her ex-husband Frances in a small village called Ballytona in Southern Ireland. The village was small enough that nothing of the sort had ever happened in their community before and the national press immediately picked up on the story. Their luck was in because the woman was divorced and was named as a Wheeler in the piece. Apparently the divorce was amicable enough at the time, but the couple supposedly clashed over one particular item during the divvying up process of their belongings. Travis could hazard a guess at which particular item caused the problem.

  So they had a lead and a relatively fresh one at that. Gemma Wheeler was strangled by her ex-husband only three weeks ago. Travis remembered hearing the news item at the time, but that now seemed like a lifetime ago.

  The ferry journey was surprisingly soothing and he found his cluttered thoughts easing. He made full use of the on-board facilities and scanned the computer in the onboard internet café. He was shocked to find no news of the deaths at the B&B back in the UK. There was no mention of any crime being committed at the house and he could only assume that Vargas had the scene cleared up. He had to admit that it was a relief to find that their wanted posters were not plastered across the internet.

  He found a small piece about a fire in Lagrasse, France. But there was no mention of Pierce Barnes, just some minor details about a gas leak.

  He sat back in his chair and pondered. Apparently Vargas was cleaning up after them as they went. But now hopefully Vargas had no idea where they were. Travis had booked a hire car from the ferry that would be ready for them when they landed in Rosslare on the southern Irish coast. He also booked them into a quaint looking hotel near the village of Ballytona, and printed off route map planners to the village along with some other details about Gemma Wheeler’s death.

  For the first time in a while he felt prepared and in control. All this felt far more familiar to him. In his days as an insurance investigator this was his bread and butter – a name, a place, an event, a case to investigate.

  Surprisingly, the crossing between Cherbourg and Rosslare took over eighteen hours. They were travelling on the oddly named Oscar Wilde ferry, which was more like a cruise liner, with more facil
ities than he expected.

  A nice dinner and a little shopping with Vargas’s money would be just the thing later tonight. But now all he wanted to do was sleep. The journey from Florence to Cherbourg had been frantic and anxious and for the first time in days he felt that they might just be out from under Vargas’s beady eye and that felt just fine.

  He walked back to their cabin with a spring in his step, easing his way quietly into the darkened room. They booked a cabin as a married couple and as such there was just the one large bed. Charlotte’s silhouette was a mound under the blankets and he looked over regretfully at the chair beside the bed. Charlotte stirred and mumbled something incoherently, pulling back the covers behind her. Travis took the invitation and crawled gratefully into the warm soft bed. He was asleep almost before his head hit the pillow.

  Sometime later his sleep was invaded by a soft mouth gently pressing against his. In a hazy balmy state that twisted between reality and dreams, he removed Charlotte’s clothes and she removed his. Her naked flesh felt like silk as she moved against his chest. With gentle hands they stroked each other. He tasted her salty skin. She gripped him. He kissed her until they were both breathless, until with pounding beats of animal ferocity he slid into her. Travis closed his eyes but quickly opened them again as he felt a sudden pang of guilt for his lost wife. In the dim light he looked with wonder at the expression of rapture on the face beneath him. They moved in exquisite unison, until finally they lay locked together as their passion lay cooling and spent and they truly slept together.

  When he woke he could hear the sound of falling water as the shower steam leaked out from under the bathroom door. He felt a stirring under the sheets as emotions long thought dead or dormant awoke with him. He struggled to realise what had been real and what might have been a dream and found himself desperate to believe that it was all real. The guilt that had consumed him for so long after Amy’s death, like a huge heavy slab of iron that had kept him anchored from living a life, felt as though it had slid a little from around his heart. Only a few short weeks earlier he’d had nothing to live for and had been contemplating suicide. But now he had a glimpse of a future that was both terrifying and wonderful.

  Charlotte came out of the bathroom and her usually blazing warrior eyes were gentle and coy and he felt a wave of closeness that sealed the intimacy between them. He now had something to live and fight for. He felt the ghost of a smile creep across his face until he realised that there was a flipside: he also now had something to lose.

  ----------

  Sage Adderley watched the happy couple from across the dining room. After the debacle in Florence her pride had taken the worst of the damage. She was contemplating calling Vargas for his help in bailing her out from the Italian police custody she found herself in, when Vargas beat her to it and phoned first. His power and influence never ceased to amaze her. Within ten minutes she was showered in apologies and free as a bird. But she was still irritated that he had to intervene as though she was a wayward child.

  She looked across at Parker and Goode sharing bashful glances over candlelight. The nature of their relationship had changed. She informed Vargas of her suspicions. He dismissed them as meaningless, but she knew that for the first time since she had known him, he was wrong: the bond between these two had strengthened immeasurably, and that made them more dangerous and more vulnerable than before.

  She lifted the crystal glass to her painted lips and took a slow and gentle sip. The wine was the best the restaurant had to offer and she had little compunction about hammering Vargas’s plastic as hard as she could. Unbeknown to Parker and Goode it mattered little about their movie style attempts to ditch Vargas’s watchful eye; the man was a hawk with endless vision and nothing escaped him.

  Sage was aware of several appreciative stares caressing her shapely form from around the room. She revelled in her power, knowing that she looked like a dream to the dreary business men, but not to the one person she wanted. It was a childish exercise, a fruitless gesture aimed at an absent father-come-lover figure that Vargas was to her. He had never shown the slightest inkling towards her beyond the professional and it infuriated her that there was one man she was incapable of attracting. All her life she’d been driven towards power and Vargas was an apex predator. She was desperate to win his approval on this, the most important of his assignments. She was determined to succeed above all else. If she could prove herself to him, then maybe he would finally notice her. If Vargas was King, then one day she would be his Queen.

  ----------

  When the ferry docked in Rosslare the first task was to pick up a rental car. While Travis did the paperwork, Charlotte sat and waited. There had not been time for a repeat of their lovemaking and for that she was a little regretful. She was relatively inexperienced but now it seemed that perhaps it was a lack of a compatible partner that was missing in her previous unsatisfying fumbles.

  She had spent a lifetime in a seemingly permanent ready state, always on the edge and never knowing just what she was waiting for. Her parent’s deaths had hung over her for so long. She was never able to move beyond that night when her father strangled her mother to death and was then consumed by the fire that engulfed the house. Despite her father’s actions, she saw them both as victims. Both victims of Hugo Montague’s reach from beyond the grave. Now, for the first time ever, she saw a path to a future – a future devoid of the long black cloud that had been choking her every breath.

  She hadn’t expected to find such potential with Travis Parker, but he was that beacon of hope. Together they would end Hugo Montague’s reign of terror. They would end the monster’s ever-repeating revenging cycle that culminated in the death of another Wheeler woman. She now felt a strong ancestral obligation to her clan: to her name, to her mother, to end this once and for all.

  She watched as Travis dealt with the woman behind the rental counter. She was amused to find herself feeling a stab of jealousy as the young woman smiled warmly at him. They were on the way to investigate another Wheeler death in a small village not too far from the Irish port they had docked in and she couldn’t help but feel a rush of nervous excitement. Travis had demonstrated how adept he was at investigation. He had shown her the research he did at the library and she was impressed by his results, despite the short amount of time he had available. They were close now, closer than she had ever been to anyone before. Unfortunately, despite Travis’s confidence that their current whereabouts were a secret, she knew that Vargas could be around the very next corner.

  Travis walked back to her, grinning his infectious grin. ‘Got us an upgrade,’ he said.

  She grinned back. ‘I just bet you did.’

  Two minutes later they were on the road. When Travis took the driver’s seat she smiled to herself to realise she hadn’t felt the need to object.

  The Irish coastline was bathed in rare sunshine for so early in the year, and as she gazed at the dramatic scenery it seemed for a moment as if they were just any other couple on holiday.

  Vargas watched the world crawl by beneath his window. His penthouse apartment served as both his office and his home; he could never bear to be further away from his work than necessary.

  He could feel the electricity in the air now. The time was fast approaching when he would hold real power rather than the feeble paper finances that seemed to pass as such. The painting was drawing close, so close now that he could taste it. After what seemed like eons of time, waiting and planning, the end seemed to be rushing at him like an out of control freight train. So much time had suddenly become so little time.

  He still shuddered at the memory of his loss of control when talking to Chris Taylor. The man was an employee and Vargas had spewed his guts out in front of him, like a child seeking reassurance. He had revealed far too much in front of the underling. So much so that he had to dispose of a very valuable resource. He had intended to simply rescue Taylor and return him to the fold. But he had been diminished in the eyes of the
computer expert and that he could not stand.

  His empire was a giant one in the eyes of man, but was that really enough for a man of his appetites? His influence stretched into governments in multiple countries on multiple continents. He owned more controlling stock in more companies than he could count in a week. He employed only the best and the brightest and the most ruthless. He demanded absolute devotion and loyalty. His rewards were unlimited but so were his punishments.

  He ran his fingers along his exquisite handmade bookcases. The beautifully textured and grained wood was lovingly fashioned by a master craftsman over a century ago. The shelves were lined with first editions of immeasurable value and importance. But his public display paled into insignificance compared to his private collection. The dark satanic texts he kept hidden were alive with power and possibilities. One of the things he inherited from his father was a desire for dark power and a key to unlocking the universe. Until he held the portrait he would never know for sure if his father had been successful in his quest. All his father’s books had perished in the fire along with all his knowledge. He may have inherited his father’s thirst, but he had to start the collection all over again.

  His eyes were drawn back to the day beyond the thick pane of glass and the world beyond. He still didn’t quite understand his own motivation or his dark desire to regain the portrait. He had been honest when he told Taylor the painting was both his legacy and his curse. Soon he would have to make a decision: honour his father, or forge his own future at his father’s expense?

  ----------

  In his race against Vargas, Gabriel Lochay felt the end was coming fast over the horizon and he was woefully underprepared. Despite all his best efforts he was still bringing up the rear. He had lost another of his top operatives in Florence. Parker and the Goode woman seemed to have the luck of the devil himself watching over them. It had taken a monumental effort but somehow he had resisted the urge to have his Florence survivor skinned alive for his failure. Good men were hard to find these days and his workforce was in a somewhat rapid decline. Perhaps there was more to the myth of the portrait after all.