Another hall, a few more rooms, a painting of galleons dueling at sea, the picture seen through the beady eye of a hovering gull. Victor would remember that one. He had just stepped into the living room, noting the cold ashes of the fire, when someone said, “There you are.”
The man wore a flannel vest without a shirt, his right arm covered with a steampunk tattoo showing gears and coils and leather straps. His head was shaved, leaving a narrow mohawk that flopped rakishly to one side, making him look a little like a bouncer or a Comic-Con enthusiast.
“Been looking all over for you,” the man said.
“Peter send you?”
The man nodded. “I’m your driver.”
“That’s funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“You don’t look the type to chauffeur people around.”
He cocked his head. “Then what type am I?”
“Forget it. Where is Peter now? I need to speak to him.”
The man shook his head. “Can’t do it. He has plenty of things to do today, and none of them involve you.”
Victor nodded, rubbing the stubble on his chin and thinking about last night, his conversation with Peter and the Wikipedia entry he’d read. A tiny alarm sounded again in the back of his mind, warning him that he might not reach the airport if he climbed into a car with this man, but he still wasn’t convinced Peter intended to make him disappear. More than likely, Peter had simply wanted to get a read on Victor so he could decide if he had to worry what Victor would say if he sat down for coffee with a reporter from the Times. If Victor had had any inkling as to what had been going on in that laboratory, maybe Peter would not have been so eager to send him away.
“How long have you been working for Peter?” he asked.
“A few years,” the man answered. “He pays well, keeps to himself.”
“Mind telling me what he needs with two Blackhawks and a crew of mercenaries?”
The man shrugged. “He likes to keep himself insulated—protected, you know. For some people, having alarms on the windows doesn’t quite cut it.”
“He’s paranoid, you mean?”
“He’s careful.”
“And none of this seems strange to you?”
He shrugged again. “It’s a steady job and it pays well. Gotta take what you can get. You should understand—you’re ex-military too, aren’t you?”
“Rangers.”
“Likewise. Airborne.” He thrust out his hand. “Razorback.” He read Victor’s raised eyebrow and shrugged. “Most of us don’t use our real names. Like I said, Peter’s a careful man.”
“Okay,” Victor answered. “Well, unless you want me to come up with a nickname on the fly, I’m Victor.”
“I know. Ready to get home, soldier?”
Victor nodded. “Absolutely. Why the hell would I want to stay in this dump?”
Razorback laughed. “Come on, follow me.”
___
A black BMW coupe with tinted windows waited for them in the courtyard. Victor looked from the car to Razorback, figuring the vehicle belonged to Peter. Razorback probably drove a pickup with a suspension lift and roof-mounted spotlights.
Halfway across the courtyard, Victor stopped and gazed up at the storied face of the castle set against a blue morning sky, pillared windows and white stone and scroll work tracing the trim beneath the eaves. The windows of the fifth-story balcony were open, letting the melancholy notes of a violin spill into the courtyard.
“Ready to go?” Razorback asked, jiggling the keys in his hand. Something in him seemed to have relaxed at the discovery they had both served in the Rangers. Maybe he was looking forward to comparing their resumes along the drive to the airport, who served where and who carried more shrapnel under their skin.
The violin was interrupted by a squeal of childish laughter. Then the notes started again, faltering before they found their place.
“Victor?”
“What song is that?” Victor asked.
“I think it’s Mendelssohn,” the man answered.
Victor glanced at the car and thought of the dusty miles to the airport, waiting on a plastic chair for a voice from the ceiling to tell him it was time to board, jostling past the other passengers and staring wonderingly out the window, hating how he would never learn what happened to those scientists or who was really responsible for the Prievska attack. And then there was the greatest mystery of all: Peter Krieg, the self-made billionaire inexplicably caught up in world politics.
“Hey,” Razorback said in a low voice, standing just a few feet behind Victor. “We really have to get going. He won’t be happy if he looks out a window and sees us standing around down here.”
Victor nodded. He was thinking about the question Peter had asked last night: Why do you care? Did he care what the scientists had been doing in that laboratory, so long as he received his electronic deposit? He could get in that car, head back to the States, and spend the day with Camila. Hell, why not make a week of it, go on a road trip to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, get down on one knee with a panoramic view behind them and an endless blue sky above them and tourists with Hawaiian shirts and cameras hanging from their necks filtering past them, ignorant of their bliss?
Why not do it?
It was right there within reach, a future thousands of people - millions - would kill to have. And yet…why did he feel the need to debate it, to weigh the pros and cons?
“I’m serious, man,” Razorback warned. “Quit fooling around. We have to—” He placed his hand on Victor’s shoulder, and before Victor knew what he was doing, he had slammed his elbow into Razorback’s solar plexus, stunning him. Then, while Razorback fell to the cobblestones, gasping for air, Victor snatched the pistol from his waist.
“Wouldn’t want you shooting me in the back,” he said.
He sprinted toward the door the scientists had entered the night before. It was unlocked. He barreled into the hall, the carpet striped with slashes of sunlight from the windows. He glanced back into the courtyard. Razorback was on his feet, barking into his radio. How many mercenaries did Peter employ? If they knew the layout of the castle as well as Razorback did, it wouldn’t take them long to track Victor down. He had to find the scientists.
And then…
There was no time to think the rest through.
He rushed through a few rooms, passing numerous open doors, before he found the stairwell. If he were Peter, where would he keep the scientists? No, that was the wrong question. The right question was this: Where would a king from the Middle Ages keep them?
In a dungeon.
He trotted down the stairs, the air growing cool and damp. The light from the upper windows faded, forcing him to draw his flashlight. The beam revealed a heavy door with a sign on it written in German. Victor could not read most of the words, but he did recognize the first one.
ACHTUNG.
To his surprise, he found the door unlocked. He pushed it inward and swept his flashlight across wooden casks and racks of glass bottles nestled against the wall. He drew one of the bottles nearest him. He could not read the label (this one was in French), but the year read 2005.
He returned the bottle and crossed to a wine rack at the end of the room. He drew another bottle at random and found himself holding a 1945 Mouton-Rothschild claret. He did not have to be a wine connoisseur to know anything bottled in 1945 would be worth a fortune.
Still, this was not getting him any closer to finding those scientists. He returned the bottle to its resting place, then listened again for sounds of pursuit. He heard neither footsteps nor voices…but what was the humming that seemed to come through the walls? A generator?
Not wishing to give up easily, he made a slow sweep around the room with his flashlight. As he was turning back toward the stairway, the light reflected off the hinge of a door. The hinge, like the rest of the door, had been darkened by a coat of black paint as thick as grease. It looked recent.
Victor rapped on th
e door with his knuckles. Unlike the door leading into the wine cellar, which was made of heavy wood banded together with iron, this door was solid steel. It was like discovering a baseball card during the excavation of an ancient Roman town. A door like this did not belong in such a place, especially considering Peter’s obsession with maintaining the Medieval integrity of the castle. This door reminded Victor of the entrance to the bunker where he had found the scientists.
He bent forward to study the door’s handle, another anachronism. The handle jutted from a steel plate, and below it was a keyhole like the head of a large flathead screw. Victor had seen this kind of security door before. The lock would engage as many as four separate tongues of steel, making it nearly impossible to open the door by force.
He tested the door just to satisfy his curiosity. As he had anticipated, the handle refused to budge. He stepped back, wondering what a man would hide behind a steel door at the back of a wine cellar, far from prying eyes. He pictured a skeleton with its hands chained over its head, dust filling the curves of its hip bones. Maybe the scientists were trapped in there, thirsty, starving, pissing themselves in fear.
Or maybe the room was lined with shelves glittering with gold bars—the billionaire’s hidden fortune.
Victor stepped back, wondering - not for the first time - what kind of man Peter was. He didn’t think Peter would keep something he treasured hidden behind that door. No, he seemed more likely to hide the things he feared, the things he thought about in the dead of night, the things he was too ashamed to speak about.
Whatever lay behind that door, Peter had gone to great lengths to protect it.
Victor jerked his head at the sound of footsteps. Two men entered the room brandishing automatic weapons. Behind them, a faint expression of amusement on his face, came Peter Krieg.
Victor raised a bottle of Tempranillo in the air, the pistol resting casually atop the wine rack.
“I don’t suppose you brought a few glasses?” he asked.
Chapter 17
“I call it my thinking room,” Peter said.
He was referring to the topmost room in the highest tower of the castle, well over a hundred feet above the courtyard. A stone balcony encircled the room, shrouded in cloud, the stone rail reaching just past Victor’s waist. It would be a perfect place to murder someone—if you didn’t mind cleaning up their remains from the ground far below.
“I used to come up here,” Peter said, “after an argument with my wife. The clean air always helped clear my head.”
“Which wife would that be?”
The corners of Peter’s eyes creased. “Someone’s been reading about me. Find anything interesting?”
“A few things. But I was more interested by what I didn’t find.”
“Is that why you assaulted one of my soldiers and fled to my wine cellar? Curious to know whether I prefer white or red?”
Victor gripped the stone rail and stared out into the dense cloud. He felt out of his depth. It seemed like Peter held all the cards…but if that was the case, why hadn’t he ordered his men to drag Victor from the cellar, throw him into the car, and shove him out at the nearest airport?
“You’re thinking about your next move,” Peter said.
“My move?”
Peter nodded. “Like chess. Do you play?”
“I have.”
“It’s quite invigorating—the discipline of thinking ahead of your opponent, predicting his moves, creating contingencies in case things change. I am trying to teach my son the game’s merits, but he is still young.”
“You mean Charles?”
Peter cocked his head. “Do you think I have another son?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Come now. You read my Wikipedia page. You must have learned everything there is to know about me.” He smiled, and in it Victor saw the winsome charm of a young boy determined to conquer the world. Maybe that smile was the reason his second wife had married him. The smile and the money.
“I find it hard to believe,” Victor said, “that you brought me here to talk about chess.”
Peter clasped his hands behind his back and stared into the gloom. “No, I brought you here for the view,” he answered ironically. “Why did you attack one of my men?”
“I wanted to speak with you.”
“And you thought you’d find me in the wine cellar?”
Victor shrugged.
“Who are you working for?” Peter asked.
“Oh, come on. You know that already.”
“I’m not talking about Tecumseh.”
Victor blinked. “You think someone planted me?”
“I didn’t, not until this morning. I never would have given it a second thought if you’d climbed into that car like you were supposed to, but now…” He trailed off, growing thoughtful. “A man of my standing makes many enemies. If you are one of them, Victor—”
“I’m not.”
“But if you are, if I discover you’re anything but who you say you are…” He stopped himself, as if deciding an implied threat would work better than a detailed one. He drew a lungful of fresh air. “So what you want me to believe is that you’re still here because of your curiosity.”
“I’m not going to leave until you tell me what’s going on.”
“I can see that,” Peter answered dryly. He watched Victor for a long time. Finally he said, “Give me your phone.”
Victor frowned. “Why do you want—”
“Either give me your phone or walk away. It’s your choice. Trust goes both ways, doesn’t it? If you want answers, you will need to prove you can be trusted.”
Reluctantly, Victor fished his phone from his pocket and held it out to Peter. “People are going to start wondering where I am. If anyone calls—”
Peter cocked his arm like a quarterback and chucked the phone over the railing. It sailed into the clouds, disappearing almost at once, Victor’s one lifeline to the world he knew.
“Whatever you’re about to tell me,” he said, “it had better be good.”
Peter stepped back into the tower doorway, pausing to wait for Victor. “Follow me,” he answered.
___
Their footsteps echoed in the narrow stairwell as they descended.
Peter said, “I was telling the truth when I denied any relationship between Prievska and the laboratory you raided. I know because I have been watching that compound for a few years now.”
Victor waited. He sensed the answers were coming, and he didn’t want to annoy Peter by pushing him too quickly.
“I invest in many companies, as you no doubt know,” Peter said. “Some years ago I was approached outside my home by a young woman. She had already shown up several times, so I told my security detail to let her through. She was hunting for an investment. She represented a Japanese company called Nichibotsu Enterprises, an organization run by a team of scientists and technologists backed by wealthy investors.”
“Backed by people like you, you mean,” Victor said.
Peter nodded. “That was the idea. The company was in the midst of developing a number of innovative ideas: Hovercraft, holographic cell phones, autonomous vehicles. They didn’t confine themselves to one field, and this…egalitarianism appealed to me.” He swallowed. “Another pet project of theirs - and this one never seemed particularly important - involved the genetic engineering of insects.”
They reached the bottom floor, beneath the castle. Victor raised his flashlight to the beams along the ceiling. Some were wood, discolored by mold and riddled with termites, while others gave the cold gleam of steel. The original pillars, each of which curled four separate arms against the bedrock, showed cracks in the stone. In other places, large chunks of the supports had fallen and now rested against the walls.
“So when did you start getting suspicious?” Victor asked.
“I have a financial adviser who reviews all my investments each year. My contributions to Nichibotsu Enterprises, though insubstant
ial, nevertheless failed to meet his standards.”
“How so?”
“The money was stale. The company’s progress reports were redundant, full of jargon and recycled information. They needed to create marketable products in order for me to get my money back, but they appeared no closer to this than before.
“My adviser began following the money trail to see exactly how they were spending my investment. He’s very good at these things. The money was distributed through numerous channels, but a significant amount ended up in an offshore account controlled by a dummy corporation.”
The Shadow Walker (The Last Colony Book 2) Page 12