Clockwork Doomsday

by Alex Archer

  Gently, Garin prodded the thing with a fingertip. It was solid enough. He leaned forward and examined the stamped words he could make out. He thought they were Greek, which fit with what he knew of the original designer, but he wasn’t sure.

  The flower seller peered into the briefcase. “You’re a collector of broken toys?”

  “Something like that.” With his forefinger, he shifted the foam and explored the bottom of the briefcase. The gray-green claylike substance that threaded across the space like a thick worm was plastic explosive. He let the foam drop back into place.

  His satphone rang and he answered it.

  “Is everything satisfactory?” Eyuboglu sounded anxious. Money meant a lot to him.

  “Yes, everything looks fine.” Garin closed the briefcase. He’d already memorized the combination.

  Klotz whispered into Garin’s ear. “We’re moving in, sir. Don’t worry about the remote control signal to the briefcase. We’ve already blocked that.”

  Unless there is a backup trigger. Garin reached under his jacket and fisted the Glock .45ACP he had holstered at the back of his waist. “You didn’t mention that it wasn’t working.”

  Eyuboglu chuckled. “After more than two thousand years, I would think that would be understood.”

  “I’m disappointed.”

  “Don’t think of trying to take off without paying me the other half. I have a sniper ready to put a bullet through your heart.”

  Turning, Garin faced the Palazzo delle Assicurazioni Generali. “Very nice. I hadn’t expected that of you.”

  “Sir.” Klotz’s words came rushed. “We don’t have the sniper.”

  “Understood, Klotz. See to your objective.”

  Eyuboglu didn’t bother hanging up before issuing his order. “Shoot him! Shoot him!”

  Lunging toward the flower kiosk, thinking of the beautiful young woman working there, Garin pulled the pistol and shot the little man between the eyes at point-blank range. The man looked shocked as his legs went boneless beneath him and he dropped to the flagstones. A small remote control dropped from his left hand.

  A bullet cut through the space where Garin had been standing. Briefcase in one hand, the pistol in the other, he vaulted the counter space and wrapped an arm around the woman to drag her to the ground. He fell on top of her and the proximity was surprisingly pleasant. Her subtle perfume tickled his nose and made him think of that very private tour that was probably off the table at this point, though she was handling this turn of events surprisingly well.

  He looked into her eyes. “Sorry.”

  She nodded.

  Screaming had erupted in the plaza. The rifle shot echoed and rolled between the buildings. Then more bullets tore through the kiosk, ripping petals from flowers and turning them into bright confetti that floated down over Garin.

  “Emil? The sniper?”

  “A moment more, sir. We’re fixing his position.”

  “At your leisure.”

  “Hardly the time for sarcasm, sir.”

  Garin grinned. “One thing I’ve learned, if you can’t have fun when someone’s trying to kill you, you’re not enjoying life.”

  The woman held on to him. More bullets crashed through the kiosk as he listened to the screaming and the blast of scooter engines.

  “Mr. Braden.” Klotz sounded out of breath but calm. “Eyuboglu is ours—alive—and the sniper is dead.”

  “Excellent.” Garin rose up with his pistol extended just as another gunman closed on the kiosk. “Emil, I am not amused,” he said as he calmly shot the man twice in the face, just in case he was wearing body armor.

  “Sorry about that one, sir.”

  Looking over the top of the kiosk, Garin scouted for other guards Eyuboglu might have had on the scene.

  None of them appeared to remain.

  At that moment, the woman thrust a small pistol into Garin’s crotch. He looked down at her and shook his head. “Ah, and I had really started to like you.”

  “You’ll like me more when I don’t pull this trigger.” The woman eased him off her but her weapon never lost contact with him. “Put your gun down, Mr. Braden.”

  Garin laid his pistol aside. “You know my name.”

  “I do.” She picked up his pistol and tucked it into a large shopping bag.

  “I do hope someone told you that I’m not a man to cross.”

  “Fortunately, after today you’ll never see me again.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that.”

  “Give me the briefcase.” She held out her free hand.

  “Tell me who you’re working for.”

  “That’s not going to happen. Professional courtesy.”

  “I understand and respect that.”

  “Good. Give me the briefcase and be glad that I wasn’t asked to kill you.”

  “Because you were told I would already be dead? That Eyuboglu would betray me?”

  “Give me the briefcase now or I’ll pull this trigger,” she said more forcefully. “I’m on a timetable.”

  Garin handed the case over. “Since I like you, I’ll tell you that there’s plastic explosive in the briefcase. And it’s rigged to prevent a break-in.”

  “Not my problem.” She took the briefcase and put it in her shopping bag, as well. Then she grabbed the straps and headed out of the kiosk as police sirens began to scream a few blocks away.

  Garin remained on his back in case she had more people watching her back. “Emil?”

  “Yes?”

  “Evidently we’re going to be flushing out the other buyer today, as well.”

  “Never a dull moment with you.”

  Garin chuckled. “And I thought you said this wasn’t a time for sarcasm.”

  “You have to keep a sense of humor in this job, sir.”

  4

  “I know about the Abenaki people.” Captain Hiram King of the Cape Cod Coast Guard was in his early sixties and still manned a desk job. “When I was a kid, I used to look for arrowheads and tomahawks in the forest. Found a few of them, too.”

  He was a thin, compact man with a long face, lantern jaw and big ears. Although his face was weathered from sun and wind, and wrinkled from the passage of years, Annja could still see in him the boy that he had been.

  He sat behind his desk in a crisply starched uniform. “I’m not trying to tell you your business, Ms. Creed, but a story about the Abenakis would probably be a lot more interesting than that witch’s ghost.”

  Annja was still eating her half of the cheese sandwich King had shared with her from his lunch. She’d been starving and wasn’t looking forward to eating out of the vending machines while the coast guard sorted out the Russians. “I know. That’s what I’d tried to sell my producer on when he gave me this story. I was hoping to do some research on the Abenaki while I was here.”

  “Those people have a tragic history, if you ask me.” King pulled a grape from the bunch in the plastic container between them and popped it in his mouth. “They were an Algonquin-speaking tribe, but separate from the Algonquins.”

  “They spoke Eastern Algonquin.”

  King nodded. “I learned a little when I was a kid. My mother, she was part Abenaki and her grandmother tried to make her hang on to the culture.” He shook his head. “Didn’t take, though, which was too bad. But my grandmother, she guarded her heritage fiercely. Used to tell me stories about Azeban.”

  “The raccoon trickster.”

  “Ah, Azeban isn’t always a raccoon, though.”

  “Right. Sometimes he’s a wolverine, but he’s always a trickster, always doing something to get food or to get others to do something for him. He was the one Abenaki parents told their kids about the most when they wanted to get a point across.”

&nb
sp; King seemed quite pleased with her. “You do know your stuff.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My grandmother told me dozens of those old stories. Sometimes she told them to me after I got into trouble, but more often than not I think it was to keep me interested in the Abenaki.”

  “Evidently it worked.” Annja nodded at the collection of arrowheads and two tomahawk stones in a display case behind the coast guard captain’s desk.

  King unscrewed his thermos and freshened Annja’s cup of tea as well as his own. He’d warned her away from the office coffee. Studying her with his faded blue eyes, he said, “You shot a few folks out there in the cemetery.”

  “They shot first, and I didn’t kill any of them. I think they were going to kill all of us.”

  King tapped the typed statement lying on his desk. “I see that. I don’t see a problem getting you out of this, but there are reports to file.”

  “Of course.”

  Puzzled, King folded his hands together. “Want to tell me where you learned to shoot like that, Ms. Creed? That’s not something they mention on that television show.”

  “My first dig I was working on Hadrian’s Wall. The Roman fortification that bisected England for a time?”

  “I read a little history now and then.”

  “Well, some of the security people were ex–Special Air Service guys. They thought I might be interested in learning to shoot. I was a quick study.”

  “When did you learn to use a sword?”

  That question gave Annja pause, but she hurried her answer to cover. “College. I took up fencing.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “It was more interesting than bowling.”

  King pulled at one of his big ears. “Those Russians aren’t saying much, but a few of them mentioned you had a sword in that cemetery.”

  Annja bit into the cheese sandwich.

  “The pilot and officer aboard the helicopter on the scene also stated that they thought they saw you with a sword. Had demanded that you drop it. Do you have anything to say to that?”

  “No.”

  King’s eyes narrowed. “Did you have a sword, Ms. Creed?”

  “Your people have surely been all over the cemetery by now. Did they find a sword?”

  King sat silent for a moment. “No. No, they did not.”

  “So why is there still a problem?”

  Opening the file in front of him, King pulled out some color printouts and spread them across his desk for Annja to see. The images were of an AK-47 that appeared to have been sliced in two. “I can’t account for the damage to this weapon.”

  Annja glanced at the pictures, then at the coast guard captain. “You like everything nice and tidy.”

  “I do.”

  “One of the things my study of archaeology and history has shown me is that we never get the whole story. Sometimes we don’t even get very much of it. The rest? We have to make informed guesses, but we can’t ever prove what really happened.”

  “You’re saying that’s what this is?”

  “I’m saying that I don’t have any answers for you.”

  After a long silence, King finally gathered the images and returned them to the file. “Interesting meeting you, Ms. Creed.”

  * * *

  “IT’S TOO EARLY in the morning for this, Annja.”

  “Really?” Holding on to her satphone as she sat out in the large bullpen where the coast guard teams worked, Annja couldn’t restrain her irritation. She was tired, still hungry, mud-caked and needed a bath. “It’s only early for those of us who have been to bed. I haven’t been to bed, Doug.”

  Doug Morrell groaned and sounded as though he was beating his head against something. He’d done that before during conversations with her. He was in his early twenties, had gotten the job at Chasing History’s Monsters straight out of college because his father knew people and was more interested in pop culture than history.

  “I want to go to bed,” she persisted. “No, strike that. I want a shower.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Seriously? You’re going to blame this on me?”

  “You’re in jail. They don’t put people in jail for not doing anything.”

  “I didn’t—” Annja curbed her anger. “I didn’t do anything. Except maybe interrupt a Russian smuggling operation. And I didn’t even do that. The Goth twins did that when ghosts jumped out at us in the graveyard.”

  “Ghosts?” That sparked Doug’s interest immediately. “There’s more than one witch’s ghost?” She could hear his grin over the phone connection. “That is wicked cool. See? I told you you’d be the one to find the witch’s ghost. Did you get video?”

  “No video.”

  “Annja!” The whine was piercing. “I’ve told you—I need video.”

  “I know you need video. You’re always telling me you need video. Trust me, one thing I’m going to remember is that you need video. In order to have video, you have to have a witch’s ghost. There was no ghost.”

  “You said there were ghosts.”

  “College frat boys in sheets.”

  “What were they doing there?”

  “They came out to scare the Goth twins.”

  “When you say Goth twins—”

  “I mean Colleen and Victor.”

  “I didn’t know they were twins.”

  Annja gripped the phone more tightly. “Colleen has had past lives. In one of them she was a witch. Maybe you could do something with that.”

  “She’s not a ghost. I promised sponsors we’d have a witch’s ghost.” Doug sounded disappointed. “Annja, we have to have something.”

  “We don’t. Except me in jail, Doug, when I should be sacked out in my hotel room, and if I don’t get there pretty quick, I’m not going to be happy.”

  “You don’t sound happy now.”

  “I can be a lot less happy.”

  “Well, I’m not very happy, either. I mean, guess who’s going to have to go explain to production that we don’t have the witch’s ghost story?”

  “You only get the story if there’s actually a witch’s ghost.”

  “Why do they have you in jail? They don’t arrest people for stopping Russian smuggling rings.”

  “I’m not exactly under arrest.”

  “Then why are you calling me?”

  “Because the coast guard hasn’t let me go.”

  “Then you’re under arrest.”

  “No. They’re holding me for questioning.”

  “It’s a no-brainer. I don’t know why you bothered me with this. Answer their questions.”

  “I have answered their questions.” Annja took a deep breath. “Get me a lawyer. Somebody to come down here and break me out of this place. Captain King gave me his good-old-boy ‘let’s talk about the Abenaki’ schtick, and here I sit.” Annja gazed across the room to where Colleen and Victor sat among hungover frat boys still in muddy sheets. They all looked miserable, but Annja wasn’t very sympathetic. “The Russians were arrested, and I bet they’ve already had breakfast, and a shower.”

  “Don’t they provide a lawyer for you if you can’t afford one?”

  “Doug, you’ve never been arrested, have you?”

  For a moment, Doug was quiet. “No.”

  “Have you ever been to a police station?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t want them to assign me an attorney. That would take forever. I don’t want to try my luck with the yellow pages or jailhouse graffiti written on the wall. I want you to contact the corporate lawyers, and get someone here. Now.”

  Annja punched off the satphone and leaned back against the wall. Sleeping in the chair wasn’t a problem. She’d learned to sleep a
nywhere. But she wanted out of the coast guard office and as far away from this ghost quest as she could get.

  She wanted something interesting to do, some real archaeological work. No matter how mundane. There were artifacts waiting for her back at her Brooklyn loft, waiting for her research and certificate of authenticity. Then there was that chapter in the book she was in the middle of. But more than that, she was ready to go out on a dig again. Go hunting again.

  If only something would break...

  5

  Eyuboglu looked like death walking, a famine poster victim stretched over thin bones. His head was shorn smooth. He was in his late forties, a tall man with thick-lensed glasses and a thin-lipped mouth reminiscent of a moray eel’s.

  Emil Klotz propelled his prisoner ahead of him, aiming him at the dark blue Ferrari FF where Garin sat impatiently behind the steering wheel. Klotz was distinctly different from Eyuboglu, average-size enough to blend into a crowd, but well-built. Also, for those who had an eye for such things, he moved like a warrior, with understated power. His short cropped brown hair and easygoing expression took years off his actual age.

  Over the centuries, Garin had worked with several such men, all professional and devoted to their craft because it gave them salable skills as well as identity and structure. Without war and struggle, these types would be lost.

  Klotz opened the passenger door and shoved his prisoner into the backseat, then crawled in after him. Eyuboglu’s hands were bound behind him and Klotz kept a pistol in his fist.

  “Hello, Emil.” Garin shoved the transmission into gear and let out the clutch, throwing the sports car into the flow of traffic. Garin narrowly missed locking bumpers as he shot across lanes to get the inside track long enough to pass a delivery van. Horns blared in his wake.

  “Why am I not dead?” Eyuboglu sat uncomfortably in the backseat and banged against the side of the car as Garin took the next right.

  “Because I don’t wish you to be dead.” Garin tugged on the leather driving gloves he was wearing. The invention of the combustion engine was one of his favorite things. “You don’t have to be alive if you don’t want to be. Emil will gladly amend that situation for you.”