by Alex Archer
“Just gonna make me beat you harder.” Juju Bee set herself and swung again.
In these conditions it would play out in her opponent’s favor if the fight was allowed to continue, so Annja ducked the blow—again with the right hand—and slipped behind Juju Bee. She caught the woman’s left arm, swept it behind her and levered it up between her shoulder blades.
Juju Bee yelled in pain and attempted to spin around, but Annja maintained her hold on the arm with her left hand, then placed her right behind the woman’s head. Annja pulled up the trapped arm and shoved Juju Bee’s head face-first into the bars.
Juju Bee’s head slamming into the bars rang like a bell. The woman quivered like a mass of Jell-O, and the lime green looked suddenly more fitting on her. Somehow she found the strength to turn around.
Annja set herself again, surprised that the woman was still erect. Then she saw the glazed lack of comprehension in her dark eyes.
Weakly, Juju Bee collapsed in a huge, loose pool in the middle of the cell. A moment later, she spat out her gold tooth and passed out.
The other women gazed at her in disbelief.
Cautiously, in case one of the others felt like championing her fallen friend, Annja put her hands down and walked over to the empty bench. She sat down, discovering that it really wasn’t any more comfortable than the floor. Yet there was a hint of satisfaction in claiming the bench.
“You knocked her out!” Colleen scrambled up from the floor and joined Annja on the bench like they were comrades-in-arms. “That was incredible.”
“Thanks.” Annja didn’t know what else to say.
“She’s really lucky, though.” Colleen squeezed her hands into small, bony fists. “I was about to flip over into One-Eyed Myra. I could feel her there, just in the back of my mind.”
Even though she felt positive she was going to regret it, Annja couldn’t resist. “One-Eyed Myra?”
“A pirate. I sailed with Blackbeard before I got my own ship and crew.”
“Oh.” Annja leaned back against the wall.
The door at the end of the room opened and a young sheriff’s deputy entered, followed by an older, graying man in a suit. The deputy looked at Annja. “Your attorney is here.”
Sighing in relief, Annja got off the newly won bench and walked to the cell door as it clanged open.
The deputy looked down at the unconscious woman on the floor. “What happened to her?”
One of Juju Bee’s friends spoke up quickly. “It was that TV woman. She done it.”
The deputy stared at Annja.
Annja crossed her arms. “Really? This is going to be an issue?”
The deputy grinned. “No. It isn’t.”
He started to shut the door when Colleen cried out, “You’re not going to leave me here, are you?” Colleen sat perched on the edge of the bench. “You can’t just leave me.”
Annja turned to the lawyer.
He held out his hand. “Thomas Costin. Your producer, Doug Morrell, called me.” The lawyer looked as if he’d be more at home in a courtroom than a holding tank.
“Did Doug mention the guides I had with me tonight?”
“No.”
“Will it be a problem getting them out, as well?” Turning, Annja saw Colleen standing at the bars of the door, gripping them tightly, her expression desperate. She looked like one of those big-eyed kids in Japanese animation.
Costin cleared his throat. “The charges against them aren’t any more serious than they are against you?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Costin looked at the deputy and lifted an eyebrow. “Well, then.”
The deputy shrugged and opened the door again. Colleen was through in a flash and wrapped around Annja. Although she was nearly bowled over by the younger woman’s glee, Annja was observant enough to notice that Colleen held Juju Bee’s gold tooth in one fist.
Must be One-Eyed Myra’s piratical influence.
7
Gently, Garin placed his prize on the desk in the extravagant hotel suite. Immersion in the river hadn’t hurt the clockwork butterfly, but it hadn’t washed away any of the layers of blue-green encrustation, either. Wearing clean pants and a turtleneck, still refreshed from the shower he’d just had, he took a seat to study the object. A new Glock pistol rode at the small of his back.
He ran his fingers over the encrustation, feeling the jagged edges of it in some places. Evidently someone had tried to clean it.
What are you? Garin turned the butterfly over. Better still, what were you and where did you come from?
In the beginning, the butterfly had probably been a work of art. Given the architecture of the thing—the small wingspan to compensate for the weight of its composit metal—it had probably never flown.
Probably. The possibility of the butterfly in flight was intriguing. The object had obviously been underwater for quite some time. It was possible the bits and pieces of the original design had been thin and delicate, lighter than he could imagine.
In the beginning, it might have flown. He liked to believe that.
Sighing in irritation, Garin shifted his attention to the computer bag beside the desk. A DragonTech security team had brought it here. He opened it and reached inside.
Pulling out his iPad, Garin brought the device online and Skyped to an encrypted connection. A moment later, Amalia Hirschvogel appeared on the screen.
“Good afternoon, boss.” She smiled, distracted. Round-faced and wearing black-framed glasses, she was a vibrant young woman who was one of the smartest people Garin knew when it came to computers. She was also an aficionado of pop culture, as evidenced by the Deadpool T-shirt she wore. A blue and white streak stood out starkly against her dark brown hair. “Still safe, I see.”
“Yes.”
“I heard about the airplane blowing up over Florence. Caused quite the stir. I suppose you had a hand in that.”
“I did.”
Her image went away for a moment, replaced by a YouTube video of the Cessna exploding against the bright blue sky.
“That video has gone viral, by the way.”
Garin grimaced. He didn’t like calling attention to operations he wanted kept off the books. “In retrospect, perhaps I should have let those people get away.”
The airplane footage disappeared and Amalia’s visage returned. She grinned. “Not like you to let somebody get away after they try to kill you.”
“No, it isn’t. Is there any way to make the video footage less viral.”
“Sure. Working on it now.” The quick syncopation of her striking the keyboard keys echoed in the background. “I’ve got a team covering the video with viruses everywhere they find it. I’ve caused YouTube to shut down twice.” She grinned again. “People hate it when you do that, and YouTube hates it even more, so it probably won’t be long till they dump it from their site. You’ve also purchased the original video, by the way. Under another name, of course.”
“Why did I do that?” Amalia’s excitement was infectious and Garin found himself smiling, as well. Or maybe that was just because he had secured the butterfly.
“You did that because you’ve also issued a cease and desist order to YouTube in order to maintain your rights concerning that property. Now that you own it.”
Fascinating how quickly the young woman worked, and how many different strategies she could come up with in such a short time.
“I also notified CNN and other news networks that they couldn’t air it, either. There were three other tourists with cameras out at the time. They got footage, as well, not as good as the first, but you now own those, too, because they were good enough.”
“Always wise to have a monopoly.”
“I thought you’d like that. Other people got shots of debris fallin
g after the explosion, but that’s not nearly as interesting as watching a plane turn into a fireball in midair. Those videos will drop out of sight quickly enough on their own because they don’t have the pizazz they need to remain viable. So you’ll be protected there. It’s just hard to go unnoticed in the digital world.”
“I’ve noticed.” Sometimes, Garin missed the old days. Not as often as his former mentor, though. Roux was forever griping about new technology. Clandestine arrangements were at greater risk these days. Being able to meet a man in an alley behind a bar and fill his guts with a length of steel had often been a solution for Garin back in the day. It had allowed him to be more personally hands-on in business transactions.
Garin, however, wouldn’t give up today’s technology for anything. Not when it had created digital dollars and bank accounts that could be accessed by computer...and a variety of ways and means to hide or ferret out fortunes. A man just had to be more patient, more careful, in his dealings.
“What have you found out about Sebastiano Troiai?”
“The background the woman gave you checks out. Troiai is a salvager based in Athens. Does a lot of work around the islands.”
That news further excited Garin. Everything about the butterfly find was falling into place.
On the iPad’s screen, Amalia disappeared and a website for Troiai Salvage popped up. Initially, the site showed up in Greek, then changed over to German.
Garin read through the information quickly, knowing Amalia would have a summary ready for him, as well. Sebastiano Troiai was featured in several of the photographs on the site.
He seemed to be in his late twenties or early thirties: athletic, trim, with a headful of dark ringlets. A five-o’clock shadow covered his lower face. He had tribal tattoos on his biceps and wore gold chains the site claimed he had found on salvage jobs. Judging by his seeming ease in front of the camera, dressed in swim trunks and standing in profile with his arms crossed in front of a sailboat, Troiai had a narcissistic streak.
“Troiai is a fourth-generation salvager.” Amalia reappeared on the iPad screen. “He also offers day trips and fishing cruises to help fund the marine expeditions. Evidently the salvage business isn’t terribly solvent, based on the peek I took at his financials. He’s a risk-taker, in the water and out of it. He was fifteen years old when he and his father got trapped in a sunken cargo ship. His father died. But that didn’t keep him from getting back in the water with his grandfather. When his grandfather passed away, Sebastiano inherited the salvage business. Over the years old ship’s logs indicate that he’s managed to put together a group of investors on occasion. They’ve missed more times than they’ve hit, but he’s made enough money to stay afloat. Pardon the pun.”
Garin’s respect for the man rose. “Is there any mention of the clockwork butterfly on his site?”
The website returned to the iPad screen and Amalia quickly flicked through the pages. “Just one. It was brought up in a collection of odds and ends that Troiai scraped up from the ocean floor.”
Touching the screen, Garin manipulated the image, expanding it. A blue-green lump, the butterfly—and he only knew that’s what it was because it was listed as a model of some sort, presumably decorative—lay amid shards of pottery and three intact amphora. The containers weren’t as encrusted as the butterfly, suggesting that perhaps they had come from a later time period.
“Want me to get rid of the image?” The screen went back to Amalia.
“I don’t think it will matter,” Garin replied thoughtfully. “You can hardly tell what it is. Is Eyuboglu’s name mentioned in Troiai’s files?”
“I’ve got a copy of a sales receipt here.”
Almost instantly, the sales receipt showed up on the screen. It listed the “model” and four other items, including one of the sealed amphoras. Amphoras were always a mystery and a gamble, depending on how much a buyer was willing to pay for one. Usually they only contained seed, dry foods, oil or spice. But occasionally they had been used as hiding places for coins and jewelry. Eyuboglu had probably had buyers for the other things, but he’d realized that the butterfly would be ideal bait for an assassination attempt on Garin.
“Can you get rid of the receipt?”
An instant later, the receipt vanished, melting away to reveal Amalia’s self-satisfied expression. “Done.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m here to serve.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. The statement held just a hint of sexual entendre. Garin knew the young woman was infatuated with him. Even with her exceptional cyber skills she couldn’t dig up the truth about him. Part of her attraction to him, he knew, was the mystery he presented.
“I’d also like to find out who convinced Eyuboglu that setting me up was a good idea.” It would probably turn out to be someone he’d bested in business, or love. People with money tended to have long attention spans.
“Already working on that. I’ve got someone digging through Mr. Eyuboglu’s recent business dealings. We’ll find out who it was.”
Garin nodded. “In the meantime, do you have anything on the third party to our transaction?”
“I identified the flower woman.” Amalia tapped at some keys.
An image of the beautiful woman who had been in the flower kiosk took shape on the screen.
“Her name was Claudia Golino.”
“Italian?” Garin had thought so, based on the accent.
“She was.” The image shifted, running through a series of scenes featuring the woman in different roles, including one with her firing a pistol into the face of another woman. “For a time, she was a contractor for the CIA and MI6.”
“Pedigreed.” Garin was impressed. The woman had not been cheap, and she’d be missed by the contractor who’d set her on Garin’s trail. Not my trail. On the trail of the butterfly automaton. That was an important distinction to keep in mind.
“Very pedigreed. Golino specialized in reacquisitions of things that had gone missing. Government documents. People, et cetera.”
“Do we know who she was working for?”
“Not yet.”
“But we know people in the CIA and MI6.”
“We do.”
“Let me know when you find out.”
“The very instant.”
Garin broke the connection. He pulled the iPad closer. All of his files were heavily encrypted and password protected. Within a few minutes, though, he’d opened up what he was looking for.
The folder contained several drawings of clockworks copied from ancient texts and scrolls. Putting that collection together had been a very expensive enterprise, and it had taken him over a hundred years of meticulous research. Despite the arrival of the digital age, that task had not gotten any easier.
During his time with Roux, the old man had constantly been on the lookout for artifacts. Since even before Joan had lost her sword. Those forays into the lost parts of the world had been filled with danger and excitement, and Garin had learned a great many things. In addition to martial prowess and battlefield expertise, Garin had also become educated about several aspects of history. He knew he would never know everything Roux knew, but Garin had learned more than the old man had counted on.
In Constantinople, more than thirty years before the fall to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 and the city’s subsequent renaming to Istanbul, Roux had come across an automaton that had fascinated him and put a fear in the old man that Garin had never before seen. At that point, they hadn’t yet lost Joan to the English. That fear lay ahead of them.
The automaton had been a silkworm. When it was wound, the clockwork had “spun” a wire strand, then folded in on itself and reopened as a silk moth. Still little more than a boy at that time, Garin had been enraptured by the mechanical creature. It had been impossibly small and delicate, and so cunningly made he hadn
’t been able to fathom it.
Once he had found out about the clockwork from gossip, Roux had killed four men and one woman to get it. Garin hadn’t thought anything of the bloodshed. He and the old man had killed their way through several parts of Europe and into Russia. Roux had always seemed to be following an agenda, but Garin had never been privy to it.
Back in the rented rooms they’d taken, Roux had examined the clockwork, made notes about it in one of the thick journals he had always carried.
That clockwork, and other items like it, had been some of Roux’s deepest mysteries.
And now Garin felt certain he had his hands on one of them. He took out a new cell phone from the electronics bag and turned it on. While it downloaded his files, he went over to the room’s wet bar and checked out the supply of beer. By the time he’d made his selection and poured it into a glass, the phone was ready to go. He brought up the number for Roux and punched the call through.
Of course, the old man didn’t answer. Roux insisted that he was the master of his time, not some electronic handheld. The attitude made getting in touch with him an exercise in frustration.
Irritated, Garin tapped in a text, then took a picture of the butterfly and sent it along, as well. Then, knowing there was nothing else he could do at the moment, he settled in to wait.
Roux would see the message and the image. Then he would call back. Garin felt certain about that.
8
Idly stirring his glass of Scotch with his cigar, Roux sat at the card table, his mind clear. He loved games of chance, and he especially loved Texas Hold ’Em.
He had maneuvered himself into this game in the small room of the magnificent penthouse in one of Paris’s largest hotels for two reasons. The game, as it was, created a welcome diversion and tested his skills on a level that didn’t often get challenged. Primarily, though, he was there to deliver punishment. Making money off the arrangement was a secondary concern and merely counted, to Roux, as a means of keeping score. He was wealthy enough by any measure.