Artifact

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Peta tried to remember what specifics she could about the three men sitting in Arthur’s living room.

  The one she knew best, outside of Frik and Ray, was the man who had cried and called out. He was Simon Brousseau, a Miami-based inventor of scuba-diving gear, a womanizer, and an underwater junkie. Judging by his pallor, he had a bad heart condition. Were she his physician, she’d be warning him to take it easy.

  The other two men she’d met only briefly, over dinner during one of her trips to New York. The burly one was Terris McKendry, a freelance security specialist. She remembered him as a thorough, stoic, and patient man—the type who could probably sit unmoving for hours when concentrating on something, a man who always had a Plan B thought out in advance. He was trained as a civil engineer but had spent many years working for a large personal-security firm that hired him out as a personal bodyguard. According to Arthur, Terris had received a huge bonus when he’d saved one of his clients, a foreign diplomat, from an assassination attempt. With his reward in hand, he’d set off on his own.

  The last man, the pacer, was Joshua Keene, McKendry’s “partner in insanity,” according to Arthur. Keene was McKendry’s opposite, a wild man who placed great stock in his instincts and his intuition. He had a quick and winning smile and was the guy who always bought the next round of drinks. He’d dropped out of college after a succession of majors and was mostly self-taught, a voracious reader and learner who bounced from one fascination to the next and lived in and for the moment. He seemed to have succeeded in life by always doing the unexpected.

  Peta had not found McKendry’s gruff manner particularly appealing. Keene, however, she’d found to be gregarious and likable.

  “That’s all I know,” Ray said at last. In the ensuing silence, he added, “You’re all aware that Arthur wanted Peta to be his successor if something happened to him.”

  Frik, who had stayed in the doorway listening to the details of his old friend’s death, stepped into the light. Peta immediately noticed burn scars on his face. He was wearing gloves, but she could see the traceries of more severe scars on his left hand in the gap between the sleeve and the glove.

  “Peta’s entry fee for membership will have to be the same as it is for any man,” Frik said. “Proof of participation in a new adventure that makes her worthy of inclusion in the club.”

  “Damn all of you.” Peta hurled her brandy glass in Frik’s direction. It hit the wall closest to him and splintered, leaving behind a golden brown trickle. “Your friend is dead. Dead. And why? For all I know, it’s because of some stunt he pulled to impress you.”

  She pushed past Frik and went out onto the rooftop. In the distance, she could see the lights of a vessel making its way up the Hudson. Closer and down below, people streamed around the corner toward Times Square to wait for the ball to drop and for the new year to be upon them.

  As if it mattered what year it was, she thought. The days and months—and years—would march on. Gradually the pain would leave her. For now, tending her island patients and Arthur’s was all she could think of doing to get herself through.

  She looked up into the cloudy sky. “Happy New Year, Arthur,” she whispered as her tears once again rolled freely, “wherever you are.”

  In the heat of her fury at the callousness of the men inside the apartment and despite the depth of her sorrow, she considered Arthur’s last wish—her inclusion in the club. She wasn’t willing to go outlooking for life-threatening stunts so that she could prove herself to the Daredevils. Her own line of work brought her into more than enough danger all of the time. Life-and-death decisions were her stock-in-trade. Then again, if the original members hadn’t considered the rescue of Arthur from prison dangerous enough to overcome the fact that she was female, these idiots certainly wouldn’t agree that what she accomplished daily was suitably perilous.

  Behind her, inside the apartment, someone turned on the local news, apparently to see if the aftermath of the explosion was being televised. Peta moved close enough to see the screen.

  Her timing was impeccable, although whether impeccably good or bad was, she thought briefly, up for grabs. Though she’d been unaware of it at the time, it seemed a cameraman had picked her out of the crowd. There she was, a full shot first, then her face filling the screen.

  She walked into and across the living room and entered the small bedroom she’d so often shared with Arthur. She stared at herself in the small mirror she’d used to put on her makeup, took off the coat she was still wearing, and fingered the pendant Arthur had given her. Taking it off, she placed it lovingly in her handbag, and began to pack her things.

  10

  In the living room, Frik leaned forward, staring intently at the television screen. The announcer said that a lone Muslim extremist had claimed responsibility for the blast, and the camera closed once again on Peta. Encircled by a gold bezel, suspended from a gold chain, was a fragment of the artifact.

  Filing away the certainty that she knew everything Arthur had known, he turned his attention to the people in the room. “Meeting’s in order,” he said. “You go first, Ray.”

  With visible reluctance, Ray pulled a videotape out of his coat pocket and slipped it into the VCR. It began with Channel 8 hype about the preopening advertising for his hotel.

  “Ray Arno, owner of the new Daredevil Casino, is much more than a wealthy investor in a business suit,” Paula Francis ofEyewitness News began. “He’s a well-known Hollywood stuntman, an Evel Knievel, if you will. You’re about to see him perform a spectacular, death-defying stunt to highlight his new adventure hotel, with its theme park full of thrill rides and its high-stakes casino.”

  “Behold one of those stupid macho stunts Peta was talking about,” Ray said. “You will notice that there is no safety net.”

  Followed by cameras and reporters, Ray could be seen climbing to the top of Las Vegas’s Stratosphere Tower—the tallest observation tower west of the Mississippi. He smiled, took a deep breath, and leaped into space. The camera tracked his shrinking figure until a rectangular skydiver’s parachute unfurled behind him.

  The camera angle changed to a shot of a wedge-shaped building with what looked like a space shuttle jutting from one side. A large neon sign in front of the structure proclaimedTHE DAREDEVIL . The image panned up to show Ray in his bright jumpsuit, expertly gliding toward the roof of the casino.

  The report switched to a cameraman on the Daredevil’s rooftop helipad. As Ray stuttered to a stop and removed his parachute, he said into the camera, “Follow me to the Daredevil.You may use the front door.”

  The screen filled with snow as the tape ended. “That’ll do,” Frik said. No one disagreed. “Who’s next.”

  Briefly, as if they were reading Cliff’s Notes, each of them, including Frik, added a tale of derring-do. Frik summarized an African man-faces-rhino ecoadventure that sounded like an outtake from Hemingway’sGreen Hills of Africa ; Keene and McKendry gave a précis about having infiltrated a white-supremacist group to rescue a black professor who had been taken hostage; and Simon described a shark attack during the exploration of a wreck near the Bermuda Triangle.

  “Listen, everyone,” Ray said after Simon had finished. “Why not talk about next year and call it a night? We obviously won’t be able to meet here from now on, so how about my place in Vegas?”

  “Your place?” Joshua Keene looked amused.

  “My new hotel. Look, I realize this apartment was Damon Runyan’s home, which made it perfect for us, and the Strip isn’t Times Square—”

  “But it’s the next best thing to being here.” Keene lifted his glass in a mock toast.

  McKendry chuckled, appreciative as always of his friend’s sense of humor.

  “Someday I’m going to buy this place and turn it into a casino,” Ray said. “But that’s not happening quite yet. Meanwhile, why not some desert R and R away from the…um”—he glanced at Arthur’s bedroom—“the memories?”

  The venue was readily
agreed upon. Glasses were refilled, and a few people munched on pretzels and nuts.

  “About next year.” Frik got ready for what needed to be a convincing performance. “I have something to propose. Something urgent that I cleared with Arthur, on condition the rest of you agreed.”

  He too glanced toward the bedroom where Peta had gone, then sat back and put forth his proposal. He went over what information he wished to divulge: the discovery of the artifacts; the fire that had killed Paul Trujold; a description of how he had sustained third-degree burns on his face and left hand.

  Having gained the group’s attention, he went on to talk about his suspicion that Selene Trujold had at least one piece of the device, sent by her father, and he recounted her threats to destroy Oilstar. Of course, he said nothing about his true purpose, making it easy for everyone to agree upon a treasure hunt for the missing pieces of the artifact.

  “I don’t mean to minimize what you’re suggesting, Frik,” Keene said grimly, “but shouldn’t we be putting our energies into finding out who killed Arthur?”

  “You’re right, Josh,” Ray said quickly. “Given the relative skills of the rest of you, you’ll have no difficulty divvying up Frik’s search. I’ll handle Arthur’s death on my own. I can always call on the rest of you if I need help. Sound reasonable?”

  Frik held his breath.

  There was silence while the others thought everything through. “Sounds more than reasonable to me. I’ll dive for the piece that was left behind,” Brousseau said, not mentioning what Frik already knew—that his doctor had warned him that his heart condition made deep-sea dives not just dangerous, but potentially suicidal.

  Frik said nothing about it. Simon’s reaction was perfect, imperative to his plan. The only risk was that Simon could mess things up by dying underwater before retrieving the piece, but that was a chance he was willing to take. “You can fly back with me,” he said.

  Simon shook his head. “I have to take care of some things in Miami first. Tell you what. Bring theAssegai to Grenada. I’ll fly in there in a couple of weeks and you can sail me to Trinidad. I could use a good sail, a little time on top of the ocean.”

  Keene and McKendry volunteered to track Selene Trujold and her gang of ecoterrorists. From her father’s notes and earlier comments, Frik knew that she had tended to focus her Green Impact activities in the main Venezuelan oil fields, near Maracaibo. If he was right, that was about to change. Now Oilstar’s large newValhalla rig, just beginning production in the Orinoco Delta, would become her prime target.

  “There is something elseyou can do,” Frik said to Ray. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to remember that you told me you were building a state-of-the-art laboratory adjacent to your penthouse.”

  “Yeah. In my guilty moments I tell myself that I built it to develop a new means of detecting and neutralizing land mines and live shells in war zones. Really, though, I’m just a kid with a four-million-dollar chemistry set,” Ray said, grinning.

  “A useful one. If you don’t mind, I’ll have Trujold’s computer models and results transmitted from our mainframe in Trinidad to your computer in Las Vegas. I need you to study them and determine if his findings were correct.”

  “Okay with me,” Ray said. “Now if you’ll all excuse me, I have to check on preparations my people are making for an important guest at the Daredevil.”

  He left the room to use the phone in Arthur’s kitchenette. By the time he returned, Peta had reentered the room. Frik could see her closed suitcase standing upright on the floor near the open doorway.

  “Fly back with me in the Oilstar jet,” he said to her. “I’ll divert and take you to Grenada before going on to Trinidad. Sure you won’t come with us, Simon?”

  Simon shook his head. “Aside from anything else, there’s some diving gear I want to pick up in Miami.”

  “Diving gear?” Peta sounded shocked. “Are youtrying to kill yourself?”

  “What are you talking about?” Ray asked. “He’s been diving forever.”

  “I’m a doctor, remember,” Peta said. “I don’t need to do an EKG to see that he has a heart problem.”

  “Is that true?” Ray looked at Simon as if he hadn’t really seen him before.

  “Leave him alone, both of you,” Frik said, more brusquely than he had intended. “He’s over twenty-one.”

  “Yes. Stop fussing over me. I’m going to do this.” Simon crossed his fingers, put his hand behind his back, and grinned like a little boy. “Tell you what, though. I promise you, this will be my last dive.”

  11

  “We’re hanging out in the wrong places, Terris. Let’s go get dirty.”

  McKendry grunted in agreement. He didn’t need to comment further; he and Keene had been working together long enough that they often seemed to read each other’s mind. For that reason, they had hardly spoken about Arthur’s death. Each knew how much the other would miss him, but since no amount of talk would bring their friend back, they mourned him in silence. Having lost friends before, McKendry understood his own process. For him, acceptance would come slowly, but come it would, ultimately turning the open wound of loss into one more scar on the body of his life.

  “The sooner we get out of Caracas, the better.” Keene slurped the last of hismichelada, a concoction of lime juice, beer, ice cubes, and salt. He had taken a great liking to the drink, which he compared to acerveza margarita . “We need to start sniffing around the oil operations. I’m betting Selene’s moved from Maracaibo and is headed east to focus on Frikkie’s operations near the Orinoco Delta.”

  McKendry knew that at any other time, Joshua Keene would have enjoyed hanging out in nightclub after nightclub, where the dancers were topless and the salsa music too loud. Not now. “You just want to get into the jungle,” McKendry said.

  “And you don’t?”

  McKendry gave a small, unintelligible response which seemed to satisfy his partner. In any event, Keene was right about Caracas. Someone like Selene was unlikely to be here by choice. Besides, at this moment in their lives, the city was far too civilized a place for the two of them. Yes, it was magnificent, the jewel of Venezuela, but a postcard would have sufficed. Shining buildings and upscale restaurants, sidewalk cafés with bright yellow awnings, lavish marble-and-brass hotels and wild nightlife never had been his idea of a good time.

  Still, McKendry thought, the search for Paul Trujold’s daughter needed to start somewhere. This had seemed to be as good a place as any. He hadn’t actually expected to find her here—Frikkie’s information said that Green Impact worked primarily in the western oil fields of the Maracaibo Basin—but this was where he had contacts in Venezuela. He knew people who could potentially lead them to Green Impact, or lead them to someone who could lead them to someone….

  People like Rodolfo. The Spanish action-film star, one of McKendry’s former employers, was very popular in South and Central America, though his career had gone nowhere in the United States. He had hired McKendry as a bodyguard and tough guy, a brawny piece of furniture to hover behind him every time he went out, even when they went where nobody knew who Rodolfo was.

  The work had been a profitable and not unpleasant contract job. The star was less obnoxious than several full-of-themselves celebrities McKendry had guarded in the past. But when the six-month contract came up for renewal, he politely declined further service and moved on to another freelance assignment. He preferred to provide real protection rather than testosterone-filled eye candy.

  When the two Daredevils were arranging to fly down to Venezuela and begin their search for Selene, McKendry had called the action star and asked what connections he might have, what help he could offer.

  Rodolfo seemed delighted to hear from him and offered to do what he could. At Simón Bolívar International Airport, in glistening tropical sunshine, the star had welcomed them both with all the enthusiasm of a long-lost Italian uncle. During their first few nights in Caracas, the grinning and too-tanned film star show
ered them with free champagne and front-row tickets to all the hottest nightclub shows. He took them to dinner at Tambo, Il Cielo, and other jet-set favorites, and provided them with a spacious suite in the Eurobuilding Hotel, far from the outlying shanties and slums and the lush jungle-covered mountains that rode high on the horizon; they were further yet from the political, economic, and natural disasters that inevitably piled one upon the other in various parts of the South American continent.

  McKendry played along for five days, asking questions and enduring the pampered treatment. Five long days; five noisy nights in nightclubs. They had been seen by all the local celebrities, by important political people in Caracas, by hotel managers and casino owners. Rodolfo was doing his best and glorying in the doing of it.

  For a different assignment, perhaps, McKendry might have been able to use these new connections he had made, to pull strings and apply leverage. But not this time. No self-respecting member of Green Impact would ever hobnob with such people.

  “We’re getting nowhere,” Keene shouted across at McKendry. He pounded on the table, signaling the nearest waitress for another michelada; so far, they had experienced no difficulty meeting the nightclub’s expensive minimum-consumption requirement.

  The music picked up tempo. Several topless showgirls jiggled coffee brown breasts as they danced past the table en route to the small central area cleared for occasional performances. “Nice,” McKendry said. “Very nice.”

  Keene ran his fingers through his curly hair. He smiled appreciatively but said nothing. When his fresh michelada arrived, he slurped salt from the edge, tasted it with an extravagant flourish, and handed the waitress a large tip.

  The dance number finished with a brassy finale followed by a shower of applause from well-dressed Venezuelan businessmen and their various foreign guests.