Sarah, Mendenhall, and Jason Ryan followed Collins onto the front porch. Everett held position at the base of the front steps, looking outward from the front yard. It seemed no one cared about the house where the thief Chavez used to live.
“Jack?” Carl said after a moment of time.
“Yeah, I feel it, too,” Collins said backing away from the door.
“Feel what,” Sarah whispered, not feeling at all comfortable.
“Someone’s watching us,” Jack said backing away from the door. Then Ryan leaned over the side of the porch and shook his head.
“Police cruiser—empty,” he said, knowing they had been too hasty to climb the porch.
Suddenly the door opened, pulling away the yellow police tape that was stuck to the outside. Jack and the others placed hands on their hidden weapons.
“Don’t shoot,” a voice from the dark said. “There were two L.A. police officers here, they’re cuffed at the moment and sitting in the living room, unharmed.”
Jack shook his head and watched as the front door opened all the way.
“Damn, you’re still a sneaky old bastard,” Collins said, relaxing.
As the door opened fully, the dim streetlamps that lined the sidewalk showed a large bear of a man as he stepped into the frame of the door.
“At least I don’t go bounding up the front steps without reconnoitering first.”
“Damn, Punchy, it’s good to see you,” Jack said as he held out his hand. “There was a rumor you were dead.”
Alexander shook Jack’s hand and then grimaced and grabbed his chest and then gestured forward with his wounded shoulder. “If it wasn’t for the body armor I had on, I would be, my friend. As it is, those two Russian bastards were so intent on taking your little sister they didn’t linger to do the job right.”
“I always thought you hated wearing armor. You always said your chest and big belly was enough to stop any bullet made.” Jack eyed his old friend closely.
“Yeah, well, getting old will make you feel closer to the afterlife than you would think,” Alexander answered, not noticing the closeness of which Jack was eyeing him.
“Everyone, this is Jonathan Alexander, the head of the Montreal sector of CSIS, the Canadian Intelligence Service.”
“If you’re Jack’s people, Punchy will do.”
“You were there, at the ambush?” Sarah asked.
“Yes, young lady, I was there.”
Jack stepped around Punchy and entered the Chavez home. He immediately saw the two policemen sitting against the far wall of the living room. They were, as Punchy had said, unhurt. Collins eased the nine-millimeter into his waistband and then turned as the others entered the entrance hall, followed finally by Everett who eased the door closed.
“Nice touch, Punchy,” Jack said, looking away from the two L.A. policemen.
Alexander cleared his throat. “I hate to burst your bubble about my being a sneaky bastard, but they were like that when I arrived.”
Their eyes met and Jack raised his brows. “Is that right?”
“Trussed up pretty as a picture, just like you see them now,” Punchy said and then quickly saw the look on Jack’s face. “Don’t worry; I checked the rest of the house. Whoever cuffed them isn’t here.”
“Punchy, why in the hell are you here?” Collins asked.
“You know why: It’s not only my job, but I happen to like Lynn, almost as much as you.”
“What in the hell happened out there, Punchy?” Collins asked as he slowly stepped from the living room into the kitchen.
“It was a setup. Lynn was anonymously contacted and she showed up in my yard. Evidently, only her direct boss knew she was coming to Canada. I guess they wanted to make a mark by bagging Sagli and Deonovich on their own. You know how kids are, they just don’t know how to play the game,” he said looking at Ryan and Mendenhall. “No offense.”
Ryan looked at Will and they both just shrugged.
“Do you think Lynn is still alive?”
“You know me, Jack, forever an optimist. That’s why I’m here and willing to breach my orders.”
“Thanks, Punchy.”
“Look, those two coppers in there are going to be relieved soon. If the LAPD overlooked anything here, we better get to looking for it.” Alexander watched Collins closely, wondering if he was still as sharp as he once was. “If not, I have to get back to Montreal.”
Jack nodded and silently pointed at Will and Everett, then used his thumb to point toward the basement. He silently ordered Sarah and Ryan to take the kitchen and living room. Then he nodded toward the wooden staircase for him and Punchy Alexander to check out.
On the way up the stairs, Jack slowly pulled the nine-millimeter from his waistband and knew Alexander was doing the same three steps behind him.
“You got the report on the man that Sagli and Deonovich murdered in Seattle?” Punchy asked as he gained the landing outside of a long hallway. He pointed his weapon left as Jack was doing the same to the right.
“The Russian-American, Serta?”
“Yeah, we don’t know the reasoning for it yet, just a bunch of rumors.” Alexander eased the bathroom door open and easily flipped on the light switch. The shiny tile and wood was clean but he could see where the police had tossed the closet as towels and washrags were strewn about on the floor and even in the bathtub.
“Rumors such as . . . ?” Jack asked as he eased the first bedroom door open with his right foot and then quickly stepped inside. He moved the handgun from side to side. He relaxed when he saw the mattress to the king-size bed had been thrown free of the box spring and had even been cut into. Pretty thorough, he thought.
“Some fantastic tale that this old man in Seattle inherited one of the Twins of Peter the Great.”
Jack looked back into the hallway just as Alexander eased the second bedroom door open.
“Twins?” Jack asked, now feeling that they were on a wasted mission to the Chavez house. He pushed the last bedroom door open and peered inside the already tossed and torn-apart room.
“Diamonds. Legend has it that Peter the Great had made a gift of twin diamonds the size of—hell, I don’t know, lemons or something. Well, this lumber magnate supposedly was in possession of one of them.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Collins said as he dejectedly placed the handgun back into his pants. He also wondered why nothing was mentioned in Europa’s investigation about these diamonds.
“Well, they supposedly disappeared around the time of the Russian revolution, along with everything else of value, including the tzar and tzarina.”
“Well, we know where they went, don’t we?” Jack said.
Alexander watched as Collins shook his head and started down the stairs. When he joined him at the bottom, they saw Sarah and Ryan throwing a few of the items still remaining in the coat closet out into the hallway. Sarah straightened and then looked at Jack, and shook her head.
“This is going nowhere fast. What in the hell was I thinking, that this asshole would leave a note behind telling us who his employer was?”
Sarah took his arm and squeezed it. Ryan was also aware the colonel was just grasping at straws, trying out anything for a single lead.
Punchy Alexander slapped Jack on the back and then walked passed. “Don’t worry, Jack, we’ll turn a rock over soon enough and find out where she’s at.”
They heard footsteps running up the stairs from the basement. Will Mendenhall soon opened the door and then with his breathing coming in short gasps, said, “Colonel, Captain Everett says you’ve got to take a look at this.”
Jack immediately went to the door and followed Will down the long flight of two different stairs. When they reached the bottom, he saw Everett standing in the middle of a dirt floor with his hands on his hips and staring at one of the outer walls. Collins felt the others behind him as they stopped; he held up a hand when he saw that Carl was thinking something out.
“Number one,
the percentage of basements in Southern California is so low I don’t even want to think about it,” Everett said without turning away from the far wall. “I lived here, in a house just like this in Oxnard. Pre–World War II, stone, just like a million others. Hell, that was the bulk of cheap building material back then, no brick, just rocks.”
Jack moved his eyes from Everett’s back where he was just staring at the walls, to the open and broken bits of crates, old cardboard boxes, broken furniture, and moldy old clothes. He felt Ryan stir behind him, getting ready to ask the captain a question, but again, Collins held his hand up, wanting Carl to think through what he was tossing about in his head.
“How many tons of rock went into building this house—fifteen or twenty, maybe even thirty?”
“Captain, I don’t see one rock down here.”
Everett finally turned and looked at Ryan. “That’s the point, flyboy, the basement isn’t constructed of the same material as the house, which means it was—”
“Recently added,” Collins finished for him.
Carl smiled. “Not only that, Jack, look over here.” Everett moved forward and pointed at the dirt that made up the floor of the giant basement.
Where most of the dirt was rough, full of footprints from the police investigation, there was a spot about the width of the entire rear wall that was perfectly smooth, as if the entire width had been artificially dragged smooth.
“Remember our antiquities thief in New York, Westchester County, and his remarkable basement?”
Jack smiled at Everett and then walked quickly to the far wall and started looking. Everett, Sarah, Ryan, and Mendenhall did the same, remembering the amazing basement that another antiquities thief had built using a false floor and winding stairway.
“Without sounding downright stupid, may I ask what it is you are looking for?” Alexander asked, placing his hands on his hips as the others started feeling around the walls.
“A switch, or a release of some kind,” Sarah said as she went to her knees and started feeling around the bottom of the drywall.
Suddenly, the room grew quiet as they all felt it at the same time, Jack, Punchy, and Everett just a split second before the others. They all three turned as fast as they could and then stopped dead in their tracks when they saw the three men with automatic weapons aimed directly at them. The men were Caucasian and were all very well dressed. Their suits were expensive and their weapons, Israeli Uzi submachine guns, were even more so. The man in the middle of the three shook his head negative and with his eyes, ordered their weapons to be removed without uttering a single word.
As the seven people complied, they heard slow, methodical footsteps descending the stairs. One step at a time, and it seemed to go on forever. Finally, a well-polished shoe appeared, and then the other. A tall blond man stepped down onto the dirt floor. In the bare-bulb light of the basement, Jack and the other members of the Event Group could not hide the shock they felt at seeing the tall, immaculately dressed man standing before them. He wore a white shirt and was wearing a plain pair of black slacks, but his identity was unmistakable.
“How many of your nine lives do you have left, Henri?” Collins asked, keeping his hands at his side.
Colonel Henri Farbeaux, archcriminal and a decade-long enemy of the Event Group, stood arrogantly before them. He slowly placed a hand in his right pocket and then shook his head. The last thing the Event Group knew about the former French colonel was that he had been supposedly swallowed up by the Ross Ice Shelf as it cracked apart and sank into the Ross Sea three months before.
“It’s not the lives, Colonel, it’s the man. I just happen to know when to bet one of those lives; sometimes as you can see, that wager pays off.”
Sarah stepped forward from where she had been looking for the switch that would open the wall. She was actually happy to see Henri alive; after all, it had been the Frenchman who had saved her, Senator Lee, Alice Hamilton, and the kids from the Leviathan, inside the cave known as Ice Palace.
“Little Sarah, how nice it is to see you again, and the fact that you made it home alive is something that makes me smile.”
“Thank you, Colonel. Tell me, how in the hell did you survive?”
“We will save that for another time, my dear. For the moment, I must ask how it comes to be that the Event Group is in the basement of one of my acquisitions people.”
Jack shook his head, really smiling for the first time. “Damn Henri, it is a small world, isn’t it? But when I think about it, the illegal antiquities community is so small and tight, this was probably inevitable.”
“I’ll ask again, Colonel, why are you here, and where is my employee?” Farbeaux took a step forward, his right hand coming free of his pocket.
“Chavez is dead. They found his body washed up under the pier at Huntington Beach this morning.” Jack watched for a reaction.
Farbeaux lowered his head in thought and half turned to his men and whispered something. Two of the men spread out so they could cover the group better. Jack heard the ominous clicks of their weapons being removed from their safe positions. Henri Farbeaux then turned to face Collins.
“The murder of my man doesn’t sound like you, Colonel Collins; it’s not your style,” Farbeaux said, taking a step toward Jack.
“No, but it is your style, Henri. What did this Chavez do for you that could get him murdered?”
“That is what I am here to find out. I’ll start by asking you once more, why you are here?”
“Henri, we need to know what this man Chavez removed from the Denver Museum of Natural History for you,” Sarah asked before Jack could pull her back behind him.
“First, who murdered my man?” Henri asked, focusing his considerable personality on Sarah.
“Two ruthless bastards, Gregori Deonovich and Dmitri Sagli,” Sarah said quickly.
Collins half turned and looked at Sarah, making her wish she hadn’t said anything.
“The names are not unfamiliar to me. They are a little beneath my standards for a working relationship, but I have heard of them.”
“That I find hard to believe,” Collins said, making Farbeaux look up and into his eyes. “Nothing is really beneath your standards, are they, Henri?”
Farbeaux remained quiet for a moment, eyeing Jack, and then turning his attention to the others. He stepped forward and moved between Collins and Punchy Alexander, who was totally confused as to who it was that had them cornered like rats inside the basement. He walked to the far wall and stood in the left-hand corner. He placed his right hand up against an ordinary piece of Sheetrock. When he finally removed his hand, the wall started to slide outward. He watched for a reaction as the Event Group watched the space widen into the walled and excavated entrance.
“Elysian Park was once riddled with dry underground riverbeds. We built this wall when we used to store stolen goods down here. Imagine our surprise when the excavation we were doing opened up into a natural storage facility. I believe this is what you were looking for?”
Farbeaux stepped aside and saw their reaction to the immense wealth of antique Queen Anne and Hawthorne furniture, a veritable art gallery of paintings and even rows upon rows of glass cases filled with stamp, coin, and paper-currency collections. Also there were row upon row of books—thousands of them.
“This is just one of my many storage facilities. All of it awaiting my soon-to-be-realized retirement.”
Jack turned and looked at Henri. His smile was genuine, at least until he noticed Collins staring at him.
“No judgments today, Colonel Collins; you of all people will not sit in judgment of me. I would trade all of this and all of the others just like it, for one more day with my wife. So don’t give me any indignant looks, not today.”
“What are you planning, Henri?” Sarah asked after she had ceased admiring one of Farbeaux’s many caches of merchandise. After the question, she saw the eyes of the man and the hate reflected in them as he looked at Jack.
“Yo
u have once again placed me in a harsh situation, little Sarah. I cannot let you go, and I cannot allow you to hurt this operation more so than what has already happened.”
“Colonel Farbeaux, do you have the Lattimer Papers, or a Russian journal penned by a colonel named Petrov?” Jack asked, once more pulling Sarah to his side.
“Worthless. They were destroyed soon after they were contracted for, on my orders. They were a hoax.”
The Frenchman watched as Collins visibly deflated, making him curious as to why it visibly affected the American.
“I will have to ask you to wait inside of the storage room until I can figure out—until I can make a few arrangements. So, please, all of you,” Henri gestured for them to step inside of the large room. Sarah kept looking back, unable to believe what Henri may be contemplating. She thought she may have learned something about Farbeaux in the time they had spent imprisoned on Leviathan, but as she watched his eyes, Jack pulled her along. She could see the depth of the coldness that haunted them.
“I am truly sorry, but once more your agency was someplace it should not have been.” Farbeaux reached out and placed his hand in the same spot. The door started to pull back into the wall. Jack locked eyes with the French colonel and they met like two thunderheads inside of a small valley.
Sarah bit her lower lip as the wall was only two feet from closing. She suddenly made a decision and pulled free of Jack’s grip and quickly squeezed through the wall before the outside world was shut out.
“Damn it!” Collins shouted as the room went dark.
“Is she nuts, Jack?” Punchy Alexander asked.
Collins was quiet as he turned away and leaned against the cool dirt of the expanded cave.
Primeval: An Event Group Thriller Page 18