The Snare

by David A Ogunde

  James’s mind raced to find an answer that he could justify without it sounding like a lame excuse, but before he closed on one, Cyndi cut him off.

  “I won’t take no for an answer, James.” Her polite smile was offset by her serious eyes, and James suddenly had a sinking feeling that he really did have no choice in the matter. “I’m tired of dining alone all the time,” she continued. “Maximos keeps me too busy to be able to keep up relationships, and I haven’t met anyone in this building who’s half as smart as you. Come on, you won’t deny your new boss buying you a welcome dinner, will you?”

  “Of course not,” James conceded. “I’d be pleased to accompany you.”

  “Wonderful. I’ll have reservations made for 8:00.” She picked up her phone and James quietly excused himself. As he left, Cyndi watched him like a hawk. He was very smart, but very pliable. This, she thought smugly, was going to be easier than she’d thought.

  *

  At 8:00p.m. sharp, James and Cyndi were seated and wined; by 8:10 Cyndi called for her glass to be refilled and pouted until James did the same. “It takes a lot to lay off our work burdens,” she said, “and it’s hard to enjoy a nice meal when one’s mind is still in the office.” Their meal came in four courses—which Cyndi had ordered with flawless French—and by the time they got to dessert, they both had gone through several goblets of the vine.

  “Oh, I am sorry, James,” Cyndi said as they waited for their coats to be brought. “I’m afraid I’ve rather let myself go this evening. I’m usually more reserved, but I guess I just felt so comfortable with you. You have a strong, secure presence; you know that? It’s nice to be in the company of like-minds, isn’t it?”

  James agreed even though he wasn’t even sure what she was talking about. He was fighting hard to find himself within his now swimming mind. He hadn’t had that much wine in a long time (if ever) and was feeling overwhelmed by its effects. Not having a sure grip was slightly frightening to a man who was used to maintaining some measure of control about himself. Cyndi continued to talk, and had even put her arm through his (when had that happened?) as they walked through the exit. It was raining outside, and James squinted as he looked around for the car.

  “Do you have your ticket, sir?” asked a helpful valet.

  “No, our driver should be here any second.”

  They stood under the awing for a minute before Cyndi all of a sudden leaned against James and her head drooped on his shoulder. The weight surprised him. It felt strange—different from what he was used to—but he couldn’t quite work out why. “James,” Cyndi’s voice barely carried over the rainfall. “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel well.”

  “Do you need to go back inside?” James asked in alarm as her words all of a sudden made him feel ill as well.

  “No, please.” Cyndi grabbed his lapel. “Can you imagine what would happen if someone in there heard or saw me get sick in the bathroom? If any reporters got a hold of it, it could mean the end for this place. I wouldn’t want to do that to them all because I was an idiot and had a little too much to drink. I just need to lay down a minute, maybe get something cold on my head.”

  “Well, where do you live? We can get a taxi.” The car still hadn’t shown up. He tried to feel confused or suspicious about its absence, but couldn’t quite get there.

  “Oh, it’s way on the other side of town. I don’t think I’d make it—I’d never live down the shame of hurling on a new employee in a taxi. Please, don’t do that to me.”

  Discomfort pricked at James in a dull way. He knew there was something here he was missing, something important. But at her urgent, worried voice and her pleading eyes, James felt his instinct to protect rise through the swamp of his addled brain. This woman needed help—his help—and it would be rude, downright wrong, to turn her away.

  “Okay,” he said as he resigned to chivalry. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.” The words sounded right; and he stepped up to the valet to order the taxi before anything inside scrambled to the surface of his consciousness in protest.

  Chapter 46

  Cyndi leaned almost all of her weight against him as they crossed the lobby of his hotel to the elevators. Though his strength was able to bear it, James couldn’t help but feel something awkward about it. He wasn’t used to basically carrying a woman around, and he kept vaguely wondering when the time would come that he could set her down. In the elevator, James stared at the numbered buttons on the wall, not sure which to press. Cyndi eyed him discretely for a moment before pushing number five.

  “I think it’s this one,” she said, her face right next to his.

  Her warm breath brushed against his cheek, and he could smell the wine it carried. Some involuntary reaction caused him to take a step back. But when he did so, Cyndi—still leaning on him—lost her balance and stumbled as she tried to regain it. She let out a sharp gasp of pain.

  James was mortified by his action. “Are you okay? I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

  “I’m alright,” replied Cyndi, making a point not to lean on him again. Somehow this made James feel slighted and challenged at the same time. He was sure that he would not be truly forgiven until she put her weight against him again; and that became his sole goal.

  The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Cyndi went first, but after one step she gasped again and hobbled forward. James rushed to lend his support.

  “I’m fine,” she waved him off. “I just need to sit down for a minute. Which room is yours?”

  James looked down the hallway in both directions. Everything looked the same. He scanned the numbers, seeing if anything looked familiar, but nothing took. While staring at a number, 535, he noticed the 3 in the middle began to blur into an 8, and a wave of fatigue suddenly washed over him—he wanted to lie down, and badly.

  Cyndi, staring at the inert man before her, took his hand and led him down the hall, not bothering to pretend to limp. Though his eyes were watching her, she could see nothing was really registering. She walked them to the right door, took a card key out of her purse, and let them in. After turning on a small lamp, she guided James to the edge of his bed, then eased off her coat. His dark eyes flickered. So, he was still alert somewhere in there. She crossed the room to the iced champagne that she had ordered to be placed here before dinner and expertly poured two glasses. Then she sat next to James and put a glass in his hand.

  James could feel something cold, and his mind jumped to attention to investigate. He was holding ice, not a glass of ice…not a glass of bubbles. Champagne. The word flitted across his brain. It was making him cold. There were other things, sensations around him. On his left, pressure against his side. On his shoulder, a hand rubbing, sending warmth through the fabric of his jacket. It was nice against the cold. Then he saw the face, Cyndi’s face. Her eyes were smoldering. She leaned in and he felt her warm kiss. The warmth spread through him and he closed his eyes. When she pulled away, he opened, looked, and frowned. This was the wrong face. Where were the deep chocolate eyes he was used to? Where was the soft brown skin? The face before him looked too pale, too cold…but not unbeautiful. His mind grappled to work it out. Another kiss came and the warmth returned, along with something new…something that it promised—relief. Relief from the turmoil of his sudden new job; relief from his worries, stresses, guilt, and loneliness. Loneliness. He hadn’t realized he had been feeling so lonely, so separated, so out of the loop with his life—drowning in the chaos of everything. But here was reprieve and understanding. Here was a chance to get out from under the weight, to be saved from the burdens that he just realized had been pummeling and pushing and crushing and squeezing. He wanted the escape; he needed the escape. He dropped his champagne and took it.

  Chapter 47

  The sharp crash of shattering glass was not loud enough to reach the underground chambers of the museum—the dormitories, in particular. But the consequences of the event certainly would. Before the violated pieces of window even hit t
he smooth, polished corridor floor, an immediate, blaring alarm screeched through every empty hallway and arrested the attention of all within the building.

  Kate and John, who had been fast asleep on two cots pushed together, lurched awake in the dark, knocking their bedside lamp to the floor. In a strange, slow moving comedy directed by the influences of exaggerated panic and clumsy, sleep-addled brains, the two began furiously groping around for a light. After successfully managing to mangle all the blankets into a twisted knot, smack John accidently in the face, and fall off the edge of the narrow cot to the floor, Kate’s senses finally engaged. Detecting the familiar bulge of her favorite flashlight tucked into her backpack pocket, she reached across the floor to the bag and un-holstered her prize. Clicking it on, she pointed it toward the other side of the room where it met John’s deer-in-the-headlights face. He instinctively put up his hands against the sudden glare.

  “Sorry,” Kate mouthed, averting the direct beam from his eyes. “Are you okay?”

  She dashed to his side and helped him up—apparently he had fallen off the cot, too.

  “What d’you think happened?” She shouted in John’s ear over the piercing alarm. “Is it the fire alarm?”

  “We’d better find out,” he yelled back. “Grab your bag.”

  Kate threw a jacket over her pajamas and swung her bag across her back. John, already having opened the door to check for smoke, signaled it was clear and ushered her out.

  As they sprinted down the hallway toward the stairs, Kate looked up and noticed the silver sprinklers lining the ceiling.

  “It’s not the fire alarm,” she yelled. “Look.”

  John followed her pointed finger to the dormant devices and understood. If the alarm was for fire, they would have been soaked by now. They reached the stairs, taking them two at a time, and made it to the main level of the museum. All at once, the noise of the alarm ceased—leaving their ears still painfully throbbing. The glass foyer’s flood lights had been turned on, and the couple looked around for any sign of what might have happened.

  His ears having recovered, John picked up a faint echo-y crackling of a radio in the corridor across from them, and the two pursued. They followed the sound toward the back offices and finally caught up with the security guard they had inadvertently been following.

  “Tom, what’s going on?”

  “All right, Mr. Caldwell? Mrs.?” The guard greeted grimly.

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” John answered. “What happened?”

  “Sounds like a break in…” replied Tom, pausing to listen to another squawk coming from his radio, “in the administration quarter,” he completed. Without inviting them to follow or discouraging them from doing so, Tom swiftly continued on his course toward the scene—Kate and John in step behind him. They came around a corner to a new passage and found a handful of other museum security guards surrounding a large window frame, of which the lower half of the glass had been busted out.

  Shards of glass lay scattered across the floor, twinkling like diamonds under the guards’ flashlight beams.

  “Tom,” one of them called as the small party approached, “flip the main light around the corner there, will ya? Ernie, call and make sure the police are on their way. These built-in alarms are supposed to directly alert them, but I don’t trust all this new-fangled wiring and such.”

  A short guard with his uniform cap askew took a phone from his pocket, while Tom and his companions backtracked to find the light switch.

  “Look, no offense,” spoke Tom in a gruff voice, “but maybe you two don’t want to be sticking around here. Once the police show up in a minute or so, they’ll want to question everyone on the scene. Now, I know the commissioner trusts you and has informed us guards about your stay; but since you’re not really…officially…authorized to be here, it might be best if you’re not.”

  John and Kate exchanged a look, reading each other’s eyes almost instantly.

  “Alright,” agreed John. “We’ll head back to the dormitories. But, please, will you let us know when you have an idea of what’s happened?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. I expect the commissioner will be notified directly, maybe even as we speak. You can bet he’ll be on top of this investigation like butter on rye. And what he finds out is bound to reach you much faster than whatever information may be trickled down to me.”

  With a solid parting nod, he flipped the light switch on the wall and headed back around the corner.

  Chapter 48

  “Outrageous! Unbelievable! Insane!”

  Commissioner Moreau threw out several more choice adjectives as he paced the wooden floor of a private research room stacked with books—one of Kate and John’s usual hide-outs. The archeologists-turned-covert-museum-squatters watched only in silence while their friend exhibited a less-than-professional side of himself in their forgiving presence.

  “In all my years here as Commissioner we’ve never had an attempted break-in,” Pierre huffed on. “I’m just boggled at the nerve, no, the audacity of anyone thinking they could get away with such vile and atrocious behavior. Stealing from a museum is stealing from society, stealing from history, and…stealing from Her Majesty the Queen herself!”

  John, fighting the urge to remind Pierre that many of the artifacts in the museum were mostly likely “stolen” from their native lands once upon a time by the British Empire in the first place, continued picking at his nails and trying to think things through.

  “But nothing was stolen, was it?” Kate asked for the tenth time in an attempt to calm the highly disturbed man before them.

  “No,” sniffed Pierre. “But the intention is just as incriminating as the act. If only we could’ve seen who it was, or could come up with some kind of clue as to who this monster might be. I mean, what if he tries again?”

  “It does seem rather convenient,” John finally spoke up, “that they attempted to come through one of the windows sitting in a camera blind-spot. Either they were very lucky…or very studied in their plan.”

  “But if they had planned things so meticulously,” parried Kate, “then, why wouldn’t they have known about the alarm? I mean, by the looks of things, they dashed off just as soon as it was triggered. Why wouldn’t they have disarmed it first?”

  “Yes, it’s quite strange.” Pierre began to speak more rationally as his frenzied state cooled down. “If they were professionals, why would they botch it up? And if they were just hooligans, why would they attempt anything so stupid?”

  “What if…” John expressed, still looking at his nails as his idea solidified. “What if it was neither? What if it was an act of desperation?” He lifted his head and met Kate’s gaze, choosing his next words carefully. “What if…they…finally figured out we are here, or, at least the tablets are?? I mean,” he could see a tinge of fear creep into Kate’s eyes as he spoke, “being hidden away down here has made us feel safe. But I think we’ve forgotten that ever since the desert, someone out there has been going to a lot of trouble to get their hands on what we’ve found, and it’s not likely they were going to stop just because we’ve momentarily quit thinking about them.”

  Kate took a deep breath and instinctively wrapped her arms around herself as she comprehended the weight of his words. He was right. She had pushed aside the immediacy of their danger in favor of the exciting research and safe feelings that staying at the museum had supplied.

  Pierre also looked forlorn; perhaps he had expected that once in his care, the tablets could automatically be marked “safe.” The re-realization that they were not was a heavy blow. The room remained silent as the group struggled to come to terms with the reality they had cast aside. There was still danger; and now it seemed that it was lurking closer than ever. What if the fiend had gotten in? What if they had found Kate and John?

  What were they going to do now?

  A startling buzz broke the spell of their anxious thoughts, and the commissioner quickly dove a hand into his poc
ket for his phone. “It’s Sarah,” he said before answering the call.

  “Yes?...Uh, huh…Okay, we’ll be right there.”

  Sliding the phone back into his pressed trousers, Pierre made his way toward the door.

  “Come on,” he called without looking back. “She’s finished the translation.”

  Chapter 49

  Without flat out running like a football star shooting for the end zone, the commissioner, Kate, and John hurried through the stale hallways of the underground archives to the labs and almost fell into each other as they abruptly halted in front of the locked door of Sarah’s workroom. Fumbling with his cardkey, Pierre seemed to take forever to gain them entrance. When the lock beeped its acceptance, John impatiently turned the handle out from under Pierre’s grasp and the three of them tumbled into the room.

  Sarah, who had been expecting them and thought nothing of their tumultuous barge-in, beckoned them over to the table where the stone tablets were resting within small, environment-controlled glass cases. She gestured to the wall above them where the translation was displayed on the three TV monitors.

  Kate and John, overtly panting, and Pierre, trying to act as if he wasn’t winded at all, stared up at the screens and read the words overlaying an image of the first tablet in their minds as Sarah spoke them out loud:

  The chosen king of Mesopotamian blood—His strength must exceed his fathers’ before him. Able to suppress opposition and rebellions of scattered peoples for uniting them in peace. Ten cities must be formed. From them the king shall have his power; upon one his throne will sit. A rising of the Supreme from the hallowed writ below resides within the One. On the path to master all the Chosen is set. His rule will be bathed in fear, yet his kingdom shall be great.