by M. J. Rose
Behind them a voice boomed out.
“Hands up. You’re trespassing.”
Chapter
FORTY-FOUR
Even with a gun in hand, the guard didn’t have a chance; he was outnumbered and he found out just how outnumbered pretty fast. Lucian and Richmond spun around, Glocks pointed at him while Jeffries came from one side to grab his pistol and Agent O’Hara came at him from the other and wrestled him to the ground.
Just steps behind the first guard, a second guard ran in.
Right into the four FBI agents who were ready for him.
Sellers and Jeffries cuffed both men’s hands and feet. O’Hara taped their mouths shut. But what to do with them? Lucian couldn’t waste a man to stay with them. He motioned instructions to Sellers. A gun was better at herding than a dog any day, and with incentives at their back, the two men shuffled obediently along.
The first door Lucian tried led to an empty kitchen. The second led to a dimly lit room with dark gray walls and a dozen black leather lounge chairs set up in rows facing a movie screen almost too large for the space. There, two men in FedEx uniforms wielded crowbars and hammers as they worked at prying open the large wooden crate that had come out of the belly of the courier plane a few hours before.
“FBI,” Lucian called out. “Drop your weapons. You’re under arrest for trafficking in stolen goods.”
“We don’t have any weapons,” one of the FedEx men called out, and then dropped the tools.
The second did the same.
“Down, now. On the floor.” Lucian’s words shot out like rapid gunfire. “Hands behind your back.”
Both FedEx men dropped down and in doing so revealed a third man, who had been standing slightly behind them and out of view. He was well over six feet tall with black hair threaded with silver strands that shone in the indirect light. His eyes were light gray and looked almost like steel as he turned his gaze on the troupe of agents that had just invaded his space. The surprise in his eyes turned to indignation.
“You are trespassing.”
The same instincts that enabled Lucian to identify the authenticity of a painting in a few seconds informed him he was looking at the Monster who had defaced the Matisse painting and had been negotiating with Tyler Weil and the Metropolitan Museum.
“Step away, please, sir,” Lucian ordered.
The man remained where he was.
“You’re under arrest for trafficking in stolen goods. You can make this as easy or as hard as you want. It’s up to you.”
“Stolen goods? I’m afraid you’re wrong.” The man glanced back at the partially opened crate and as Lucian approached he could see an emotion in the silver eyes he recognized immediately—longing. “This was a very fair trade.”
“Holy shit, Lucian,” Richmond said under his breath. “Don’t you know who he is?”
Lucian had no idea. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Darius Shabaz,” he said, pride evident in every syllable.
Shabaz? Lucian pictured a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds, heard a clap of thunder and saw the emerald letters appearing on the movie screen in his mind as, with each flash of lighting, the letters burned and built into the completed logo: Sha…Shabaz… Shabaz Productions.
This was who had devised the exchange of the sculpture for the four paintings? The movie producer?
Lucian pulled out a pair of handcuffs. What was going on? He ran through a dozen scenarios. Could Shabaz have had something to do with Solange’s murder? Was he somehow connected to Malachai? The only parts of the puzzle that now made sense were all the professional disguises—the men in the Los Angeles hotel room, the fake FedEx trucks, the choreographed action.
“Darius Shabaz, you are under arrest,” Lucian intoned. Shabaz remained still but bowed his head as if in prayer, his posture slumped and his shoulders rounded as if hearing his name had broken something in him.
Lucian was only two feet away from the producer when he felt the floor tremble, saw the walls shake and heard a deep rumbling.
“It’s an earthquake!” Shabaz yelled out, as Lucian, Richmond and the three FBI agents fell into a wide crack that had opened up in the floor.
Chapter
FORTY-FIVE
But it wasn’t an earthquake at all. The backup teams positioned in the groves of trees just beyond the bungalow heard a rumble, yet the ground they stood on remained still. Just yards away, hundreds of twelve-inch-wide slats of aluminum rose from the ground. In less than twenty seconds, a massive steel fence cut off the building they’d just been staring at. The structure was now hidden from sight. And so was the rest of the compound.
Once the trembling earth had quieted and he could hear the crazy cries of birds reacting to the unnatural occurrence, Special Agent Gary Fulton approached the fence cautiously, gun drawn, aware that if someone had gone to all the trouble of creating a metal moat, they might also have set up booby traps in the ground.
He reached it without incident and inspected the overlapping slats. There were no toeholds. No way they’d be able to scale the smooth wall. Even if they built a ladder of human rungs and they could get an agent to the top, how would he drop down inside?
Running alongside it, Fulton couldn’t see an end to the curving metal wall. How much of the compound was cut off?
There was no time to find out. No time to dig under the fence and tunnel in. He and his men needed to reach the building where Glass and Richmond, Sellers, O’Hara and Jeffries were prisoners.
Fulton got on his radio and called for help. He needed a chopper and he needed it fast.
Chapter
FORTY-SIX
Lucian smelled earth and mold. He was cold, much colder than he’d been just minutes—or was it hours—before? There was a metal band of pain circling his head. If his eyes were open he could no longer see. The blackness surrounding him was so complete he couldn’t tell if he was inside it or it was inside him.
Dazed, he fought through the pain to try to make sense of what had just happened, of where he was, of why he was here, of what he’d been doing. Remember, he instructed himself. Remember. But he couldn’t grasp any thoughts. Pain swept over him in a wave, and all he could see in its inky swells were the faces of the women he had been drawing for the past few weeks. Jeering at him from out of the blackness—one angry, the next shocked, a third weeping. All of them had been wronged, were troubled, were grieving—and all blamed him, demanded something from him. The women stretched out their arms so their fingers were touching, creating an unbreakable chain around him, trapping him not just by their physical strength but by his guilt over what he’d done to them, what he had taken away from them.
Please, he pleaded. Tell me what I’ve done. How can I make amends if I don’t know what crime I’ve committed? What do you want from me?
“Lucian?”
Was one of them finally answering after so many weeks?
“Lucian?”
No, it was a man’s voice, calling to him from above the water.
Lucian tried to break the grip of the circle of women and their suffocating demands. He tried to swim up to the surface. He could just see the light filtering down through the murky green water.
“Lucian? Are you okay? Answer me, man. Answer me!”
Lucian concentrated. Open your eyes, he screamed at himself. Open your eyes. But he couldn’t. There was too much pain. Damn, his head hurt in what seemed like a million new ways.
No, not all of it was his head. There was pain ripping across his back, radiating out and down from his right shoulder. He must have hurt himself when he…fell…yes, when he fell. He’d been holding a gun on the Matisse Monster when the floor had opened and he’d fallen.
“Lucian?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m okay.” Forcing his eyelids apart, he looked into a cold white light.
“Hey!” He put his hand up to shield his eyes from Richmond’s small but powerful flashlight.
“Sorry.” Richmond moved the
light so it wasn’t shining right in his face anymore. “You scared me there.”
“I scared you? You don’t scare.”
“I do when my partner doesn’t respond to me screaming in his ear and slapping his face.”
“For how long?”
“A few minutes.”
“Damn it.” Lucian was taking it all in now, looking around, assessing where he was, peering into the shadows where O’Hara, Sellers and Jeffries stood behind Richmond. He asked them if they were all right.
“Fine.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay, too, Richmond?” Lucian asked his partner.
“Actually, pretty banged up. We all are. Scratches, bumps, sprains, but nothing we can’t cope with. You got the worst of it. Opened your shoulder on some outcropping of rock as you fell.”
Lucian was examining the cave. “Where the hell are we?”
“Good a guess as any—hell. We’re in hell,” Richmond answered as he helped his partner stand.
“What happened?” A wave of dizziness hit Lucian but he fought it, willing it away. There was no time now.
“It felt like an earthquake to me. Not too bad, though. Maybe a two or a three,” Sellers said.
“Any idea how to get out of here?”
“O’Hara’s working the radios.” Richmond looked over at the youngest member of the team. “Any luck?”
“I’ve gotten through twice but there’s too much static. They don’t seem to be able to hear me at all, and I can’t make out what they’re saying. There’s a wall of interference between us and the outside.”
“Because we’re too damn deep,” Jeffries said. “We must have slid at least fifteen feet.”
“What the fuck is this place? Some kind of museum of natural history?” O’Hara asked.
Lucian looked up into the darkness. “Where’d we come from?”
Richmond aimed the beam skyward, illuminating an inky chute.
“We fell straight, then slid for a while and landed here. It’s not a direct plunge. Wherever we came from is out of sight.”
With nothing left to glean from above, Lucian scanned the small crypt. He walked the circumference of their trap, inspecting the walls and the floor. When he was three-quarters of the way around he noticed a set of drawings—menacing and primitive black lines on the rocky walls. It was a mural that unfolded like a story, encircling them. It started with naked hunters on horses riding over snakes curled in the grass and finding a herd of bison, and ended with the hunters brutally killing two of the giant beasts and then dancing victoriously around a fire while overhead giant, vulture-like birds circled the sun.
But not any sun Lucian had ever seen. This one had a black center. He stared at it. Something was wrong. He walked up to it. There was a hole in the center of the sun. He shone Richmond’s flashlight into the opening and saw an inner chamber half the size of this one, carved out of the same stone. On the floor he could just make out a bone-white skeleton ceremoniously laid out.
Woven baskets surrounded the body. Some were filled with multicolored beads, others with acorns, others overflowed with smaller bones and shells. Bits of fabric lay beneath the skeleton, as if the man’s burial shroud had disintegrated. Encircling his head was a headdress of twigs and shreds of brightly colored strings.
The macabre sight looked so familiar that Lucian wondered if this was like the faces of the women he dreamed about, whom he couldn’t forget but couldn’t remember.
The pain was making it hard to grab hold of a thought and follow it through, but he knew he’d seen this before.
Behind him, he was aware of other men waiting for him to report on what he was seeing. Turning to tell them, Lucian tripped. He wasn’t yet that steady after the fall, and as he lost his balance he dropped the flashlight, which rolled away, creating a moving light show on the rocky wall.
“You need to take it easy,” Richmond cautioned as he helped his partner up.
“I need to figure out how we’re going to get out of here, and you need to help me,” Lucian argued.
“How about we try to break a bigger hole in that wall and see if there’s an exit through there,” Richmond offered.
“There won’t be.”
“How do you know that?”
Lucian shrugged. “I have no idea.” He bent to pick up the flashlight and in the process noticed an irregular rounded stone set into the ground. Even before he looked more closely he knew it had a lion’s head carved into it.
The ferocious face stared up at him.
What was happening to him? He didn’t know how, but he knew something about this emblematic stone…something that really might help them escape from this dungeon.
Chapter
FORTY-SEVEN
Fulton banged his fist against the aluminum wall. He and his men were as trapped outside as Richmond, Glass and the others were trapped inside.
“What kind of signals are you reading?” Fulton asked Travers, whom he’d put in charge of both the GPS and the MRSS devices while he tried to organize the rescue and continued to monitor the radio.
“The sculpture is the only thing holding steady, and—”
Electronic noise spat out of the radio. Fulton held up his hand to stop Travers, depressed the speak button and shouted, “Come in! Come in!”
Not a single word broke through the angry static.
“Come in. Come in. Are you there?”
The only response was more crackling electricity.
Fulton stared down at the radio, wanting to fling it against the highly polished surface. “Travers, do you have anything new on the MRSS?”
Early on they’d been able to track the first burst of activity when the team entered the building. They’d seen two of the five men already inside show up in the same vicinity as the FBI agents and remain there even after the agents moved in deeper, eventually reaching the area where the three other occupants were. Then all hell broke loose. Now the scanner was having trouble reading inside the high-tech fortress. Travers reported that as far as he could tell it looked as if all but two men inside the building had moved to an area below the first floor.
“Drasner?” Fulton called out to another member of his team. “Any news on the chopper?”
“On the way. ETA less than seven minutes.”
There were two ways around the fence. Equipment to rip through the aluminum was on its way by truck but could take as long as forty minutes to reach them. Too much could happen inside the compound in that much time, so Fulton had also requested a helicopter, which could airlift him and his team up and over the wall. They had all the weaponry they needed to storm the building and overwhelm everyone inside—they just couldn’t do it from where they were.
“What is taking so long?” Fulton shouted at Drasner, knowing as he did that raising his voice wasn’t going to help, but the pressure was getting to him. His job was to think and to act, and he hadn’t been able to act on anything for fifteen minutes. There were men in there depending on him, and he wasn’t coming through for them, either literally or figuratively.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Drasner said.
Travers stood up. “Agent Fulton,” he shouted, “I’m picking up activity in the building.”
Chapter
FORTY-EIGHT
“Help me with this,” Lucian shouted. With his shoulder ripped up, he was handicapped, so O’Hara, Jeffries, Richmond and Sellers wedged their fingers under the outer lip of the stone marker and, on the count of three, made an effort to lift it.
It didn’t budge.
“Let’s try it again,” O’Hara said, and started the count.
On three they tried and failed again.
“We need something to slip under there and get some leverage,” Richmond said.
“Good idea,” Jeffries said. “I’ll just jog over to the hardware store.”
Lucian pointed to the hole in the wall. “Inside. The body is on top of some kind of
wooden platform. If we can get in there we can use pieces of that as a wedge.”
“What the fuck is a body doing in there anyway?” Jeffries asked. “What is this place?”
“I told you we’re inside some sick museum. Dioramas and all,” O’Hara said.
For the next few minutes the four men—with Lucian looking on—struck the wall with rocks, breaking off and loosening large chunks of it, widening the opening. They split their fingernails and scraped their skin, but kept at it, yanking and wrenching and pulling away handfuls of debris until the hole was big enough for the smallest of them—Sellers—to climb through.
Despite the prohibition against disturbing a crime scene, this situation was serious enough to forget about procedure. Pushing the skeleton off the platform where it rested, he broke the wooden gurney apart and handed the planks, one by one, to Richmond and then climbed back through the oculus.
O’Hara placed one end of the first plank under the lip of the lion stone. “Ready?”
Richmond, Sellers and Jeffries said they were.
“On the count of three. One…two…” On three O’Hara stepped down on the plank. A loud, creaking sound echoed in the chamber as the wood snapped in half. The stone hadn’t budged.
“Let’s go again,” Lucian shouted.