by Gordon Ryan
Dmitri idled in the fishing boat below the yacht, just off the front deck. He gave Tess and Lars a look of alarm. She tried to wave him off, but he didn’t move. Get out of here, you idiot.
The helicopter chopped to a halt. Borisenko and two more bodyguards stepped out and approached, together with a handful of other staff, who entered a door on the back deck. Some carried bags, one man hefted a fish by the tail.
Yekatarina had followed Tess and Lars to the deck and now she met Borisenko for a passionate kiss. You’d never know they were married, or that she was not particularly beautiful. Guys like Borisenko usually consorted with vacuous models and Valkyrie-like tennis stars.
He spotted Tess and Lars. “Hello, hello.” He held out a meaty, ring-covered hand for Lars to shake. His shirt opened two extra buttons to reveal a tuft of hair. A strong odor of cologne hung around him. Lars took the hand, but passed a look to Tess.
“I see you met my wife. Katenka, did you invite Sabine and Mr. Nilsson for lunch? We got a bonito, and some octopus, come, join us.”
“Unfortunately dear, Sabine was just telling me that she was in a hurry to catch the ferry to the mainland. A problem has come up with your mosaics, it would seem.”
“Problem? What kind of problem?”
Tess recovered just as Borisenko fixed her with a frown. “Nothing serious, but I must rush to Tunis,” she said in her affected Arabic accent. Yekatarina gave her a half smile from behind her husband’s shoulder. “The curator at the Bardo is asking an extra twenty thousand dinar, greedy man, so I am afraid I must decline your invitation while I resolve matters.”
While searching North Africa and the Middle East for the looted goods from the Baghdad Museum, she’d discovered a rotten curator who wanted to sell artifacts from the Bardo Museum, in Tunis. She passed his name to the Tunisian government, who arrested the man, but quietly, so as not to harm the museum’s reputation. It had been the perfect cover when she came up with the plan to pose as a Tunisian. She’d used the curator’s name and list of artifacts as bait.
“Pay what you need to,” Borisenko said. “But if he pushes too much, you tell me. I have ways of pushing back.”
“Yes, of course, but I do not think that will be necessary. Salaam. We shall be in touch.” She nodded to Yekatarina. “Salaam.”
To her relief, the bodyguard at the gangplank stepped aside to let them go.
“My god, what just happened?” Lars asked when they were on the gangplank. “Did she really just let us go?”
“Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
Moments later and they were on the fishing boat with Dmitri, who sped away from the yacht and through the harbor with his hat pulled low to hide his face.
They passed beyond the breakwater and followed the curve of the island, south toward Sfax on the Tunisian mainland. The yacht receded in the distance and Tess’s fear subsided even as her frustration grew.
“I hate that man,” Dmitri said after Tess and Lars explained what had happened. “I can’t tell you how much.”
“So frustrating,” Tess said. “So goddamned frustrating. It was right there, on that boat. Why did she have to be there?”
“I don’t understand why she let you go,” Dmitri said. “She’ll tell him soon enough.”
“The faster we get out of here, the better,” Lars said. “We’ll go straight to Sfax, then drive to Tunis and catch the first flight out of here, doesn’t matter where. That’s it for the Damascene then, it’ll disappear into his collection and never be seen again. And the Akkadian King, sorry about that.”
“It’s not over,” Tess said. She pulled her hair back from her face with one hand and held it against the wind. “He’s still got to get the artifacts back to Russia. Until he’s there, we’ve still got a chance.”
“Are you kidding?” Lars asked. “Go back to the States, where you’ll be safe.”
“I can’t walk away now, when we’re so close.” She turned to Dmitri, who knew her better. “You know I can’t.”
“You told me he said something about Marseille,” Dmitri said. “You could wait in La Baux, do your castle thing, while I hang out in Marseille, see if Borisenko shows up.”
After the breakup with Peter, she’d called in her sabbatical year and gone to La Baux to write her next book and build medieval siege engines for the castle museum. Getting out of Manhattan would let her forget Peter and Nick, or so had been the plan. Dmitri was right, it would give her good cover.
“It’s an idea. Lars, can you take another week off work, until we know how this plays out?”
“I could,” Lars said in a skeptical voice. “But why push our luck? If his wife had said something, we’d be octopus bait by now.”
“Come on Lars, be a Viking for me.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means grow a backbone already, will you?”
Chapter Three:
One of the tourists looked wrong. He was the only one watching Tess and not the trebuchet. It made her nervous.
It was two days after the meeting in Tunisia and she was at the castle in La Baux, doing a demonstration. Four sweating men cranked the wheel to lift the trebuchet’s counterweight. She’d had no shortage of volunteers, some pushed forward by wives and children as they feigned reluctance.
”Plus rapide,” she said to the sweating men at the wheel, then, in English, “Faster. Remember, anyone on trebuchet duty gets first spoils when the castle is sacked.”
A mixed crowd of tourists—French, Italian, German, Japanese, American—gathered outside the ropes. The sight of the trebuchet arm dipping, the counterweight creaking skyward, drew them, together with Tess in jerkin and breeches, a sword at her side.
Lars was down in the village, waiting to hear from Dmitri in Marseille.
The men finished lifting the counterweight and she ushered them to the other side of the safety rope while family members snapped photos. Others took pictures of Tess.
“You can see what kind of work it would be to mount a full scale attack,” she said. “And your enemy is shooting back, mounting sorties. But if you get this thing going, that six thousand kilo counterweight can batter down the strongest wall, given enough time.”
She spoke easily, confidently, but was unsettled by the man who stood by himself, out of place. He wore a tailored suit and expensive looking shoes. Looked French, not Russian, but that didn’t mean anything. Borisenko could have hired a local to do the job.
“Is everyone ready to fire the trebuchet?” Scattered applause mingled with cheers from the children. “Any ideas how far the stone will fly?”
Answers to her question ranged from a few tens of meters, to over the side of the hill, to the ludicrous: the mountains on the far side of the valley. Hah. It was a siege engine, not a rocket launcher.
“This is the biggest working trebuchet in Europe,” she said. She picked up the rope. “I’d love to smash some real walls, show you what damage we can do, but the people up at the castle don’t like it when we attack their pretty ruins.”
The sun had chased away the chill of a late fall morning at La Baux, Provence. The village was a cluster of houses and steep, narrow roads that grew from a rocky ledge that overlooked the plains to the south. Just above the village, the ruined castle and the museum where Tess demonstrated the trebuchet. Most tourists were helpless to do anything but snap pictures or run camcorders when they first climbed above the village, in an attempt to capture the magic of the place for friends and family back home.
The crowds were half the size they’d been just a few weeks earlier and some of the shops in the village had trimmed their hours to match the shorter days. But the late-season visitors were Tess’s favorites. They were attentive, more likely to be families or small groups, rather than the massive, frantic groups dropped off for 90 minutes from tour busses on their way to the Pont du Gard or the Roman theater at Orange.
“One more question,” Tess said in French. She looked through the crowd, as i
f at random, before focusing on the suspicious-looking man in the suit. “Sir, do you speak French? English?”
He answered with what sounded like a Texas accent. “English is fine.”
“What else could you fire with a trebuchet instead of stones?” Tess asked.
“Flaming pitch,” he answered without hesitation. “A castle’s interior buildings would be made of wood. Or bodies. Korybut of Lithuania hurled corpses into enemy cities to spread disease. The Turks tried it, too. Or so I read in a book.”
Yeah, her book. She had a whole chapter about the incident.
“Very good,” she said and forced herself to look away, make eye contact with others in the crowd. “A big weapon like this is not just about battering down walls, it’s about terrifying an already frightened castle garrison.”
She picked up the rope and shooed them back from the rope barrier.
The tourists stared, leaned forward as she took the rope and gave them one last warning. It wasn’t just her words, but the tension of the machine, cranked into its unstable position and ready for a violent release.
“And a trebuchet could be enormous,” she continued. “Imagine something three times this big. It’d take fifty men and a team of draft horses just to move the machine into place.” A pause for dramatic effect. “Are you ready?”
A few kids shouted in the affirmative. The others leaned forward, stretched the safety rope taught.
As soon as it fired, nobody would care what she had to say. They’d continue to the castle or be off to see Michel and his falcon. Climb the tower, get the view of the Provincial countryside from the edge of the cliff.
Except the tourist who was not a tourist. He’d come for something else.
Tess pulled the rope. The counterweight dropped, the arm punched at the sky. The stone hurled itself into the blue. Camcorders and phone cameras tracked its flight. A collective “ooh” went through the crowd.
The stone landed near the edge of the cliff with an audible crack of stone on stone. The crowd cheered.
The man she’d been watching ducked under the safety rope and made his way toward her. The counterweight still rocked to seek equilibrium and the rope at the end of the arm whipped dangerously back and forth.
“Hey, you can’t come in here,” she said.
“You’re Tess Burgess, right?”
” Yes, I’m Tess. I’m sorry, have we met?”
She felt tense as a loaded trebuchet herself. He carried a leather attaché case, which he flipped open. Tess had a sword in her scabbard, which she knew how to use. Blunt, of course, but she could hack his wrist and knock a gun from his hand.
Most of the tourists melted away. People returned to the museum or walked to the edge of the cliff or back toward the castle. A few children stayed behind, talking in loud, excited voices. She could call for help.
“Not in person.” He pulled a book from the attaché case. “I brought you something.”
Tess uncoiled. She moved her hand from where it had rested near the pommel of her sword, then took the book. The cover was a familiar painting of a castle, its towers on fire, under siege by a row of trebuchets. Engines of Destruction, by Tess R. Burgess.
She met the man’s gaze with a frown. “You want an autograph?”
“It’s for you.”
“You’re giving me a copy of my own book?”
“And this.” His hand dipped into the attaché case a second time. It returned with a black plastic case, about eighteen inches long, decorated with a gold fleur-de-lis. Every gift shop between here and Carcassonne sold the replica daggers.
He put it in her free hand before she could protest. Not one of Borisenki’s hit men, then, but an overeager fan. You didn’t get many from writing lay histories, but she’d collected more than a few letters from amateur historians, members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and even hard-core gamers. Plus the crazies who wrote her love letters based on her picture on the dust jacket.
“A mysterious fan,” she said with a smile. “Sorry, you caught me off-guard. The replica knife is—” She trailed off, not sure how to reject the thing without coming across as rude. “Well, thank you. I do have plenty of copies of the book at home. Why don’t I sign it for you and you can keep it.”
“The book’s for you. Added a few notes.”
“Ah, okay.”
Now she got it. He’d tracked her down to argue. Maybe she hadn’t properly appreciated the role of China in developing siege engines, or given short shrift to the siege of Constantinople. Deciphering the past was like shining a flashlight into a dark room and trying to describe the furniture by its shadows on the wall. Other people could study the same shadows and come to different conclusions.
She fought the urge to flip open the book and check out his complaints. “I’ll take a look later. Thanks.”
A new batch of tourists gathered on the other side of the rope barrier, no doubt wondering what the woman in the jerkin and breeches was about and if they’d get a chance to see the trebuchet in action.
She gave a nod in their direction. “Time to show off my baby again.”
“Think they had any female engineers in Korbyut of Lithuania’s army?” He gave a half smile, almost knowing, then turned to walk away. “Don’t toss the dagger, Tess.”
The man stepped over the rope barrier and headed down toward the village. What did he mean by the female engineer barb? And who told him she was working at La Baux? Not like it was advertised on the dust jacket. She looked down at the dagger case, then snapped it open.
And gaped. A quick look after the man, but he was gone.
She snapped the case shut and tucked both case and book under her arm and strode across the field, over the rope and past the confused tourists. When she got to the entrance to the museum she got an unobstructed view into the village. The main street was a confused mass of tourists stepping into shops, eating pastries, taking pictures. No sign of the man who’d given her the gifts.
She opened the case again.
It was a dagger, all right. But not the generic, pseudo-medieval dagger that came in these cases for fifteen euros, guaranteed to get your bags searched at the airport. The blade looked gold, the handle wood with lapis lazuli beads. She didn’t recognize the style, but thought it might some kind of ceremonial blade from Turkey or Armenia.
She pulled out her phone to call Lars.
Borisenko had said nothing when she’d emailed that the curator had been arrested, that he’d have to forget the mosaics and leave Tunisia. But maybe Yekatarina had since told her husband that she knew Tess from New York, and that she was Peter Gagné’s ex-girlfriend. He could have tracked her here.
Was this a warning? A threat?
#
Lars looked worried as Tess took a seat across the table. “No question now,” he said. “We’ve got to give it up. You’d be safer in the U.S. than here. And do you think they’ve figured out who I am?”
The restaurant sat near the old church. The bell tower shaded its outdoor patio in the summer and the indoor seating wrapped around a stone oven where you could enjoy the heat and the smell of baking bread in the colder months.
“Calm down,” she said. She hadn’t shown him the dagger yet, or the book, just told him that a suspicious man had approached her. “Nobody followed me, we’re safe at the moment.” She looked around the restaurant. Mostly locals, from what she could see.
The resident population of La Baux was currently twenty-three, compared to thousands who once lived in the town. From the hill it was a postcard of a Provincial village, full of winding streets and brick buildings the color of the exposed stone, with tile roofs. But every building was given over to a gift shop, a café, or a patisserie. A handful of shop owners lived in apartments over their businesses; the rest commuted from Arles or other nearby towns.
But they still needed a place to relax away from the crowds. If any place could be said to cater to the locals, it was Le Domaine. It filled with tourists for
lunch, but a simpler, less-expensive menu came out in the evening when the castle closed and the tour busses pulled away.
Lars was already munching on bread with tapenade—a spread of olives, capers, anchovies, and garlic—with an open bottle of Minervois red. Alarmed, maybe, but it hadn’t spoiled his appetite.
Some men would have looked the picture of sophistication with a bottle of wine and tucked into a back corner of a Provincial restaurant. Not Lars. He looked perfect when demonstrating axe-throwing at an open-air museum just outside Copenhagen, his beard braided and dressed for the part, but even here the look of his face was a brawling Viking lord, ever a threat to overturn the table and throw the serving wench over his shoulder as he made a sprint for his longboat.
“Then who was this guy?” Lars asked. “Unless Borisenko sent him.”
“I don’t know, sounded like he was from Texas. I’d expect Borisenko to send a Russian, or maybe a Frenchman.”
“We can’t take the risk.”
She helped herself to his bread and tapenade and between bites said, “It’s always too risky for you. I thought Eric Bloodaxe was one of your ancestors.”
“Erik Bloodaxe killed most of his brothers, then died warring in England,” Lars said. “My ancestor was the quiet brother, who owned a farm, stayed out of the wars and fathered eleven children.” He glanced toward the kitchen. “I hope you don’t mind, I ordered already. Herbed lamb okay?”
Tess’s stomach growled in anticipation. “You know me too well.” She removed the book and the dagger case from her lap and set them on the table.
“Even if we don’t give up, you should still go back to the States, let Dmitri and me handle it.”
“No,” Tess said. “I’m not going to leave you guys here, while I stay out of harm’s way. Besides, I like it here. Gives me a chance to think about my next book and work out…” She thought about Peter and his son, Nick. “…work out other things.”
Lars reached for the dagger case. “What’s this? Tourist junk?”
She put her hand on the case. “Wait a second before you open that or you won’t hear another word.”