by Cari Z
If he wasn’t okay, I didn’t know how I would react, but I was pretty sure it would involve vengeance, fire, and brimstone.
He’d better be.
Chapter Eight
I HONESTLY don’t know what possessed me to throw the gun. It was, in one way, the most idiotic thing I could have done with the weapon. It shot projectiles; what business did I have throwing it around like it a boomerang?
On the other hand, what business did I have trying to fire a weapon I had no experience handling? Such things had never been any more than relics to me—the closest I ever got to a gun in my day-to-day life was back when I’d been in charge of the museum’s arquebus collection. No, firing it was out, absolutely out. Throwing it was better than letting Corday take the scepter from that room without a fight.
But you’re not the one who has to do the fighting, I reminded myself guiltily as I sprinted down the stairs, all my limbs trembling with delayed shock. You left Alex to do it for you. The fact that fighting was, in fact, his job wasn’t much of a consolation. What if he had been shot? What if she had another weapon? What if she’d stabbed him and he was bleeding out on the floor up there and I could have saved him if I’d just done the right thing instead of running off like a bloody coward?
I stumbled into the lobby, just barely remembering to cover up the scepter’s head before anyone else saw it. The manager saw me and scowled disapprovingly. “Monsieur, what is the meaning of all that noise?” she snapped.
“It is… it’s….” I couldn’t send her up there. She might get killed. “I have to go,” I said in a rush, and ran out onto the street before she could chase me down. She probably wouldn’t be the only one trying, right now. But where to go? I had to believe that our hotel room was compromised. I had no secure place to head to indoors, and the last thing I wanted to do was hop on the Metro—God only knew how many people that might endanger if I was followed.
My feet made my mind up for me, heading toward the Pharo Palace to my left. I merged with the rest of the walkers, a fair-weather Sunday crowd, and made my way to the gardens outside the palace. There were plenty of little trails, trees, and bushes—I could get lost here, take a breather and figure out what to do next.
You get your damn partners back, that’s what you do next. Just thinking about Alex again made my blood pressure rise with anxiety. I forced the thoughts back and focused on putting one step in front of the other, time and again, not even seeing the beautiful nineteenth-century mansion on my left as I walked a circle around the edifice.
Find a place to hunker down—anywhere, any place, just—
I turned off the path before rounding the next gentle curve, ignoring the “hmph!” from one of the tourists behind me as I made my way down the rocks and grass to a small, tree-covered knoll halfway down the short but steep hill. I set my back against one of the trees, let it take my weight, and finally realized that my hands were absolutely killing me. I looked down at them, cramped from gripping the scepter, and forced my fingers to relax a bit.
I had that, at least. I had it in my hands, a piece of unsung history. Tentatively, barely breathing, I pulled the wrapping back again and took another look at the flower at the top of the scepter. The workmanship was simply exquisite, the engravings still sharply delineated despite the passage of time and centuries of obscurity. If this was the real thing, it would rank among the most glorious royal scepters ever to grace a human hand. The ruler of the Malian Empire, the wealthiest man in history, had held this in his hand.
If it was real.
I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. Everything depended on whether or not it was real. I was supposed to authenticate it, but the best I could do right now was say that it seemed to match the specs proffered by Mr. Ashad. It wasn’t an obvious fake, which was better than someone with no experience at all could say, but to know more I needed to dig deeper. I’d have to find an expert in African art to inspect it, and then do—
A sharp prick against my right side made me gasp. My eyes flew open, my breath rising to shout, but a strong hand clamped down over my mouth before I could make a sound. My assailant was too close for me to see his face, but… “Hey there, pal,” a familiar voice murmured in my ear. “I was expecting you to make for the harbor. You almost lost me.”
’Scuse me, pal….
The American tourist from the fort yesterday, the one I’d run into on the way out of the loo. He was—he had to be Corday’s partner. Her second, her sniper. The person who had nearly put a bullet through my hand not fifteen minutes ago.
I began to thrash, then stopped struggling abruptly as the prick against my skin became an actual stab. Not a deep one, a tiny fraction of an inch, but—
“It doesn’t take much to reach the kidney from here,” he husked in my ear. “I don’t want to hurt you, Professor, but I will if you make me. Just stay calm, and you’ll get through this all right. Now, I’m going to take my hand off your mouth, but I’m leaving the knife where it is. You scream, shout, you do anything to draw attention to us, and I’ll carve your initials into your kidney and leave you here to bleed to death. You understand?”
I nodded, breathing hard. His hand smelled like peppermint gum, strong enough to make me want to retch, but I managed to maintain my control. As soon as his hand was off my mouth, I gulped air like a fish out of water, nearly hyperventilating.
“Settle down, friend,” my attacker advised, smiling in a friendly way as he pulled back enough for me to see his face. Yep, it was the same man—golden blond hair, freckled skin, oddly awkward features that somehow managed to make him look well put-together. “You’re gonna make yourself real sick if you don’t.”
“I won’t be sick,” I managed to say, barely audible but hell, I was just proud to be able to get the words out.
“You will if you keep breathing loud enough to wake the dead. I would know.” The implicit threat didn’t just pass me by this time, and I made an effort to calm my breathing. The knife in my side withdrew, and that helped a lot.
“There you go. Good.” He glanced around. “This is a nice place you picked for us to meet. Quiet. I like it.”
“I’m so pleased for you,” I muttered.
“You should be pleased for yourself. Quiet means everybody gets to live. Now.” His free hand slid down my shoulder to my arm and grabbed the shaft of the scepter. “Let go, and we can both walk away from this with what we want.”
“I want the scepter.”
“You want your life more,” he said, and—well, he wasn’t wrong, but… I stared at the blue velvet, felt the weight of the scepter in my hands, the heft lent by so much precious metal, so much history, so much time. I should have hit Corday in the head with this, not Alex’s gun. Maybe I could—
“Ah-ah.” The knife was back before I could do more than tense my muscles. “Professor.” The man shook his head. “Let me give you a piece of advice, okay? Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.”
I frowned. “You’re not Sicilian.”
“No, I’m—it’s a Princess Bride quote, it—look. It means don’t try to beat a man at his own game. Just ’cause we’re talking and playing nice for now doesn’t mean I won’t kill you as easy as I would a cockroach, all right? I don’t want to—my boss isn’t paying me to do that. But I will if you don’t hand over the prize.”
My lungs began to hitch again—he was serious, and I was bleeding, and there was nothing I could do to save myself and the scepter, not right now. I tightened my grip, shut my eyes even tighter, then—let go.
The man stepped back, taking the find of a lifetime with him. “Good choice,” he said. “Now just—”
Bang! My eyes flew open as soon as I heard the gunshot, and I watched with horror as my attacker suddenly jerked back. The bullet impacted his chest, but… he didn’t fall. And he wasn’t bleeding.
He was infuriated, though. He dropped his knife as he went down to one knee, pulling a gun from behind his back as he held on to the s
cepter with his other hand. He fired twice up the hill, then turned and ran toward the waterline. I watched him go, one palm pressed to my trickling side, feeling almost like I was watching a movie. Things like this didn’t happen in real life, did they?
Yes, they certainly do, my throbbing side begged to differ.
A few seconds later Patricia crashed down next to me, a small pistol in one hand. She looked disheveled, but unhurt. “Mal!” She put the gun away and looked me over anxiously. “Are you all right?”
“I’m….” So furious at myself I can barely move. So ashamed that I can hardly breathe. “I’m not badly injured,” I settled on. “But he got the scepter.”
She scowled. “Because he got away from me. I can’t believe I lost him, I haven’t lost track of anyone like that in years.” She sighed with pure, weighty unhappiness. “I’m so sorry.”
“It isn’t your fault.” And it wasn’t truly mine either, I knew that, but I wasn’t looking forward to explaining to Alex that I let the scepter get away. Speaking of… “Where is Alex?”
“He went the other way to look for you.”
I breathed a great sigh of relief. “So, he’s okay, then.”
Patricia shrugged. “I think that’s going to be in the eye of the beholder. He said he could manage, but he sounded rough. We should go and find him.”
Yes, we should. She must have seen something of my despairing apprehension in my face, because she touched my shoulder. “Alex won’t blame you,” she said, calm but insistent. “And this isn’t over yet. We’ve seen these people now, we know their faces, and we’ll get more people to help us going forward. We’ll get the scepter back. For now, though, let’s get Alex.”
PATRICIA TEXTED Alex as we walked up the hill, then informed me a minute later that he was going to meet us in the parking lot of our hotel. That was a relief—he’d gotten through his half of the ordeal intact, at least.
I should have known better. As soon as I saw Alex leaning against the side of Patricia’s car, I started to run toward him. My sense of guilt, which had died down a bit thanks to Patricia’s efforts, surged up stronger than ever as I took him in. Good lord, he looked like he’d been put through a paper shredder. The small, thin cuts, too many for me to count, weren’t even the worst of it, though. His poor face….
I stopped in front of him, panting, not quite knowing where to put my hands or even if it would be okay to touch him like this. His face was positively purple in places, his nose swelling up, and the way he was hunched over a little made me instinctively want to cross my legs. “What the bloody hell did she do to you?” I demanded.
Alex shrugged, then winced. “She beat me up,” he said, then his eyes went to my side. “Shit, you got stuck?”
“Not really, you—”
“Patricia,” Alex said, glancing her way. She was standing with her hands on her hips, a picture of exasperation. “We need to get him to a hospital.”
“I don’t need a hospital, you do,” I exclaimed. “He barely pricked my side with his knife, whereas you look like you went ten rounds with Wolverine.”
Alex half-smiled. “I didn’t figure you for a comics fan.”
“There have been several movies as well, and Hugh Jackman is exquisite in everything,” I said mock-primly, finally lowering my anxious hands once I felt sure that he was going to keep his feet. “Really, though, a hospital is—”
“Not necessary.” He looked back at Patricia. “What about—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, of course you’re coming home with me,” she interjected. “As though I would put you into another hotel after what happened today, much less this one! But neither of you are getting into my car looking like that,” she added. “Not before I lay down a towel. And why haven’t you gotten some ice? Never mind.” She held out her hand. “Give me your room key and sit down. I’ll get your things.”
He got out his wallet with a grunt and pulled out the keycard. “Don’t forget to check for—”
“Yes, I know. Despite evidence to the contrary today, I’m not an idiot.” She stalked off, and Alex tilted his face slightly up, letting his eyes shut. He looked bloody exhausted, and the glow of the warm afternoon sun did nothing to soften the injuries marked all over his skin. When he slumped a little, I took it as my cue to finally touch him.
I stood next to him against the car and leaned into him a bit so I could take his weight if he wanted to pass some to me. “I’m so sorry,” I said quietly. “You went to all that trouble to help me get the scepter away, and I couldn’t keep it. A priceless—an invaluable—artifact, and I didn’t even manage to hold on to it for more than fifteen minutes.” The memory of its weight and the gleam of the gold hummed just behind my eyelids. I knew I would dream of it tonight and that it would be excruciating.
Alex cracked one eye open and looked at me. For all that he looked like something the cat had dragged in, there was an earnestness in his expression that came through. “You know I don’t care about that, right?”
I blinked. “What?”
“The scepter. I mean, sure, it’s not good that it’s gone, but we have time to get it back. And even if we didn’t, the most important thing is that you’re not hurt.” He glanced at my side. “Not badly hurt, at any rate. The world turned just fine before we knew this thing existed, and it’ll keep on turning whether or not we get it back. It’s not worth a life. It’s definitely not worth your life.”
I… well, I couldn’t do much more than gape, quite honestly. What he had just said was the kindest, sweetest, and perhaps most horrifying thing anyone had ever told me. It was the sort of thing only a nonhistorian could get away with. My colleagues knew the importance of the physical representation of history, knew how incredibly valuable it was. People came and went, but the great works of art that made statements about entire cultures… those were worth dying for.
But Alex didn’t think so. Or at least, he valued me more than the scepter. I turned that over in my head for a moment, thought about it long and hard, and came to a startling conclusion.
I valued him more than the scepter as well. Even if I had come out of our altercation with the scepter still in my possession, if Alex had died, I would be devastated. It wasn’t a fair trade. Not even close. “It’s not worth your life either,” I managed to get out. Alex sighed and let himself lean into me, and I leaned right back.
“All right, then.” Patricia seemed to appear out of nowhere. She had my suitcase in one hand and a pair of hotel-branded towels in the other. Alex’s duffel was slung over her shoulder. “Get in. We’re going to Toulon.”
Toulon, apparently, was where KIS’s local office was, which was to say that it was where Patricia lived and worked. She was the heart of their operation in southern France, and from the sound of things, she mostly worked out of her home, but kept an office on standby in case she needed to meet clients in person. I gathered all this by shamelessly eavesdropping on both Alex and Patricia as they spoke with their boss, Robert, on speaker over the phone during the car ride.
“You’re going to have to lock her location down, fast,” Patricia cautioned, both hands on the wheel and a stormy look on her face. “Corday is better than I thought at manipulating detection. You might want to look into keeping an eye on her companion instead.”
“Yeah, who was he?” Alex asked, switching his grip on the bag of ice Patricia had brought him from the hotel. The ice was starting to melt, but he held it up gamely. “Guy was a hell of a sniper.”
After a moment of keyboard clacking, their boss spoke. “I don’t have much on him yet. He doesn’t have as blatant a trail as his collaborator, but I think his name in the business is Fawkes.”
“Fawkes. Jesus, of course.” Alex shook his head.
And him not even British. Unless he’d been faking that American accent, but it had sounded very genuine to me.
“An alert has gone out to all the airports within a hundred miles of Marseille, as well as the ports.”
“That
didn’t do much good last time,” Patricia said, and I was glad she had, because I was certainly thinking it.
“We didn’t know who she really was last time,” Robert countered. “I’ve got a dossier on this woman an inch thick, and it’s got a lot of very interesting information in it. She might get out again, but we’ll know where she’s going before she’s fifteen minutes into the air.”
“You’re sure she wants to fly?” Alex asked.
“She has a bad history with boats,” Robert said cryptically. “Plus, her item is getting hotter and hotter. She needs to unload it fast, sell to the highest bidder, and return to obscurity for a while. She’s dealt in African art before, so I have some ideas about where she might go. We’ll find her.”
The quiet confidence in his voice was enough to straighten my own spine. These people, KIS, they were professionals. Corday was too, quite clearly, but this was no game of cat and mouse. This was a full-on dog fight.
“Be ready to move, but I don’t think we’ll get much traction for at least twelve hours,” Robert went on. “If she looks anything like those pictures you sent of yourself, Alex, then she’s going to need to heal up a bit before she can even hope to go anywhere without drawing attention.”
“She’s not quite that bad,” Alex said with a grunt. “Less damage to the face, that’s for fucking sure.”
“Next time don’t be such a gentleman,” Patricia advised.
“I tried to break her ankle!”
“But you didn’t succeed! There is no try, only do or do not!”
The entire car was silent for a moment. “And on that note,” Robert finally said, “I’m going to leave you to it and get back to work. Alex, do you or Professor Armstrong need a doctor?”
“No,” he said, not without a sidelong glance at me, but I’d already made it clear that if he wasn’t getting a doctor for himself, he certainly wasn’t summoning one for me. “We’ll handle it.”