“Wow,” Payne said, “dinner smells great.”
Marissa was standing in front of the electric stove, stirring a pot of spaghetti and meatballs. “Thanks. I dumped it out of the containers all by myself.”
“Ouch,” he said as he entered the galley and grabbed a piece of garlic bread from a hot baking sheet. “I was being serious. It smells really good. And the yacht looks unbelievable. I can’t believe you whipped it into shape so quickly.”
She glanced back at him and realized that he was being sincere. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s been a long and confusing day. Some of it still hasn’t sunk in.”
“That’s probably a good thing.”
“You’re probably right.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Sore, but I’ll survive.”
Payne sidled up next to her and tried to dip his bread in the simmering tomato sauce, but she smacked his hand with hers.
“Ouch!” he said with a laugh.
She held up her wooden spoon in a threatening manner. “That’s the second time you used that word. Don’t make me cause a third. Now get out of my kitchen.”
Payne grinned. “It’s technically a galley, so—”
“Out!” she ordered with a smile. “Make yourself useful and get the others. And tell them to wash their hands. I can’t believe how many corpses you’ve touched today.”
Payne was about to bite into his garlic bread when he realized she was right. He discreetly tossed the piece in the trash on his way to disinfect whatever he could.
Once the yacht had reached the bay and Jones had searched the interior for listening devices, the four of them gathered in the dining area for their late-night meal. In addition to the spaghetti and meatballs, they also had an order of lasagna, some chicken parmigiana, a container of cheese ravioli, a large house salad, and several cans of soda from Jarkko’s refrigerator.
Despite their need for sustenance, Payne felt they should remain vigilant during dinner, so they turned off the interior lighting and ate in candlelight. This allowed them to see out of the glass-lined interior in a full 360 degrees. He highly doubted the Russians would attack again after suffering so many losses in Valletta, but nothing about their behavior had made sense to Payne, so he wasn’t going to take any chances.
With no unbroken plates to eat on, they made do with the takeout containers and baking sheets. Not that anyone was complaining. All of them were so famished after such a grueling day that they ate in near silence for the first few minutes. It wasn’t until Jones cracked a joke that they snapped out of their food-induced trances and had an actual conversation.
Jones spoke in a high-pitched, motherly tone. “So, kids, how was your day? Did anything exciting happen at school?”
Payne looked at Jarkko, who looked at Marissa, who looked at Payne. Then all of them burst out in laughter over the absurdity of their situation.
Jarkko spoke first. “Jarkko punched car and made puppet out of dead Russian.”
Payne pointed at him. “I saw that! What the hell were you doing?”
“Trying to make David laugh.”
Jones nodded. “And it worked.”
Marissa went next. “I dove over a freaking counter to avoid gunfire. I did not expect that when I woke up this morning.”
“You looked like your namesake,” Payne teased.
“My namesake?” she asked, confused.
“Lara Croft.”
She laughed. “Oh my God! I totally forgot about that. I guess you’re right!”
Jones leaned back on the cushioned bench. “As for me, I got to climb. And jump. And kill. Pretty much my perfect day.”
Payne laughed at the absurdity of his statement. “Truth be told, I was pretty impressed by your moves. That flip you did was like something out of an action flick. Unfortunately, your landing was straight from a disaster movie. You crashed and burned big time.”
“What do you mean? I took out two Russian gunmen while evading a grenade. I hardly call that a disaster.”
“Actually,” Payne corrected as he twirled pasta on his fork, “you took out one Russian gunman. I shot the other guy in the face before he could shoot you in yours.”
Jones played the scene back in his mind. “Is that why his head exploded? I thought it was from the grenade. Oh well, perfect day ruined because of Jon.”
Jarkko looked at Payne. “And what about you?”
“What do you mean?” Payne asked.
“What was your highlight?” Jarkko wondered.
Payne put down his fork and wiped a pretend tear from his eye. “I’d say sitting here and eating dinner with all of you.”
Jones threw a piece of bread at him. “Boooo!”
Jarkko and Marissa quickly joined in. “Boooo!”
“Fine!” Payne said as he tried to defend himself from flying carbohydrates. “If I had to choose one thing from today, I’d probably say that soup at lunch. It was soooo good.”
Jarkko nodded. “Best soup ever.”
Marissa pretended to pout. “I spend the entire day whipping up a fancy Italian feast, and the highlight of your day was the soup at lunch? What about meeting me?”
Payne gave it some thought as he chewed. “That was third.”
“Third?” she blurted. “What was second?”
“Weren’t you listening? I shot a guy in his face to save DJ’s life.” Payne reached over and grabbed Jones by his cheeks. “Look at this mug. How could I let anyone hurt this mug?”
Jones pushed him away. “Bad touch. Bad touch.”
“Besides,” Payne said, “your highlight wasn’t meeting me; it was diving over a counter. I did the same damn thing like two minutes later.”
She smiled. “Maybe so, but I stuck my landing.”
“I stuck mine, too,” Payne claimed. “Stuck it right against the wall. I hit so damn hard I think I cracked my ass.” He started to stand up. “Here, do me a favor and take a look.”
She grabbed the wooden spoon from one of the takeout containers. “Sit your ass back down. Remember what I told you before—don’t make me use this!”
Jones looked at her funny. “What in the hell are you going to do with the spoon? And if you did it before, please tell me you washed it before you served the spaghetti.”
Jarkko kept eating. “Jarkko don’t mind. Sauce taste good.”
Jones grimaced. “Dude! That’s disgusting.”
“What?” Jarkko said. “Marissa is good cook. David should thank her.”
Payne nodded and raised his can of soda. “Actually, everyone should be thanking her. Somehow she brought a sense of normalcy to this otherwise abnormal day. Thank you for making us feel at home.”
Jones and Jarkko followed his lead and lifted their sodas in salute.
Marissa sheepishly smiled and clinked their cans before she set hers down on the table. Through it all—from the urgent text message from Petr Ulster, to the shootout at the library, to the madness of the marina—one thing had been nagging her, one thing that she desperately needed to find out, and she felt this was the time to do it.
“Guys,” she said, “I appreciate the toast and the kind words. I really, truly do. Today has been unlike any other day in my entire life. And yet, as I look across the table at each of you, there is one tiny thing that keeps echoing over and over in my brain. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t get this question out of my head.”
“Go on,” Payne encouraged. “What’s troubling you?”
She took a deep breath before she spoke. “Why the hell am I here?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Because of the chaos of the day, one crucial thing had slipped the minds of the three men staring back at Marissa: she still hadn’t been briefed about the treasure.
Over the past few hours, she had picked up bits and pieces on her own. She knew the Russians had stolen a collection of documents from Jarkko’s stateroom. She also assumed that the collection tied in with her expertise, or else she wouldn
’t have been contacted in the first place. But no one—including Petr Ulster—had told her any specifics.
And that needed to change for the sake of her sanity.
“Holy crap,” Jones said as the realization washed over him. “You’ve been under fire since the library, facing the same shit that we have, yet you have no idea why.” He shook his head in amazement. “Great job, Jon. Way to keep your troops in the loop.”
Payne looked at Jones. “Wait. Why is it my fault?”
“Because I don’t want it to be mine. Duh.”
“Fine! I’ll take the blame, but I think it’s only fair to point out that I’ve been kind of busy trying to keep us alive and out of jail, so excuse me if I didn’t find time to schedule a briefing.”
“Guys,” she assured them, “no one’s to blame. We were attacked before you had a chance to tell me. Then there were too many cops around to discuss it or too many calls to make to pull me aside. I swear I’m not mad at anyone. I’m just confused. So I’d appreciate if someone could fill me in from the very beginning. Otherwise, I think I may just lose my shit right here, and I don’t want to do that in front of people that I actually like.”
So the men explained everything, each of them filling in sections of the backstory while the others continued to eat. Through it all, Marissa said very little. She asked a few questions for clarity’s sake, but other than that, she just let them talk until they had nothing more to say.
Once they were done, the men tried to gauge her reaction—to see if they had risked their lives for nothing. But she gave them little as she processed the information. Not to torture them, but because she needed some time to think. Jones started to crack a joke to end the painful silence, but she raised her hand and signaled for him to stop while she finalized one last thought.
“Okay,” she said. “Now I’m ready.”
Payne furrowed his brow. “For what?”
“I’m assuming this is when you guys ask me a million questions, so fire away.”
Jarkko went first. “Do you have boyfriend?”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh my God! We were just attacked by Russian gangsters because of a box of documents that I might know something about, and your first question isn’t about your stolen collection or the likelihood of Maltese treasure. It’s about my social status?”
Jarkko nodded. “Not asking for Jarkko. Asking for friend.”
She kept on laughing. “Next question!”
Jones shook his head at Jarkko. “Dude. Bad start.”
Jarkko shrugged. “Sorry. Jarkko is sober and not thinking clearly. Give Jarkko second chance. Jarkko will ask better question. Jarkko promise.”
Jones nodded. “Go on. But it better be good.”
Jarkko stroked his chin in thought. “Do you have girlfriend?”
Jones and Marissa burst out laughing. There was just something infectious about Jarkko’s delivery and sly grin that made his humor tough to resist. And considering how furious he had been when he had first seen the damage to his yacht, they were just glad to see him joking around. But for some reason, the comment rubbed Payne the wrong way. Maybe it was Payne’s continued confusion about the Russians’ aggression or his innate knack to take control of a group that had lost its focus, but he sensed that this was a time for information, not humor.
“Knock it off!” Payne growled in the authoritative tone that he had perfected in the military. “Marissa risked her life to help us today. She’s not some floozy at a bar. She’s a highly respected historian, so show her the respect that she deserves.”
Just like that, the yacht was silent.
And all eyes were on Payne.
He dialed it back a notch before he continued. He wasn’t mad at his friends. He simply needed them to know that it was time for business. And in order to establish Marissa’s voice as one of authority, he felt she needed a proper introduction. “When I spoke to Petr, he told me that you had trained at the Archives for several months and felt that you could be a massive help to us, but he never told us about your area of expertise. Perhaps you could start there.”
She sensed what he was doing and gave him an appreciative nod. “I have a DPhil in history from Oxford with a specialization in Maltese history. My most recent project has been focused on the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni—a Neolithic subterranean structure dating back to the Saflieni phase in Maltese prehistory. But I am quite familiar with other eras as well, everything from the Megalithic Temples of Malta to the modern-day iterations of the Knights Hospitaller.”
Jarkko whistled, impressed. “Jarkko must apologize for earlier joke. Jarkko now realizes you have no boyfriend or girlfriend. You are far too smart to date.”
Marissa smiled. “Thanks, I think.”
Jones jumped right in. “A couple questions. What the hell is a DPhil in history?”
“Doctor of Philosophy in history. It’s Oxford’s fancy way of saying PhD.”
“So you’re British?”
“Only when I pretend to be Lara Croft.”
Jones laughed. “The reason I ask is because your lexicon is very American. If I had to guess, I’d say you went to undergrad in the States, but not somewhere pretentious like Harvard or Yale. I say that because I haven’t noticed any northeastern vowels in your speech patterns.”
“Very good,” she said. “I went to undergrad at Stanford.”
“But you aren’t American.”
She shook her head. “My mother was from Malta, hence my interest in Maltese history. And my father is from—well, my father is a long story. Suffice it to say, I grew up all over, which is why I have such a good ear for accents. Then again, I guess you do, too.”
Jones nodded. “It was part of our training in the special forces. We had to make split-second decisions in the field based on whatever information we could get, and sometimes our ability to distinguish between friend and foe came down to word choice and accents.”
“Interesting,” she said, and she meant it.
“Tell us more about your research. You said the Hypogeum was a megalithic subterranean structure dating back to Maltese prehistory. How old is that?”
“The Hypogeum is Neolithic, not megalithic. And it dates back to 3,300 BC. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly eight-hundred years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza.”
“And it’s here in Malta?”
She nodded. “It’s located underneath the town of Paola in the South Eastern Region of Malta. It was discovered in 1902 AD in the middle of a crowded neighborhood when workers cutting a cistern for a new housing development broke through its roof.”
“Damn. I’d love to see that. Maybe you can show us.”
She shook her head. “No way. Not until this is over with. I don’t want the Russians anywhere near that place. It’s far too important to Malta.”
“Fair enough,” Jones said. “It will give me something to look forward to.”
She smiled. “Me, too.”
Payne chimed in. “And what can you tell us about the Knights Hospitaller?”
“Quite a bit. What do you know already?”
“Not much,” he admitted. “Prior to bumping into Jarkko, I’d never heard of them—at least not by that name.”
“For good reason,” she explained. “They have been called many names over the years. In the beginning, they were known as the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, and it was founded during the First Crusade after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 AD. The organization was a religious and military order with its own Papal charter, tasked with the defense and care of the Holy Land. Back in those days, the two most formidable military orders in the Holy Land were the Hospitallers—as they were known then—and the Knights Templar. Most people have heard of the latter, but the Hospitallers have a much longer history.”
“Maybe so,” Jones cracked, “but the Knights Templar have a much cooler name. What the hell is a Hospitaller anyway?”
She smiled. “To understand
that, you have to understand the group’s origins. Some scholars disagree on the specifics, but most believe that a group of caregivers founded a hospital in Jerusalem in the eleventh century on the site of the monastery of Saint John the Baptist. Their goal was to provide care for poor, sick, or injured pilgrims coming to the Holy Land, regardless of their faith or race. The devotion of the hospital workers was eventually recognized by Pope Paschal the Second in 1113 AD with an official edict known as a papal bull. Entitled Pie postulatio voluntatis, it officially decreed the establishment of the Hospitallers as a lay-religious order under the sole protection of the Church. The bull also gave the Order the right to elect its grand masters without interference from the Church or external authorities. As I mentioned, the group initially cared for pilgrims in Jerusalem, but the Order soon started to provide pilgrims with armed escorts—and those escorts eventually grew into a substantial force. Thus, the Knights Hospitaller became a military presence without losing its charitable roots.”
Jones nodded in understanding. “Okay. Now their name makes sense. It was an order of knights that originated from the Hospital of Saint John in Jerusalem.”
“Exactly!” she blurted, glad that someone was paying attention. “And do you know where that papal bull from 1113 AD is located?”
Jones guessed. “The Vatican Archives?”
She shook her head. “The National Library of Malta.”
Jones groaned. “Seriously? I hope we didn’t shoot it.”
She laughed. “If you did, you would have been arrested for sure, because it’s the library’s most treasured possession.”
Payne rejoined the conversation. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but why is it in Valletta and not the Vatican—or even Jerusalem? Or am I skipping ahead?”
The Malta Escape Page 16