Order of the Black Sun Box Set 7

by Preston William Child

  For some reason her only consolatory thought was to see Father Harper. Nina, the heretic, the anti-Catholic, the shunner of religion, wished to see a Catholic priest to feel better? Nina scoffed at the travesty of her feelings, but she had to concede that it was her true desire to just speak to the giant in black robes at the St. Columbanus museum of historical repression.

  “No absolution. Just talk,” she told herself as she closed the door of the Bed & Breakfast she’d stayed at.

  When she arrived in Oban, the mid-afternoon sun was strong and unusually solitary in its presence above, with but a few clouds to populate the sky. The wind was mild, filling the town with the odor of the ocean and primrose flowers as she drove home. She decided to moor at her house first for a bit of a rest, unpacking and getting back into her domestic routine again before bothering the priest with her reluctant disclosure.

  After all, she was a heathen, not quite an atheist, and generally just not a fan of organized religion. Still, she wished to speak to Father Harper in his capacity as counsellor, not for any spiritual assistance. Even though the esteemed Dr. Nina Gould was not a member of his congregation, Father Harper never turned her away. Perhaps he was of the opinion that he could eventually sway her to his god or even just to attend one service. On the other hand, he was far too intelligent to be that naïve. Anyone with a grain of perception of psychology could read that Dr. Gould was a resolute woman in all her opinions and beliefs, not that she could not admit when she was mistaken.

  Her house on the steep slant from the street leered over her like a jilted lover. The porch light was burning, as she had left it on.

  “Shit, electricity is going to be through the roof again,” she mumbled as she walked up the cement walkway, lamenting the lawn’s growth that she could simply not keep up with. Untidy stems reached across the cracked stone and concrete where she labored with every pace.

  Getting old, Nina. Your temple at Ronnie’s Fitness down awaits. You didn’t even bother for a single workout at Masterton’s in Quartermile territory when you were in Edinburgh, you slothy bitch, she reprimanded herself. This is why you’re puffing like a locomotive up your own bloody walk!’

  She finally reached the stair to the porch and flung her suitcase onto the top landing. The porch light was flickering ever so slightly, proof that her forgetting to set the timer while she was absent was taxing on the old bulb. Ignoring the burn in her legs and easing her breathing to dismiss the fact that she was a bit out of shape, she elected to skip the last three steps – successfully.

  “That’s right, I still have what it takes,” she smiled through her gasps as she unlocked the front door. A frigid breath of air escaped the old stately home she’d purchased a few years before, overlooking Oban and its mostly serene blue waters.

  It was dark inside, even in the pinnacle of the day’s brightness. Light was never a strong presence in her house, mostly due to the windows facing south and southwest. Their position evaded most of the sun’s course during the day, whereas those windows facing east and west had their light obscured by the large birches and rowans.

  Nina liked the shadows. She worked much better in the dark, where her thoughts were contained in the musty confines of dimness, making her feel more distant from the true era she was living in. As a historian, she preferred to surround herself with old things: antiques, codices, and bureaus to store her academic notes, folders, and papers in. In fact, Nina only had a laptop because modern communication and the need for fast research merited the machine. She much preferred scribblings in her own hand and the typewriter to generate fact sheets.

  As she stepped into the lobby, her inadvertent contemplation turned to the metaphors of her existence. Much as she hated that, she couldn’t stop it. The cold air in the house, along with the barren wooden floors, sporadically clothed with old Persian carpets, turned into a simile before she could direct her mind to other things. Loneliness, cold, and darkness permeated through the place she called home and Nina found herself wondering if solitude was really something she desired for the rest of her life.

  Consciously, she did. There was no need or want for a partner or a pet. Freedom was pivotal, especially for someone as impulsive as she. But if she was alright with it, why did the thought even occur just because the quiet house that welcomed her felt more like Siberia than Shangri-La?

  To facilitate the banishment of these morose notions, Nina happily switched on her iPod for some good and dirty hard rock while she woke up the kettle in the kitchen.

  “No alcohol today. No alcohol today,” she repeated aloud as she fixed her coffee. Alcohol always made her emotional, and with the past day or two having been emotional pens of rejection and absence, it was unwise to drink at all. For the last two months, she had not done any concrete work; she’d written no dissertations nor lectured anywhere. In truth, Nina was tired. Not forever tired, but momentarily fed up with her vocation. She was worked to death on that which she hardly had to try to do well anymore, much as she loved what she did.

  Black coffee and too much sugar substituted a good bourbon this time, as she dialed a number on her landline. Today, she thought, was not a good day to drink until she was useless, until she just called it a day after failing to try too many times over. It was rather demoralizing to know that one did not achieve anything the day before, especially because of one’s own timid resistance to the things that disabled productivity.

  “Hello Benny? It’s Nina Gould,” she announced to the man on the phone. “Listen, not to be a pain or anything, but can I borrow your lawnmower again?”

  As she bartered with the old fisherman about his lawnmower, a call waiting alert beeped in her ear.

  “Benny…,” she she said, trying to ask if she could call him back. But the old man, who adored her, would not stop chatting. Nina could not afford to piss off the old Glasgow football hooligan of the 1960s or she would never get the grass cut.

  Beep-beep

  Beep-beep

  “Listen Benny, let me call you back in a tick, okay?” she said quickly and ended the call promptly.

  “Aye?” she said loudly as she took the waiting call.

  “Hello? I am looking for Dr. Gould?” a man’s voice inquired.

  “This is she,” Nina replied. “And you are?”

  “My name is Dr. Barry Hooper and I hope you don’t mind me calling you at home, Dr. Gould, but I could not reach you on your cell phone,” the caller said.

  “Oh shit!” Nina exclaimed, remembering that she had not yet switched on her phone after arriving home. Her purse was just out of reach from where her phone cord could manage.

  “Excuse me?” he asked.

  “No, Dr. Hooper, don’t fret. I just remembered something I forgot to do is all,” she explained cordially. “How can I help you?” she asked, stretching out her leg. With her toes, she tried to hook the sling of the purse and draw it closer as the man stated his business.

  “My wife works for the London Archives and she referred me to you. My colleague and I have a bit of a conundrum on our hands and we need the expertise of a historian, I think,” Barry clarified.

  Nina switched on her phone and set it down on the table, where, one by one the missed calls the doctor spoke of, came through. “And what is the nature of your predicament, doctor?”

  “I would prefer if we spoke in person, Dr. Gould,” he insisted cautiously. “You see, I work for the city morgue in the Barking area in London and we may have…we think we may have stumbled on something…odd…”

  Nina listened attentively, but when the missed calls on her phone yielded Sam’s number, she lost her focus.

  11

  Wake Up Call

  Sam could not sleep for the third night in a row. The thing with Nina bothered him immensely, and to exacerbate his misery, he had no way to make up with her, since she was not answering her calls. He’d used the first sleepless night to complete the editing for his riot coverage for Channel 15, and submitted it the next morning. />
  Since then, however, only personal toils populated the night. Lying in the full moon that occasionally peered through the slow progression of dark clouds, he could not help but think how it controlled the brightening and darkening of the room. Just like his life of late, Sam realized that the light and dark repercussions of events, regardless of what they were, were out of his control. All he could do was to draw the curtains, but he couldn’t control what happened in the sky, naturally.

  He had to sleep, but such thoughts permeated through his subconscious constantly, penetrating whatever veil Morpheus had managed to weave. It ripped the soft fabric of slumber into a clear wakening once more with every new notion, making it impossible for him to settle down. Hoping that Nina was not furious enough with him to maintain the aggressive stalemate for good, he refrained from calling her again. She would be awake at this hour, because she was a night animal, but if she still had not returned any of his calls by now he took it as a clear signal that she did not want to talk.

  Sam sat up. The clock announced that it was just past 3 a.m., so he avoided the whiskey and went for a cup of chamomile tea like a good boy. He winced at the weakness of the beverage on first sip, but he had to be alert and the tea would hopefully calm him enough to make some clear decisions.

  The LED screen on his desk glared ominously, still wearing the image of the Islamic persecutor on freeze frame.

  “No fucking wonder I can’t sleep,” he hissed, sweeping the mouse across the pad and closing the player. Momentary reconsideration prompted him to set the tea down and open the player again. “Can’t believe I am doing this.”

  Again and again, he watched the clip that had been secretly recorded over his footage. Much as he hated the nauseating feeling it brought him, Sam felt that he had to familiarize himself with the man’s face, mannerisms, and voice. In places, there was something sincerely amicable about the dark-eyed villain, but Sam also intuitively picked up on an unmistakable hostility just beneath the surface, waiting to be provoked.

  Obsessively, the journalist reran the piece, forgetting about the rest of his tea. One thing was certain. The deadline had passed without incident, because, unlike the general consensus among the men who demanded delivery of the woman, Sam did not have to deliver in the first place. He could not give her up, obviously, and he was not about to return to London to try and save her once more after her less than grateful response the last time.

  She would never agree to accompany him to All Hallows by the Tower anyway, let alone to be given back to her attackers. Sam lit a smoke, jumping at the brush of fur against his calf.

  “Jesus, Bruich!” he mumbled around the cigarette as the tobacco took, illuminating Sam’s face in an orange glow. “You want to give me a heart attack?”

  Suddenly the silence was shattered by his ringtone, jolting Sam backward a second time. “For fuck’s sake!” he moaned in frustration as the sharp, repetitive tone irritated his ears.

  I told you so, he heard Nina say in his mind. Long ago, she’d told him that he should use a favorite song as ringtone, but he found that then he could not hear his phone ringing, or he would prefer to listen instead of taking the call.

  Before Sam could reach for the illuminated screen to see who it was, it stopped short. The sudden silence was deafening. He looked at the clock. It was near 4 a.m. already. The phone screen revealed nothing but a private number notification. Bruich purred on Sam’s feet. He had a new thing to be befuddled by. Had it been Nina, there would have been a text at least. Her calls would bear her name and her calling from an unknown number was highly unlikely.

  It would not be Purdue, because he and Sam had more than five different devices to communicate on. The billionaire genius had devised prototypes that he had finally perfected and built especially for times he had to get hold of Sam in tight situations. Apart from them, Sam was not really in contact with anyone personally.

  “Oh my God!” he exclaimed, as it hit him out of the blue. “The fucking terrorist!”

  That is what Sam called the man on the screen, just for convenience. He knew how extremely accusatory and discriminating such a moniker would be in public, but he could not help but see a Taliban interrogator every time he looked at the man. Sam was convinced, and with a secret number at this time of the morning it would be a safe assumption. Still, he couldn’t do anything about it. He could not call back, nor did he have any desire to do so.

  “I may as well be up – officially. Hey, Bruich?” he told his cat, running his free hand through his hair. The cat was sleeping. Sam sighed, “Bastard.”

  At once, the phone lit up again in its cacophony. Sam got such a start that his hand propelled the device onto the table with a clatter that sent Bruich speeding down the corridor to safety. “Christ!” he shouted, finally fed up with the intrusion on his fabricated peace. He grabbed the phone that still showed no caller identity and yelled, “What?”

  A quick pause revealed a background of people talking and the ambient noises associated with an office, but at four in the morning? Sam frowned, momentarily contrite for his rudeness.

  “Sam Cleave?” a woman’s voice exclaimed. By her tone, she was not inquiring as much as exclaiming in astonishment. “Sam? Is that how you always answer your phone, dearest?”

  “Who is this?” he asked equally standoffish. He was exhausted, stressed about the video message threat and its possibilities. This was no place for politeness, not at this time of the morning. The voice was vaguely familiar, but he had no clue where to even begin recalling.

  “My apologies for calling at such a dreadful hour,” she apologized unconvincingly, “but I knew you’d be up. You were always nocturnal, like the rest of us journalists and reporters.”

  At once, it dawned on Sam, leaving him with an even more rancid taste in his mouth than before he’d taken the call. “Jan Harris,” he stated.

  “Well done!” she cheered, her voice still vexing him with the same intensity that it had back then, if not more. “I’m flattered that you remember my voice so well.”

  “As a dying man recalls the shriek of a mandrake,” Sam replied sarcastically.

  “Play nice now, Sam,” she warned, “…because you never know the ammunition held by the one you choose to insult.”

  “Actually, I am quite surprised that you even grasped the meaning of the insult, but I guess you’ve learned to look things up since I last saw you,” he snapped.

  “Oh, I did,” she concurred with a gloat, “but it’s not only research that makes a reporter, as you well know. Congratulations on the Pulitzer, by the way. Even if it came at a hefty price.”

  Sam swallowed hard, trying to keep his composure when Jan referred to his late fiancé, Patricia, being shot in the face and killed right in front of him during an exposé on a gunrunning cartel.

  “So sorry to hear about…Pat…was her name?” Jan stabbed mercilessly.

  “Leave Trish out of this, Harris. You didn’t even know her. She was twice the reporter you will ever be,” he retorted.

  “That is true,” Jan agreed, gearing up for another low blow. “Apparently she even got shot twice, right? I hear that half of her pretty face was ripped clean away. My God, the poor woman – and you watched?”

  “Fuck you, Harris,” he sneered, his heart racing with rage.

  “Just before you hang up, dearest, I have a proposition for you that you might want to have a look at,” she said quickly.

  “As always, you fail basic communication skills. I said, ‘Fuck you, Harris,’” Sam growled and without hesitation hurled his phone against the wall. It shattered into three pieces which landed over a radius around the couch and two coffee tables. Sam could feel it well up inside him – the breaking point.

  He had not felt this bottomed since, well, since he’d seen the love of his life get half of her face blown away a few meters from where he stood filming it. But the hyperventilation and sweat did not come from reliving Trish’s death, or even from being reminded of it. He
had lost Nina’s affection because he could not cope with a chain of events he had chosen to become a part of. All of this, his fight with Nina, his predicament with the attackers of the thankless bitch he’d saved, Harris reappearing for God knows what reason – all these things were weighting down on Sam in an unprecedented manner he feared he would collapse under.

  He wanted to weep. In fact, he felt the ache in his chest as there were an iron rod lodged there. Tears begged release, but he refused to buckle and he elected to even rebel against drink, which was usually his first pacifier. Sam had had it with his own weaknesses, much as he could not deny the pressure on him for another second. It was not about unhappiness or ineptitude. It was about staying out of matters he knew nothing of, the very antithesis of who he was.

  Sam’s nature was engaged in battle with his common sense and both sides were bound to lose more than a healthy portion. What was pivotal, though, would be which parts of which facets he would retain long enough to stay sane.

  An hour later Sam emerged from the shower, feeling somewhat proud of himself. Not only had he not reached for the alcohol, but he’d managed to formulate some sort of plan for the next day or two. Losing his phone to a fit of rage was a remarkably light matter for him, especially since he would not be able to receive calls from that bitch, Jan Harris. A less cheerful thought was that he now could not be in touch with Nina, even after she would have calmed down. But overall, these were good things. With the women unable to distract him, he could focus his attention on the other woman who has been causing him hell – Patient #1312.

  The least he thought he could do, was to ascertain her whereabouts in case he was confronted by more than he could handle in the way of the men looking for her. After all, Sam Cleave was not exactly unknown to the media world and he could probably be easily located with the proper resources available, which he was sure the man on the video clip had.