Order of the Black Sun Box Set 7

by Preston William Child

  Vincent gave a dry chuckle. “Well, we are here for you now. Isn’t this what you came for?”

  “It is,” Purdue sighed. He was naturally very curious, yet he rued having to dislodged some of the mummified skeletons to get through to the boiler room.

  “Hurry,” Vincent urged him. “The tides are changing in about ten minutes and we won’t have much time for the first lift to be completed.”

  “We have to get as much done in one session as we can, old boy,” Purdue reminded him as he pulled some of the remains aside. “There are easily a few hundred German soldiers down here, and,” he hesitated as he grasped at something, “more of these.”

  Vincent shook his head when Purdue showed him more of the golden coins. “These seem to be everywhere the dead guys are. Maybe they were carrying it?”

  “God knows. I hope they did not swallow these treasures in some desperate errand to hide or claim it. That is greed taken a bit too far,” Purdue remarked.

  “Would serve them right, though,” Vincent scoffed. “Look, David, I don’t want to speak out of place, but these boys don’t look like common skeletons, hey? Am I off or what? By the looks of them, their skins are still on them, hair, the lot. They look like . . . mummies?”

  “Could be,” Purdue muttered as he disappeared into the boiler room adjacent to count more bodies. “Perhaps the heat from the boiler room and the ovens petrified their remains?”

  Vincent felt decidedly creeped out by the grisly scene, and with the undertow bringing all kinds of sounds through the broken carcass of the battleship, it made for an experience that could make even the devil uneasy. “Do hurry, David! We have to get topside before the tide changes!”

  Purdue was silent behind the wall of bodies. Only the echoes of the dead ship accompanied the skipper of the Cóncord as he took samples of fabric from the uniforms, and, reluctantly, peeling minute samples of skin and hair from the bones of his nearest gruesome donor.

  “My God! I don’t believe this!” Purdue shouted from the other room. “Vincent! You have to get one more pulley down here before we pack up for the day, old boy!”

  “What? What is it?” Vincent asked eagerly, very grateful to hear his diving partner’s voice again. He chose to follow through the morbid obstacle of corpses to see what Purdue was on about. With great toil he finally managed to get through with the heavy tanks still strapped to his back. His blue eyes grew wild at the vision before him, bringing tears to his eyes.

  “Unbelievable. Oh Christ, she is beautiful,” he wailed as Purdue smiled.

  “Do you know her?” Purdue asked playfully, assuming the golden statue of an Inca woman in full royal dress was the relic Vincent was looking for.

  “I know her,” Vincent said softly as he waddled towards the full-size artwork. He looked at Purdue with an expression of absolute shock and admiration, his thick, gloved hands shaking. “Do you realize what this means, David?”

  “Your prophecy can come true?” Purdue guessed, still not certain about the pursuits of the mariner with the oddly blue eyes.

  “This is the statue reputed to have been melted down by the greedy Spanish conquistadors under that dog, Pizarro, after the sacking of Cuzco in 1533. Do you know the account of Atahualpa, the Inca emperor the Spanish held ransom?”

  Purdue shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. I’ve heard of Atahualpa, but I fear I lack the smaller details.”

  “Murdering, greedy bastards, they were,” Vincent lamented.

  A loud clank against the gunwale jolted them both back to reality. They gathered the samples, designated the area with bright orange luminous paint and returned to the surface with far more than they ever thought they would find.

  21

  The Sun Man

  Solar Eclipse Imminent: 68%

  “How am I going to go to school while we’re here?” Raul asked Madalina.

  The two of them were sitting in a quaint little restaurant in the main street of Sax. Outside the window the massive thirteenth century Sax Castle leered down upon the modern highway that ran past the town, casting its mighty shadow like a stone guardian that stood up from the soil.

  “You don’t have to,” Madalina smiled. “I’m a teacher. I will teach you anything you need to know.”

  “But if you teach me I’ll have no friends, Madi. I want to go to school to have friends, not to learn,” he objected, while stuffing his eager mouth with ice cream and chocolate sauce. Madalina only had a coffee. She had to conserve what little money she had left after the hasty trip they recently undertook. Having paid the B&B upfront for a week she felt a bit more relaxed, at least until her brother would hopefully show up. Madalina knew that she would be in a world of trouble, not only with the police, but Javier was going to be so disappointed in her for everything she had done.

  To exacerbate matters, she honestly had no excuse or reason for what she had done. Her desperate actions that had led to a murder and a kidnapping came from nowhere in particular, apart from a need to get the boy away from the wicked mother figure he was with. It had been several days since Madalina had taken the boy, yet still he did not once ask where Mara was, or if she were dead. He didn’t treat Madalina like the stranger she was, and this unsettled her somewhat. She was grateful that he wasn’t resisting her, but his unconventional reaction to it all had her logic knotted up, begging her to resolve it by asking Raul why he was so complaint.

  Perhaps, she thought, he could have suffered such trauma from the incident that he has not yet processed it. On the other hand, she had to concede that he was far too resilient and steadfast of mind to crumble. The boy was clearly of great intelligence, not in the ‘child genius’ way, but in an ‘old soul’ way. His sharpness was similar to that of a teenager, a curiosity that belonged to youth and the experience of a hard life combined.

  “You can make friends once my brother takes us to a new home, alright?” she said, trying to appease him. He said nothing. He was in deep thought, concentrating on his ice cream, using the spoon to sculpt it. “What are you making? Oh, the castle up on the mountain?” she asked, trying to divert his attention from the tight situation they were in.

  “No, this is home,” Raul corrected her. He shot his dark eyes up toward Sax Castle. It perched upon a steep mount of rock and gravel that reached a substantial elevation above the town. The afternoon sun shone fully into his eyes and Madalina was spellbound by the child’s beauty. His long eyelashes cast shadows inside the yellow-brown of his irises and his skin was without blemish. “Sax Castle once belonged to a race of dark-skinned people who’d been of the Muslim religion. But it is way older than the Moors. Did you know that?” he asked her.

  Madalina was amazed by his knowledge of castles. But there was one he mentioned previously that had her wondering since he first told her about it. “Tell me about the one Mara took you to in Germany. That one sounded bigger than this one.”

  “Oh,” he chirped, “that was Wewelsburg, the one where the people wanted to be like King Arthur.”

  “And Mara took you there on holiday?” she asked. Raul shook his head, very intrigued by the shapes he could make in his slowly thawing dessert.

  “She collected me there, actually. From there I started living with her,” he said matter-of-factly without meeting Madalina’s eyes. She gasped at the realization that he had not always been with Mara, while she thought all the while that the angry woman was his foster mother or something of that sort. “And before that? Who were you with?”

  “Others. A few. They come and go. Some pass me on to others, and some steal me away. Some,” he looked at Madalina with a blank expression, “even kill to take me.”

  Her heart stopped. Tears came, but she quickly looked away, pretending to admire the colossal castle on the hill. Raul had finished his sloppy work of art. He slid the pudding bowl toward her with a smile. “There. All done.”

  Relieved that he was not half as upset as she was, she feigned happiness. “Wow, I’m impressed!” she sni
ffled with a smile, noting the detail of the makeshift building he had fashioned. It was a remarkable likeness of a temple, a rectangular base with step-like elevations growing narrower toward the top. “Is this another castle?”

  Raul replied, “No, that is home.”

  “Where is home?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, shrugging and pulling the bowl back towards him to break the artwork onto his spoon before it became too mushy.

  “Then how do you know it’s home, darling?” she pried, absolutely spellbound by his answers. Like riddles, they teased her deduction and she became quickly addicted to unraveling them one by one.

  “I just know,” he mumbled through a mouthful of ice cream. Madalina could take no more. She decided to just come out and ask the child what she wanted to know most, what perplexed her above all other things. “Raul, why did you come willingly with me when I took you?”

  “Because Mara is dead,” he answered plainly. “No use staying with a corpse. How would she take care of me?” He frowned. “Besides, I like you, Madi. You’re not mean like she was. I think you really care about me, so you are one of the good ones of all the women who took me away.”

  Madalina was dumbstruck. He knew. He knew all along, she thought to herself. There was more to find out and now that he was speaking freely she took the opportunity. “Why do they take you?”

  “They can’t help it,” he replied, munching happily. His words were far from trivial, but he talked as if he were discussing a trip to the zoo. Madalina felt her heart ache. She could not stop the tears now, but she grabbed her napkin and quickly wiped her eyes. What he was saying was so profound that she felt doomed and redeemed at the same time for the unnatural urge to save him. Her voice choked when she tried to articulate, desperately combating the crying spell she felt.

  “All of them? They can’t help but take you? Why, Raul? Are you doing something to manipulate their thoughts?” she asked.

  He scoffed. “No. I don’t do that. That’s what the doctor does when Mara took me to see him. I do nothing. Really. But I’m not stupid just because I am small. I can see that those who take me don’t know why they do it.” His revelations made her shake in terror.

  “W-wh-at doctor, my darling?” she asked carefully.

  “The psychologist in Sagunto. I was there only once. Mara had a fight with him and we left. Just like you. She was hiding me at the motel when you found us,” he recounted, scraping the bottom of the bowl to gather the last milky drops onto his spoon. Madalina’s eyes were bloodshot and drenched, her cheeks streaked with tears, but stronger than the awe she was under at the boy’s revelation, was the betrayal from a Judas she knew she shared with Raul.

  “Dr. Sabian?” she stammered.

  “Sí,” Raul confirmed, slamming the truth into her mind like a sledgehammer.

  “Jesus Christ!” she hissed softly into her hands, covering her face. “No wonder. No wonder.”

  “What’s wrong?” the child asked her. His voice was tender and fraught with concern, but she could not see him as she cried into her hands. Suddenly Madalina felt Raul’s hand brush her temple, his small attempt at consoling her. “Do you want some of my milkshake? It will make you feel better.”

  How can he be so wise and still so much a child? she wondered, basking in his compassion. How can he know so much and still be so carefree?

  “No thank you, darling,” Madalina said, still weeping softly. “I’m a little sad, but I’ll be fine in a few minutes. Um,” she sniffed and drew her hands from her flushed face to blow her nose with another napkin from the dispenser, “how do you know what your home looks like if you’ve never been there?”

  The question came out of her before she’d given it much thought, similar to her inadvertent actions back in Sagunto. Madalina reckoned that such inquiries were the result of a subliminal need for answers that trumped propriety.

  “Have you ever just known something but you could not explain to your parents where you got it from?” he asked her, cupping his little hands around the wet glass of the milkshake. “Sometimes I get homesick, but because I have no idea where it is, I can’t cry about it. I want to cry sometimes, because I miss my home, but from as long as I remember I’ve never been home,” he explained with difficulty.

  “I guess I can relate a little, but not exactly like you,” she replied, calming her upset. “When I was in high school I had no friends as well, so I used to hide in the library and just look through books. Sometimes I would see places in other countries that I’d never visited, but it felt as if I came from there. Only I did not because I’ve always lived in Spain. Is that what you mean?”

  “Si, but I was there. I remember. I just don’t know where it is.” Raul shrugged.

  “How old were you?” she asked. “When you were at this place?”

  He looked at her in befuddlement, unable to answer her. Glaring brown eyes stared incoherently through her and she could tell that he was trying to give her a decent reaction. “I don’t know when I was there, otherwise I must have had a memory before I was three because I was three when the first woman stole me from our house in Argen…um, Argentia?”

  “Argentina?” she gasped. Raul giggled sheepishly, “Sí! I’m stupid. Sí, Argentina.”

  “Were you born there?” she kept throwing him the questions that just seemed to appear in her mouth.

  He laughed. “I don’t know where I was born! Geez, I can’t remember the things that happened to me when I was a baby, you know.” The little boy’s snickering warmed her heart, and she laughed with him, electing to leave him be for now. He had provided her with enough shocking and wonderful information—information she would take quite a while to process thoroughly enough to put the pieces of the puzzle together for a solution.

  At once she heard a familiar voice that cheered her heart with a start.

  “Hola Madi.” It came from behind her in the small diner, shaking her to the core.

  “Javier?” she whispered. But Raul was facing her, and by his expression, he wasn’t sharing the same joy she was feeling for her brother’s arrival. In fact, the child looked both terrified and angry. Madalina turned in her seat, but what she saw standing there was not her responsible older brother. It was a conniving mind-killer and an emaciated husk of what her brother once was.

  Behind her, Madalina heard Raul mutter in his native Quechua, “Intiq qari.”

  22

  Alliance

  Nina had trouble sleeping. After hearing the dreadful news over a myriad of news channels that her two closest friends had probably perished in a terrible seaborne crash, her mind could not stop racing. She was on her way to Spain, not sure exactly where she would start looking for Purdue and Sam, but she did not care. As long as she did not have definitive proof that they were dead, she would keep searching. Of all people she knew them best and had a hard line to their way of thinking.

  After the crash was reported, Nina had contacted Purdue’s assistant and various offices of his, only to learn that he was indeed missing and had not yet contacted any of them. The same went for Sam. His cell phone number informed her that the subscriber was not available, something Sam’s phone would never normally say. At worst, it would go to voice mail. This confirmed her fears that the two men may truly be lost, but she refused to write them off as dead and gone.

  After her Glasgow to Dublin flight, she connected almost immediately to her Madrid flight, leaving her exhausted by the time her plane touched down on the wet runways of the Madrid–Barajas Airport. The rain was unusual for this time of year in Spain, but after the recent heat wave, it was not too surprising.

  Nina had barely switched on her cell phone when a whole list of missed calls came through on her phone. Her demeanor lifted instantly, assuming it would be either Sam or Purdue telling her that they were safe and sound and keeping a low profile for some reason. They would do such a thing. In fact, it would be odd if they behaved normally. All the calls were from a landline in
Sagunto, which could very well have been the boys. Of all the calls, the last that came from that number was on her voice mail.

  Hastening, she punched in her code and listened.

  “Hola, this is an urgent call for Dr. Nina Gould the historian,” a male voice opened. His English was decent, but his accent was very heavy and she had to strain to understand. It was a call from a Sagunto police officer, Capt. Sanchez, urgently needing her expertise in an ongoing homicide investigation. Nina sighed. Feeling disappointed, she hung up the phone before the message was completed.

  “I don’t have time for this,” she muttered, hardly able to stay awake anymore. She decided to return the call from the unknown number once she got to Málaga, but first she had to freshen up and get something to eat at one of the airport restaurants. While she was having an order of lasagna and espresso her phone rang incessantly inside her leather sling bag. She would check the call to make sure it was not Sam or Purdue, but noticed that the police captain was unbelievably persistent.

  “Come on, nothing can be this urgent,” she said with a mouth full of food as she answered the phone, hoping it would repel his efforts. But it had quite the opposite effect.

  “Dr. Gould? Dr. Gould! Dios mío, I have been desperate to speak to you,” he gasped in delight.

  “Um, hang on,” she replied, and took a moment to swallow her food. “Listen, Capt. Sanchez, I appreciate that you need to get my advice on something, but I am extremely busy right now.”

  “Please, Dr. Gould, I will not take more than five minutes, I think, of your time. Please. As we speak I am leaving to a town in Alicante where something terrible is about to happen between a suspect and a very nefarious member of the Black Sun, and I have to know before I get there,” he implored in one fell swoop without as much as taking a break to breathe.

  “Wait, what?” she asked abruptly. She had to make sure that she’d correctly heard the name of the organization that had almost claimed her life a few times. “The Black Sun did what?”