A Triple Thriller Fest (100 page)

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.”

“Now you’re toying with me.”

“Let’s just say it wasn’t Borisenko, but a weird, overly aggressive fan. Who has the resources to track me here?”

“They called your publisher,” Lars said. “Or Cornell.”

“The people who know wouldn’t give out my address, they’d say I was on sabbatical in Europe, but that’s it.”

The carrot soup arrived and Lars started eating at once, but kept eyeing the dagger case. “Say he’s someone trying to get your interest. Remember all those letters you got from the German guy? Someone heard about your next book and wants to talk.”

“I thought about that, but the German was a fellow academic. Besides, there are probably ten people in the world who know the subject of my next book.”

“Word gets out,” Lars said. “You said he was American. Some guy at Harvard or whatever who wants to help with the book Maybe he’s even got original research. He gave you a little gift to pique your interest.”

“Check out the so-called little gift, Lars.” She took her hand off the case.

He took the case and opened it. A low whistle as he picked it up and then he turned it over in his hands, got a serious look on his face and returned it hastily to the case. He met her questioning look and blinked twice, then looked back at the dagger with a frown.

She studied his expression. “You know the man who made this, don’t you?” Of course he would. True craftsmen were vanishingly rare. Didn’t matter if you were talking construction of a trebuchet or metallurgy, the knowledge base was kept alive by a handful of people.

“That would be impossible, Tess.” He closed the case and pushed it away. “The man who made this dagger died four thousand years ago.”

Chapter Four:

“Gimme that,” Tess said. She snatched back the dagger case and flipped it open. “It’s a replica, right? I mean, a good one.” Her fingers closed around the curved hilt.

“For God’s sake, don’t pick it up,” Lars said.

She pulled back as if she’d burned her fingers. She studied his flushed expression. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, I’m serious. It’s either real or such a good fake that you’d need a lab to prove it. Tess, this is a gold ceremonial dagger from a royal tomb in Ur. It was looted from the Baghdad Museum.”

Tess shut the case and looked around the restaurant, studied the other patrons. Most were locals and everyone was engrossed in their own conversations, some loud.

She lowered her voice as she turned back to Lars. “Doesn’t make sense. The guy handled it like it was nothing. He told me not to throw it out, but still. If it’s real it’s worth what? Hundreds of thousands of dollars?”

“You can’t put a price on it,” Lars said with a note of protest.

“People do all the time. That’s what we’re doing here, remember?”

“But I have no idea how much it’s worth. Look at the condition, it was in a dry tomb for thousands of years and the blade is gold. There’s nothing like it in the world.” He shook his head. “There’s no question Borisenko is onto us. This must be a warning.”

“And he warned us with a priceless artifact?” she asked. “Why not just take care of us? We’re nobodies. I mean, people would notice, but then the police would find out we were involved in this smuggling stuff and they wouldn’t get any farther. Dmitri might be safe, he has important friends, but we wouldn’t.”

“Dmitri’s not safe, his friends are Russian, too,” Lars said. “Borisenko has more than friends, he has money and he has the government.” He eyed the dagger case. “Can you hide that? It’s making me nervous.”

“Calm down. It looks like a tourist knick-knack.”

“Tess.”

“Okay, whatever.” She stuck it under the book.

Lars relaxed visibly. “Okay, so what about that book?”

“He said there were notes. I haven’t looked, I was distracted by the dagger.”

Tess examined the book. It was a broken-spined and dog-eared copy. She flipped through the pages. Someone had scrawled notes next to a diagram of a siege where the attackers had mined under a vulnerable corner of a castle, filled the hole with wood and brush and lit it on fire in an attempt to collapse the outer curtain. Someone had scrawled in red pen: “Vulnerable???” A second hand, more controlled, answered in blue: “Ground too rocky. Mines impossible.”

Lars leaned across the table as she continued to thumb through the book. Midway through, she came to another dog-ear. Here was a picture of a trebuchet like the one on the hill, broken into labeled parts. The scrawling hand had written in the margin and then highlighted yellow: “Can Tess build this???” There was no answer.

She turned the book so Lars could see. He studied the picture and the words and then shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“Me, either.” The waitress came with the food and Tess shut the book, set it on top of the dagger case.

The waitress put the two plates of herbed lamb in front of them and then told Tess, “The men at the window table were asking about you. Friends of yours?”

Tess and Lars looked up, but the two men were on their way out the door, their backs turned, menus abandoned on the table. As the door shut and they turned down hill, she got a glimpse of the second man. The tilt of the head was familiar, the sandy-blonde hair.

Lars pushed away from the table and ran out the door after the men. He came back a few minutes later, panting. He sat back at the table, shook his head. “Gone.”

“The blonde one, that was him,” she told Lars, suddenly certain. “The one who gave me the book.”

Chapter Five:

Dmitri sliced downward, from belly to head. Intestines, kidneys, bladder, heart, and lungs bulged from the body cavity. He reached a hand into the fish and pulled out the lumpy, sloppy mess, then threw the guts to the dock.

Seagulls fought over the prize. The air was alive with their screams. The smell of fish and blood was so strong it made Dmitri’s head swim.

Two hours ago these fish were swimming in the sea,
he thought. Bright, alive, aware. Every day, millions of them dragged to gasp, suffocate, stiffen in death. Vast fleets of fishing boats combed the Mediterranean and turned it into a desert patrolled by these white, screaming vultures.