A Triple Thriller Fest (102 page)

“Don’t move that hand,” a voice said in English over his shoulder. Something hard pressed the back of Dmitri’s skull and he froze. “That’s right. Pull your hand out.”

He obeyed. “What the hell?”

Henri continued to drive forward, but a smile played at the corner of his mouth. The magnitude of Dmitri’s miscalculation struck him almost at once. A man had hidden in the backseat; Henri had an ally after all. And who would bother to take a day laborer hostage? They wouldn’t. A cold feeling pressed into the depths of his gut.

“Mind telling me what this is about?” he asked.

“Take out your cell phone,” the man with the gun said. “Give it to me.”

The gun stayed at Dmitri’s skull, but the man used his other hand to fiddle with the cell phone. “Call Tess. Leave this message.”

“Tess? Who? What?”

Pain exploded in his left ear. His head jerked to one side under the blow. The man had pistol-whipped him from behind.

“Shut up. You’re going to die if you don’t pay attention.”

I ’m going to die anyway,
he thought. Hearing the man speak Tess’s name confirmed how dire his circumstances had become. They knew everything. They had set him up perfectly. Nobody could help him, not Tess and Lars, not his Russian friends. His bile rose like rotten fish guts.

The man dialed a number on Dmitri’s phone. He should make a move for his gun. He had a split second while the man was distracted. But he couldn’t move.

The gunman held the phone to Dmitri’s ear, the one that still burned from the blow to the head. “Here’s what you’re going to say. One wrong word and your brains will be all over the dashboard.”

Tess’s voicemail came on just as the man finished giving instructions to the rendezvous point in Arles. He repeated the words, then leaned back into the seat and closed his eyes as the panel van continued north.

Chapter Seven:

Tess and Lars approached the café on foot. Lars kept his hands in his pocket and Tess had her handbag by her side, unzipped. Her Beretta M9 sat in the bag, loaded. She gave a final tweak to her blonde wig and put on a oversized pair of sunglasses. Lars wore a mustache that looked totally fake and hat and sunglasses or no, it was impossible to disguise the Nordic features.

“Keep the safety on your gun,” Tess said. “I don’t want you to shoot yourself in the balls.”

“Safety’s on.”

“And let me do the talking. You sound nervous.”

Tess knew the square and used it to guide their approach, giving the outdoor cafes as brief a view of their approach as possible. They cut directly in front of the Hotel Nord Pinus, whose face included two surviving Roman columns. A cloud of pigeons lifted heavily from the square to avoid their rapid strides.

“On the left,” Lars said.

Dmitri’s message had been short, but clear. “Place du Forum. Café with a red awning. Borisenko will have a gray cap and will be reading
Le Figaro.
He’ll be alone.”

It was just after 10:00 in the morning and people sat in the cool open air, sipping coffee and reading newspapers. Tess saw the man, his newspaper open onto the square, his gray cap poking just above the newspaper.

“Borisenko,” she muttered.

“You can do this,” Lars said.

“Of course I can,” she said.

“I was talking to myself.”

Tess knew why she hated Borisenko. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the man with the snakeskin boots. A man just like Borisenko. They took what they liked and the history, the knowledge to gain be damned.

She’d had a strange childhood, spending summers with her mother in the rarified cultural air of the 8
th
 Arrondissement, where she could walk to the Tuilleres Gardens, and along the Seine to the Louvre. At the end of every summer she would leave Paris and return to the desert canyons of Southern Utah to pass the school year with her father, her stepmother and her half-brothers.

Her father kept a secret on his 3,500 hundred acre ranch. The canyons were dotted with Anasazi ruins. Hidden in clefts in the walls or tucked beneath overhangs, they were hard enough to see when you knew what to look for. There was one amazing collection of houses—a small village, really—where you could walk into the rooms and see pots sitting in the corner, still half-filled with corn cobs, as if the owners planned to come back that afternoon. Only the ruins had been abandoned for hundreds of years. The desert climate had preserved them perfectly.

“Some day,” Dad told Tess one day when she was twelve. They’d stopped their horses to drink at a spring and he showed her rock paintings tucked behind a clump of sage brush. “I’m going to tell the state and maybe the University of Utah will send someone to excavate. Put some of it in a museum or let people hike up to see the ruins.”

“But why not now?” she asked. Some of the stuff in the Louvre had been collected two hundred years ago. All this was just sitting here, unappreciated.

“Grandpa Burgess kept his mouth shut because he didn’t want people traipsing around the ranch, hauling everything off. Maybe he could sell it some day. Me, I figure if he’d told people, they’d have come in with shovels and mucked it all up. They’re a lot more careful now. There’s all sorts of stuff you can learn, if you take your time.”

“Like what?” Tess asked.

“Like when they built the houses. What they ate, when they had a good or a bad crop. Even what kinds of diseases they suffered. But you’ve got to excavate very slowly, very carefully.”

She’d taken a short cut one day from the bus stop, crossing over an ancient volcanic uplift, the black rocks covered with green collared lizards sunning themselves. It was hard on the feet, but she liked the view

Tess came down the other side to find a guy on a four wheeler, consulting a map and a compass. He was off-road, on private property. A cloud of dust hung around his yellow pickup truck which sat on the service road down the hill. The man had a tanned, weathered face and crows feet around his eyes like the kind you got from a lifetime of squinting against the sun.

But the thing she noticed was the clothes. He wore a fedora festooned with arrowheads. Her dad had taught her to leave arrowheads where you found them. The man wore snakeskin boots and a snakeskin belt. Dad said that a rattler needed its skin more than a man needed fancy boots.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Surveyor for UP&L,” he answered without hesitation. “We’re building a new coal-fired plant near Escalante and need to run power lines.”

“Oh,” she said.

Maybe if she’d thought to mention the guy at dinner or even the next day they might have stopped him. But it was breakfast two days later when she made an offhanded comment about the man’s snakeskin boots and his arrowhead hat.

Dad exchanged a look with her stepmother, who got up to make a call. It took about five minutes to disprove the Utah Power and Light story. It was a Saturday and so she rode with her father to take a look around.

He relaxed after they verified that the two Anasazi sites closest to the road sat undisturbed. And Tess, who’d grown anxious with her father’s mood, began to think maybe she hadn’t made such a terrible mistake after all.

But then they reached the village. They dismounted and she walked with her father among the ruins. There were holes gouged in and around the buildings, walls pulled down to get to something discovered further back. One man—possibly with friends—had done more damage in his hasty snatch and run operation than 700 years of exposure to the elements. Dad picked up a single potsherd and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger.

“That bastard,” he said. “That greedy, greedy bastard.”

Tess watched him in shock. Her dad had been raised by strict Mormons and she’d never heard him use strong language before. More shocking still was the hitch in his voice. Almost like he was going to cry, if that were possible.

Four years later, in high school, Tess was in Provo for a fencing tournament when she saw the yellow pickup truck a second time. It was older, rusted through in spots, and if not for the red dust—as if the truck had just driven in from desert—she wouldn’t have paid it any attention. As the other kids walked ahead through the parking garage with the fencing coach, Tess did a double take and saw the rattlesnake tails dangling from the rearview mirror.

She’d just returned from spending the holidays with her mother and blurted,
“C’est pas possible.”

The other kids glanced over their shoulders. “Are you blabbering in French again?” one of the boys asked.

Just in the last year, guys in France had started to chat her up in the park or offered to take her to La Grande Roue for the night view of Paris. What they wanted was a chance make out and slip a hand under her shirt. In Utah, the guys hadn’t yet moved beyond snapping her bra.

Tess turned quickly from the truck. “
Oui, monsieur.”
She affected a French accent. “Is zat a problem for you?”

He blinked and shook his head with a look of disgust. “You’re weird, Tess.”

“Je me fous complètement de ce que tu penses,”
she answered. The kids who studied French at school snickered, no doubt picking up the vulgarity, even if they understood nothing else.

The fencing tournament wasn’t until that evening, so they were off to explore Provo. It was what passed for the city for most of the kids and they planned to visit the old Mormon tabernacle, the courthouse, eat in a Mexican restaurant, and then return to the car and drive past the Mormon temple.

“Mr. Simpson,” she said as they stepped from the garage into the cold January air. “I forgot something in my bag, I’ve got to go back to the van.”

“What’d you forget?” the same kid said. “Some brie? Your beret?”

She fixed him with a smile. “Feminine products. I can loan you a tampon if you need one. Maybe you can shove it up your—”

“Tess,” the coach cut in. He fished out the keys to the van. “Just go get your stuff, meet us across the street at the courthouse.”

Back in the parking garage, Tess was soon sure. There was a road atlas on the passenger seat of the yellow pickup, together with a book called, “Roadside Geology of Utah,” and another one, “Lost People of the Desert,” with a picture of an Anasazi cliff dwelling on the front. On the floor, a crowbar, a surveyors pick, and more maps among the crushed Styrofoam cups and empty Coke cans.

Had to be the same guy.

The door was locked, but she found a length of chain in the back of the truck. She wound the end around her hand, looked around the parking garage to make sure nobody was coming, then swung the chain at the window. It cracked. She swung again and broke it open.

Tess rifled through the glove compartment to steal his registration information, then took Mr. Wilson’s keys and scratched into the vinyl seat: “THIEF & VANDAL.” Yes, the last word was ironic, but what of it? Not like she was desecrating Anasazi ruins or anything, it was a crummy pickup truck.

She grabbed his books, his maps, and whatever else she could scoop up and shoved them in the nearest garbage bin. It was a stupid, childish protest. What she wanted was to take the registration information to the police, but she’d ruined that chance by vandalizing his truck. The he-said, she-said nature of the artifact thefts was one thing, but her fingerprints were all over his truck. Whatever else happened, if she went to the police, they’d charge her with a crime. In the end, she tore up his registration and put that in the garbage, too.

Tess’s life had taken a few twists over the years, but it was no surprise that she’d progressed from vandalizing the truck of a petty thief to robbing a Russian billionaire in this French café.

The newspapers rustled as Tess and Lars took their place opposite the man, but he didn’t yet lower the paper.

“Expecting someone?” Lars asked.

“Probably not us,” Tess said. “Now, listen carefully, we’re both armed. You think maybe we won’t shoot you, this being a public square and all, but you’d be wrong.”

And you’ll deserve it, you bastard, she thought. But she didn’t say it. This had to be a simple robbery. Art thieves, or agents of a fellow collector. They’d be too easy to track down otherwise, in spite of the wig and fake mustache.

The newspaper lowered slowly. The man on the other side was smiling. “Hello, Tess.”

She drew back in shock. It wasn’t Alexander Borisenko. They’d been set up.

Chapter Eight:

Jim Grossman was in the cabin, wiring his new radar when he felt the sailboat rock, as someone stepped onto the deck. He got up with a frown and was halfway to the cabin door when it opened and two men muscled their way inside.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said. He was just starting to feel alarmed as he thought of the crates in his boat shed and remembered that he’d stepped to the wrong side of the law as soon as he’d taken them.

“I told you not to open the boxes,” the first man said in good English, precisely pronounced, but with a strong accent at the same time. The second man was about six-three and overly muscled.

“Oh, it’s you,” Jim said. He still gripped his screwdriver. “God, I thought maybe you were the police.”

“Why did you open the boxes? Did someone tell you to do it?”

“What? I’d never do that, I told you before—”

Before he could finish, the second man stepped forward and in a swift motion, drew a handgun from his jacket, which he pressed against Jim’s forehead. The rest of the sentence strangled in his throat.

“Should I have Sergei kill you now?” the first man said. He’d called himself Black Horse on the phone. “Or will you stop lying? It’s your choice, Mr. Grossman. I’m willing to be reasonable, but I need a man I can work with.”

Jim let his screwdriver fall. “I guess I did open a couple of the crates, just a little. I started to get worried, you know. You said you weren’t shipping anything illegal, but I didn’t believe it, I wanted to know if I should watch out for the Coast Guard or what.”

“That’s better,” the man said. “Now, step out on the deck with us for a moment. I’m not sure I’ve been clear enough, so I want to make sure we avoid any more misunderstandings.”