A Triple Thriller Fest (109 page)

She didn’t believe it. There would be another, more important confrontation later. Why would he reveal his true strength? Mental or physical? Better to let her think he was vulnerable, easily beaten.

“What’s that about?” Lars asked. He stood to one side with the other dead men.

She explained what had happened, then turned to Peter. “Did you help Niels set me up?”

“No, of course not.”

“Except you told me that she and your son always went walking through Central Park at a certain time,” Niels said.

“I did? I don’t remember that.”

“It was the day you first told me about the castle. Was easy enough to set an ambush.”

Tess was surprised. That meant Peter must have been planning this whole thing for more than a year. He’d never mentioned it to her. So then he’d broken up with her, while apparently intending to invite her all along. “But why?”

“You’re the world expert in medieval warfare, Lady Burgess,” Niels said.

“Oh, cut the crap.”

“You are. When I’m unsure about something, I go straight to your papers. I use your textbook in my classes, and mine only as a supplement.”

“Well, of course,” she said, enjoying the flattery. “But don’t call me Lady Burgess. That’s just silly.”

“Right. Tess, then?”

“Sure, fine. Niels
.
But you’ve known I was coming for months. You tricked me into a little encounter in Central Park. I found out you were coming three days ago.”

“I need every advantage I can get.”

“Right, that again. You’re the one Hollywood hired when it wanted to stage an authentic looking siege.”

“Did you see the movie?” he asked. “The siege is fine, but the computer animated castle looks about as authentic as the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas. Wish they’d called you instead.”

“Who says they didn’t?”

The ship pulled into the docks below. Lars went to the edge of the rock and shouted back and forth with Dmitri and Henri to tell them what had happened. Winners and losers alike met on the docks a few minutes later. Henri hung lanterns to help the men see as they unloaded supplies.

Tess noticed Niels watching and noting both men and equipment, while he and Peter chatted about how the timetable for the next few days, when both armies would arrive and prepare for the siege.

“So,” Niels said to Peter. “You get the castle. That makes you king.”

“King Peter,” Tess said. “Nice. As if his ego isn’t big enough already.”

“And that makes your man the usurper,” Peter said with a smile. “Hope Lord Borisenko isn’t too put out by your loss.”

Dmitri and Lars had taken a crate from a pair of men on deck and walked past her. They stiffened visibly at mention of the name.

“Lord Borisenko?” Tess asked. She met Niels’s gaze, raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you are so going down.”

Chapter Sixteen:

It was easy enough for Dmitri and Henri to slip into the darkness with one of the chests. Men grunted, swore, bashed fingers, argued. Some of these guys were billionaires, yet they worked as hard as anyone else. Peter had chosen well.

Through all his time on the ship, Dmitri had noticed that Henri never moved more than ten feet from that chest. Even before the Belgian whispered in Dmitri’s ear as men lashed the ship to the docks, he’d known there was something special about its contents.

Someone raised a lamp to the top mast and flashed a signal to the far castle. Within half an hour, a dozen men arrived from the castle, driving a pair of draft horses, or riding in the back of the wagon they pulled.

“This is your garrison,” Dmitri heard Peter telling Tess, “together with the men from the ship.”

“What’s that? Fifty, sixty men?” She glanced at Niels Grunberg and his men, still standing to one side, watching, but not helping. She said something else to Peter, but in a lower voice that Dmitri couldn’t catch.

“Teper,” Henri whispered to him in Russian. Now.

Everyone Dmitri had met so far was bilingual or better, with the exception of one American and an Australian. But Henri stood out. He spoke at least Russian, French, German, English, and Dutch fluently.

Two lanterns lit the docks, the first centered on the boat, and the second on the wagon. It had rained a few days earlier, leaving the area between them a muddy mess and Peter decided not to risk getting the wagon stuck. More muscle work. Men bumped into each other or stumbled with their loads in the shadowy stretch between the two.

Dmitri and Henri carried their chest along the south side of this stream of moving men. Then, when they were in the centermost point of the dark path, Henri veered sharply from the road. Dmitri forced the Belgian to slow the pace, afraid he’d go sprawling.

“Come on,” Henri whispered. “Trust me.”

Dmitri’s splinted thumb was throbbing too hard to buy that line. “Slow down, asshole.”

“Here,” Henri whispered at last. He stopped them at the base of a big oak tree. They set down the case while Henri rummaged around the other side. “Don’t sit there like an idiot, give me a hand.”

“What’s in the box?” he asked.

“Uh, uh,” Henri said. “We don’t need to know, so we don’t open it.”

“I don’t work for you.”

“Yeah, well that’s what Kirkov said. Don’t open it.” He came around with a pine branch, which he tried to put over the chest.

“Move out of my way,” Dmitri said. “I’m opening the damn box.” He opened it.

He knew what most of the other boxes held. Food, of course. Clothing. Spare armor. Weapons. But they’d sapped lethality from the weapons: swords with dull edges, blunt lances, bows with arrows designed to splinter rather than puncture, half-weight maces with blunted spikes.

This box was lethal. It was stuffed with crossbow bolts. But the ends were not padded, and the bolts were heavy, he noted as he picked one up. The tip was brass, and sharp. In the heat of battle, who would notice if you changed the ammunition of your crossbow? It was too dark to see well, so he pushed his fingers into the box to confirm that there were bolts all the way down.

Henri, for all his bluster, reached over the shoulder to pick up one of the bolts. “Nice.”

“I don’t get it,” Dmitri said. “Why not sniper rifles and sub-machine guns? Better yet, some plastic explosives?”

“Don’t be an idiot, we’re just a mile or two offshore. What do you think is going to happen after twenty, thirty minutes of gunfire? And plastic explosives? Yeah, that will draw attention.” Henri put down the bolt. “Now shut the box. Hurry.”

There were several more precut branches behind the tree, which they used to cover the chest. Moments later, they’d returned to the group.

Very soon, Dmitri and Henri would be on the inside of the castle. The lethal crossbow bolts would remain outside.

#

Niels Grunberg grabbed Tess by the elbow as they prepared the first march to the castle and gave her two warnings, the first for everyone to hear, the second meant for her ears only.

“Watch the sky,” he said in a loud voice. “My engines are going to pummel your castle to dust.”

She returned the boast. “You build a trebuchet that doesn’t collapse the first time it fires and I’ll dance naked on the walls in dumbfounded admiration.”

She tried to pull away to join the others but he tightened his grip. A frown crossed her face. What was this, intimidation?

He leaned close and whispered. “You’ve got a traitor. Not my guy. Watch yourself.”

He let her go and she moved to the front of the group, next to her friends Lars and Dmitri, suddenly wary. Did Niels think she’d fall for it? It was a classic tactic, to sow doubt, to start a witch hunt that ended only when the army dissolved into fear and mistrust.

But then she realized she knew of a traitor already.
She
was the traitor. She wanted inside that castle, and not just to defend it. She meant to rob the king of his treasure.

Could that be what Niels was talking about? Dmitri or Lars had said something careless, and Niels Grunberg, ear to the ground, had picked it up. He didn’t know who, or what, but he wanted to warn her?

“He’s a good match for you, don’t you think?” Peter said. “I can’t wait to see the two of you face off, see who comes out on top.”

“Yeah, uh huh.” Her mind was still on Niels’s warning.

There were powerful men here and more on the way. There had to be agendas, rivalries, and hatreds. Like Dmitri, Lars, and Tess and their animosity to Alexander Borisenko for his artifact looting. She found herself studying Peter, then Henri, then the Japanese guy she didn’t know who watched her when he didn’t think she was looking. And there was someone from Scotland who’d sat by himself on the ship, staring back toward Burlington the entire time. Hadn’t he been talking to the Japanese guy when they were unloading the docks? In Japanese?

And now she was distrustful of everyone. And wasn’t that what Niels was up to?

The prickles of rain turned back to sleet. Tess huddled in her cloak and walked next to the horses, which puffed and labored to haul the wagon up the hill. Most of the men remained at the ship, unloading crates and chests. It would be a long night for them, but she needed to get to that castle and study its defenses.

It was maybe a mile to the castle. The trees thinned at its approach, but all Tess could see at first was the hill on the northern end of the island. And then, what she’d taken for a rocky ledge came into focus. The castle.

Two gate towers, an outer curtain that stretched from the bedrock itself. Very good. Mining would be impossible. The keep stretched from the back side of the castle like a giant rook on a chess board. She hoped to never use it; by the time you’d retreated to the keep you were in trouble.

A lantern hung on either side of the gates, but it wasn’t enough to see what she was looking for. She grabbed the lantern from Lars and quickened her pace. Her exhaustion was gone and her mind raced.

She stopped dead in front of the gates. Oh, god. Talk about playing with a bad hand. Niels Grunberg would be delighted.

“You’ve got no gate,” she said when Peter joined her. Lars came up a moment later, but she sent him back to tell the others to stop before they came within earshot.

“What are you talking about?” Peter asked. “Of course I do.”

“Not a proper one. Where’s the moat and drawbridge, for a start? You know, you pull the bridge up so nobody can stand right next to the castle and yank off the portcullis. I thought this was a perfect replica, what’s the original castle look like?”

“I don’t know. It was a military headquarters in the Second World War, destroyed in a Luftwaffe raid in 1940 and never rebuilt.”

“Well, you can bet the entrance was better protected. Your road goes straight to the gates with the no obstacles. And the gates themselves are just two wooden doors. Quite pretty, really. But what kind of reinforcing have you got on the back side?” She nodded at his blank look. “That’s what I thought. Are there murder holes in the passage between the gatehouse towers? Something we can use to punish anyone foolish enough to break down your gates?”

“Yes, it’s got that. They’re still blocked up with windows. You know, heat conservation in the winter.”

“That’s no problem. They’ll come out easily enough.”

She took the lantern and reached up to feel the portcullis, which was half-drawn. It wasn’t quite as bad as she’d feared, as it was good and heavy. She walked through the passage to the inner doors. They were solid but not reinforced with iron and a couple of men with crowbars could pry those hinges right off.

She opened the doors and stepped into the bailey, ignored the two men who came to greet Peter. He gave them quick instructions and they went down to help guide the horses and wagon into the castle.

Buildings lined the interior of the castle: barracks, a blacksmith, a great hall. The keep—the final, defensible tower, should the castle walls and bailey fall—sat on the northeast corner. She was relieved to see that it did, at least, have a moat and drawbridge.

Tess waved Peter over. “The outer curtain looks strong enough, and the keep is good. But those gates are a problem. Niels is going to see a great big welcome mat.”

“Is it that bad?”

“Here’s the thing. Winning any battle—really, warfare in general—boils down to two principles. First, strong against weak. You punch a guy in the kidney, not in the rib cage. You attack the flank. You go for the gate, not the strongest point of the castle’s outer curtain.”

He nodded. “Right. So the key is to keep strengthening your weak point until it’s as strong as anything else.”

“Exactly. That’s what you’re doing with armor, or with the gate towers. Force the other side to increase his strength to match you. Worked so well that most large castles were simply never attacked. You either bypassed the castle or you starved out the garrison.”

“You said two factors. What’s the other one?”

“It’s a corollary of the first, really,” Tess said. “But it’s absolutely critical if you want to destroy something powerful, like a castle. It’s called multiplication of force.”

“Explain.”

“You could lie down, put a sheet of plywood over your body while I stack a hundred bricks on your chest. You’d labor for breath, but it wouldn’t hurt you. But what if I stuck a dagger through the plywood before putting it on you? How many bricks would it take to drive that dagger into your gut? Two? Three? The plywood spreads the weight of the bricks. The dagger concentrates it.”

“What does that have to do with defending the castle?” Peter asked.

“Put these two things together,” she added, “and you’ve given me a problem. I’ve got a perfectly serviceable castle, but the point where I need the most protection, I’m helpless. Those gates are ornamental, not defensive. Niels Grunberg is going to shove his dagger right there.”

The men finished unloading crates from the wagon. Some set about carrying supplies into the rooms. A small garrison of half a dozen men had come out of the keep and the barracks and they left with some of the others toward the docks to get the next load.

“So we’re screwed,” Peter said. “Maybe we should plan for an eventual retreat to the keep. It’s strong enough, and it’s got a moat.”