A Triple Thriller Fest (119 page)

Niels stood in the threshold of the tent while Tess and Kirkov walked down to the tournament pitch. Henri stood at his back, his knife still in hand. There was a guard outside, but nobody else in the tent. Borisenko, if he was still alive, remained in the camp.

“For what it’s worth, I think you’re with us,” Henri said. “Or will be.”

Niels turned with a raised eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“You know it can’t stand.”

“The world, you mean?”

“Right. Humans are like a hoard of locusts, with no predators. They’ll keep eating and eating until the ground is stripped bare. There will be nothing left. Maybe if there were only a few hundred million of them and if we could control who reproduced and who didn’t, we’d stand a chance. But for now, there are just too many of them and they’re growing in every way.”

“The only way to save civilization is to destroy civilization,” Niels said.

“Exactly,” Henri said. “We can’t go on like this forever. Exponential growth. It’s insane.” There was a twinge in his voice, almost religious in tone. Peter got that tone sometimes.

“I know what you mean,” Niels said. “I’m just not sure this is the best way to do it.”

“It’s the only way. It’s like a bone that sets wrong. You’ve got to break it, make it straight.
Then
let it heal.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not right, because the bone hasn’t broken yet.”

“Should I give you a minute to work on your analogy?” Niels asked.

“I know what you’re going through, because I was the same way. I needed a lot of time. I kept playing the argument in my head. Eventually, I saw that Black Horse was the only way. Just sweep everything aside. Famine is grim, but it’s better than a nuclear bomb for clearing out populations. Doesn’t touch the ecosystem.”

“Few people die of famine,” Niels said. “What happens is people grow weak and they start to die of dysentery and other diseases.”

“Yeah, well that would be even better. But nobody had any luck engineering a super bug. Sounded easier than it was.”

“My god, you’re talking about the death of hundreds of millions of people in the same way you’d talk about spraying for mosquitoes.”

Henri gave him a hard look. “You think it can all be saved, just because you feel bad about a few people dying?”

Niels backed down at once. “No, you’re right, civilization is doomed. It deserves to fall. But how does Black Horse help anything? You can kill a couple of billion people, but it’s temporary. Humans will rebuild and then we’ll repeat the same cycle.”

“That’s just the point!” Henri said. “It sounds callous, but it’s going to happen, so why not position ourselves to control the fall? We’ll be in place organize a better system, one that doesn’t rely on six billion locusts behaving in an enlightened way.

“The hard part,” Henri continued, “will be holding on for dear life until things calm down in five or ten years. Then we can reassert control.”

“Seems nearly goddamn impossible, if you ask me.”

“Gold and oil,” Henri said. “That’s the key. Got enough of those things and you can do anything you want.”

What Niels really wanted to know was what the castle had to do with any of this. They were going to attack, kill a bunch of people, then what? How would that do anything for Black Horse?

He was still trying to decide if he could risk asking the question directly when the battle started on the tournament pitch. Kirkov came with a flurry of blows that Tess only managed to turn aside. Any hope that the Russian had overestimated his own skill disappeared in an instant. Niels clenched his jaw, willing Tess to move out of Kirkov’s grasp. He was too strong. She couldn’t trade blows.

Niels pulled back inside the tent. “You can watch if you want,” he told Henri. “Just tell me when she’s dead.” He moved unsteadily to sit on the cot.

He was sore, he was exhausted. But he was not as sore and exhausted as he showed Henri. Niels caked a slack look on his face and let his eyes droop. Underneath, his muscles tensed. He was like a rat trap, ready to break the back of his prey.

Henri watched him sit, then turned back to the action. He showed the back of his head. Niels spun on his heel. He grabbed Henri by the hair with his left hand. His right punched at the man’s larynx. The blow came from the shoulder.

Henri crumpled to the ground. Niels took no chances. He wrested the man’s dagger from his hand, pulled back Henri’s head by the hair and dragged the dagger across the man’s throat. The Belgian was dead without a cry. Outside, shouts, the clash of swords.

Niels pulled the tent flap closed, then wiped the dagger on his pant leg. He moved to the back of the tent and shoved the dagger into the canvas and started to saw. He made an opening just wide enough to escape, then slipped out the back of the tent.

There were men all around, most of them directly behind him at the camp. Any one of them could have seen him come out the back of the tent. But all eyes turned toward the battle on the tournament pitch. Niels pulled up his hood and walked back toward the tents and fires of his own camp. Nobody challenged him.

#

Inside the castle, Dmitri turned to the other man guarding Yekatarina’s door. “Pointless for both of us to be here, don’t you think? You want to go watch Tess kick some ass?”

The other man didn’t know it, but cutting out of his job was the only thing that would save his life. His name was Tim Forester and he had a colorful history. From Vancouver originally, he’d spent the early nineties in Seattle in a grunge band. When the band fell apart, he spent a few years in the military, then worked for a group of private contractors—mercenaries—based in South Africa.

“Tess’ll be pissed if I leave,” Tim said. “You see the steam coming out her ears this morning when she talked to those guys who fell asleep on the watch last night?”

“She’s a college professor,” Dmitri said. “What’s she going to do, flunk you out of school? Anyway, we don’t both need to be here. This door is barred from the outside, and Lady Borisenko is unarmed. What could happen?”

At that moment there was a shout from outside the window at the end of the hall. Ignoring the draft, Tim had pushed it open as soon as they’d arrived. They had no view of the tournament pitch from the window or he’d no doubt want to lean out the window, but through it they could hear shouts and jeers from the men on the walls.

“Dude, I don’t know.”

“If you don’t go, I’m going.”

Tim looked down the hall to the staircase. “There’s no way she could know, right? I mean, she’s down there fighting.”

“And when she comes back she’ll be beat up and sore. Last thing she’s going to do is march up here and check on the prisoner. You’ll be back long before then.”

“Okay. Yeah. Just make up something if anyone asks. I went to take a shit or something.”

“No problem,” Dmitri said.

“Thanks, dude.”

Dmitri watched him go with a touch of a relief. He’d just met Tim Forester half an hour earlier but it was enough. As Tim blabbed about girls he’d had and famous bands he’d met, a real person took shape. Hard to kill a man once you knew him. What would it be like to put a crossbow bolt through Peter’s head? What about Tess or Lars? Could he do it?

Maybe it was the broken thumb that made him think that way. Sapped his confidence, made him second-guess his motives.

He unbarred the door. It was a small stone room with a single chair against one wall. There was no fire in the fireplace. Yekatarina stood in front of the window. She glanced over her shoulder. “Anton is about to kill your friend. Do you want to watch? She wasn’t your lover, was she?”

“Tess? No.”

Dmitri wanted to go to the window. He wanted to shout for Tess to get out of there. It was a trap. If she was going to die, it should have be in a fair fight.

“I didn’t think so. She’s still in love with Peter.” She turned with a smile. “And Peter is in love with me. Damn inconvenient for Tess. Just so long as you’re not in love with Tess, that would be even more inconvenient for you.”

“I’m not.”

“So you say.”

“Can we get out of here? I got rid of that idiot, but he might have second thoughts.”

“Oh, I thought you were going to kill him.” She grabbed her cloak off a hook and left the window.

“Tim Forester?” Dmitri asked. “He’s nobody.”

“Exactly. If he were somebody, we’d make him do something before he died.”

They shut the door behind them and then she handed him a green pill. “Swallow this.”

He eyed the pill as they headed for the stairs. “How long will I be out?”

“A few hours. You might have a hard time remembering everything that happened. That’s good. Just lie down in the hallway. You’ll be out in maybe ten, fifteen minutes. They won’t be able to figure out how I took you down, but it will be obvious I did something.”

He popped the pill into his mouth. It was bitter. It took two swallows to go down. Yekatarina smiled. For a moment he thought maybe she’d poisoned him. Get rid of an inconvenient detail.

They hurried down the steps to the bailey. Twenty feet of open air and they were in the keep. Dmitri brought her to the trap door over the dungeon and they threw it open and hurried down the ladder. Yekatarina produced a small flashlight.

“I shoved this up my pussy before I got on the boat. I thought Peter might search me before I came to the island.”

“Too bad you couldn’t fit a sawed-off shotgun up there,” Dmitri said.

They grabbed the ladder and moved it to the second trap door, the one that led down to Peter’s warehouse. “What’s the point in killing someone like Forester, anyway?” Dmitri asked.

“Are you getting squeamish?”

Dmitri held up his splinted left thumb. “I’m not squeamish, I just don’t kill for the sake of killing.”

“Sometimes I do,” Yekatarina said. “It’s practice. For when you’ve got to do it. Like shooting arrows at a target. Train your muscles. You don’t want to be fumbling at the bow string when an enemy is charging with a drawn sword.”

They made their way down the hallway and into Peter’s warehouse. Yekatarina flipped the switch and put away her flashlight. Dmitri wondered if she’d washed it or if it still smelled like her crotch.

He was struck again by the huge size of the room and the beauty of those few things he could see. He knew they were replicas, but what a display they would make.

“What a fool,” Yekatarina said. “What a total, complete waste of a human being Peter is.”

“He’s almost there, he’s almost one of us,” Dmitri said. “Why do you hate him so much, is it because the two of you broke up?”

She turned, her face livid. “I hate him because he sees, he knows what’s going to happen and he’s doing nothing. This whole collection is shit. Who cares? You think after the collapse anyone is going to care about anything but feeding their bellies?” She snorted. “Not for a hundred years, maybe longer.”

“What are you saying?”

“You think we’re playing with castles? You think we’re storing crappy museum stuff in our redoubts? No, our vaults have Mi-24 attack helicopters, artillery, AK-47s, ammunition, and twenty million barrels of oil, plus gold, silver, food, everything we’ll need to fight off the starving hordes, then control the aftermath.”

“But what’s the point, if we can’t stop people from acting like animals?” Dmitri asked. “Who wants to rule over a world of starving slaves?”

“That’s going to happen no matter what,” Yekatarina said. “And if we don’t take over, it will happen again and again and again. You care about art, history, that sort of thing? Fine, then you need to control the aftermath of the collapse.”

“And the only way to control it is to become a ruthless warlord.”

“Bluntly, yes.”

Dmitri and Yekatarina crossed the vault to the service entrance. It had taken him nearly an hour to find it last night. It was a heavy metal door with all the locks on the inside. They opened it. There was a pile of fractured cinderblock and pressed cement. A pair of crowbars sat on the floor. Henri and Dmitri had chipped and bashed through the new construction, almost to the open air.

“Let’s hope you’re right about this wall,” Yekatarina said.

They picked up the crowbars and bashed and pried at the wall. In a moment they’d opened a hole to the outside. It emerged from the solid granite on the far side and into the open air. Yekatarina poked her head out and looked around, then pulled back inside.

“Damn it,” she said. “There must have been a ramp or something.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re still ten feet off the ground. There’s still bedrock underneath us.”

“You’ll have to jump,” Dmitri said. “Then run for it. If everything goes right, they’re still fighting out front, but you don’t want anyone to see you coming out of this hole. I’ll shove some of this rubble back in place, see if I can block it up.”

“How are we going to get back in?”

“Ladder,” Dmitri said. “Should be easy enough. If your guys do their job out front this morning, the watch tonight will be very weak indeed. But if Tess gets away, she’ll be watching this side, too.”

Yekatarina put a hand on his wrist. “If I’d known you wanted her, I’d have told Anton. You could have had her.”

“I don’t want Tess.”

“Good, because she’s already dead.”

After Yekatarina was gone and Dmitri filled in the rubble, he passed through the warehouse a second time. It seemed colder this time. And maybe it was these last few days of candles, torches, and firelight, but the fluorescent lights looked sterile, almost poisonous.

Dmitri carefully shut the door behind him as he stepped into the little room with its ladder that led back down into the dungeon. He turned around and drew up with a start. Lars stood above the stairs.

“Jesus,” Dmitri said. “You scared me.”

“What are you doing?”

Dmitri blinked. “What was I doing? I started to worry about the far side of that warehouse. I was wondering if there was a second entrance on the far side, and I thought—”

“Right. You had all these thoughts at the exact moment when Tess was outside the castle fighting.”

“How is she doing? Is she winning?”

“And it’s funny, but I thought you were supposed to be watching Lady Borisenko. Tim Forester showed up and said you’d sent him away. I went back and you were gone. Now look at you.” Lars took a step closer and Dmitri had to look up to meet his gaze.