A Triple Thriller Fest (124 page)

He said nothing.

“Would you like a break?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

For an answer, she grabbed the chair Lars had been sitting in and carried it to Dmitri. Tess had briefed Susan ahead of time, and the woman pulled the peg on the wheel to loosen the man’s chains. Dmitri groaned as his arms came down. He sagged into the chair.

The women said nothing. Within seconds, Dmitri’s head began to droop.

“Now?” Susan asked.

“Not yet.”

Tess dipped her hand into the bucket. Cold as lake water. She waited a minute, maybe two, until he would be deep asleep. She hated it and hated Dmitri for making her resort to such tactics.

“Now,” she told Susan.

Susan cranked the wheel and Dmitri’s chains drew taught. Tess threw a dipper of water in his face and yanked away the chair. He sputtered and lurched to his feet.

“A short break, I know.”

“Goddamn you, Tess.” He looked like he was going to cry, but then seemed to regain mastery of his emotions.

“Dmitri, what are you doing? Do you really think the world was better a hundred years ago, or a thousand? You want to live in a world where people use this kind of stuff to destroy their enemies?”

“I was born in the Soviet Union, remember.”

“That’s right, you were,” she said, as if just remembering. “How many people did Stalin murder in the 1930s. Millions? Tens of millions? A few lovely famines to go along with all the tortures and executions. But you could go back further, to Peter the Great, or Ivan the Terrible. Gentle, benign rulers. Russia is full of wonderful examples of people living in harmony. And you want to go back to those times, is that it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then what are you doing? It looks to me like your friends are attacking civilization itself. Is that what’s going on?”

She could see him struggle to keep quiet. Two days ago, he probably would have. Right now, he was thinking about those few moments of sleep.

“The problem is people. More specifically, modern people.”

“Modern people?” she asked. “The kind that have walked on the moon, invented penicillin, brought clean drinking water to most corners of the world?”

“The kind that are cutting down the Amazon and melting the ice caps.”

“Oh, don’t give me that crap,” Tess said. “You don’t like that, you work against global warming and join the Sierra Club, you don’t kill people.”

“You can have all the marches and protests you want,” Dmitri said, “it’s not going to matter so long as the population keeps growing and growing.”

“You mean, people having children, that’s the problem? You make it sound like a moral failure, like humanity is evil. Aren’t we just like other animals? They do the same thing.”

“Animals come to balance with their environment. Humans keep thinking of new ways to increase their take. We come against an obstacle and we find a way to get around it. No, to exploit it.”

“Yes, it’s one of the wonderful things about us,” Tess said. “We can overcome all those horrible things like germs and starvation and cold.”

“That would be great, if there were fifty million of us,” Dmitri said. “There are over six billion and we’re growing all the time. And I’m not just talking about population growth. Everyone on earth wants a car, a cell phone, a computer, an oversized house—make that two houses, because we need a house on the beach, right? Where does that leave the rest of the creatures on Earth?”

His exhaustion seemed to peel away in layers with every sentence. This was it, Tess thought. This was what had pushed him to this ruinous decision.

“The earth is not going to survive the 21
st
 Century,” he said.

“Sure it will,” Tess said. “Humans aren’t going anyway.”

“Oh, there will be humans, but will there be anything else? Elephants, tigers, rain forests, clean streams, unpolluted lakes? We’ll have melted our glaciers, burned up every bit of fossil fuel and will be chopping down every tree to keep the lights on for a few more days.”

“We’ll find a way around our problems. Nuclear energy, maybe fusion, solar power.”

“Magic, you mean. These spectacular technological solutions to our problems. Are you going to put a nuclear reactor in every car? Face it, Tess, it’s unfixable.”

She stared at him for a moment. His energy level couldn’t last. Sure enough, moments after he finished his rant, he began to crash. He blinked and his head began to droop. She took a dipper of water from the bucket and splashed it on him.

“Will you stop that?”

“Not yet. We’ve got a good start here. What I want now is some answers. What are your friends trying to do?”

“You’ll have to wait and find out.”

“They haven’t broken in, yet, even mounted a serious attack. So they must have given you up for dead.”

“I can hear the trebuchet through the walls,” Dmitri said.

“Not doing any damage,” she lied.

The outer curtain began to crack. There was a missing chunk in the gatehouse. Only the snow had kept buildings from burning, but it was melting now. Kirkov and Yekatarina were saving their pitch.

“Whatever, I’m not saying anything more.”

“Then I’ll leave you to it, for now, but one thing first. Your fantasy world, where we’ve stopped raping the earth and live in some utopia of group hugs, Kumbaya, and environmental stewardship, what’s it going to look like?”

“It will take a while to sort out, I’ll admit that.”

“But don’t you think the collapse of the Roman Empire might be a good model?” Tess asked. “Petty warlords, incessant conflict. Those average people who don’t starve will end up as slaves or cannon fodder. And what about women? What would happen to them?”

“That’s why you brought your friends, isn’t it?” Dmitri said. “This is about women.”

“That’s right. This probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but think about what the world was like for someone like us five hundred years ago. We’d be married off for political reasons. Daria would be a nun, if she was lucky. None of us would know how to read.

“If your friends do break in,” she continued, “watch what they do to us. That will give you a clue about the future. My guess is that those three of us you see here will suffer some abuse before we’re done away with. And if Kirkov succeeds in knocking down the castles that protect the modern world, there will be many more women who will thank you for all the rapes that they’ll endure.”

Dmitri lapsed into silence and she decided that was enough.

She kept him awake for another ten or fifteen minutes before Miko Talo came. The Finn had a bandage above his eye, but otherwise seemed to be thriving in the environment. He may have been an employee to one of the billionaires who’d come to play on the island, but as things had changed, some men showed themselves to be leaders and others followers. Talo was a leader.

When the women were back in the storeroom above the dungeon, Daria took Tess by the arm. She waited until Susan had disappeared into the bailey. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Those guys can get any woman they want, with as much money as they’ve got. And they’re educated men, too. I don’t understand why they want to kill us, but surely they’re not going to rape us if they take the castle, right?”

“Are you kidding? That’s the first thing they’ll do. Spoils of war and all that. Someone will take you into a back room, call his nastiest friends, and they’ll have a go at you. The others will look the other way. Eventually, they’ll tire of you and cut your throat.”

“God, Tess, you’re blunt.”

“You want the truth, don’t you? Or do you want me to pretty it up for you?”

“The truth.”

“That’s what I thought,” Tess said. “I’m torturing one of my best friends. What does that tell you about how they’re going to treat
us
when they take the castle? The truth? The truth is all three of us are in for a good old fashioned gang rape, if the castle falls.”

“Then you be damn sure it doesn’t fall,” Daria said.

“It won’t.”

Chapter Thirty-five:

John Liao listened to the man on the other end, then asked for clarification. It was highly irregular to question an investment decision from a Temasek executive, but this was a highly irregular request.

“You’re sure? Twenty-five billion to gold?”

There was a long delay, then Hao Chang’s voice came through, crackling. The call must come from a satellite phone.

“Yes,” Chang said on the other end. “You’ll have to liquidate stocks, and all your dollar holdings.” Like Liao, Chang spoke excellent, Oxford-accented English, his
Singlish
accent nearly erased.

“It will make waves.”

“Of course. So be quiet about it.”

Positioned between America and Asia, and on the edge of Europe, but outside the Eurozone, London was the capital of global currency exchange. One of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds, Temasek Holdings had extensive dealings in the city, through which a good chunk of its hundred billion dollar plus portfolio flowed.

Liao swallowed hard. One didn’t move twenty-five billion dollars into gold unless one was expecting a major currency disruption, probably caused by a war or a terrorist attack. Entire fortunes had been made or lost by predicting such things.

“You have the code?” Liao asked.

He flipped open his laptop and entered a password to get the encrypted code. Outside the window, the view into the city and across the Thames was gray and miserable. The damp, endless winters and the brutally short days were the hardest things about living in London.

“Yes, are you ready?”

“Ready,” Liao said.

“AX375E39.” A pause. “Z24TTL.” Another pause. “4YN28B. Read it back.”

Liao did. It verified.

He hesitated. He didn’t know Chang well, but he knew the man’s reputation. Every tiger economy needed teeth and claws. Some men reached the top through connections, or were simply lucky enough to be born under the right numbers. Not Hao Chang. A man like that didn’t get where he was without devouring the weak and stupid.

“Very sorry to question you, sir,” Liao said. “But you are sure with these numbers?”

“I’m sure. I want that transaction executed at precisely fourteen hundred GMT, Friday. Don’t communicate with the home office. This is a pig in a python. It must move delicately if it is to go down. Quietly, Liao, quietly.”

“You are certain?” he asked one more time. “One hundred percent certain?” Liao thought he’d heard an odd tone to those last words of Chang’s. Strain in his voice.

A delay, then Chang snapped, “You blur like sotong, or what?”

It was a Singlish expression. Blur like a squid. Squirt ink to hide one’s stupidity. Clueless, as the Americans would say.

“Very sorry, sir. I just didn’t want to make a mistake.”

Liao hung up the phone and stared out the window. Why the Singlish? Men like Liao and Chang did everything they could to purge their language of the crippled grammar and unintelligible accents of Singaporean English.

It must have been intentional, Liao decided at last. Couldn’t have been a slip-up.

He was warning Liao, that’s what. Don’t make a mistake here. Obey me without question or you’ll be driving a cab on the streets of Singapore. All that education will be swept away and you’ll be speaking like the man on the streets.

Liao called his secretary from his speaker phone. “I need you to clear my schedule for the rest of the week. Call Jensen and Li. I want them on the next flight from Frankfurt. And get the Dubai office on the phone.”

Three days was not much time, so Liao got right to work, quietly laying the groundwork for a massive move out of the dollar and into gold.

#

Six thousand kilometers away, under a leaden Vermont sky, in the shadow of a castle, Hao Chang hung up the satellite phone. Anton Kirkov pulled the knife away from his throat.

Chang lifted his fingers to his neck. The knife had been pressing against the flesh and he half-expected to feel blood.

John Liao, that fool. He’d wouldn’t execute that trade, would he? He’d call the office to verify at least one more time, more afraid of making a mistake than enraging Chang. Right?

The larger trebuchet fired. The stone flew through the air and struck the castle. Chips of rock and mortar exploded into the air. The gatehouse and the nearby walls had taken on a pock-marked appearance.

Soon, Kirkov’s men would open a breach. And then, Chang thought glumly, the castle would fall.

Chapter Thirty-six:

Once Tess saw where the enemy trained the larger trebuchet, she set about countermeasures to defeat it. She tore up every mattress or rag in the castle and made giant pillows out of rolled tapestries. Niels helped her build a system of ropes, cranes, and pulleys to maneuver the pillows into wherever they thought the trebuchet would strike next.

Neither one of them was an engineer, but it seemed to cut the force of the blows by half, and the damage—when they caught a shot—was minimal. This forced the enemy to move the trebuchet to fire at different spots, but this was time consuming and scattered the shots across a wider stretch of the castle.

“I hate to see my trebuchet defeated by what looks like giant couch cushions,” Niels said.

Peter came up the stairs beside them. He had Nick with him. “And here I was thinking that it was ironic to see you using an authentic fifteenth century Belgian tapestry—woven with scenes from a feast in a castle, no less—to defeat a castle siege.”

“Keep down, behind the battlements,” she told them. “Peter, watch Nick’s head.”

She scanned the field for crossbows trained in their direction. Earlier that morning, a small group of men had come within range and killed a man with well-directed fire. She saw nothing at the moment.

“It looks like a giant toy,” Nick said. The boy peered through a pair of merlons. “Is it just that big thing falling that throws the stone?”