The Atlantis Scrolls (Order of the Black Sun Book 7) Read online

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Sam asked innocently when he appeared in the dark crack of the opening door. Under Katya’s hand the door stopped abruptly, where Sam had his foot lodged against the back of it.

  “Oh!” she jerked, startled by seeing the wrong face. “I thought Nina was in here.”

  “She is. Passed out. All that homebrew kicked her arse,” he replied in a self-conscious chuckle, but Katya did not look amused. In fact, she looked downright terrified.

  “Sam, just get dressed. Wake up Dr. Gould and come with us,” Sergei said ominously.

  “What’s wrong? Nina is fuck drunk, and she is not waking up until doomsday, it looks like,” Sam told Sergei more seriously, but he still tried to play it all off.

  “Christ, we don’t have time for this shit!” a man shouted from behind the couple. A Makarov appeared against Katya’s head and the finger pulled the trigger.

  Click!

  “Next click will be made of lead, comrade,” the gunman warned.

  Sergei started to sob, rambling madly to the men who stood behind him, begging for his wife’s life. Katya’s hands covered her face and she fell to her knees in shock. From what Sam gathered they were not colleagues of Sergei’s, as he first thought. Although he could not understand Russian, he deduced from their tone that they were very serious about killing them all if he did not wake Nina and come with them. Seeing the altercation escalating dangerously, Sam put up his hands and stepped out of the room.

  “All right, all right. We’ll come with you. Just tell me what is going on and I’ll wake up Dr. Gould,” he calmed the four vicious-looking thugs.

  Sergei put his arm around his crying wife and shielded her.

  “My name is Baudaux. I am to believe you and Dr. Gould accompanied a man named Alexandr Arichenkov to our lovely patch of land,” the gunman asked Sam.

  “Who wants to know?” Sam snapped.

  Baudaux cocked the gun and aimed at the cowering couple.

  “Yes!” Sam shouted, his arm outstretched toward Baudaux. “Jesus, will you relax? I’m not going to run away. Aim that fucking thing at me, if you need midnight target practice!”

  The French thug lowered his weapon while his companions kept theirs at the ready. Sam swallowed hard and thought of Nina who had no idea what was happening. He regretted affirming her presence there, but if these intruders found him out, they would surely have killed Nina and the Strenkovs and strung him up outside by his balls for the wildlife to find.

  “Wake up the woman, Mr. Cleave,” Baudaux ordered.

  “All right. Just . . . just take it easy, okay?” Sam nodded in surrender as he slowly reversed into the dark room.

  “Lights on, door open,” Baudaux said firmly. Sam was not about to put Nina in peril with his wisecracks, so he just agreed and switched on the light, grateful that he covered Nina before he opened the door for Katya. He did not want to imagine what these brutes would do to a nude, unconscious woman if she was already spread-eagle on a bed.

  Her small frame hardly lifted the covers where she slept on her back, mouth agape in a drunken siesta. Sam hated having to spoil such a perfect rest, but their lives depended on her waking up.

  “Nina,” he said rather loudly as he bent over her, trying to obscure her from the leering beasts that hung around the doorway while one held up the homeowners. “Nina, wake up.”

  “For fuck’s sake, switch off the fucking light. My head is killing me already, Sam!” she whined and turned on her side. He quickly looked apologetically to the men in the doorway, who just stared in amusement, trying to catch a glimpse of the sleeping woman who could shame a sailor.

  “Nina! Nina, we have to get up and get dressed right now! Do you understand?” Sam urged, rocking her under a heavy hand, but she only frowned and pushed him away. From nowhere Baudaux stepped in an walloped Nina so hard across the face that her node bled instantly.

  “Get up!” he bellowed. The thunderous bark of his cold voice and the crippling anguish of his slap shocked Nina stone cold sober. She sat up, bewildered and furious. Lashing out her hand at the Frenchman, she screamed, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “Nina! No!” Sam shouted, afraid that she had just earned herself a bullet.

  Baudaux caught her arm and backhanded her. Sam darted forward, spearing the tall Frenchman up against the wardrobe along the wall. He rained down three right hooks on Baudaux’s cheekbone, feeling his own knuckles shifting backward with every punch.

  “Don’t you ever hit a woman in front of me, you piece of shit!” he screamed, fuming.

  He grabbed Baudaux by the ears and rammed the back of his head hard on the floor, but before he could land a second shot Baudaux grabbed Sam in the same way.

  “You miss Scotland?” Baudaux laughed though bloodied teeth, and pulled Sam’s head into his own, delivering a debilitating head butt that immediately rendered Sam unconscious. “That one’s called a Glasgow kiss . . . laddie!”

  The men roared with laughter, while Katya pushed through them to come to Nina’s aid. Nina’s nose was gushing and her face was bruised badly, but she was so angry and disorientated that Katya had to hold the petite historian back. Letting out a torrent of curse words and promises of certain death at Baudaux, Nina ground her teeth while Katya covered her with a robe and held her tightly to calm her, for the good of them all.

  “Let it go, Nina. Let it go,” Katya said in Nina’s ear, holding her so close that the men could not hear their words.

  “I’ll fucking kill him. I swear to God he is dead the moment I get my chance,” Nina sneered in Katya’s neck as the Russian woman held her close.

  “You’ll get your chance, but you have to survive this first, okay? I know you’re going to kill him, sweetheart. Just stay alive, because . . .” Katya soothed her. Her tear-soaked eyes glanced at Baudaux through the strands of Nina’s hair. “dead women can’t kill.”

  Chapter 6

  Agatha had a small hard drive in her possession that she used for any eventuality she might need on her travels. She had rigged it up to Purdue’s modem, and with consummate ease it took her all of six hours to create a software manipulation platform from which she hacked into the Black Sun’s previously impregnable financial database. Her brother sat in silence next to her in the frosty early morning, a hot cup of coffee clamped firmly between his hands. There were few people who could still astonish Purdue with technical savvy, but he had to concede that his sister was still perfectly capable of provoking his awe.

  It was not that she knew more than he did, but somehow she employed knowledge they both had more readily whereas he constantly neglected some of his drilled-in formulas, leaving him searching his brain storage like a lost soul a lot of the times. It was one of those moments that had him questioning last night’s schematic and this was why Agatha could so easily find the missing circuits.

  Now she was typing at the speed of light. Purdue could hardly keep up reading the codes she punched into the system.

  “What, pray tell, are you doing?” he asked.

  “Give me the details of those two friends of yours again. I’ll need ID numbers and surnames, for now. Come now! Over there. You put it over there,” she rambled, flicking her index finger, about to point as if she was writing her name in the air. What a marvel she was. Purdue forgot how amusing her mannerisms could be. He went to the chest of drawers where she pointed and retrieved the two files where he kept Sam and Nina’s records, from when he first employed them to assist him on his excursion to Antarctica to locate the legendary Ice Station Wolfenstein.

  “Can I have some more of that stuff?” she asked as she took the papers from him.

  “What stuff?” he asked.

  “That . . . man, that stuff you make with the sugar and milk . . .”

  “Coffee?” he asked, flabbergasted. “Agatha, you know what coffee is.”

  “I know, for fuck’s sake. The word just slipped my mind while all this code is going through my brain processes. Like
you don’t hit a glitch every now and then,” she snapped.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll make you some of that stuff. What are you doing with Nina and Sam’s details, may I dare ask?” Purdue called from the cappuccino machine behind his bar.

  “I’m unfreezing their bank accounts, David. I am hacking into the bank account of the Black Sun,” she smiled, chewing on a licorice whip.

  Purdue almost had a fit. He raced toward his twin sister to see what she was doing on the screen.

  “Are you out of your mind, Agatha? Do you have any idea what magnitude of security and technical alarm systems these people have globally?” he spat in panic, another reaction Dave Purdue would never exhibit until now.

  Agatha looked at him with concern. “How to respond to your bitch fit . . . hmm,” she said calmly through the black candy between her teeth. “First off, their servers, if I’m not mistaken, were programmed and firewalled by . . . you . . . eh?”

  Purdue nodded in contemplation, “Yes?”

  “And only one person in this world knows how to hack your systems, because only one person knows how you code, which circuits and sub-servers you use,” she said.

  “You,” he sighed with a small measure of relief, sitting attentively like a nervous backseat driver.

  “That is correct. Ten points to Gryffindor,” she said snidely.

  “No need for melodrama,” Purdue reprimanded her, but her lip curled into a smile as he went to finish her coffee.

  “You would do well to take your own advice there, old boy,” Agatha teased.

  “So they won’t detect you on the main servers. You should run a worm,” he suggested with a mischievous grin, the likes of the old Purdue.

  “I should!” she laughed. “But first let’s get your friends back to their old statuses. That’s one recovery. Then we will hack back in when we come back from Russia, and rupture their funding accounts. While their leadership is on a rocky road, a blow to their finances should lend them a well-deserved prison fuck. Bend over, Black Sun! Aunty Agatha has a boner!” she sang playfully, licorice clenched between her teeth, as if she was playing Metal Gear Solid.

  Purdue roared with laughter along with his naughty sister. She sure was a nerd with bite.

  She completed her intrusion. “I left a scrambler to throw off their heat seekers.”

  “Good.”

  Dave Purdue last saw his sister in the summer of 1996, in the southern lake region of the Congo. He was still a bit more coy back then, and had not a tenth of the wealth he had now.

  Agatha and David Purdue were accompanying a distant family member for a bit of what the family called “culture.” Unfortunately neither of them shared their paternal great uncle’s penchant for hunting, but much as they hated watching the old man slaughter elephants for his illegal ivory trade, they did not have the means to leave the perilous country without his guidance.

  Dave enjoyed the adventure, a portend to his escapades in his thirties and forties. Like his uncle, his sister’s incessant nagging to stop the killing grew tedious and soon the two were not speaking. Much as she wanted to leave, she considered taking her uncle and brother on about the senseless poaching all in the name of money—a most unwelcome excuse to any of the Purdue men. When she saw that Uncle Wiggins and her brother would not be moved by her insistence, she told them that she would do everything in her power to oust her great uncle’s little enterprise to the authorities when she got home.

  The old man just laughed and told David not to think anything of a woman’s intimidation, and that she was just upset.

  Somehow Agatha’s appeals to leave ended up in a tiff, and without ceremony Uncle Wiggins promised Agatha that he would leave her right there in the jungle if he heard one more complaint from her. At the time it was not a threat he would have adhered to, but as time wore on and the young woman became more aggressive about his methods, Uncle Wiggins took David and his hunting party out early one morning, leaving Agatha behind at the camp with the local women.

  After another day of hunting, and an unexpected night spent camping in the jungle, the Purdue party boarded a ferry boat the next morning. Dave Purdue inquired fervently while they were on the boat, crossing Lake Tanganyika. But his great uncle only assured him that Agatha was “well taken care of” and should soon be flown out to join them at the Zanzibar port by a charter plane he hired to collect her at the nearest airfield.

  By the time they drove from Dodoma to Dar es Salaam, Dave Purdue knew that his sister was lost in Africa. In fact, he thought she was industrious enough to get herself home and did his best to push the matter out of his head. As the months went by Purdue did try to find Agatha, but his trail would grow cold at every end. His sources would report that she was seen, that she was alive and well, and that she was an activist in North Africa, Mauritius, and Egypt the last time they heard. And so he let it go eventually, figuring that his twin sister was following her passion for reform and conservation, and thus did not need saving anymore, if she ever had.

  It was rather a shock to see her again after decades apart, but he enjoyed her company immensely. With a little pressing he was sure she would eventually reveal why she resurfaced now.

  “So tell me why you wanted me to get Sam and Nina out of Russia,” Purdue insisted. He had been trying to get to the bottom of her mostly shrouded reasons for seeking his help, but Agatha hardly gave him the full picture and the way he knew her, that was all he would get, until she decided otherwise.

  “You have always been about the money, David. I doubt you would be interested in anything you did not profit from,” she replied coolly, as she sipped her coffee. “I need Dr. Gould to help me find something I was hired to locate. As you know, my business is books. And hers is history. I don’t need much from you, other than summoning the lady so that I can use her expertise.”

  “That’s all you need from me?” he asked, a smirk playing on his face.

  “Yes, David,” she sighed.

  “In the past few months Dr. Gould, and others involved like myself, have gone incognito to avoid being persecuted by the Black Sun organization and its affiliates. These people are not to be trifled with.”

  “No doubt something you did that pissed them off,” she said plainly.

  He could not refute that.

  “In any event, I need you to find her for me. She would be invaluable to my investigation and well remunerated by my client,” Agatha said, shifting impatiently. “And I do not have an eternity to get to it, understand?”

  “So, this is not a social call to catch up on all the things we have been up to?” he smiled sarcastically, playing on his sister’s well-known intolerance for tardiness.

  “Oh, I am up to date on your doings, David, and well informed. You have not exactly been modest with your achievements and celebrity. It doesn’t take a bloodhound to dig up the things you have been involved in. Where do you think I heard of Nina Gould?” she asked, her tone much like that of a boasting child on a full playground.

  “Well, I’m afraid we would have to go to Russia to get her. While she is in hiding I am sure she doesn’t have a phone and cannot just cross borders without acquiring some sort of forged identity,” he explained.

  “Good. You go get her. I’ll wait in Edinburgh, at that nice house of yours,” she nodded derisively.

  “No, they will find you there. I am sure the council’s spies are all over my properties everywhere in Europe,” he cautioned. “Why don’t you come with me? That way I can keep an eye on you and be sure that you are safe.”

  “Ha!” she mocked with a sardonic chuckle. “You? You can’t even keep yourself safe! Look at you, lurking around like a cowering worm in the recesses of Elche. My friends in Alicante tracked you so easily I was almost disappointed.”

  Purdue did not enjoy that low blow, but he knew she was right. Nina had told him something similar the last time she went for his throat too. He had to admit to himself that all his resources and fortune were not enough to protect those h
e cared about anymore, and that included his own crumbling safety that had now become evident, if he could be discovered so easily in Spain.

  “And let us not forget, my darling brother,” she continued, finally displaying the vindictive demeanor he had initially expected from her when he first saw her there, “that the last time I trusted you with my safety on a safari I ended up, shall I say, the worse for wear, to put it mildly.”

  “Agatha. Please?” Purdue asked. “I am elated that you are here, and by God, now that I know you are alive and well, I intend to keep you that way.”

  “Ugh!” she fell back in the chair with the back of her hand to her forehead to imply the dramatic air of his statement, “Please, David, don’t be such a drama queen.”

  She cackled mockingly at his sincerity and sat forward to meet his gaze with hateful eyes, “I will come with you, dear David, lest you suffer the same fate Uncle Wiggins bestowed on me, old boy. We wouldn’t want your evil Nazi family to discover you now, would we?”

  Ch apter 7

  Bern watched the small historian glare at him from her seat. She enticed him in more than a petty sexual manner. Much as he preferred stereotypical Nordic featured women—tall, thin, blue eyes, fair hair—this one appealed to him in ways he could not fathom.

  “Dr. Gould, I cannot express enough how appalled I am by how my colleague treated you and I promise you, I will make sure he gets justly punished for it,” he said with gentle authority. “We are a bunch of rough men, but we do not hit women. And we do not condone the mistreatment of feminine captives by any means! Are we clear, Monsieur Baudaux?” he asked the tall Frenchman with the bruised cheek. Baudaux nodded passively, to Nina’s surprise.

  She had been accommodated in a proper room with all the necessary amenities. But she heard nothing about Sam from what she deduced eavesdropping on the small talk between the cooks who brought her meals the previous day while she waited to see the leader who had ordered to bring the two of them here.