Chapter Two
Sebastian Shaw
I shouted over the sound of the rotors, voice straining with the effort. Though the chopper had already landed, it was taking too long for the damn thing to wind down, and I needed to get their attention. So rather than shout until my lungs were empty and my throat cracked and dry, I pulled open the pilot’s door.
“Hello to you too,” said Garry, a giant with a baritone voice and a distinctive South African accent so resonant it could have been heard over a jet engine.
“No time,” I shouted, “She’s done a runner. I’ve got a heavily armed team in the drawing room – left of the front door when you come in.” I sliced a hand toward the large and imposing front door to the manor ahead of us. The place was huge, old, and judging by all the junk that had been in that drawing room, a bloody death trap. But hey, it had treasure too, otherwise I wouldn’t damn well be here.
Maratova, his M-15 slung over his shoulder, jumped out of the back of the bird, scuffed army boots landing roughly on the loose stones of the turning circle. Hair whipping back across his face from the still-dying rotors, he reached down, pulled up his balaclava, and fixed it in place. “We’ve got this, Shaw, you can go back to your books.”
I ignored him. Maratova liked to think a real man was judged by the length of his rifle. I didn’t give a shit how long his gun was. All I wanted was to find those antiques before one of the other teams got their hands on them. Oh, and there was the fact I’d turned my back on her for one second and the girl had done a runner with my gun and keys.
Shit, tonight couldn’t get any worse.
Maratova cracked his neck, adjusted the sight on his rifle, then slapped me on the back as he walked past. He tapped his earpiece with one hand, cleared his nose, spat on the ground, and grumbled a “Got it.”
The only thing he had was an ego the size of Mars. To hell with it if I was going to let this idiot ruin my find.
Shit, if I’d known they were going to bring Maratova along, I would have called the boys in blue instead.
Rather than fight him on it, I shrugged, shot Garry a look, and walked off around the side of the chopper.
I had real intel on the targets inside, but Maratova wasn’t the kind of gunslinger to stop and get his bearings. Shoot first and let someone else clean up was more his style.
Garry shrugged, and the rest of the unit jumped out of the chopper to follow their leader.
It wasn’t as if they were going to face any resistance: I’d taken down Romeo’s boys in the drawing room.
“Fuck,” I hissed as I remembered one tiny fact: I’d given the girl my gun. The same girl was now holed up in her house somewhere. Granted, I hadn’t been dumb enough to leave it loaded, but Maratova wouldn’t know that. I could see the woman, frightened out of her wits, doing the first thing she could think of with the gun and point it at the heavily-armed men smashing through her house.
She’d been attacked by a unit of mercenaries. In her current state, I doubted she could tell the difference between the good balaclava-wearing, gun-toting guys and the bad ones.
So I turned on my foot, scattering stones as I went, and bolted toward the front door.
If she was smart (and I doubted that, considering how she’d announced to a room full of mercenaries, antique dealers, shady Government agents, and plain old crooks that she had a set of the rarest treasure maps out there) she would have taken my keys and headed for my car.
Amanda didn’t strike me as smart. Amanda seemed ditsy, unkempt, and unlikely to be able to deal with a full-scale incursion into her country manor.
She’d be hiding under her bed – I’d bet a tenner on it.
Amanda Stanton
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried the back door again. I offered a silent swear word as I realized it was locked. The click it gave as it resisted my desperate attempt to open it sounded like a gunshot.
I heard the front door open.
My heart in my throat, my hand shaking as I clutched the door handle, I stared around wildly.
I’d made it to the kitchen. It was right at the back of the first floor, and it had a door that led out to the back of the property. There was a garden path outside that led into the woods, with a shortcut down to the laneway beyond. There was an old bicycle tied up to a tree on that laneway; a quaint vestige of my great-uncle’s estate.
The guy – Sebastian Shaw, the extremely good-looking lawyer who’d turned out to be an extremely good looking mercenary/spy/criminal – had offered me the keys to his car. I wasn’t stupid. There was no way I was going to get in his car. It was probably stuffed full of weapons, dead guys, and stolen goods. I was going to take the bike, stick to the old country road, and cycle like a woman possessed, still in my pajamas, until I reached the local town.
But the door meant to lead me to my brilliant escape was the door that wouldn’t open for me. It was locked, the key all the way back near my front door in one of the drawers of a side dresser.
I mouthed another silent swear word as I heard the sound of heavy footfall coming from up the hall.
Instinctively I ducked to my knees, crouching and sidling awkwardly until I was hiding behind the island bench, back pressed up against a jar full of dried pasta and a knife board.
The gun was still in my hand, and I held it at an awkward angle – afraid of the damn thing, but not willing to let it go when there were more unwanted guests traipsing through my great-uncle’s manor.
I had no idea if they were good or not. Just as I had no idea if Shaw had been honest. Somehow I doubted it. When it came to rescuing people from break-and-enters, the police had that covered – shifty men in suits, no matter how dashing, didn’t. Whatever Shaw was doing here, and whatever that helicopter and that van had to do with it, I doubted any of it was legal.
As I sat there, heart thumping so violently I could feel it through my clenched teeth, the footfall got closer and closer. I guessed there were several men, but not once did they speak to give away their exact number.
It was all so professional and all so frightening. The burglar at the door and the mercenaries in the drawing room had been one thing – hell, even Shaw had been manageable somehow (if you count manageable to mean I’d spent most of the time crawling away from him in the mud). But there was something about the silent way these men walked up my hall, the way each step was so damn precise and light that I had to strain my hearing to even pick it up.
Christ, Christ, Christ. I slammed a hand over my mouth, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to make it all go away. I wiped my eyes, tears forming and streaking down my cheeks. That was when I realized I still held the gun.
I gave an involuntary and audible squeak.
The steps stopped. They’d been heading up my stairs before, but after a pause, they headed my way.
My heart could have popped; never before had I felt such intense, pressured stress. I could hardly breathe, and my eyes were so tear-streaked I could barely see.
I’d closed the kitchen door behind me, but I hadn’t had the presence of mind to shift a table or something heavy in front of it.
So there wasn’t anything but an unlocked door separating me from whoever the hell was beyond it.
If it was the police, if it was somehow the army – if it was some legitimate Government security force – they would announce themselves. They’d shout out a quick “This is the police, we’re here to help you, ma’am, and we’re here to catch the bad guys.” Sure as hell the guys outside my kitchen door hadn’t paused to reassure me they were here to help.
I clutched the first thing I could find – which happened to be a jar of dried pasta and not one of the knives on the magnetic rack across from me. With the jar of pasta in hand, I lurched toward the back door.
It was at that point it opened toward me.
I skidded to a stop, a dark, tall, large figure before me framed by the moonlight. The man took a step forward as the kitchen door behind opened with a soft clunk.
I’d never been so desperate in my life, and my body, pumped with fright, did the first thing it could think of and struck out at the figure before me with the jar. The pasta rattled around as the jar struck home on the guy’s upper arm.
“Ow,” the man protested as a red dot of light crossed his face and drifted to my upper arm.
I screamed. I’d seen the movies; I knew what was coming next.
“Hey, hey, hey – it’s fine. Maratova, she’s fine – she’s fine. Occupant of the house,” the man, who I realized was Shaw, spat his words out in quick file, his hands up.
Despite his words, several more of those red-pointed lights flew over the room and settled on or around me.
That’s when I chucked the pasta jar right at Shaw’s head, ducked around him, and bolted out of the back door.
I heard the jar shatter against the floor, heard someone swear, but didn’t stop to clean up the mess and make sure everyone was wearing shoes lest they slash their feet on the glass.
I flew across the path, arms pumping, feet stumbling in the dark, but never stopping, gun still held awkwardly in my vice-like grip.
Sebastian Shaw
“Did that woman attack you with a jar of pasta?” Maratova snorted like a bull.
I didn’t answer. I turned to follow her.
“We’ve got this, Shaw,” Maratova blurted gruffly.
Was that the click of a safety going off? Maratova was no idiot – his safety would have been off the second they saw that van. Nope, he would have clicked it on again so he could click it off to give me a pointed message.
While I often worked with the Special Operations Unit, we couldn’t be classed as friends. Not me and Maratova anyway. I had a certain history with that raving idiot.
It was a violent history.
That wasn’t the point. Amanda was now running down a dark garden path, seconds from falling into a ditch and breaking her neck. Or worse. As far as I knew, there could still be more bad guys – amateurs or professionals – roving those woods. It wouldn’t take Amanda long to realize her gun didn’t work. Nor would it take long for her to be taken down.
“She’s the owner,” I said, “She’s scared, she has no idea what’s going on—”
“And she’s got a gun.” Maratova signaled two of his men to stay behind while he and another one headed for the back door.
“It’s not loaded,” I spat back, trying to get it through his thick skull that Amanda was as much of a threat as his own grandmother (though, knowing Maratova’s particular upbringing, maybe that wasn’t true).
“How the hell do you know that?” Maratova shoved past me roughly, pausing to listen to my answer. It was obvious he didn’t think Amanda could give much opposition. He probably thought he’d pop out and she’d be hiding stupidly behind a painted flower pot.
But that girl could run.
“My gun,” I snapped back. “I gave it to her.”
The guy next to Maratova snorted, and Maratova gave a growl. “I don’t even want to know why.” With that he turned stiffly and stalked out the door, gun raised.
“It’s not loaded,” I screamed back.
“Way to go to break our cover,” one of the guys said – Jefferson, I think. He raised his gun and took position near the kitchen door. “Everyone in this house knows where we are now.”
As if Maratova’s loud, guttural, annoying tone hadn’t already done that.
Rather than point that out, I sidled closer to the door. I was playing a dangerous game here: I was on their team, technically, but that technically could see me with cable-tie handcuffs tied around my wrists and a black eye if I didn’t respect their rules.
Yet something was niggling deep in my gut. It was the way she’d looked at me out near the turning circle – the whites of her eyes glinting in the moonlight, her lips slack and her mouth open.
It was miles away from the light, breezy, frankly ditzy way she’d been when we’d first met. When she’d walked into that auction room, smiling nervously, the auction house owner tittering excitedly at her shoulder, I’d been ready to write her off as a new secretary or PA – a vague and flaky one. When she’d sat through the auction, shock plastered over her face as the innocent spotting globe she’d put up for sale started to go for millions, I’d realized something was up. It wasn’t until Narcina – a shady Egyptian antique dealer – walked right up to her and asked her to withdraw the item from sale and sell it to him for an even higher price, that I knew something was wrong.
That’s when she’d done it. Shock still plastered over her cute face, her button nose crinkled and her blue eyes popping, she’d stood up, blinked at the man, and stuttered, “I have more of them. I have a set of… five I think.”
God, you could have dropped a fucking grenade in that building, and not one single person would have moved. They were all of them in there for one reason: the spotting globe at auction was worth potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in lost treasure. We’re talking Spanish galleons stuffed with doubloons, Roman hoards, Egyptian tombs, treasures the Nazi’s stole and squirreled away through the war. While each globe was valuable, they didn’t work as a map until they were combined. There were five globes in total – and when Amanda had innocently admitted to the room that she owned the whole set… well.
My heart could have stopped at that point. I’d been searching for a hint of those globes my entire career, only to have one pop up for freaking auction down the street from my office. I hadn’t had to battle bandits in South America for it, hadn’t had to fight through the war-filled valleys and mountains of Afghanistan, hadn’t even had to pull out my gun.
They were called the Stargazer Set. And among those in the know, they were the most famous, previously elusive, and most highly desired treasure maps in the world.
Ditsy Amanda had them. All of them, apparently.
I was sure she didn’t have a clue what they were, nor, it was obvious, did she understand what was happening to her.
What was happening was what happened when you blurted out you had the Stargazer Set in your basement.
“Come on, Jefferson,” I tried, voice at normal volume, as I was sure there was no one left conscious in the house, “You know Maratova: he’s going to scare the shit out of her, or worse. You want that?”
Jefferson wiped his nose with the thumb of one of his combat-glove-covered hands. “She threw a pasta jar at you – I don’t think she’s a fan.”
“She has no idea what’s going on. She isn’t the criminal here. Let me…” I trailed off, not sure what I wanted. Did I want to be the one to go out and pull her out of the ditch while she flailed at me with the butt of my own gun?
Nope. But I owed it to the girl. She’d been dumb telling everyone in that auction room she had the Stargazers, but I’d been worse for not warning her when I’d had the chance.
The trouble was I wanted those globes. The only person who knew where the rest of them were, and the legitimate owner (not that anyone in this building – good or bad – cared who officially owned the things) was pelting through the forest trying to get away from me. Maratova, despite my insistence that her gun wasn’t loaded, would still treat her as armed, and he’d use protocol on that. That same protocol wouldn’t be kind to Amanda. The poor girl would explode if she was tackled by a trained soldier or had several M-15s pointed in her face while Maratova screamed at her to drop the weapon and drop to her knees. In other words, she was in trouble.
There was a lot of trouble going on here tonight, and I doubted it was over yet.