Carpathian: An Event Group Thriller (Event Group Thrillers) Page 4

  “How am I supposed to learn anything stuck in that underground hell you call a complex?” she hissed as she smiled at the bartender as he passed her another glass of champagne.

  “Listen, I—”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard the Golden Child. I believe we have a very special evening in store for your pleasure.”

  Lee and Alice turned at the announcement. The man was impeccably dressed in a white tuxedo with a black cummerbund.

  “I told you, red cummerbunds are so tacky,” Alice said softly through the side of her mouth.

  “I apologize for not having the same taste as our host, Lord Hartford Benetton Harrington, the seventeenth Lord of Southington.”

  “Sounds made-up,” Alice said as she looked the stately host over from head to toe.

  Lee glanced over quickly as he took in Alice for the first time without his anger blinding his one good eye. He saw her eyes beneath the black veil watching their host make his greeting. The perfect jawline coupled with her slightly turned-up nose usually calmed Lee down like no sight in the world—but this night was different. Her looks now had the opposite effect on him as he realized what a dangerous situation the girl had placed herself in.

  “Tonight you will be witness to one of the truly great collections in the world. We will present to you, ladies and gentlemen, many items of history and from the dawn of man and his understanding of not just himself, but that of his God, or gods.” Many of the guests nodded appreciatively. Lee just watched on with distaste. “These are not just mere antiquities that will thrill and enthrall you at each viewing, ladies and gentlemen, they will mesmerize you—and of course checks will be acceptable.”

  The gathered guests chuckled at the humor displayed by the Englishman, who smiled and nodded at the men and women as they passed him heading for the salon belowdecks. The man had the appearance of a smiling shark as his prey swam around him.

  “Since we’re here, do you think you could put my perceived shortcomings on the knowledge of field operations aside long enough to allow us to do our job?” Alice said as she pulled the stole around her shoulders and made ready to follow the others. She half turned and her green eyes settled on Lee’s blue one.

  “I had already come to that conclusion and told you so before you stormed off half-cocked.” He looked at her with intense gaze. “Don’t think this is over, Hamilton.”

  “Believe me, I know it’s not over,” she said as she extended her left arm. “Now, shall we see what all of the fuss is about, General?”

  Lee smiled enough that his teeth blazed, as it was hard enough to do without breaking off his teeth in his anger. “By all means, Mrs. Hamilton.”

  As they fell in line with the crowd walking through the gilded glass doors of the salon, Lee felt many eyes on them. Thus far he had counted at least seven armed guests. At least five heavily armed guards, and of course that wasn’t counting the crew. He now felt he and Alice were walking into the bowels of a pirate ship and he also knew they were making this up on the fly. He leaned in close to Alice when he knew no one was in hearing distance.

  “We observe and we make mental notes of what we see being auctioned. Then we report everything to the Hong Kong police. If we’re real lucky we can get the information on what’s here and where in the hell it came from. All our department is interested in is the history of the pieces involved, not their value, but their provenance. Our job is not recovery. Our job is to document the history of the pieces and discover if we have a historical precedent to alter the perceived historical reference to those items or the location in which they were discovered. Agreed?”

  “I never intended anything different,” was her curt reply.

  As the guests walked down a wide carpeted stairway, Alice was the first to see the black satin-covered objects set up in the massive salon of the Golden Child. Spotlights had been arranged for maximum effect once the black dustcovers were removed. To Garrison Lee it was nothing more than antiquity thieves making thievery as legitimate-looking as possible.

  Some of the objects were massive, while others were small. Alice quickly counted eighty-seven objects. As the guests were again offered drinks and champagne, the satin covers were slowly pulled away from the items to be sold.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the items on sale here tonight have all been authenticated and a provenance has been established for the…” the British lord smiled almost embarrassingly, “… the more controversial pieces.” The seventeenth Lord of Southington raised a flute of champagne. “Please, peruse the collection and enjoy, the sale will commence as soon as everyone has viewed the items.”

  Lee turned slowly, taking in the faces of the buyers. Alice momentarily watched Garrison. She knew his mind was one of those rare things in the world that make one afraid to know someone too closely. As the former OSS man looked at the faces around them as the guests moved toward the illuminated objects, she knew he was mentally taking a picture of every face he saw. He had a photographic memory and never once forgot a name he had been given or the face that was attached to that name. The senator had made Alice extremely uncomfortable before she got to know him in the years since they met at Walter Reed Army Hospital in 1945 where he was recovering from the devastating wounds received at the end of the war.

  “Well, are they all arch-criminals?” she asked as Lee accepted another drink from a waiter.

  “While not arch-criminals, nonetheless, there are some very seedy characters here,” he said as he pretended to sip at his drink. “And a few others that don’t belong here at all.” His eyes wandered over to a man who stood in the far corner with a small plate in his hand. The man was slowly eating caviar on toast points and Lee saw that the man wasn’t that good on his surveillance techniques. “Like this gentleman in the far corner, he seems quite interested in you far more than the antiquities at auction. I suspect the revealing dress is more fascinating to him than any old broken pottery.”

  “Is there anyone else that doesn’t belong in this den of thieves, General?”

  “A few,” he answered and then turned away. “I think we better split up, we seem to have attracted the attention of our host.”

  Alice smiled and then slowly turned and saw Lord Harrington conferring with a uniformed crewman and two of the plainclothes security men and they were looking right at her. Alice moved into the milling guests as they started to examine the artifacts.

  Lee moved off to the far end of the lined exhibit, stopping in front of two urns that had been braced upon the tops of columned pedestals. The director of Department 5656 was just starting to look away when he decided that he needed a closer look at the two urns. His interest was piqued. The urns were faded and both had several large cracks coursing through their surfaces where the artisans had taken painstaking time in their reconstruction. Lee saw designs and artwork he wasn’t familiar with. He could see they were possibly of Canaanite provenance in construct but the images were unlike any he had ever seen before. The former OSS general leaned closer and read the placard attached to the pedestal:

  THE BROTHER AND SISTER URNS UNEARTHED AT TELL ES-SULTAN—THE ANCIENT CITY OF JERICHO 12/8/1943

  “Son of a bitch,” Lee hissed beneath his breath. The exclamation was loud enough that a French woman next to Lee gave him a distasteful look and moved away to the next exhibit.

  “Those were almost my exact words when these two exceptional beauties were unearthed.”

  Lee closed his one good eye and then gathered himself as he straightened after reading the placard. He smiled and nodded at the smaller man standing next to him. He had a pencil-thin mustache and his cheeks were reddened to the point Lee suspected the man to be wearing rouge.

  “You must be Lord Harrington?” Garrison asked, placing his hands with his cane behind his back instead of offering his host his hand in greeting.

  “The very same, uh, Mr.…?”

  “Kilroy, Addison Kilroy,” Lee said as he held the man’s eyes with his own. Neither man bl
inked at Lee’s use of the infamous cartoon graffito of a million American servicemen during World War II—the famous Kilroy Was Here.

  “Ah, I see. Many apologies, Mr. Kilroy, so many invitations were sent out I failed to recall sending yours.”

  Lee reached into his dinner jacket and produced the wax-sealed invitation forged by the same agent at the complex that created the fake documents for Alice.

  “Sir, I have no need to see your invitation. I just wanted to greet my guests and offer any explanation of the items that I may.”

  “Well,” Garrison said as he replaced the forged invite into his jacket, “I must say these are two very important pieces—if they’re real, of course. I mean, the ruins at Tell es-Sultan are closed to archaeological study, ordered by your government in the forties and the no-dig policy has been carried over by the new state of Israel.”

  Lord Harrington smiled and nodded his head. “Yes, the ruins at Tell es-Sultan have been closed, as you can see for very good reason. There are some unscrupulous people in the world today that would take advantage of such marvelous finds, Mr. Kilroy.”

  Lee nodded his head and smiled crookedly. “There are indeed, sir, very unscrupulous people. I mean, the mystical city of Jericho? A lot of people would call that blasphemous to dig there.” Lee leaned in close to Lord Harrington, who stood his ground not too comfortably against the scarred and very much larger Garrison Lee. “I mean, the city was supposedly destroyed on the orders of God himself. Frightening stuff,” Lee said with his brow arched high above his eye patch, waiting for a reaction from his host.

  “Fairy tales to scare the unenlightened, Mr. Kilroy.”

  Lee smiled, broadly this time. “I’ve learned that fairy tales, when ignored as such, tend to be more truthful in the end than first thought and that they also usually come back and bite you right in your hindquarters when taken too lightly, Lord Harrington.”

  The smile from the American was unsettling to the Englishman, enough so that he half bowed and slowly backed away, nodding toward his security people that this man was to be watched. Lee lost his smile as he turned back to the stolen urns.

  Alice nervously looked over her shoulder and saw that Lee was holding his own with their host. She closed her eyes and nearly walked into a woman standing in her path.

  “Oh, excuse me,” Alice said as she placed her empty champagne glass on the tray of a passing waiter. Then her eyes locked on the young girl she had nearly collided with. They were approximately the same age. As Alice looked closer at the raven-haired woman she could see that the dark beauty had one brown eye and one green eye. She was a beautiful girl. Then Alice saw that she was also being examined, or more to the point, she thought, she was being sized up by the girl like she was a possible adversary.

  “American?” the girl asked as her eyes roamed over the dress Alice was wearing. The strange young woman wore a plain black satin dress that was as gorgeous as Alice’s expensive gown. Her equally black and shiny hair was straight and shiny and she wore large but not ostentatious gold hoop earrings.

  “Yes, I’m American,” Alice answered as she watched the young girl with the strange European accent and multicolored eyes look over every inch of her.

  “Yes, I can actually smell the difference,” the girl said as she finally stopped examining Alice and then looked into her eyes under the veil.

  “Excuse me?” Alice said with that tinge of anger that exposed itself at most times unbidden—Garrison was rubbing off on her to her horror as she felt her defensive hackles rise.

  “Well fed—Americans smell well fed,” the gorgeous young woman answered as she turned to look at a large stone block. She crossed her arms and looked at the ancient section of wall that once stood at Tell es-Sultan—the ruins of the city of Jericho. “Interesting piece, don’t you think … Miss…?”

  “Hamilton, and it’s Mrs.,” Alice said, looking from the girl to the giant block that appeared as if it taxed the carpeted salon deck with its massive weight. Suddenly Alice’s eyes widened when she realized what it was she had been directed to look at. She didn’t see the girl beside her smile as Alice leaned closer to look at the strange object embedded in the stone.

  The granite block was eight feet high and as many feet thick. It had been rough-hewed and quarried thousands of years before. The tool marks were still clearly visible on the block’s leading edges, a surefire way of determining the provenance of the piece, as the tools themselves were linked to a specific region of the Middle East.

  However, it was the relief carving in the dead center of the stone that froze the heart of the American girl from the farmlands of Virginia. The raised outline of the animal was clearly visible. The stone block looked as if the relief was carved around the depiction of something out of a nightmare. The muzzle of the beast could clearly be seen and even the claws of its hands were in stark contrast to the surrounding stone.

  Alice suddenly realized she wasn’t looking at a carving of a deity of some kind from long-ago Jericho, she was looking at an animal that had been crushed between two massive stones. She could even see scorch marks from a long-ago fire. Her eyes went to the sand-colored and now petrified beast. The animal was massive and as Alice examined the piece others were drawn to the stone block. Many were crying hoax and some were angry at an obvious attempt at humor by their host, Lord Harrington.

  The young European girl smiled and then without another word and with her eyes on the man that Hamilton had been speaking with a moment ago, the strange and exotic woman left the gathering crowd of skeptical bidders.

  Alice never noticed that the woman had left her side, as she couldn’t take her eyes from the block and the animal mysteriously encased there. Recognition sprang immediately to her memory.

  “Vault 22871,” she whispered to herself. Most of the gathered guests had already voiced their opinion on the stone block and its obvious defacement, or outright attempt at a hoax, and then moved on, leaving a stunned and shocked Alice, who knew she had to bring Garrison over to the stone block. The assistant to the director of Department 5656 knew she had stumbled onto something that even the great General Lee could not ignore. As she turned, Alice came face-to-face with a small and ancient-looking woman.

  “You will have to excuse my granddaughter, things related to our distant past do not impress her the way that they should.”

  Alice heard what the old woman was saying but nothing was registering in her head. A well-dressed and appointed lady in a light but elegant white gown with pink highlights. Alice placed her age at somewhere in the eighties. Her cane looked like an old twisted wooden walking stick complete with what on closer inspection looked like the Egyptian Eye of Ra embossed in gold on the handle. Not an ordinary walking stick. Her clothes were beautiful. The dress satiny and fine and her gold jewelry sparkled in the salon spotlights. Alice looked closer and saw a tattoo that began at the woman’s neck and disappeared into her dress. The top of the tattoo was that of a pentagram, the five-pointed star, but Alice couldn’t see what the rest of the tattoo held below the neckline.

  “I am Madam Korvesky.” She turned to look at the stone block and the animal that had been crushed to death by it more than three thousand years before. “We have come a great distance to denounce this … this abomination.” The old woman smiled and then looked at Alice with her aged eyes. “But I can tell that you have seen this sort of trickery before my dear, am I correct?” The old woman stepped closer to the young American. “Yes, I see the recognition in your eyes, young one.”

  Alice didn’t say anything at first; she just raised her white-gloved hand and slowly reached out and touched the petrified image of the beast.

  “Don’t do that.” The old woman reached out and lightly took Alice’s hand and pulled it away, giving her another grandmotherly smile. “Bad things can come of it,” she continued, but her next action betrayed her warning as a lie as she herself reached out and lightly ran her old and weathered hand over the stone-hardened fur and teeth o
f the beast. Then the old woman’s spell seemed to break and she smiled and looked at Alice. “You seem not to belong amongst these people.” She looked around with distaste etched on her wrinkled features. She tapped her cane on the carpeted deck once, and then a second time. The old woman became serious and fixed Alice with a gaze that froze her blood.

  “You don’t seem to belong either,” Alice finally managed to say.

  “I belong nowhere, my lovely girl. We belong nowhere.” She leaned close to the American woman and whispered in a voice steeped in an East European accent, “You seem kind, not like these…” she gestured around her at the men and women eating, laughing, and preparing to buy the stolen items taken from an illegal archaeological dig at Tell es-Sultan, “… people, these scavengers of our shared history.” The old woman bowed her head and then looked up minus her warm smile. “Forget what you saw here tonight, and if I am correct and you have seen something like this before, tell no one and keep your secret buried…” She hesitated only a moment as she looked deeply into the eyes of Alice Hamilton. “Wherever that may be.” Her European accent vanished and her next words were spoken in unaccented English and were far deeper in bass than her voice had been a brief second before. “You have just twenty minutes to remove yourself and your one-eyed handsome escort from this ship, my dear. All of this,” she gestured with her wooden cane, even going so far as to accidentally poke another American woman on her rather ample derriere, which elicited a shocked yelp and angry look, “Because all of this is going to be at the bottom of the South China Sea momentarily.”

  “What?” Alice asked, shocked at the slowness of her reaction.

  The old woman had gone. She melted into the milling buyers as if she had never been there at all.

  * * *

  Lee was getting close to the explosion factor that made his early years in the Senate a legend, and one of the reasons it was suggested to him by his own party that he was maybe just a little too high-strung for politics. The general always found his temper hard to control when sheer audacity of privilege and corrupt people at every walk of life threatened his keen sense of justice.