Kyle Swanson wore caution like an outer layer of skin, as strong and protective as the shell of a Texas armadillo. Think. Analyze. Plan. Take care. Look at what the enemy sees. Remain flexible. Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.
He was being pushed toward something. He didn’t know what the destination might be, but his sails were filling and the wind was fair and he was being moved, though not by his own hand. The Cornwells had no answers, not that he expected any, because the full extent of the problem was unknown. Swanson thought that by talking about it with them some moment of clarity might shine through. Two days of talking, looking at it every which way, and they’d found nothing.
In his room, the sheets were fresh, the pillows soft, and he had some jazz playing softly to counter the sounds of the big city. Any metropolis is filled with nighttime traffic, abrupt screams or loud laughter, the animal sounds of cats and dogs, and piercing automobile alarms. Swanson wanted sleep. He would fly back to Washington tomorrow, and go out to CIA headquarters and make a decision concerning Luke Gibson. Coastie would be arriving soon. Nicky Marks might come creeping around. He turned off his mind and closed his eyes.
As he slid deeper into the unconscious abyss, a heavy darkness engulfed his mind, with ominous gray clouds that rolled about the sky like volcanic marbles. A screen of raindrops dappled an unseen ocean, followed by the roar of thunder and a thirty-knot wind of an instant storm that ground the surface into waves that blotted out the horizon and swallowed the little sky that was faintly visible. The smells of sulfur and ash came to him. He was about to get clobbered, and he didn’t even have time to batten down the hatches. Oh, no. I don’t want to do this; I don’t want to see the Boatman.
But there he was, stringy in dirty rags and standing at perfect ease aboard a long, narrow boat that bobbed in a puddle of calm while the maelstrom roared about. “We need to talk,” came a hissing whisper from the nightmare figure.
“You are not there. You are just a PTSD hallucination.” Swanson saw himself standing at the end of a long pier, soaked by the waves that surged up all around. He was in uniform, with an M27 IAR across one shoulder and his boonie hat tilted low.
The figure gave an evil smirk. “Of course I’m a hallucination. You really should get some help from a psychiatrist about seeing me all the time.”
“So why are you bothering me?”
“Because, as usual you’re in trouble and you’ve summoned me to prepare for what’s ahead.” The Boatman leaned on a long oar to keep his craft steady and waved a bony arm. “My little boat is empty for now. You will bring me some souls to ferry across.”
“I don’t think so.” Swanson shifted the machine gun. Maybe he should just rip a couple of bursts of 5.56-mm. rounds through that stack of rags and be done with him. But you cannot kill something that is not alive.
“I know it’s true. You’re already on the path.”
“I’m going after only one man. You don’t even have to make a separate trip for him. Leave Nicky Marks here to rot for a while after I kill him. Let the crows work on his eyes and innards. He’s a worthless piece of shit.”
A cackle of laughter. “This cannot be done alone. You can keep the body. His soul belongs elsewhere.”
Swanson stiffened. “I’m not alone. I will have help.”
The black hood shook from side to side. “No. Again, you see the signs, now I have told you, but you neither listen nor see.”
“How, then? Why? Tell me how this comes down.”
The winds spiked the surrounding waves into sharp peaks of foam. The Boatman’s black robes spun out like wings as he leaned on the oar and pointed the bow back into the storm. Over his shoulder, before the darkness swallowed him, he called out, “I will save a place for you.”
“Wait! Don’t go yet! Tell me more. Give me something!”
The little craft vanished, and Swanson tossed and turned in the bed, sound asleep and troubled.
Nicky Marks had a fine time showing his American lawyer lover around the treasure domes of France. From the Louvre to Versailles to churches and élite collections, she was dazzled by the gold, jewels, and masterpieces.
When the emperor Napoleon went trekking about conquering countries, he assigned teams of experts to accompany the armies. For centuries, the common practice of a conquering power was to loot the victims. However, Napoleon wanted more than just money hidden in a farmer’s potato bin. When the dust of battle settled, the French specialists had first crack at the important thievery. Their systematic gathering of valuable plunder brought back paintings by the Masters and scientific wonders spawned by foreign genius. The result was a France awash in antiquities. That lasted until the Nazis came along and stole most of it for themselves. One thing that was left behind by both of them was an established illicit trade in antiquities.
While the Alabama attorney took a long shower back at their hotel after a grueling day of sightseeing, Marks logged onto her laptop, as he had done every day that they had been together. Using her IP address, he went to an international search-engine site that specialized in fine art and was given a choice of more than thirty million possibilities. The top-tier index was a long list of paid placements by museums and auction houses, and Marks quickly filtered out items being offered by private parties. With hundreds of kilobytes per second, it did not take long.
There it was, in plain sight, the header line in dark blue:
FOR SALE: Early translation, Italian to English, of The Prince, by Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. Private estate. Provenance established. Serious inquiries only. Reply this address.
It was a bogus, nonsense ad that any serious collector would dismiss out of hand, because it contained no dates, no price, no details, and no verification of any sort. An obvious forgery. Many scam artists sharked the art world, and they were very adept at gulling rich amateurs.
The ad had been created by a talented hacker to draw little attention, but, just in case, it had some specific defenses. An embedded malware virus switched any potential customer without a password to a hard-core porn site. The simple, nondestructive shield virus easily discouraged most of them from going further. Any attempt to break through that firewall would result in a meaner virus attacking the snooper’s system.
That was fine. The advertisement was aimed only at him. Using the password, he went through the corrupted site to a relay point that bounced him to another site.
Up popped up a generic picture of the marketplace in Kabul. He recognized it instantly. No words, only the single color photograph. It meant that Marks had to go back to Afghanistan.
When he heard the shower stop in the bathroom, Marls cleared the laptop’s recent browser history, logged off, closed it up, and replaced it on the table.
Sylvia stepped out wearing only a fluffy towel, and said, “My feet are killing me.”
He smiled at her and flipped down the bedcovers. “We have some time before dinner, my dear. How can we possibly waste a few hours? Come and let me massage those poor feet.”