“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 he 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?”
Chapter 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.
“I realize that our methods must be a shock to you…” he started coyly, but Nina was fed-up listening to all these self-righteous types apologize obligingly. To her they were all just terrorists with manners, thugs with big bank accounts and, on all accounts, just political bullies like the rest of the rotten hierarchy.
“No, actually. I’m used to being treated like shit by people who have bigger guns,” she retorted harshly. Her face was a mess, but Bern could see that she was a great beauty. He watched her baleful glance at the Frenchman, but he ignored it. After all, she had reason to hate Baudaux.
“Your boyfriend is in the infirmary. He suffered a mild concussion, but he will be okay,” Bern reported, hoping that the good news would please her. But he did not know Dr. Nina Gould.
“He is not my boyfriend. I’m just fucking him,” she said coldly. “Jesus, I’d kill for a cigarette.”
The captain was visibly shocked by her reaction, but he attempted a weak smile and immediately offered her one of his cigarettes. By her base response Nina had hoped to distance herself from Sam so that they would not bother to use them against each other. If she could persuade them that she was in no way emotionally attached to Sam they could not hurt him to sway her, should that be their agenda.
“Oh, good, then,” Bern said as he lit Nina’s fag, “Baudaux, kill the journalist.”
“Oui,” Baudaux barked, and promptly left the office.
Nina’s heart stopped. Were they testing her? Or did she just compose Sam’s funeral dirge? She played it cool, dragging hard on her cigarette.
“Now, if you please, doctor, I would like to know why you and your colleagues traveled all this way to come and see us if you were not sent?” he asked her. He lit his own smoke and waited calmly for her reply. Nina could not help but contemplate Sam’s fate, but she could not lead on that they were close at any costs.
“Listen, Captain Bern, we are fugitives. Like you, we had a nasty brush with the Order of the Black Sun and it kind of left a shitty taste in our mouths. They frowned on our choice not to affiliate with them or become pets. In fact, we had a very close call very recently and we were forced to seek you out, because you were the only alternative to a slow death,” she hissed. Her face was still swollen and the awful welt on her right cheek was turning yellow at the edges. The whites of Nina’s eyes were a map of red veins and the bags under her eyes attested to her lack of sleep.
Bern nodded contemplatively and took time to suck at his cigarette before speaking again.
“Mr. Arichenkov tells us that you were going to bring us Renata, but… you… lost her?”
“So to speak,” Nina inadvertently scoffed, thinking of how Purdue betrayed their trust and threw in his lot with the council by spiriting Renata away at the last minute.
“How do you mean, ‘so to speak,’ Dr. Gould?” the stern leader asked in a calm tone that carried some serious malice in it. She knew she would have to present them with something without giving away her closeness with Sam or Purdue — a most trying navigation, even for a sharp girl like her.
“Um, well, we were on our way — Mr. Arichenkov, Mr. Cleave, and me…” she said, omitting Purdue deliberately, “to deliver Renata to you in exchange for joining you in our fight to bring the Black Sun down once and for all.”
“Now get to the place where you lost Renata. Please,” Bern coaxed, but she detected a brooding impatience in his soft tone, the tranquility of which would not last much longer.
“In the mad chase, pursued by her peers, of course, we were involved in a car accident, Captain Bern,” she recounted thoughtfully, hoping the simplicity of the incident would be sufficient reason for them to have lost Renata.
He raised one eyebrow, almost looking amused.
“And when we came to, she was gone. We supposed that her people — those who pursued us, reclaimed her,” she added, thinking of Sam and if he was at that moment being killed.
“And they just did not put a bullet in each of your heads to make sure? They did not recapture those of you still alive?” he asked with a certain trait of military trained cynicism. He leaned forward on the desk and cocked his head with a malicious bob, “That is precisely what I would have done. And I was part of the Black Sun once. I know full well how they operate, Dr. Gould, and I know they would not have swooped up Renata and left you breathing.”
For once, Nina was speechless. Even her cunning could not save her with a plausible alternative to the story.
Is Sam still alive? she thought, wishing desperately that she did not call the wrong man’s bluff.
“Dr. Gould, please don’t test my civility. I have a talent for detecting bullshit and you are feeding me bullshit,” he said in a cold politeness that made Nina’s skin crawl under her oversized sweater. “Now, one last time, how is it that you and your friends came out alive?”
“We had help from an inside man,” she said quickly, meaning Purdue, but she stopped short of identifying him. This Bern was, from what she could gather as far as sizing people up, not an unreasonable man, but in his eyes she could tell that he was of the species “not-to-be-fucked-with”; genus ”bad death” and only a fool would wiggle that thorn. She was remarkably quick with her answer, and hoped she could utter other helpful sentences off the bat without fucking up or getting herself killed. As far as she knew, Alexandr, and now Sam, might well already be dead, so she would benefit from being forthcoming to the only allies they still had.