Order of the Cyclops Read online

  ORDER OF THE CYCLOPS

  A Nick Caine Adventure #9

  by

  K.T. TOMB

  Created by

  J.R. Rain & Aiden James

  Acclaim for the authors:

  “Gripping, adventurous, and romantic—J.R. Rain’s The Lost Ark is a breakneck thriller that traces the thread of history from Biblical stories to current-day headlines. Be prepared to lose sleep!”

  —James Rollins, international bestselling author of Bloodline

  “Aiden James has written a deeply psychological, gripping tale that keeps the readers hooked from page one.”

  —Bookfinds on The Forgotten Eden

  “J.R. Rain delivers a blend of action and wit that always entertains. Quick with the one-liners, but his characters are fully fleshed out (even the undead ones) and you’ll come back again and again.”

  —Scott Nicholson, bestselling author of The Red Church

  “The intense writing style of Aiden James kept my eyes glued to the story and the pages seemed to fly by at warp speed. Twists, turns, and surprises pop up at random times to keep the reader off balance. It all blends together to create one of the best stories I have read all year.”

  —Huntress Reviews for The Devil’s Paradise

  The Nick Caine Adventures

  by J.R. Rain and Aiden James

  1. Temple of the Jaguar

  2. Treasure of the Deep

  3. Pyramid of the Gods

  by Aiden James

  4. Curse of the Druids

  5. Secret of the Loch

  6. River of the Damned

  by K.T. Tomb

  7. Map of the Masons

  8. Mountains of the Moon

  9. Order of the Cyclops

  10. Labyrinth of the Minotaur

  11. Blade of the Ripper

  Order of the Cyclops

  Copyright © 2016 by J.R. Rain and Aiden James

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Epilogue

  Reading Sample

  About the Author

  Order of the Cyclops

  Prologue

  Palermo, Italy

  “To the letter,” the Instigator had insisted. “Do you understand me, Antonio?”

  “I understand, sir,” Antonio had replied.

  “Piero, you like Steven Seagal, don’t you?” Mr. Giordano, the Instigator, had asked.

  “Absolutely! I love him: Code of Honor, Dangerous Man, Shadow Man, Mach… Ouch!”

  Antonio had nudged his partner in the ribs interrupting the lengthy filmography before it went beyond the patience of their boss.

  “No Steven Seagal shit on this assignment. It has to be clean. It has to go off without a hitch,” Mr. Giordano had continued in an even tone. “You do exactly as you’re told; nothing more and nothing less. You’re doing a special favor for a special friend of mine, understood?”

  “Special favor. Special friend. We got it, boss,” Antonio had responded, repeating the order.

  “No Steven Seagal,” Piero had added.

  “I want this done right. You’re not common thieves; this is a civilized organization.”

  “Civilized?” Piero repeated.

  “Yes, civilized. Lucky for you two you don’t have to be worried about all those details. You just do as you’re told… I’ll keep my eye the big picture.”

  Without further discussion or instruction, Mr. Giordano had pushed a plain white slip of paper across the desk to Antonio. It was that slip of paper that Antonio was looking at as he and his partner walked down the narrow hallway in the almost vacant, aged building near the Piazza Magione. He glanced at Piero, and then looked up and down the hall before reaching up to tap three times on the door.

  “It’s open,” was the call of a feminine voice within.

  Antonio Ricci stepped into the dimly lit office with Piero Bianchi trailing along behind him. He was nervous, but he kept it well hidden, unlike his higher-strung companion. What had his gut in a knot was the fact that he could see nothing but a shadowy figure behind the desk.

  “Here,” the voice said. A well-manicured, slender hand appeared on the surface of the desk as it pushed a manila envelope forward until it was centered in the circle of light.

  Having made note of the voice and the hand, Antonio wondered about the comment, “Special favor for a special friend.” Did Mr. G have someone on the side? He pushed the question out of his mind. Just thinking stupid things like that could get you fired. Antonio started to open the envelope.

  “Not now,” the voice snapped. “Everything you need to know is there, including how you’ll get paid. Other than that, I never met you, and you were never here.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. Antonio wouldn’t even have to lie. He hadn’t seen her and could give nothing more than a description of her voice and her hand if asked. He started to turn away.

  “Neither of them are to be harmed in any way,” the voice was authoritative. “If they’re harmed, you’ll get nothing for your trouble. Do you understand?”

  “That’s not easy to do sometimes, ma’am,” Piero protested. “Sometimes they fight back and need a little thump to make them behave.”

  “Not to be harmed or you’ll answer to your boss, got it?”

  After the instructions that Mr. Giordano had given them, he knew that answering to him wouldn’t be pleasant. “Understood,” Antonio replied.

  “That is all.”

  Antonio gave Piero a nudge toward the door. They walked rapidly down the hall, out the door and turned to follow Piazza Carlo Maria Ventimiglia without saying a word or looking back. After crossing Via della Ventriera, they came to Cicio in Pentola. Antonio pushed the door open and the two of them made their way to a table at the back, nodding a silent greeting to Alfredo, the proprietor, as they sat.

  Antonio didn’t speak as he opened the envelope and pulled out the typed instructions.

  “Who we nabbing and where?” Piero asked when he saw Antonio pull airline tickets and photos.

  “A couple of mooks. Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Antonio replied.

  “The what?” Piero asked. “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a where, and it’s in Africa.”

  “Africa? Have you ever been to Africa?

  “It doesn’t matter,” Antonio countered. “A job is a job, and besides, the boss told us to do it.”

  Chapter One

  Aeroport de Goma,

  Democratic Republic of the Congo

  “Nick should have been here by now,” Ishi said. The final boarding call had already been made and the flight was nearly full. “Did he have some secret thing to do? Did he tell you anything?”

/>   “He just said he was going to the bathroom,” Catalina Galvan—Cat—responded.

  “That’s what I heard too,” Cat’s sister, Natalia—Nat—added.

  “Do you think he’s sick or something?” Cat asked. “It’s kind of odd that he couldn’t use the lavatory on the airplane.”

  “He gets claustrophobic or something. He won’t use them. He had to a couple of times and it wasn’t pretty,” Ishi answered.

  “If he doesn’t hurry, they will close the doors and push back and he’ll be stranded with pretty much nothing while he waits for the next flight out. I’ve got his carry-on bag,” Cat told him

  “I’m going to go get him,” Ishi announced, unbuckling his belt and pushing himself up out of his seat. He started down the aisle and was stopped by a flight attendant.

  “Sir, would you please return to your seat?” She smiled. “We’re about to close the doors and push back.”

  “You can’t close the doors,” Ishi protested. “My friend has gotten on the plane yet.”

  “We’ve given three boarding calls and a final boarding call, sir. If your friend hasn’t made it by now, then he’s just going to have to catch another flight out.”

  “Can you just give me ten minutes to go get him?” Ishi pleaded. “He just went to the bathroom. He might be sick or something and need my help.”

  “Ten minutes is much too long to keep the other passengers waiting,” she replied, still maintaining the smile. It seemed to him that flight attendants seemed to practice in the mirror every day to keep it perfectly in place, like a man ties his tie.

  “Five minutes, then, just give me five minutes.”

  “Let me check with the boarding crew and the captain.”

  “By the time you do that, we’ll have wasted five minutes and the five minutes I asked for will be ten minutes,” Ishi pointed out. “Just let me run out there and run back. If I’m not back in five minutes, you can close the doors and push back.”

  “Fine,” she relented patiently. “But in five minutes, we’re closing the doors, pushing back and you’ll be out of luck.”

  “Gotcha! Thanks,” he said with a broad grin. “Really thanks.”

  “You’re wasting time,” she laughed. “Hurry!”

  Ishi scrambled down the aisle, out the door of the plane and back up the jetway. He was sure that he’d meet Nick at any point along his sprint to the waiting area in the terminal. He didn’t.

  The boarding crew chief was about to close the door to the jetway when Ishi rushed out.

  “Hold that door, please,” he said in a breathless voice. He waved to the hallway, which was where the bathrooms were located, across from the waiting area. “They gave me five minutes to get my buddy out of the bathroom.”

  “Five minutes and no more!” the boarding crew chief shouted at his back.

  Ishi waved a hand over his head and continued running.

  Not a very large man, Ishima Cuyamel made up for his lack of stature with the intensity and sense of purpose that had been instilled in him from his Tawankan ancestors. Besides the influence of his people, one person had had an enormous impact on his life: Nicholas Caine. Nick had initially taken Ishi in, but because of Ishi’s staunch loyalty to him, their relationship had grown to friendship and then to a partnership that went well beyond mutual interests. In short, Ishi and Nick thought of each other as brothers.

  Over time, Ishi’s ability to focus and learn rapidly had turned him into something of a techno-geek, but that new role in their partnership had never diminished Ishi’s intense drive to protect Nick. Driven by a fear that Nick was either sick or in trouble, Ishi was reacting, as per usual, and rushing to the rescue.

  He came to the end of the hall, saw the universally recognized stick figure without a skirt with “hommes” printed beneath it, and rushed in, nearly knocking over a gray-haired Congolese man as he was coming through the doorway.

  “Nick, you in here?” he called out. Having received no answer, he started to push open stall doors. He continued to call. “Nick, you sick? Are you in here? Nick!”

  The sand in his figurative five-minute hourglass was spilling through the neck at a rapid pace and he hadn’t even gotten a response. It was obvious that his partner was not in the men’s room. Where the hell would he go? He doubted that Nick had any other sort of secret agenda to tend to in the time that it took for the boarding crew to work their way down to the final call for boarding. If he wasn’t sick, then something else must have happened to him. “Yassir Ali,” he whispered, fearing the absolute worst case and feeling the acidic taste of panic rising up from his throat.

  Yassir Ali had had sinister designs about getting his hands on Nick from a long time before. Though Yassir himself had met his demise in Scotland, his Egyptian colleagues, for lack of a better term, had never let up in their pursuit. The removal of Nick’s head by a sharp sword was the Egyptians’ main interest in the archeologist. They’d done their very best to stay under the radar and as far away from Egypt as possible while they were on their mission to find the Spring of Life for a secret organization known as Project Golden Eye. Up until that point, Ishi had been certain that they’d avoided the angry Egyptians.

  They’d also been pursued, captured and then had escaped from a particularly nasty local thug by the name of Laurent Nkunda Batware Jr., who had been nothing more than a younger version of his bloodthirsty father, when they were in search of the Spring of Life among the Mountains of the Moon. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that some of Junior’s thugs had caught up with Nick and carried him off.

  Whatever the case, Ishi didn’t spend much time worrying over who had Nick. He rushed out of the men’s room with a singular thought in mind. I’ve gotta get Cat and Nat off the plane so we can go find Nick.

  He turned the corner and rushed back down the long hallway that led to the waiting area. He was halfway down the hall when a door opened up off to the side of the hall. The moment of hesitation, due to the unexpected movement, was just long enough for someone to slip up behind him and hit him with something hard.

  Without the slightest chance to resist, Ishi saw the entire world start to spin in rapid circles as he felt himself collapsing. Before he made contact with the floor, all light had disappeared from his sight and he felt a pair of hands grip him. Then complete darkness overtook him.

  Chapter Two

  Palermo, Sicily

  The throbbing pain in Nick Caine’s head, a smell, which took him several seconds to identify, and a bitter taste in his mouth entered his senses before he even attempted to open his eyes. What the hell? Is that marinara? I must be dreaming. He blinked his eyes open, feeling the intense pain that went along with a lump formed on the back of his head coupled with the glare of the bright overhead lights.

  He winced as he turned his head, trying to get his bearings. After a few moments of looking from one side to the other and determining nothing more than that he was on a bed in a room, he raised his head to get a better look. He let his head drop back to the pillow instantly.

  “Sleeping beauty is awake, eh?” a voice with a thick, Sicilian accent said and then called out to someone in another room. “Hey, Tony, he’s awake.”

  Worse than I thought. I’ve died and my hell is being in a bad gangster movie.

  “Ah, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky,” a different voice, though with similar accented English, said as he came from wherever he had been and entered the room where Nick lay. “Good to have you back in the land of the living, eh? I’m sorry about the lump on your head and the ether; it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Not to worry. I’m cooking you a very special dinner to get rid of that bad taste. You’re gonna love my purpetti in marinara. Tell him, Ricky.”

  “Just like mama makes,” Ricky responded.

  It does smell good, come to think of it. His stomach growled and he forced himself to sit up in spite of the pain, but still supported his heavy skull in his palms. “What the hell’s going on? Who the hell are you guys?”
Nick asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “You can think of us as relocators,” Tony replied. “Somebody wanted us to take you from where you was and deliver you to where they want you to be, which is here. I’m Tony and this is my brother, Ricky.”

  Jesus. I wish Yassir Ali had gotten me instead. At least I wouldn’t have to feel this throbbing in my head. “So, where is here and why am I here?” Nick muttered.

  “Here is Palermo. You’re here because a special friend of our boss asked us to bring you here,” Tony replied.

  “Great. I’ve pissed off somebody with connections,” Nick mumbled.

  “Ah, it’s not as bad as that, Nicky,” Tony replied. “We work for a much bigger organization than that, probably more powerful too, and we got specific instructions not to hurt you.”

  “Yeah,” Nick responded, massaging the back of his neck and temples. “Too late for that.”

  “Ah, well, you know how it is; wanting you to cooperate and come along without a fight and all that.” Tony let go of a hearty laugh.

  Great! A cheerful captor. Probably gets a real kick out of knocking people out and carrying them away in sacks.

  “Maybe you’ll feel better after a shower, eh?” Tony nodded toward Ricky. “Get him a towel and show him where the shower is. There’s no point in lettin’ the man suffer now he’s awake.”

  Ricky grunted as he got up from the chair he’d been occupying in the corner while he watched Nick sleep. “Come on, Nicky, Tony’s right. You’re gonna feel better and then you can eat somethin’.”

  “The marinara needs to simmer a little longer anyway and I need to chop up the arugula and tomatoes. Some people just make it with lemon, olive oil and parmigiano, but Ricky and I love tomatoes.”

  Great. Check out Martha Stewart over here. Nick struggled to turn himself so that his feet were on the floor. He wasn’t going to be rushing anywhere, but the shower and the promise of a hot meal were pretty tempting.