Order of the Black Sun Box Set 3 Read online

  It had been two days since Nina, Sam, and Alexandr crossed the continent by train and finally reached Novosibirsk, from where Alexandr landed them all a lift on a less than roadworthy rental car that brought them to the Strenkov farm on the Argut River, just north of the border between Mongolia and Russia.

  Since Purdue had abandoned their company in Belgium, Sam and Nina were now at the mercy of Alexandr’s expertise and loyalty, thus far the most trustworthy of all the untrustworthy people they had been dealing with of late. That night when Purdue disappeared with the captive Renata of the Order of the Black Sun, Nina had given Sam his nanite cocktail, same as hers, given by Purdue to alleviate the two of them of the Black Sun’s all-seeing eye. That was, as far as she hoped, as forthcoming as he could be, given she had chosen Sam Cleave’s affections over Dave Purdue’s wealth. With his departure he had assured her that he was far from relinquishing his claim on her heart, regardless of the fact that it was not his. But such were the ways of the millionaire playboy and she had to give him that—he was as relentless in his love as he was in his adventures.

  Now they were lying low in Russia while they plotted their next move to gain access to the renegade complex where the rivals of the Black Sun held their fort. It would be a very dangerous and trying task, as they no longer had their bargaining chip—the soon-to-be deposed Renata of the Black Sun. But still Alexandr, Sam, and Nina knew that the defector clan was their only refuge against the order’s ruthless pursuit to find and kill them.

  Even if they could persuade the leader of the rebels that they were not spies for the Renata of the order, they had no idea what the Brigade Apostate would have in mind for them to prove it. That in itself was a scary notion at best.

  The men who guarded their keep in the Mönkh Saridag, the highest peak of the Sayan Mountains, were not a bunch to be trifled with. Their reputation was well-known to Sam and Nina, as they learned during their incarceration at the Black Sun headquarters in Bruges not a fortnight before. It was still fresh in their recollection how Renata was going to send either Sam or Nina on a fatal mission to infiltrate the Brigade Apostate and steal the coveted Longinus, a weapon about which not much had been revealed. Until now they had still not ascertained if the so-called Longinus mission was a legitimate assignment or simply a ruse to sate Renata’s malicious appetite for sending her victims on cat-and-mouse excursions to make their demise more entertaining and elaborate for her amusement.

  Alexandr had gone alone on a scouting trek to see what manner of security the Brigade Apostate held at its compound. With his technical knowledge and survival training he hardly held a candle to the likes of the renegades, but he and his two companions could not hole up at Katya’s farm forever. They had to connect with the rebel group eventually; otherwise they would never be able to return to their normal lives.

  He had assured Nina and Sam that it would be better if he went alone. If, by some way, the order was still tracking the three of them, they would certainly not be looking for a solitary farmer’s hand in a banged-up LDV (light duty vehicle) on the plains of Mongolia or along a Russian river. Apart from that, he knew his homeland like the back of his hand, therefore making for faster traveling and better command of the language. If one of his colleagues were to be questioned by officials, their lack of knowledge or language could seriously impair the plan, if they did not get captured or shot.

  He drove up the desolate little gravel path that meandered toward the mountain range that marked the border and silently announced the beauty of Mongolia. The small vehicle was a battered old powder blue Tatra that creaked and squeaked with every bump and hollow the wheels navigated, provoking the rosary on the rearview mirror to swing like a holy pendulum. Only because it was dear Katya’s ride, did Alexandr tolerate the annoying clash of beading against the dashboard in the silence of the cab, otherwise he would have ripped the relic from the mirror and tossed it out the window. Besides, the landscape was godforsaken enough. A rosary would not hold any salvation for it.

  His hair was fluttering in the cold wind that rushed through his open window and the skin of his forearm was starting to burn from the chill. He swore at the stripped handle that could not wind up the glass to give him some solace from the frigid breath of the flat wasteland he traversed. Inside him a small voice reprimanded him for his ungratefulness for the fact that he was still alive after the gut-wrenching events of Belgium where his beloved Axelle was killed and he barely dodged the same fate.

  Ahead of him he could see the border post where Katya’s husband thankfully worked. Alexandr cast a quick glance at the rosary that scratched on the dashboard of the swaying vehicle and he that that was a lucky blessing too.

  “Da! Da! I know. I know, dammit,” he rasped at the swaying thing.

  The border post was nothing more than another decrepit little building, surrounded by extravagant lengths of rusty barbed wire and patrolling men with AK-47s that also had seen better times, just waiting for some action. They walked lazily here and there, some lighting smokes for their friends and others questioning the odd tourist who was trying to get through.

  Alexandr saw Sergei Strenkov among them, taking a picture with a loud Australian lady who insisted on learning to say “fuck you” in Russian. Sergei was a deeply religious man, as was his wild cat, Katya, but he humored the lady and instead taught her to say “hail, Mary,” convincing her that it was the phrase she asked for. Alexandr had to laugh and shake his head as he listened to the conversation while he waited to speak to a guard.

  “Oh, wait, Dima! I’ll take that one!” Sergei shouted at his colleague.

  “Alexandr, you should have come at night,” he spoke under his breath as he pretended to ask for his friend’s papers. Alexandr passed him his documents and replied, “I would have, but you knock off before then and I don’t trust anyone but you to know what I am going to do on the other side of this fence, see?”

  Sergei nodded. He had a thick moustache and heavy black eyebrows that made him look even more intimidating in uniform. Siberians, Sergei and Katya were childhood friends of the crazy Alexandr and spent many a night in detention because of his reckless ideas. Even then, the skinny, tough boy was a menace to anyone who strived to keep an organized and safe life and the two teenagers quickly learned that Alexandr would land them in serious trouble before long if they kept agreeing to join him on his illegal fun adventures.

  But the three remained friends even after Alexandr left to serve in the Gulf War as scout for one of the British units. His years as a scout and survival expert helped him rapidly move up in the ranks until he had become an independent contractor who quickly attained the respect of all those organizations that hired him. In the meantime Katya and Sergei had steadily moved through their respective academic lives, but lack of funding and political unrest in Moscow and Minsk, respectively, forced them both to return to Siberia where they were reunited once more, after leaving for bigger things that never transpired.

  Katya inherited her grandparents’ farm when her parents died in an explosion at the munitions factory where they worked while she was in her second year of information technology at Moscow University and she had to return to claim it before it was sold off to the state. Sergei joined her and the two had settled there. Two years later, when Alexandr the unstable was invited to their wedding, the three reacquainted themselves with one another, sharing their adventures over a few bottles of Samogon and reveled in bittersweet memories.

  Katya and Sergei found the country life nurturing and eventually became church-going citizens while their wild friend opted for a life of danger and constant change of scenery. Now he had called on their help to harbor him and two Scottish friends until he could sort things out, omitting, of course, the extent of the danger he, Sam, and Nina were really in. Kind at heart and always happy to have good company, the Strenkovs welcomed the three friends to stay for a while.

  Now it was time to do what he came to do, and Alexandr promised his childhood friends tha
t he and his companions would soon be out of their hair.

  “Pass through the left gate; that one, falling apart. The padlock is fake, Alex. Just pull the chain away and you’ll see. Then drive through to the river house, there—” he pointed to nothing in particular, “about five kilometers on. There is a ferryman, Costa. Give him some liquor or whatever you have in that flask. He is sinfully easy to bribe,” Sergei laughed, “and he’ll take you to wherever you need to go.”

  Sergei shoved his hand deep down his pocket.

  “Oh, I’ve seen that,” Alexandr jested, embarrassing his friend into a healthy blush and stupid chuckle.

  “Nyet, you idiot. Here,” Sergei gave Alexandr a broken rosary.

  “Oh, Jesus, not another one of those,” Alexandr moaned. He saw the hard look Sergei gave him for his blasphemy and lifted his hand apologetically.

  “This one is different from that one on the mirror. Listen, give this to one of the men on guard at the compound and he will take you to see one of the captains, okay?” Sergei explained.

  “Why a broken rosary?” Alexandr asked, looking thoroughly perplexed.

  “It is the symbol of the apostate. The Brigade Apostate uses it to identify one another,” his friend answered nonchalantly.

  “Wait, how did you—?”

  “Never mind, my friend. I was in the military too, you know? I’m not an idiot,” Sergei whispered.

  “I never implied that, but how the hell did you know who we wanted to see?” Alexandr asked. He wondered if Sergei was just another leg of the Black Sun spider and if he could be trusted at all. Then he thought about Sam and Nina, unsuspecting, at the homestead.

  “Listen, you show up at my house with two strangers who have practically nothing on them and no money, no clothes, fake papers... and you think I cannot see a refugee when I see one? Plus, they are with you. And you don’t keep company with safe people. Now go on. And try to be back at the farm before midnight,” Sergei said. He tapped on the roof of the wheeled junk heap and whistled at the gate guard.

  Alexandr nodded in thanks with the rosary tossed on his lap as the vehicle moved through the gates.

  3

  Purdue’s glasses reflected the electronic schematic in front of him that illuminated the dark he was sitting in. It was quiet, the dead of night in his part of the world. He missed Wrichtishousis, he missed Edinburgh and the carefree days he spent at his mansion astonishing guests and clients alike with his inventions and unparalleled genius. The attention she had given him had been so innocent compared to his obscenely impressive fortune, but he missed it. Back then, before he stepped in deep shit with the revelations on Deep Sea One and his bad choice of business partners in the desert of Parashant, life was all interesting adventure and romantic skullduggery.

  Now his wealth barely kept him alive and his shoulders were burdened with the safety of others. Try as he might, he found that it had become virtually impossible to hold everything together anymore. Nina, his beloved, recently lost ex-lover whom he intended fully to reclaim, was somewhere in Asia with the man she thinks she loves. Sam, his opponent for Nina’s affections and (let us not deny it) recent winner of such, was always there to assist Purdue in his ventures—even when unwarranted.

  His own safety was spread thin, regardless of his private security, especially now that he had temporarily brought the leadership of the Black Sun to a standstill. The council, overseers of the leadership of the order, was probably watching him and for some reason holding ranks for the moment and that made Purdue exceptionally nervous—and he was by no means a nervous man. All he could do was keeping a low profile until he had devised a plan to join Nina and take her somewhere safe until he had figured out what to do should the council act.

  His head pounded from a heavy nosebleed he had suffered a few minutes before, but he could not stop now. There was too much at stake.

  Over and over Dave Purdue redesigned the device on his holographic screen, but there was something amiss that he just could not see. His concentration was not as sharp as always, even though he had just recently come out of a nine-hour uninterrupted sleep. The headache was already present when he woke up, but that was not surprising since he all but totaled a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red by himself in front of the fire.

  “For fuck’s sake!” Purdue shouted without his voice, as not to rouse any of his neighbors, as he slammed his fists down on the desk. It was completely out of character for him to lose his cool, especially at the meager challenge of a simple electronics schematic, the likes of which he had already conquered at age fourteen. His dark demeanor and his impatience were owing to the past few days and he knew that he had to admit that leaving Nina with Sam did after all scratch at him.

  Normally his money and his charm could sway any quarry with ease and to top it all he had Nina for more than two years and yet he took it for granted and disappeared under the radar without the grace to let her know that he was alive. This sort of behavior was what he was used to, and most people accepted it as part of his eccentricity, but now he knew that it was the first hammer blow to their relationship. Resurfacing only upset her more, mainly because she knew then that he deliberately kept her in the dark and then, the deathblow, getting her involved in the most threatening confrontation with the powerful Black Sun to date.

  Purdue took off his glasses and placed them on the small barstool by his side. Closing his eyes for a moment, he pinched the bridge of his nose lightly between his thumb and index finger and tried to massage away his tangled thoughts and bring his brain back to technical mode. The night was mild, but the wind forced the dry trees to lurch out at the window and scratch like a cat trying to come in. Something was lurking in the night outside the small cabin where Purdue was resident indefinitely until he had planned his next move.

  It was difficult to discern between the relentless tapping of the gale-stirred tree branches and the fumbling of a lock pick, or the rapping of a spark plug to cut the window glass. Purdue stopped to listen. Not generally a man of intuition at all, he now found himself at the receiving end of solid acrimony, courtesy of his own emergent instinct.

  He knew better than to take a peek, so he used one of his gadgets, one not yet tested before he fled under cover of night from his mansion in Edinburgh. It was a spyglass of sorts, converted for more varied tasks than just clearing a distance to scrutinize the doings of those unaware. It contained an infrared function, complete with a red laser beam that resembled that of a task-force rifle, but this laser could slice through most surfaces within a hundred yard radius. On the flick of a switch under his thumb Purdue could set the spyglass to lock onto heat signatures, so although he could not see through walls, he would be able to detect any human body temperature on the move outside his wooden walls.

  He briskly skipped the nine steps of the wide makeshift ladder to the second floor of the cabin and tiptoed to the very edge of the floor where he could look through the narrow slit where it joined the thatch roof. With his right eye on the lens he explored the terrain directly outside the structure, slowly navigating his way from corner to corner.

  The only heat he could detect was that of the engine of his Jeep. Other than that there was no sign of any immediate threat. Perplexed, he sat there for a moment, contemplating his newfound sixth sense. He was never wrong about these things. Especially after his latest brushes with deadly enemies, he had learned to recognize impending threat.

  As Purdue made his way back down to the first floor of the cabin, he closed the hatch that led to the room above him and jumped over the last three steps. He landed hard on his feet. When he looked up a figure was sitting in his chair. Instantly he knew who it was and his heart stopped. Where did she come from?

  Her big blue eyes looked ethereal in the glare of the colorful hologram, but she looked through the diagram, straight at him. The rest of her melted into the shadows.

  “I never thought I’d see you again,” he said, failing at hiding his honest surprise.

 
“Of course, you didn’t, David. I wager that you rather wished the same, instead of counting on its actual gravity,” she said. That familiar voice felt so odd to Purdue’s ears after all this time.

  He moved closer to her, but the shadows prevailed and hid her from him. Her eyes flicked downward and combed the lines of his design.

  “Your cyclic quadrilateral is incorrect here, did you know?” she mentioned matter-of-factly. Her eyes stayed fixed on Purdue’s mistake and she remained silent, regardless of his barrage of questions on other topics, such as her presence there, until he came to correct the fault she had spotted.

  That was just typical of Agatha Purdue.

  A genius with compulsive idiosyncrasies that left her twin brother looking utterly mundane, Agatha’s personality took much getting used to. If one did not know that she had a stupefying intelligence quotient, she might well have been perceived as a lunatic of some sort. Unlike her brother’s suave application of his smarts, Agatha was borderline certifiable when she locked on to a problem that needed solving.

  And this was where the twins differed vastly. Purdue had successfully utilized his aptitude for science and technology to acquire a fortune and a reputation the likes of ancient kings among his academic peers. But Agatha was no less than a pauper compared to her brother. With her unappealing introversion to the point of being reduced to a staring freak, men just found her weird and intimidating. Her self-esteem was largely based on correcting the mistakes she found effortlessly in the work of others and this was what mainly dealt her potential a solid blow every time she tried to work in the competitive fields of physics or science.