Order of the Black Sun Box Set 3 Read online

  Eventually Agatha became a librarian, but not just any librarian, forgotten among towers of literature and the dusky light of archival chambers. She did show some ambition in becoming more than what her antisocial psychology dictated. Agatha had a side career as a consultant for various wealthy clients, mainly those invested in arcane books and the inevitable occult pursuits that came with the gruesome trappings of antique literature.

  To people like them the latter was a novelty, nothing more than a prize to an esoteric pissing contest. None of her clients ever showed genuine appreciation for the Old World or the scribes that recorded the events that new eyes would never see. It pissed her off, but she could not refuse the occasional six-figure remuneration. That would just be idiocy, no matter how she yearned to stay true to the historical significance of the books and locations she so freely led them to.

  Dave Purdue looked at the problem his annoying sister had pointed out.

  How the hell did I miss that? And why the hell did she have to be here to show me? He thought as he fixed the paradigm, surreptitiously checking her response with every redirection he implemented on the hologram. Her expression was empty and her eyes hardly moved as he completed the circuit. That was a good sign. If she had sighed, shrugged, or even blinked he would know that she disproved of what he was doing—in other words—it meant that she would be sanctimoniously patronizing him in her own special way.

  “Happy?” he dared ask, just waiting for her to find another error, but she simply nodded. Finally her eyes moved like a normal person’s and Purdue could feel the strain abate.

  “Now, to what do I owe this intrusion?” he asked as he went to pull another bottle of liquor from his travel bag.

  “Ah, polite as always,” she sighed. “My intrusion is very well-founded, I assure you, David.”

  He poured himself a glass of whiskey and held up the bottle to her.

  “Yes, thanks. I’ll have some,” she replied and sat forward, pushing her palms together and slipping them between her thighs. “I need your help with something.”

  Her words fell like shattered glass in his ears. By the crackle of the fire Purdue turned to face his sister, ashen with disbelief.

  “Oh, come now, with the melodrama,” she said impatiently. “Is it that inconceivable that I might need your assistance?”

  “No, not at all,” Purdue answered as he gave her a glass of liquid trouble. “It is inconceivable that you would deign to ask.”

  4

  Sam hid his memoirs from Nina. He did not want her to know such deeply personal things about him, although he did not know why. It was clear that she knew just about everything about his fiancé’s gruesome death at the hands of the international arms ring, run by the best friend of Nina’s ex. Many times before Nina had lamented her involvement with the callous man who stopped Sam’s dreams in their bloody tracks when he brutally killed the love of his life. Still, his notes contained a certain subliminal hurt he did not want Nina to see if she read them, and so he elected to keep them from her.

  But now that they were waiting for Alexandr to return with word on how to join the ranks of the renegades, Sam realized that this period of boredom in the Russian countryside north of the border would be an opportune time to further his memoirs.

  Alexandr had gone bravely, perhaps foolishly, to speak to them. He would offer his help, along with Sam Cleave and Dr. Nina Gould, to stand against the Order of the Black Sun and eventually find a way to crush the organization once and for all. If the rebels had not yet gotten word of the delayed official ejection of the leader of the Black Sun, Alexandr planned to use this momentary weakness in the order’s operations to introduce an effective strike.

  Nina was helping Katya in the kitchen, learning how to make pelmeni.

  Every now and then, while Sam was scribbling his thoughts and painful reminiscences on his dog-eared notepad, he would hear the two women burst out in shrieking laughter. This would be followed by an admission of some ineptitude by Nina, while Katya would negate her embarrassing mistakes.

  “You are very good ...” Katya hollered, falling into her chair with a hearty chuckle, “for a Scot! But we’ll make a Russian out of you yet!”

  “I doubt it, Katya. I’d offer to teach you to make highland haggis, but truthfully, I also suck at that!” Nina spurted out with a rowdy laugh.

  This is all sounding a bit too festive, thought Sam, and he closed the cover of the notepad and tucked it safely into his satchel with his pen. He rose from his wooden single bed in the spare room he shared with Alexandr and walked along the wide hallway and down the short staircase toward the sunken kitchen where the females were making a hellish noise.

  “Look! Sam! I made ... uh ... I made a whole batch of ... of many? Many what...?” she frowned and gestured for Katya to help her out.

  “Pelmeni!” Katya cried gleefully, motioning with her hands over the mess of dough and spilled meat on the wooden kitchen table.

  “That many!” Nina giggled.

  “Are you lassies inebriated, per chance?” he asked, amused at the two beautiful women he was blessed to be stranded with in the middle of nowhere. Had he been a more cavalier man with iniquitous notions there might well have been a dirty thought in there, but being Sam, he just plopped down in a chair and watched Nina trying to cut the dough properly.

  “We are not intoxicated, Mr. Cleave. We are just tipsy,” Katya explained as she filled a clean jam jar half way with an ominous clear liquid and passed it on to Sam.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed, running his hands through his thick dark hair, “I’ve seen that stuff before and it is what us Cleaves would call a shortcut to Slosherville. Bit early for me, thank you.”

  “Early?” Katya asked, honestly bewildered. “Sam, it is an hour short of midnight!”

  “Aye! We started drinking at 7 p.m. already,” Nina chimed in, her hands splattered with the pork, onions, garlic, and parsley she had been mincing to fill the dough pockets with.

  “Don’t be daft!” Sam marveled as he rushed to the small window and saw that the sky was way too light for what his watch indicated. “I thought it was much earlier and I was just being a lazy sod for wanting to hit the bed.”

  He looked at the two women, as different as day and night, but both as beautiful as the other.

  Katya looked exactly as Sam first imagined at the sound of her name just before they first arrived at the farm. With big blue a dainty snub nose and a sultry mouth of full lips she looked stereotypically Russian. Her cheekbones were so pronounced that they cast shadows on her face under the sharp light above her and her straight blonde hair fell wildly about her shoulders and brow.

  Lean and tall, she towered over the petite frame of the dark-eyed Scottish lass next to her. Nina finally had her own hair color back, the rich, dark brown he so loved to drown his face in when she mounted him back in Belgium. Sam was relieved to see that her pallid gauntness had worn off and she once again boasted her dainty curves and flushing skin. The time away from the talons of the Black Sun had healed her quite a bit.

  Maybe it was the country air far, far away from Bruges that soothed the both of them, but they felt more exhilarated and rested in their raw Russian surroundings. Things were far simpler here and the people were friendly, but tough. This was not a land for prudence or sensitivity and Sam liked it.

  Looking out over the flat plains growing violet in the dying light, and listening to the merriment in the house with him, Sam could not help but wonder how Alexandr was faring.

  All Sam and Nina could hope for was that the insurgents on the mountain would trust Alexandr and not mistake him for a spy.

  “You are a spy!” the skinny Italian rebel shouted as he paced patiently in circles around Alexandr’s strung-up body. It gave the Russian a terrible headache, which was only exacerbated by his upside-down position over the tub of water.

  “Listen to me!” Alexandr implored for the umpteenth time. His skull was bursting with the flooding blood that ran
to the back of his eyeballs, and his ankles gradually threatened to dislocate under the weight of his body that hung from a crude rope and chains that were fixed to the stone roof of the chamber. “If I was a spy, why de fuck would I walk right in here? Why would I come here with information that would help your cause, you stupid fucking wop?”

  The Italian did not appreciate Alexandr’s racial slur and without retort just sank the Russian’s head back into the tub of freezing water, so that only his jaw remained above. His colleagues sniggered at the Russian’s reaction while they sat drinking near the padlocked gate.

  “You better know what to say when you come back up, stronzo! Your life depends on this wop, and this interrogation is already cutting into my drinking time. I’ll fucking leave you to drown, I will!” he shouted, kneeling next to the tub so that the submerged Russian would hear him.

  “Carlo, what is the problem?” Bern called from the corridor he was approaching from. “You sound unnaturally high-strung,” the captain said plainly. His voice grew louder as he drew nearer to the arched entrance. The other two men stood at attention at the sight of the leader, but he waved dismissively for them to relax.

  “Capitano, this idiot says he has information to help us, but he has only Russian papers that look fake to us,” the Italian reported as Bern unlocked the sturdy black gates to enter the interrogation area, more aptly—the torture chamber.

  “Where are his papers?” the captain asked, and Carlo pointed to the chair where he first had the Russian tied. Bern had a look at the well-forged border pass and identification. Without peeling his eyes from the Russian writing, he calmly said, “Carlo.”

  “Si, Capitano?”

  “The Russian is drowning, Carlo. Let him up.”

  “Oh, mio Dio!” Carlo jumped and pulled the choking Alexandr up. The soaked Russian gasped desperately for air, coughing profusely before he vomited out the excess water in his body.

  “Alexandr Arichenkov. Is that your real name?” Bern asked their guest, but then realized the man’s name was inconsequential to their prodding. “That doesn’t matter, I suppose. You’ll be dead before midnight.”

  Alexandr knew that he had to state his case to the superior before being left to the devices of his attention-deficit stricken tormentor. The water still pooled in the back of his nostrils and burned in his nasal passages, making it nearly impossible to speak, but his life depended on it.

  “Captain, I am not a spy. I wish to join your company, that is all,” the wiry Russian rambled.

  Bern turned on his heel. “And why would you want to do that?” He signaled for Carlo to introduce the subject to the bottom of the tub.

  “Renata is being deposed!” Alexandr screamed. “I was part of a plot to overthrow the leadership of the Order of the Black Sun and we succeeded ... sort of.”

  Bern raised his hand to stop the Italian from executing his last order.

  “You don’t have to torture me, captain. I am here to freely give you the information!” the Russian explained. Carlo stared him down hatefully, his hand twitching on the pulley that controlled Alexandr’s fate.

  “In return for this information, you want ...?” Bern asked. “You want to join us?”

  “Da! Da! Myself and two friends, who are also running from the Black Sun. We know how to locate the higher order members and that is why they are trying to kill us, captain,” he stuttered through the discomfort of shaping proper words while the water in his throat still impeded his breathing.

  “And where are these two friends of yours? Are they hiding, Mr. Arichenkov?” Bern asked sarcastically.

  “I came alone, captain, to see if the rumors were true about your organization; if you were still in action,” Alexandr babbled quickly. Bern knelt next to him and sized him up. The Russian was middle-aged, short, and skinny. A scar on the left side of his face gave him the look of a fighter. The stern captain ran his index finger over the scar, now purple on the wan wetness of the Russian’s frigid skin.

  “I trust this was not from a car crash or something?” he asked Alexandr. The drenched man’s pale blue eyes were bloodshot from the pressure and the near drowning as he looked at the captain and shook his head.

  “I have many scars, captain. And not one came from a crash, I assure you of that. Bullets, shrapnel, and women with hot tempers, mostly,” Alexandr answered through quivering blue lips.

  “Women. Ah yes, I like that. You sound like my kind of man, friend,” Bern smiled and cast a silent, but weighty glare up at Carlo that unsettled Alexandr just a little. “All right, Mr. Arichenkov, I will give you the benefit of the doubt. I mean, we’re not fucking animals!” he growled at the amusement of the men present and they roared savagely in agreement.

  And Mother Russia welcomes you, Alexandr, his inner voice echoed in his head. I hope I don’t wake up dead.

  As the relief of not dying overwhelmed Alexandr in the din of the bestial bunch’s howling and cheering, his body went limp and he fell into oblivion.

  5

  Just short of 2 a.m. Katya slammed her cards on the table.

  “I fold.”

  Nina scoffed in jest as she clutched her hand, making sure Sam could not read her poker face.

  “Come on. Whip it out, Sam!” Nina laughed as Katya kissed her on the cheek. Then the Russian beauty kissed Sam on his crown and slurred, “I’m going to bed. Sergei will be back soon from his shift.”

  “Good night, Katya,” Sam smiled as he spread his hand on the table. “Two pairs.”

  “Ha!” Nina exclaimed. “Full house. Pay up, partner.”

  “Shit,” Sam muttered and took off his left sock. Strip poker sounded better before he learned that the ladies were better at it than he first reckoned when he agreed to play. In his scants and one lone sock he shivered at the table.

  “You know that is cheating and we only allowed it because you are drunk. It would be terrible of us to take advantage of you, eh?” she lectured him, barely holding her own. Sam wanted to laugh, but he did not want to spoil the moment and put on his best pitiful slouch.

  “Thanks for being so accommodating. There are so few decent women left on this planet these days,” he said in utter amusement.

  “That’s right,” Nina agreed, emptying the second jar of Samogon into her glass. But only a few drops, it just splashed unceremoniously onto the base of the tumbler, proving to her dismay that the fun and games for the night had come to a blunt conclusion. “And I’m only letting you cheat because I love you.”

  God, I wish she was sober when she said that, Sam wished, as Nina cupped his face in her hands. The soft scent of her perfume mingled with the noxious onslaught of distilled spirits as she planted a soft kiss on his lips.

  “Come sleep with me,” she said, and led the staggering Scotsman in the Y-fronts from the kitchen while he laboriously collected his clothes on the way out. Sam said nothing. He thought he would accompany Nina to her room to make sure she did not take a nasty tumble from the stairs, but when they came into her tiny room around the corner from the others, she closed the door behind them.

  “What are you doing?” she asked when she saw Sam trying to get his jeans on, shirt thrown over his shoulder.

  “I’m fucking freezing, Nina. Just give me a sec,” he replied, frantically struggling with his zipper.

  Nina’s slender fingers locked over his fumbling hands. She slipped her hand into his jeans, prying apart the copper teeth of the zipper again. Sam froze, enchanted by her touch. Inadvertently he closed his eyes and felt her warm, soft lips press against his.

  She pushed him back on her bed and doused the light.

  “Nina, you’re drunk, lassie. Don’t do something you’re going to regret in the morning,” he warned simply as a disclaimer. In actual fact he wanted her so badly he could burst.

  “The only thing I’ll regret is that I have to do this quietly,” she said, sounding remarkably sober in the darkness.

  He could hear her boots being flung aside and then t
he chair shifting to the left of the bed. Sam could feel her pouncing on him, clumsily crushing his privates under her weight.

  “Careful!” he groaned. “I need those!”

  “So do I,” she said, kissing him passionately before he could respond. Sam tried not to lose his composure when Nina laid her small body on his, breathing in his neck. He gasped as her warm, bare skin touched his, still cold from playing poker for two hours without a shirt on.

  “You know I love you, right?” she whispered. Sam’s eyes rolled back in reluctant ecstasy at hearing those words, but the alcohol that came with every syllable ruined his bliss.

  “Aye, I know,” he appeased her.

  Selfishly, Sam allowed her to have free reign of his body. He knew he would feel guilty about it later, but for now he told himself he was affording her what she wanted; that he was only at the fortunate receiving end of her passion.

  Katya was up. Her door creaked open gently when Nina started to moan and Sam tried to silence Nina with deep kisses, hoping they were not disturbing their hostess. But among it all he could not care less if Katya came into the room, switched on the light, and offered to join in—as long as Nina kept at what she was doing. His hands caressed her back and he traced a scar or two, each of which he could remember the cause of.

  He was there. Since they had met, both their lives had spiraled uncontrollably down a dark infinite well of danger and Sam wondered when they were going to hit the hard, waterless base. But he did not care, as long as they crashed together. Somehow, with Nina at his side, Sam felt safe, even in the claws of death. And now, with her in his embrace right here, her attention momentarily on him and him alone; he felt invincible, untouchable.

  Katya’s footsteps came from the kitchen where she unlocked the door for Sergei. After a brief pause Sam could hear them having a muffled conversation he would not be able to understand anyway. He was grateful for their chat in the kitchen so that he could enjoy Nina’s dampened cries of pleasure as he drove her up against the wall under the window.