The French balcony doors opened inward with a muffled click. Two men stepped in from the rain, soles squeaking ever so softly on the tiled floor. Dressed in black from head to toe, they became one with the darkness inside the house. Only the tan skin around their narrowed eyes was visible through the holes in their ski masks, their irises black coals.
A flash of lightning through the doors behind them glinted from the pistols they held pressed to their thighs.
Thunder grumbled as they passed through the formal living room. When it faded, there was only the timpani of raindrops on the ceramic-tiled roof.
The man was supposed to be expecting them. There should have been a light on somewhere in the house, yet even the foyer had been dark through the front windows. Of course, the man had also expected them to ring the bell, not pick the lock and sneak in through the back.
So where was he?
They passed from one room to the next. The kitchen was deserted, the pantry empty. Only the dining room showed signs of recent habitation: a broken bottle on the floor and a demolished cell phone on the table next to a glass ashtray brimming with ashes. They followed the hallway past a bathroom and a vacant guest bedroom to the open door at the end of the corridor.
The scent of cordite ushered them into a study that contained a much less pleasant aroma.
A desk chair lay toppled on its side, its occupant sprawled on the ground. The hardwood floor was sticky with a black amoeba of blood, centered around the man's head, the back of which was a ruined crater of bone fragments and singed hair. Gray matter bloomed through the hole, a sickly flower of convolutions.
Both men looked at the wall to their right, where spatters of blood and brain chunks surrounded a deep hole in the cracked plaster.
The man had saved them a good deal of effort, but he had also robbed them of the little bit of enjoyment they were ever allowed to derive from their work.
Their employer wanted the golden artifact. He was just unwilling to pay such an exorbitant cost for its acquisition. Granted, he would have easily been able to turn around and sell it for twice what he paid, but why narrow the margin if he didn't absolutely have to? Their services came at a fraction of that cost, and their employer did have a reputation to uphold after all.
Besides, the man who had approached them had been an amateur. A greedy little Anglo.
They approached the corpse. The man clearly wore the headdress. Gold glimmered under his face, and the strap he had used to hold it in place was still around the back below the self-inflicted wound. They rolled him over with gloved hands and stared down at the sad sack of flesh.
The man's mouth hung open. His pupils were fixed and dilated. Trails of dried blood coiled around his eyebrows and nose. One of his cheeks was crusted with it from lying in the puddle. And the golden headdress covering his forehead---
'Son of a bitch,' the man said in Korean. 'It's useless to us now.'
The pounded gold was scorched and warped around the hole where the bullet had entered just underneath the inset chrysocolla eyes. There was no way they would be able to sell an ancient artifact scarred by a bullet hole. The best they could hope for now was to melt it down and sell it as bullion for next to nothing.
And considering it was covered in blood...
They had been double-crossed in the act of double-crossing, which was probably what they should have expected from the start, especially knowing that the dead man at their feet was an American politician.
Chapter Fifteen
I
Blackness bled into a pale red glare through her eyelids, and consciousness returned with a fit of shivers. Sam struggled to open her eyes, but barely managed a crack through which she saw glistening mud and flattened grasses. Her right arm was pinned beneath her in the muck. The current tugged at her legs. She retched and vomited a wash of vile fluids into a puddle against the side of her face and nose. Pain pierced through the fugue and she started to cry.
She pushed herself up to all fours on shaking arms, filthy strands of hair hanging over her face, and crawled out of the stream onto the bank. With a groan, she rolled over onto her rear end and propped herself up on her elbows.
The storm had finally abated. Droplets still fell from the dense canopy, glimmering with the pink light of dawn. Through the branches she could see a sliver of blue sky.
How long had she been unconscious? The last thing she remembered was going over the falls and then a sudden rush of darkness when she hit the water. How far had she traveled?
She gasped and bolted upright.
Where was Merritt?
She fought through the pain to stand, swaying as though acted upon by a ferocious gale that only she could feel.
'Merritt?' she whimpered.
She stumbled along the shoreline through waterlogged ferns and tangles of reeds. Nothing looked familiar. It could have been any section of the jungle, every section.
'Merritt!' she screamed.
Several times, she tripped and fell, but managed to rise to her feet again. She screamed her throat raw as she followed the river, peering frantically through groves of trees connected by vines and blooming with epiphytes, scouring the surface of the water for any sign of a body pinned against a rock or crumpled near the bank.
'Merritt!'
Sam crashed through a wall of shrubs and clapped her hand over her mouth.
There was a body, facedown on the muddy bank in a clump of cattails. She ran toward it, tears streaming from her eyes, and fell to her knees beside its hip.
She reached toward it, then recoiled. A sob made her whole body shudder. Gathering her courage, she slid her trembling hands under its shoulder and rolled it onto its side.
Galen stared back at her, his face a mask of mud, his mouth packed with sludge.
She jerked her hands away and he fell back onto his chest.
Rocking back, she screamed up into the sky.
'What's all the commotion about?'
She turned toward the sound of the voice. Merritt leaned against the broad trunk of a Brazil nut tree, soaked to the bone, clothes in tatters. He appeared one step shy of death.
He offered that cocky, lopsided smile.
Sam leapt up from the ground and ran to him. She threw herself into his arms so hard she nearly knocked both of them down.
'I thought you were...Galen...' she stammered.
An avian shriek from above them.
They both flinched as a dark shape swooped through the branches and alighted on the bank.
A tall bird with a broad black body and a ring of white feathers around its bald head hopped across the mud and up onto Galen's prone form. The fringe of rubbery flesh above its ivory beak jiggled.
It seemed a fitting tribute, to in death continue the work to which Galen had devoted his life.
