Treasure

by K. T. Tomb

  A week after that, Oscar, Sirita and a wheelchair bound Mark attended the memorial of the thirty-six FBI agents who had died when the building had been torched.

  Anthony Stewart was not mentioned.

  ***

  Somewhere outside of Deadhorse, Alaska

  Chyna woke up in a haze of sweat and tears.

  Her room in the cabin was still dark, though she could see light barely starting to color the sky orange. Another night had passed, thankfully without those recurring dreams that consisted of a beautiful city with intimate courtyards and jasmine on the breeze and white, pristine ivory with intricate carving. Chyna could handle the seclusion she was living in right now, but the dreams... they haunted her like the ghosts of a past she desperately wanted to escape. They chased her around when she only wanted to curl up in a corner and cry. They focused a glaring limelight on her, when all she wanted was to disappear into darkness. They made her remember, when all she wanted to do was forget.

  But how did one erase fifteen years from memory? All the good times… in the cafeteria at Quantico; her father’s library; silent, sensual nights spent on the banks of the Nile; the peace and calm being out in the middle of the ocean; Paris at sunset.

  Chyna turned in her bed, shaking her head at the errant thoughts that had somehow found their way back in. If she wanted to get through today, she needed to get herself under control, however hard it might seem.

  She kept things simple out there in the wilderness, sticking to the most mundane routine she could devise. She got up, brushed and bathed, dressed and ate and flopped in front of the TV, trying to pass the day. News was out of the question, as were romantic comedies. She resorted to watching reruns of the Simpsons and Family Guy. Other cartoons made their appearance once in a while. Eventually, she would have lunch and watch some more TV. By the time the sun set, her mind was effectively buzzing with chatter from Rocko’s Modern Life and Recess. She gladly fell into the bed at night with a thump, and that was all she needed to lull her into another fit of restless sleep.

  For one more night, Chyna Stone was effectively away from—and dead to—the world.

  ***

  Anchorage, Alaska

  He was determined to spend all of his time off the radar keeping a tab on how she was doing. The way everything had gone down in Europe had almost killed her…Hell, he had almost killed. No, he would never have been able to go that far. He had trusted that she would take control of the situation, despite the depth betrayal she was being faced with, and she had. She had handled herself like the indomitable woman he had loved for almost fifteen years. She hadn’t let him down.

  She had abandoned everything, everyone and secluded herself in the wilderness of the Alaskan tundra. He knew Riva’s camp well. He also knew that she had gone to the best person for help. Riva knew what she was going through. She’d had a similar experience in Israel when her own army had abandoned her and left her in the hands of Hamas after the failed assassination attempt of Khaled Mashal. She had come out on the other side a different woman, a dead woman really, and had left the Middle East to live a free life in the snowy wilderness. She had lost a lot in captivity but the fact that Mossad thought she was dead had emancipated her from their ranks. Riva understood what Chyna was going through and she could help her.

  He wanted so badly to leave a note on her window, step out from behind a tree and wave as she went past on the dogsled, but he couldn’t. The operation was nowhere close to completion and he couldn’t rick her life and the lives of so many others just so that he could save the two of them from broken hearts. He could only hope that Riva could deliver the message without having to be too obvious. She was a military woman, after all; he was sure that subtle connotations were a way of life for her.

  He stood by the helipad watching the helicopter make its way in and thought deeply about the damage he had done to the woman he loved. He could have broken down and cried like a baby under the circumstances but the end game was what he would focus on instead. When it was all over and all the cards were on the table, Chyna would see what he had done and why he’d had to do it. Whether she accepted it, whether she forgave him, whether she could love him again…only time would tell.

  ***

  Somewhere outside of Deadhorse, Alaska

  She drifted in and out sleep until her alarm clock screeched in her ear. She hated the thing, but knew she would never get out of bed if not for its insistence and today was the day she would stop the mourning.

  Today would be different…

  She drank three cups of the hot, black coffee that sat brewing on the kitchen counter as she dressed in her snow camo and pulled on her hunting boots. An hour later, with a compound bow and arrows slung across her back and her AR rifle slung over her shoulder, she mounted the snow mobile parked outside the cabin and rode across the valley toward the base camp.

  As she approached the cluster of log buildings, she could see Rivka Ibrahim bringing out her dogs one by one and hooking them up to the sled line. Chyna parked the snowmobile under the shelter of the utility shed and went to help her friend bring out the lead dogs.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this, mamele?” Rivka asked, taking a good look at Chyna’s face.

  “Don’t give me any of your sentimental schmegegge!” Chyna retorted. “It’s time to get back to life and I’ve never felt more alive than I did in the moments that I’ve spent taking one.”

  “That’s a little morbid for you, Chyna. You were always a conscientious hunter, no matter what, or who, you were hunting.”

  “Maybe that was my mistake all along, Rivvi. Maybe, if I had learnt all those years ago in Israel to care as little as my platoon members did, I would have been as successful at the job as they were.”

  “Now who’s talking schmegegge? It’s always been your heart that singled you out from the conformist soldier and it’s what lead you back to your real love, your true calling. Look what you did with Found History in those few short years. Don’t you want to get back there?”

  “I do Rivvi; that’s why I got out of bed finally.”

  “It's good.”

  “I know it is.”

  “And it's time.”

  “Yeah, it is. Let’s go shoot some moose.”

  The End

  Chyna Stone returns in:

  The Rosary Riddle

  Return to the Table of Contents

  THE ROSARY RIDDLE

  by

  K.T. TOMB

  A Chyna Stone Adventure #7

  The Rosary Riddle

  Published by K.T. Tomb

  Copyright © 2015 by K.T. Tomb

  All rights reserved.

  The Rosary Riddle

  Prologue

  RSS feed. Lana Ambrose, 2014

  The Queen: Isabella, ‘The Catholic’ of Castile and Leon was born on April 22, 1451, at Madrigal de las Altas Torres, to King Juan II and Queen Isabella of Castile. King Juan had ascended the throne when he was only 14 in 1419. His mother and his uncle, King Ferdinand I of Aragon, had both acted as regents during his teenage years. His first wife, Maria of Aragon, produced a male heir, Enrique, born in 1425, before she died in 1445. King Juan took on a second wife, Isabella, a bride sent from Portugal, in 1447, suggested by his trusted confidant, Don Álvaro de Luna. Although Juan was nearly 15 years older than Isabella, the two were a faithful and loving couple, and produced two children: Isabella, and a boy, Alfonso, born in 1453. Isabella saw Juan as controlled by Luna, and she urged his independence. Juan listened to his wife and finding Luna suspicious, had him executed the same year of Alfonos’s birth. A year after Alfonso’s birth, King Juan died at the age of 49, supposedly overcome by grief of losing Luna. Enrique was crowned King of Castile, and two years later he married the sister of King Alfonso V of Portugal, Juana, in May of 1445.

  Chapter One

  “Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern your
self not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.” —Pope John XXIII

  Chyna Stone had never gotten along with God.

  Although an archaeologist by profession and used to dealing with the remnants of the religious pasts and sentiments of civilizations, she had never felt any direct affinity with the entity referred to as God. He was, for her, an idea that provided balance to the imbalanced, light to the darkened, and comfort to the lonely. He had always been a question of belief in her mind, a chimera of an omnipresent, omnipotent entity that she found hard to believe in. On that note, she was thankful for the secular surroundings passing through the streets of Geneva in her car; she was finding herself at war between the believer and the skeptical parts of her ever since what had happened in Lithuania.

  For the short time they had been established there, Istanbul had become a home to her. Everything she had seen in her future had been based on her new life there. She was used to waking up to its sun and going to sleep staring at the skyline of the city. She had flat out refused to go back to Turkey when the news had come concerning the destruction of the FBI home offices there. Thirty-six agents had lost their lives that day.

  Everything had changed and it was as ruined for her as her heart and her dreams of the future. The bustling shops might have been on fire, and the beautiful, charming Hagia Sophia might have been the carcass of the time it was a remnant of. The sun burned through her skin, the sky darkened her eyes more than they already were. Though she was stubbornly hanging onto her illusion of self-sufficiency, the light truly had gone out of Chyna Stone’s life and had been replaced by mistrust, anger and regret. Things she abhorred with all her being and yet found herself completely consumed by.

  Anthony Stewart was dead to her, or at least that was the little lie she held on to. All she wanted to do was to delete him from her mind; a dark part of a life that could have been. What was there that she could do to erase fifteen years of her life with Tony, from the minute they first talked in the cafeteria at Quantico to Dresden, where she sat with Mark bleeding in her arms; and a smug Tony circling her like a vulture would a carrion corpse.

  Chyna Stone had been a strong woman in every sense of the word. She was tenacious, adventurous, eager, and vibrant with the necessary skills to bring down a mammoth. Now, she felt weaker than ever; emotionally more than physically. She felt as if she crossed a void just trying to get back to the normal pace that she was used to. Even then, nothing was right, nothing quite fit. The air sat bitter in her lungs, and her eyes itched and reddened unbidden.

  When she arrived, Chyna noted that the house was quite different from the rendezvous points that she was used to occupying with the Found History team.

  She thanked Lana mentally for not going overboard with the accommodations which she had secured and looked with hope at the apartment building. Set in the heart of the city with bustling crowds, it provided the perfect anonymity Chyna craved since Lithuania. Maybe the busy environment would be just what she needed. She might be alone in love, but she knew she would never be alone in life with the people waiting for her inside that building. Her surrogate family, she had discovered, meant more to her than the partnership she had lost.

  She parked the black, armored Range Rover in a vacant spot and made her way inside. No one stopped her; clearly, the concierge team had been informed that she was coming. Security, however, was tighter than ever. Her team had the top floor to themselves, with only the private elevator to reach it, for which only Chyna and her team had keycards. Anybody else was required to check in with the front desk concierge and await clearance.

  Chyna shouldered her small duffel bag and walked uncomfortably toward the elevator under the impassive gaze of the moderately attractive woman behind the front desk. Even after two months of complete solitude in Alaska and she was still paranoid; a nightmarish thought formed in her mind as she swiped the card and the elevator began its journey. Tony was still out there somewhere. He had inside information on just about everything that she had worked on, every secret she had exposed and artifact she had recovered. Hell, he had provided her with indispensable back up on almost all of her missions. It was only a matter of time before the proverbial shit hit the fan.

  The ping of the elevator brought her back to the real world. She hoisted the slumping bag back onto her shoulder, took the card and swiped it at the only door in the hallway, and turned the handle to open it. She held her breath as she entered but exhaled deeply at the sight of them all. She had not anticipated the relief she would feel seeing her team together again.

  “Chyna.” Oscar was the first one to rush over to her. She was engulfed in his friendly arms, and she nearly choked up at the thought of how much she had missed him.

  “Hey, Oscar.” She smiled at him.

  “How’ve you been?”

  She could see the wariness in his eyes, as if she might break and begin sobbing like a little girl right there. Was she so fragile in appearance?

  “Good, good. You?” She nodded.

  “Better now that you are here. You’ll be pleased to hear that we have beaucoup work ahead of us.” He waved an arm to draw her attention to a table brimming with folders and laptops. Clearly the team had not been idle in her absence. She looked over his shoulder to see Lana and Sirita. She didn’t wait for them to come to her, but crossed the room and wrapped them both in a firm embrace; too firm for Sirita, who gasped slightly under the pressure of Chyna’s biceps. Chyna murmured an apology and relaxed her arms slightly to allow Sirita to draw breath. There was a moment of silence as the three of them hugged. Chyna felt great affection toward her girls, the tacit camaraderie that negated the need for words to describe emotions, fears, pain. When one of them hurt, all of them did, and Chyna’s pain was still evident.

  “How’s married life treating you, Lana?” Chyna smiled at her friend, and tried to put in some semblance of true joy into it.

  “It’s suiting me, to say the least.” Lana smiled at Chyna, but she didn’t go further despite her clear ebullience; any talk about the course of true love was likely to be the last thing Chyna needed. Sirita broke the potentially uncomfortable moment by hugging Chyna a second time, but with her arms over her employer’s.

  “I missed you so much, Chyna.” Chyna returned the embrace with warmth, or at least as much as she could summon.

  “I believe I get the same reception?” A voice boomed from the corner of the room, and she raised her head from Sirita’s shoulder to see the only man she had been eager to see for the past two months; misandry being an easier path to tread than acceptance.

  Mark Gunnar seemed like he had aged a decade since she last saw him. His blond hair, which had once been kept in flowing locks, was shorter and cropped close to his head. The blue of his eyes was more ice than azure, and he still winced when he raised his left arm. The doctors had been able to restore the use of it, but the same couldn’t be said for its efficiency. In time, full function would return, but it would be a slow, painful process. Chyna noticed he was walking with a cane and a huge medical boot on his right foot. She had heard about his fall down several flights of stairs after he had failed to grasp a railing with his injured hand. His heel and ankle had been shattered.

  Chyna felt that she had some kind of silent bond with Mark after all that had happened to them, and although Mark would never admit it, the feeling was clearly mutual. Friendships made in crisis situations had a habit of forming those kinds of links and Chyna was reminded of the similar bond she had once shared with Tony. Mark had seen the worst of the betrayals committed in that church. The memories of it sent pangs of guilt due to her own self-absorption running up Chyna’s spine. Her emotions had been hurt, tortured even, but he had received much more tangible and more permanent wounds.

  “Mark.” Her smile softened and held genuine depth. She was truly happy to see him.

  “Chyna.” He walked over to where she was and engulfed her in his arms, and she felt her first f
eel of normalcy and warmth since she had stepped foot in Geneva.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Ready for a marathon,” he beamed, tapping the cane on his leg and wincing slightly with an exaggerated hop. He was actually joking with her, despite everything that she had gotten him into in Dresden. Finally, she had a genuine feeling, a strange gurgling in her throat. It was a laugh, something which had been absent for a very long time.

  She didn’t need anything more than that, at least for the moment. Sirita picked up her bag and showed her to her bedroom. She took some time to freshen up and then strolled back into the living area of the apartment.

  “I think we need to talk about Tony,” Chyna announced abruptly. The others were in the middle of a discussion led by Lana about an email request which Sandra had forwarded from the New York office, but Chyna found she couldn’t concentrate without getting what was troubling her off her chest. Lana stood open mouthed, cut off mid-sentence. There was dead silence in the room. Everyone had turned to stare at her like she was going to explode. Chyna ignored the looks and pressed forward.

  “I think he has something else up his sleeve. He is carrying out some sort of a plan, and we need to know what it is,” she said.

  Oscar began to speak, but she silenced him with a wave of her hand.

  “No one keeps up pretenses for that long unless they have an elaborate plan, Oscar. There must be something else, something we’re missing,” she said.

  “Chyna, listen to me,” Oscar said, and this time he closed the laptop and stood up. “We should forget them.”

  “Forget who?” Chyna said, with a raised eyebrow.