Cash Cassidy Adventures: The Complete 5-Book Series (Plus Bonus Novels)

by K. T. Tomb

  Laura leaned back against the parapet and gazed at Cash. “We've still got the oldest part of the castle to look at. Basements; perfect place for a hidden clue.”

  Cash grumbled and let her body drop back against the wall behind her. “This was just a dumb idea. We don't even know it has anything to do with this period. It could still be anything.”

  Laura shrugged. “It would be kind of stupid not to finish this now, though. We can always make a new plan tomorrow.”

  Cash glowered at her. “Bugger off with all this making sense and stuff.”

  Laura grinned. She indicated with her head. “Let's go.”

  The dungeons were the last thing they looked at. Of course, they were the last thing they looked at, even if Cash might have preferred to start there normally. They had just followed the stream of tourists and had really just wandered around.

  But the dungeons didn’t yield anything either. They walked up again and then Laura saw something. There was something scratched on a stone in the bottom of the wall. She pointed it out to Cash. They ran toward it.

  Cash knelt down. There was a small picture of an amphora etched into the stone. And next to it was a jumble of seemingly random lines.

  Cash knelt down and ran her fingers over them. “What the hell?” she muttered.

  Laura knelt beside her. “What's going on?”

  Cash ran her fingers over the lines again. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize what was underneath her fingertips. Laura squatted beside her, looking perplexed. Suddenly Cash turned to face her, her eyes bright and her face lit up.

  “It was him!” Cash exclaimed.

  “Huh?” Laura asked, suddenly very quiet.

  Cash leapt forward and gave Laura a huge hug, rocking her back and forth in excitement. Laura jumped back in surprise. She caught herself, threw her head back and laughed like a sailor.

  “Harald!” Cash said happily. “Harald Hardrada. It was him. That's his name right there!” She squatted back down by the bit of 11th century graffiti and traced the runes out. “Haga, Ansu, Raido, Ansu, Lagu, Daga. Hotel, Alpha, Romeo, Alpha, Lima, Delta. Harald.”

  Laura smiled. “So where did he take it?”

  Cash calmed down and frowned. She got up and walked over to stand beside Laura, gazing at the tiny patch of imagery that nobody had paid any attention to for centuries.

  “Could be in Norway, but then he may have hidden it before he made it to Trondheim. And then we're really fucked, because that's thousands of miles of fjords to scour for information. And that's not including Denmark and Sweden.”

  “So, then what? Where would he have taken something like that?”

  Cash pursed her lips. “Can't be Constantinople, we'd know.” And then suddenly a light went on. “Harald married the daughter of the King of Kiev, didn’t he?”

  “I think so.”

  “What a beautiful way to present a gift to someone you found intimidating, don’t you think? It wouldn’t be the first time that the box had been used as gift wrapping for an affluent person!”

  It was late in the evening in the hotel room, both women were tired, but Cash was packing and preparing the trip to Kiev. She was excited. “So how are you with a pistol?” Cash asked Laura, who was lying on her bed.

  Laura frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Kiev is dangerous. Neo-Nazis all over the place there right now.”

  Laura looked down. “I'm not going, I think.”

  “Why not?” Cash looked at her. She had hoped her friend would come with her.

  Laura looked up at her, then down again. “I think you’ve come to the Cash Cassidy part of the adventure and that’s not really my thing, Cash. I can’t shoot a gun; I’ve only ever taken a crash course in self defense at the ‘Y’. I’m afraid I’d be more of a hindrance to you than a help.”

  Cash thought for a moment, then realized that she was probably right. Things could quickly turn into a fight for survival if the investigation took a turn for the worst. “I'm sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed you’d be gung-ho about rushing into danger with me.”

  Laura now looked at her and shook her head. “Apology accepted. Plus, I think it would be a good idea for you to have a level headed contact like me outside the chaos in case things do go pear-shaped.”

  “I actually like that idea a lot. There’s no way of telling what I might encounter over there.”

  Laura shook her head again. It was Cash who looked down then.

  “I'll see you back on Lesbos when I get back though, right?”

  Laura held up her hand to silence Cash’s doubt. “Of course, I’ll still be there. It’s not like I’ve got any glamorous job offers to chase after. I’d love to have a job that had a little less to do with human suffering ad misery for once but for now it just back to the same charity work for me.” She sighed. “Furthermore, for as long as you’re around, I’d like to continue being friends with you. I don’t have many of those on the island.”

  Cash laughed. “Trust me, Laura. I haven’t got many of those myself.” She shook her head and sat down next to Laura. Suddenly, Laura smiled and hugged her. Cash hugged her back.

  “Are you going to be alright in Kiev?” Laura asked.

  Cash nodded. “Now you sound like Tim.” She grinned. “He'd try to stop me going.”

  Laura grinned. “I'm not trying to stop you; I'm just expressing the hope that you won't get yourself killed.”

  “I wont,” Cash said confidently. “And for all you know maybe when I get back we can look about finding you something a little more cheerful to get involved with once your work in Greece is done.”

  “Now, that’s an incentive to look forward to your return if I needed any at all.”

  Chapter Seven

  Cash swore as she dove behind a container. She landed softly in the snow. Her hand slid toward the Walther P5 she wore on her hip, hidden beneath her jacket. Things had gone wrong so quickly, it was ridiculous. It wasn’t even a plot from a novel anymore; it was just mental.

  Since she had landed, she had been in the thick of it. She was a foreign woman, English speaking, fit and with blonde hair. The men there liked the entire package and they were shameless. They didn’t come on to her like some of the newcomers on Lesbos and other places in Greece had, but they were insistent, angry, macho and in large groups.

  It was a number of Norwegians and Icelanders who had come to her rescue. Why they were there, they didn’t say, but they were clearly special forces.

  She could tell from the way they held themselves. She could tell from the shapes of pistols and knives hidden underneath their jackets.

  Of course, Cash had to be herself, and she wouldn’t be herself if she had not chosen to stay in the very center of the old city, just a few streets away from the infamous Maidan Square.

  She passed the square as she walked from the train station to the hotel, thinking she could walk through it, but found it was blocked. The square was occupied once again, now by people who told her they wanted to get rid of the corrupt, American and EU-backed regime of neo-Nazis. Cash balked at that. She had heard about the neo-Nazis, but there being a large, new protest camp in Maidan Square was news to her. Suddenly she wondered whether she should really be there.

  That sense of worry only increased when she stood by the window of her hotel room. She saw the glow in the big avenue beneath her. The glow of torches. She heard chanting. The chanting people down there carried a yellow and blue flag, decorated with what looked like runic symbols. Cash whistled through her teeth.

  In the morning, Cash went to the Golden Gate. It was a modern building, in relative terms, having been built in the 19th century by the Russians. They claimed it was an exact copy of its predecessor, but as there had been no images of the original, it was hard to see how it could be. The site was correct, though, the site of the original Golden Gate in the walls of the city from the 11th century.

  She had no idea what she was looking for now. She was confident the ivory
box could only be in Kiev, but she had no idea where to be looking for it now. It was the only place Hardrada could have hidden such a relic.

  Honestly, Cash was lost now. She had no idea where to go next. She only knew that Hardrada came through here and married the princess and it was the only big city he had spent any serious time in between Constantinople and Norway. She also found it suspicious he had left the Varangian Guard soon after that campaign to Sicily, where she now knew he had had something to do with that amphora.

  She wandered around aimlessly. For several hours, she looked around for similar clues to those she had found previously, but she didn’t even dare hope for anything like it, seeing as the building was new. There was nothing left from the 11th century at all in the city. Maybe she could gain access to some of the archeological sites underneath buildings, but even then, she knew she was lost.

  Until the Norwegians came to her rescue again.

  She saw them pass her by and caught a single word from their conversation. “Hardrada.”

  She had little Norwegian, but she did understand enough to follow their conversation as she followed after them. Two of the men she couldn’t understand at all. They spoke with an accent and she guessed they were some of the Icelanders in that group.

  They were talking about the relics of King Harald Hardrada. When they left the Golden Gate complex, she followed them. She followed them on the metro, heading away from the city center.

  “De har åpnet en sann Pandoras boks når de stjal disse relikvier fra os,” she heard one mumble on the train. “They have really opened a true Pandora's Box when they stole those relics from us.” Her eyes opened wide with surprise. This was a development she had not seen coming.

  Cash followed the men to an affluent suburb of Kiev. The men just walked through a street, seemingly just walking, but she noticed the men looking sideways at a building with flags on it. She knew those blue and yellow flags with the rune on it. She had seen those flags on the news several times. This must be a building connected to the Azov Battalion.

  Something else made sense to her. Suddenly she knew why those men were there and what the relics were they were looking for. Late last year, there had been a single report on the BBC about an art theft in the Netherlands. The Westfries Museum, she remembered it was called, in Hoorn. She remembered because she had looked up the town on Streetview and made a note to go there once.

  The people in possession of the works had been members of this battalion, but it had been worse than that. The negotiations for their return had run through the Svoboda Party, a neo-Nazi party. She had had a sense that something more was going on than the BBC had reported, a feeling she got increasingly often watching the news. And it was the reason she switched it off more and more.

  She kept following the men when they headed back to the center of the city and when she saw them head into a hotel, she finally stopped trailing them and went to find her own hotel room.

  That evening, she headed out, having retrieved her pistol from her bag. She had bought it ages ago when she went to Columbia on an expedition which she should have known would end badly. She did have that inkling then, which is why she had bought the pistol, but she had not needed it since.

  She had kept it locked up and hidden mostly, but had carried it with her to Greece for some reason. She had spent a few days in Athens and Laura, who had returned to Lesbos, had sent her the weapon. She had had no problem getting it past customs into Ukraine. When it turned out to be so easy, she knew she had done the right thing in taking it too.

  She went out again with it tucked into the waist of her trousers and hidden by her short leather jacket. She headed for that hotel where she had last seen the Norwegians and waited outside. She thought for a moment about heading in and just asking them straight up what they were doing and whether she could join them, but she knew better than that.

  She found a shadowy doorway and observed the hotel from there.

  She saw the Norwegians and their Icelandic friends all heading out about two hours after nightfall. She followed them again. They went by metro, but only when Cash watched them get off did she notice there was a man missing. She had counted the men when they had helped her at the airport and tried to picture their faces as she looked them over. She decided the missing man was the Icelander who had helped her.

  The men went back to the Azov building. Cash realized that pretty quickly. She hid in the shadows at the end of the street and waited.

  She waited for what seemed like an age. It was cold, freezing in fact. She was happy there was no snow and that she had worn the right clothes. Her leather gloves were tight around her hands, but quite warm. She had bought them on her way to her own hotel when she realized her thick ski gloves made it rather awkward to hold and fire the pistol. In fact, these gloves were warmer than those she had bought at the airport.

  Cash was dozing off. The cold should have kept her awake, but she was tired as well and, without any excitement to deal with, it was hard to keep her eyes open. She leaned back against a wall and slowly she began to drift off, then silently cursed herself for being able to sleep standing up.

  Then there was a bang. A flash of light and the noise of shots fired reached her. She shot into action and ran toward the Azov Battalion building. A huge group of men in black ski masks came charging out. There were more of them than the Norwegians. The moment Cash realized a lot of them were Ukrainian soldiers, she just turned and ran.

  That was how she ended up behind the container.

  Two eyes glared at her suddenly through the slits of the black ski mask. The man wore a bomber jacket with the wolfsangel on the chest. He pointed the gun straight at Cash and she swore she could see a grin form behind that mask. There was a bang and a flash and Cash cringed. She shut her eyes.

  The heavy body of the man fell on top of her and her eyes shot open. There was blood pouring out of the man's back and Cash pushed him away. She saw another man standing at the other end of the alley. His pistol was leveled and there was a hint of smoke drifting from the barrel into the cold winter air.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Cash swore.

  The man shook his head. “What are you doing here? Following us?”

  Cash glared at him for a moment, trying to compose herself. “Yeah,” she began boldly. “Seems like you're the ones who were talking about Hardrada and that godforsaken box.”

  There was a panicked look in the man's eyes suddenly and he strode toward her. He grasped her shoulder and pulled her to her feet. “Who told you?”

  “I found out for myself.” Cash pulled herself free from his grasp. “What were you doing there anyway? Taking on a whole battalion on your own?”

  The man grumbled and tossed his weapon up in the air. Cash's eyes followed it and she just saw the man grabbing it out of the air by the barrel. Then the butt of the pistol slammed into her temple and everything around her went black.

  Chapter Eight

  Cash came to with a splitting headache. She tried to get up and fell back, quite dizzy and with stars dancing around before her eyes.

  “She's back with us,” a voice said.

  Cash looked up and saw she was in a dark room with three men. They sounded like they were the Norwegians she had followed.

  “Looks like it, doesn't it?” she said, trying to sound angry to hide her embarrassment at being knocked out. “Want to tell me who you guys are?”

  The three grinned and one of them shook his head. “How about you tell us something first?”

  “Like what?” Cash said, still trying to sound hostile.

  “Like who you’re and what you're doing here?” the same guy said.

  “Cash Cassidy. I'm an author and I'm doing research,” she answered. “Now, can I get some answers as well?”

  The men looked at each other and tried to gauge what they could tell. Two provided their names and ranks.

  “You're Norwegian military, I know that much.” Cash put in, hoping to prompt them.r />
  The one man sighed. “Porvaldur Bjarní Einarsson, of the Viking Squad.” He gestured around to the other two men. “They did tell you their proper name and rank, but they're indeed special forces. Though as far as I know, they used to be in the Telemark Regiment.”

  Cash had to think for a moment. “Viking Squad? Isn't that Icelandic SWAT?”

  “Something like that.”

  Captain Johanssen stood forward and made a gesture at the Icelander to cut him off. “Still doesn't explain why you have been following us.”

  “I was interested.”

  “In what?”

  “In what you’re doing here.”

  Captain Johanssen frowned. “What do you know of what we're doing here?”

  “You're hunting for some artifacts linked to King Harald Hardrada. I presume they were stolen?”

  She saw the confusion on his face.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I overheard your men saying something about it. I worked out the rest.”

  Porvaldur gave Sergeant Dahl a dig in the ribs. “I told you to shut your trap.”

  “Cut it out,” Captain Johanssen said immediately as he saw Dahl was about to return the favor. “And what really brings you here?” he asked Cash.

  “I'm after one of those as well,” she answered.

  “Oh?” He frowned. “What artifact?”

  “Pandora's Box.”

  The troopers led her up to another room. Cash had trouble getting up the stairs, but she refused Porvaldur's help. The moment she came through the door, a soldier came up and began to give her the mandatory finger check and asking her questions. He checked the bump on her head and when he was done, he gave her the lighthearted verdict that she would survive without the sick bay.

  Dahl went to sit with some men on one end of the room, Porvaldur went to another and Johanssen sat down at a table in the middle of the room. Cash was left alone at the door and after a moment, she went to the corner where the Icelanders sat. She knew instantly all the guys there were Icelanders. It was obvious by the way they looked. She pulled up a chair and sat down next to Porvaldur. She reckoned the Icelanders might be a bit freer with information than the Norwegian soldiers.