“No,” she said uncertainly. “Not nearly. But perhaps still a monster of some kind. A beast that feeds off blood and gold until he gorges himself. Perhaps that kind of a monster. Safe travels, Admiral.”
“You as well.”
With that, Victoria walked away, leaving Admiral Ogden alone at the table once again. He watched her return to the well-dressed man across the room who was staring over at Ogden curiously. Ogden wondered if Victoria would tell her father who he was. He kind of hoped so, just to see the rich man's face when he realized he was looking at the supposed sea monster in human flesh that doused his ship's sails in human blood. Given that he didn't look nearly as curious as his daughter, he would probably be terrified, far more afraid of the pirate than she had been.
Although, that image she left him with did stick in his mind very thoroughly. The image of a beast drinking blood and gold until it had its fill—there were some days when that really did resemble him. But other days, quiet ones like this, with someone to have a good conversation with…
6
THE PLACE PIRATES CALLED HOME
The capital of the Bahamas, the city of Nassau, was renowned for its role in the history of piracy. It had been a hub for all kinds of seafaring criminals during piracy's golden age. Many notorious vessels made port there and used it as a home base when raiding the waters around it.
Now, Nassau was a booming tourist attraction and vacation destination. Cruises stopped there to let their passengers off for a day of tropical fun and sightseeing. People could enjoy its beaches and waters, including its beautiful coral reefs that many liked to dive to. They could enjoy amazing food at all kinds of exotic restaurants. It was the perfect place to relax and it was a far cry from the rough, dangerous island it used to be.
There were no longer pirates running it. There were no longer war ships with black flags on their masts docked in the harbors. There were no longer battles between the British royal navy and the notorious pirates that had practically taken control of New Providence Island. All of those historical battles were now just fodder for the museums to use for their exhibits. The age of piracy in Nassau had long since passed.
But it hadn't forgotten its history. Its association with the pirates of old still permeated its streets and shores. There were countless tourist spots dedicated to teaching the history of piracy and an obnoxious amount of gift shops selling foam swords and rubber eye patches. Purdue wondered how many of those worthless souvenirs and toys kids really needed.
It had always bewildered him how pirates had been romanticized over the years. Bloodthirsty murderers and criminals had become heroes of adventure. It was strange how much perception changed over the centuries.
The Nassau pirate museum was far more expansive than the pirate museum he recently visited in Salem. That made sense. Salem was a town that used to have frequent run ins with pirates, while Nassau had been something of a pirate metropolis.
There were all kinds of exhibits and displays with items that had been collected long ago. Pirate relics had probably been easy enough to find in a place like Nassau. They were probably strewn all about the island for any passerby to be able to pick up. They had probably had enough antiques to open up a museum with the moment they decided to create one.
Purdue and the crew spent their time at the museum taking note of the security. They counted cameras. They looked over the entrances and windows. They observed the security guards who were lightly dispersed throughout the museum.
Purdue knew that they needed to account for every possible scenario that could happen, and they needed to know everything they could for that to matter. To everyone else, they were a group of tourists enjoying the history on display around them. In reality, they were seafaring pirates themselves, preparing to make off with a valuable possession and then make their escape at sea.
Purdue stumbled upon a glass display all about Admiral Ogden and some of the collected items related to him were inside. Apparently, all of the items inside were collected from the shipwreck of Ogden's sunken vessel, the Scarlet Wing, and had been hauled up and donated to the Pirate Museum of Nassau years ago.
They even had the pirate admiral's sword. The blade had been warped and debilitated from its time in the water. It was crusted over with coral and rock. It wouldn't be able to cut a carrot now, let alone pierce the body of a human being. It wasn't the proud weapon of a pirate anymore. That's what centuries did to a blade in the ocean, though. It turned it into nothing more than a relic from a time long past.
The flintlock that was on display didn't look much better. In fact, it hardly looked like a gun at all anymore. It could have easily be mistaken for a piece of driftwood. Its centuries being battered by the currents and pressure of the sea had forged it into a new shape. The wood of the old pistol had been made smooth and withered. Its edges had been scraped up so that the barrel of the weapon now ended at a series of sharp points of wood.
The etchings that Admiral Ogden had carved into his pistol were very faded but still present. Under closer inspection, they could probably be read, but not from behind a glass case.
“Can't you read it from here?” Aya asked beside him.
“Absolutely not,” Purdue said. “We'll need to get a much better look.”
Aya looked more disappointed than surprised. She probably hoped that they could get whatever information they needed as tourists, rather than thieves. It was a far less dangerous route, but unfortunately for them, thievery was their best option.
They spent the next day preparing for the heist. Despite their involvement in the Wharf Man's seedy enterprise, no one on the crew had much experience in such high level thievery. Everything they planned seemed like it would work in theory, but no one knew for sure how things would go once it was being carried out; once it was really happening. No one had ever been part of a job like this before so no one could offer than any useful advice.
They were going to be going in blind.
If something with the plan went wrong—and there was a high chance that something would—then their whole operation would implode. Any chance of getting any closer to Admiral Ogden's treasure would be gone too. They needed this flintlock to help decipher all of those Xs on the map. Everything relied on getting that crusty, rotting piece of wood that barely resembled a gun at all anymore.
While they prepared, Purdue filed through the book of shadows looking for anything that could help make their heist easier. The sleeping powder he used at the bank wouldn't do him much good this time, and even if it could, there was no way of collecting the ingredients he needed from their ship. No, he would need something else, but the witch's journal mostly just offered tortured methods or ways to murder people. Not even magic could help this makeshift, amateur heist go well.
There was a time when he could have just thrown his money around to make things easier. He could have paid off a security guard or bought a private tour of the pirate museum. He might have even been able to just purchase the old flintlock from the museum itself with a big enough offer.
Not anymore. He was practically crippled now. He and his crew had to rely on thievery alone, and none of them were professionals.
The Pirates of Nassau Museum closed promptly at nine o'clock. Purdue and the crew were going to wait at least an hour after that to start their operation, just to ensure that any straggling tourists or workers were away from the museum. The less people they had to worry about, the less obstacles they had to manage to avoid, and the easier the whole thing would go. Given their collective lack of experience in stealing from museums, they needed everything to go as smoothly as possible if they were going to succeed. One hiccup in the plan and the whole job could collapse in on itself, taking all of them with it.
At ten o'clock, under the cover of the night sky and the quieting streets, the crew took their respective positions that they had all been assigned. Purdue waited across the street at a bus stop, looking on his phone and pretending to be waiting for his transport
ation.
The others were spread about as well. Aya and Alton were walking on the sidewalk, holding hands. Aya hadn't been overly thrilled with having to pretend to be romantically involved with Alton, but he took the assignment in stride and was playing it very convincingly. He laughed and danced around with her in the street like they were enjoying a lovely date night in the city of Nassau.
Oniel, on the other hand, used his typical silence to his advantage and sneaked up to the museum. Despite knowing the path he was going to take, Purdue still barely noticed the mute man as he crept up to the building and started climbing up to one of the windows.
There were only going to be minimal security guards inside, two or three at most, so it wouldn't be too difficult for a man like Oniel to deal with once he was in the building. Purdue did stress to him though that killing wasn't a necessity.
“It would make things a lot easier,” Alton had argued.
Purdue didn't care. He knew he was working with dangerous people who had probably used lethal force to their advantage plenty of times. But those guards were just doing their jobs, protecting items they probably didn't even know much about. They didn't deserve to die just for wanting a paycheck.
Hopefully Oniel respected that. He hadn't been able to argue verbally like his twin brother had, but his expression at the time had made his opinion on it very clear. He wasn't happy about being told how to do his own job, especially from someone like Purdue who had no real authority over him.
Oniel's task was to break inside, either sneak past or take down the guards, disable the security cameras, and open the door from within. Trying to break in through the front door would have set off a number of alarms and ended their operation before it even began. Oniel needed to help open the floodgates so they could get in without a full blown siege on their hands.
Oniel scaled the side of the museum and used some saw-like device to cut a hole in one of the windows. Once there was a big enough opening for him to fit through, he disappeared into the building, out of sight. The success of this operation was all on him right now. The rest had to be careful later on, but the beginning of it was one of the most crucial parts. If he failed, they all failed, like a series of dominoes falling on one another.
Purdue remained firmly seat on the bench across the street. Every fifteen or so seconds, he'd glance over at the museum, hoping he'd see Oniel's signal. Aya and Alton continued their giggling and little dances on the sidewalk, pretending like they were having the time of their lives but each time Alton spun Aya around in a little romantic twirl, she was really checking for the signal just like Purdue was.
Every minute that passed while they waited, Purdue felt more and more nervous. If Oniel had been caught, then it was all over. They would never get in and one of the most skilled people on the crew would be lost to them. And who knew what Alton would do if his brother was compromised. Based on what Purdue had seen, he would probably move heaven and earth to get his twin back, even at the expense of the mission.
Finally, one of the lights in the museum flashed on, and then off, a handful of times—the signal they were waiting for. Oniel had succeeded in getting inside. The door was unlocked. Purdue breathed a long sigh of relief from where he sat on the bench. All of those worries he had felt in those last minutes faded away, and now his anxiousness was fixated on the future. The first part of the plan had worked. Now they just had to make sure the rest of it did.
Purdue casually strolled up to the museum. Aya and Alton were a few steps behind him, trying not to make it look too obvious that they were altogether. Purdue reached the door and it was pulled open in front of him. He entered and Oniel was holding the door for him.
“Well done,” Purdue said, glancing around for any sign of dead bodies. “Are the guards still breathing?”
Oniel, as usual, said nothing but just glared at Purdue. It wasn't exactly and answer so when Purdue walked into the museum's lobby, he made sure to keep his eyes peeled for wherever the guards ended up.
Alton and Aya came in soon after, and Oniel locked the door behind them. Purdue turned around to greet them and the four of them all stood there in the empty museum. He took a moment to appreciate the fact that things were going well so far.
“So far, so good, hmm?” Alton snickered.
“Oniel, you keep watch,” Purdue said.
Oniel nodded but as usual looked annoyed that Purdue was ordering him around. Alton patted his brother on the back. “Just do as your told, brother. This will be easy.”
Purdue, Aya, and Alton hurried through the museum. They moved toward the exhibit that Purdue had examined during their visit earlier. It was tucked into one of the museum's corners and in that exhibit, the display of Admiral Ogden's recovered belongings waited for them.
The coral encrusted cutlass. The worn down flintlock that had been nearly turned into a useless piece of driftwood. Old navigational tools, silverware, and chests that had been found in the sunken wreckage of his ship. It was all there, all ripe for the taking. Among all of the valuable items from the age of piracy in that museum, Admiral Ogden's was worth the most. His possessions weren't valuable themselves, but if they led to his treasure, as Purdue suspected they did, then they were worth far more than anything else. They were worth as much as the riches that they could help find.
“Aya, can you check on the guards please?” Purdue asked, as he looked over the display. “Make sure they're still breathing.”
“My brother did not kill them,” Alton said firmly.
“And how do you know that?”
“If Oniel killed them, believe me, you would know,” Alton chuckled. “You would be able to tell right away and wouldn't miss it. There would be much more of a mess. A great, big mess.”
That wasn't exactly comforting. “Please,” Purdue said again to Aya who nodded and left to go find the guards.
This next part of the plan would be more challenging than infiltrating the museum. They had to actually acquire the items on display without triggering any sort of alarms or giving away that there was anything unusual going on in the exhibit.
Alton had managed to pick up a device through the Wharf Man's connections on the black market. A tool used by some of the world's most skilled thieves that could open up glass cases, without triggering the alarms that were set to go off if they were broken into. They hadn't exactly been able to test the tool's effectiveness, so there was a great risk performing the trial run during the moment when they actually needed it.
It looked almost like a giant wrench, with adjustments that could be made to its u-shaped jaw, to adapt to whatever it needed to grip. Alton pulled out the wrench and fit it to the size of the security glass that stood between them and Admiral Ogden's items. The claws of the wrench gripped the glass tightly and then Alton pressed the button on his device.
Once the wrench was attached properly and firmly to the case, Alton put in ear plugs and handed Purdue a pair of them so he could do the same
The tool's biggest asset was that it could release a high frequency sonic vibration, which could easily shatter glass into tiny pieces in seconds. It was incredibly useful to completely destroy a glass barrier so quickly, that the alarms wouldn't even register that the glass was damaged or gone. A perfect tool for someone who needed to get something inside of a glass case.
Alton pressed the button and the glass display instantly shattered. The glass fragments left behind were so tiny that they seemed like nothing more than sparkles as they fell away from the items they were guarding.
Purdue waited a moment and then removed his ear plugs, somewhat expecting to hear alarms blaring when he did. There was nothing. The tool seemed to work exactly as intended. Alton turned and smiled at Purdue who couldn't help but return it.
Their plans were really working.
Suddenly, alarms started sounding all throughout the museum.
“Shit.”
That wrench was supposed to be fool-proof, so either the tool didn't work, or they w
ere fools. Either way, they were in deep water.
“Hurry,” Purdue said, grabbing the old rusty cutlass and putting it into the case that they had brought along to carry the items. He made sure it was secure and then grabbed the driftwood flintlock as well. The message Admiral Ogden left hinted at the need for the sword and the gun, so as long as they had both of those, they should have be good. Alton, however, was taking everything else in the broken display case and tossing it in their case. “What are you doing?”
“Being certain,” Alton said over the alarms. “Would hate to have missed something. Better to have it all, hmm?”
Purdue didn't disagree but they didn't have much time until the police arrived. They had to get moving. Aya came running into the exhibit. “What happened!?”
“Bad advertising,” Alton said, removing the wrench from where it was clamped and shoving it into his jacket. “I will have that man's head for selling it to me.”
“That's if we make it out of this,” Purdue said anxiously, locking his case with the sword and gun inside. “Let's get the hell out of here. Right now!”
The three of them sprinted through the museum, back toward the entrance. As they ran, Purdue noticed a few of the security guards on the floor in the corner of his eye.
“Aya, are they alive!?”
He didn't want the law enforcement on their way to have even more reason to hunt them. Dead security guards would only make things harder for them.
“They are,” Aya replied. “Oniel just knocked them out.”
Oniel was standing in front of the museum's entrance where red and blue lights could be seen flashing outside. They didn't need to worry much about the security guards. They had bigger concerns since the police had already arrived.
“There has to be another way out of here out back,” Purdue said.
Alton took a step toward the front door, next to his brother, and then stopped. “Will not matter if they have already set up a perimeter around the whole building.”
Order of the Black Sun Box Set 9 Page 26
