Chaos

by Johansen, Iris

  “Yes, he could. But he didn’t, and at nine seventeen this morning she appeared to be healthy enough and presumably essential for Masenak to use in a plan that involves Reardon.” He spoke into the phone. “Is that right, Vogel?”

  “Oh, am I back with you again?” Vogel asked dryly. “My reports are never bullshit, Alisa. They always have substance, and there was every chance Sasha was still alive.”

  “‘Chance,’” she repeated. “I have a problem with that word connected to Sasha. Is Korgan right? Does Masenak seem to have an agenda that could keep Sasha alive for the long haul?”

  “Yes and no. I’ll play the conversation between him and Reardon, and you can judge for yourself. It all seems to depend on this race and a horse named Chaos and another called Nightshade. The call was short, and I didn’t understand a good deal of what they were talking about. I had an idea there was a lot going on that wasn’t on the surface. I thought I’d throw the ball in Korgan’s court and see if he could figure it out.”

  Alisa stiffened. “Chaos?”

  “Did that strike a chord?” Korgan asked. “Something Sasha mentioned?”

  “Oh, yes, that struck a chord. Chaos is one of Sasha’s horses that was stolen with the others from St. Eldon’s. She hasn’t mentioned him to me lately. And I guarantee she would never have mentioned him to Masenak if she could help it.” She shook her head in frustration. “But how can we tell what she was forced to tell him during those last days before the attack? She was so alone and might have been trying to handle everything on her own.” She gestured impatiently. “Just play the video and I’ll try to make sense of it.”

  “Right.” He punched the button. “Here it is.”

  It did make sense to her, she thought after the Skype had finished. It was as brief as Vogel had said, but she could understand and predict every nuance of what was going on among the three people involved. Particularly Sasha, who had not spoken at all. Alisa could tell Sasha had been trying to remain expressionless, but Alisa could read every emotion.

  And what she was seeing was terrifying her. Chaos…She felt physically ill. Waves of cold were bombarding her as she thought about what this development might mean to Sasha. Caught. She’d be caught and wouldn’t be able to free herself.

  “Alisa?” Korgan’s gaze was on her face. “Bad?”

  She nodded jerkily. “We’ve got to get to her right away. No matter who wins that race, she’ll die.”

  “No, she won’t. There’s always something we can do. First, we decide which way we want the race to go. We should be able to—”

  “She’ll die,” Alisa repeated. “You don’t understand. Masenak thinks he knows what he has, but he doesn’t really. Either it hasn’t sunk in, or Sasha’s managed to keep the details of how really special Chaos is from him. I believe it has to be the latter or Masenak would have been bragging to Reardon on that call. But Sasha knows and she’ll be getting ready. We’ve got to get her away before she does anything reckless.”

  Korgan took another look at her expression and stopped arguing. “Then we’ll do it. It will be your way. No problem. After you tell me why. You’re right, I don’t understand. But I’m damn well going to.” He started the car. “I’ll call you later, Vogel. Any news of Margaret?”

  “She said she’ll be ready to leave Geneva by tomorrow morning. I’ve arranged for a helicopter to bring her from Casablanca to where you are in the mountains to meet you, if you can find somewhere to land up there in the stratosphere.”

  “We’ll find it. I’ll give you our location later.” He ended the call. “Don’t say anything right now, Alisa. No pressure. You’re upset and not ready to deal with questions or anything else right now. I’m going to drive for a couple more hours and then find a place to stop for the night.” He was backing out of the layby. “But then I expect you to be ready to tell me everything I need to know about Chaos…”

  * * *

  Korgan had to drive another three hours before he found a place where they could stop for the night. He settled on an open cave that was set several yards back from the road and surrounded by scrawny pines, branches, and brush. “It appears dry enough and we can use those branches for fuel for a fire.”

  “Fire?” Alisa asked as she got out of the Land Rover. “We’re not going to sleep in the Land Rover again?”

  “Maybe. It depends on how low the temperature drops. We’re high enough now that it could go below freezing. But we can start out with a warm fire and a hot meal this evening.” He was pulling out their backpacks, water, and supplies and tossing them on the ground. “Or we might use the cave if it’s habitable. I’ll go check it out for scorpions, snakes, and other critters.”

  “I’ll do it.” She was scowling as she grabbed her flashlight from her backpack. “You’d be more efficient gathering wood and making a fire. I’m still using this damn sling, so searching for scorpions is about the only useful thing I can do.” She headed for the cave opening. “I’m sorry about that. But I promise this is the last day I’m going to pamper myself. I’ve hated it, too.”

  “I know you have.” He smiled faintly. “Nothing could be more obvious. But the only actual thing I hated was that I was getting impatient from having to restrain myself from helping you more. Which is a natural instinct and has nothing to do with your capabilities. But you’re far from being a gracious receiver in that department.” He waved his hand at the cave. “By all means do what you like. I won’t offer to help. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be the scorpion attacking you.”

  “Thank you.” She paused before she went toward the cave. “I don’t believe you. You would offer to help. You couldn’t help yourself. And I’m sorry that I can’t be gracious about stuff like that. I wouldn’t know how.” She turned on her flashlight. “But Masenak is worse than any scorpion, and I’m taking your help swatting him. Tell me how to be gracious about that and I’ll do it.”

  * * *

  Alisa ducked her head and entered the darkness of the cave.

  “No scorpions. No snakes,” she announced when she came out forty-five minutes later. “Just some weird bugs that skittered all over the place when I came near them. They were probably first cousins to cockroaches. Margaret said they’re going to inherit the earth. I told her I’d prefer dogs or horses.” She glanced around the small clearing. “You’ve done a good job.” A small fire was burning, and she could smell coffee from the pot Korgan had set on the stones beside it. “But regardless if that cave is safe and livable or not, I’m not going back in there tonight. I’ll opt for my sleeping bag, either out here or in the Land Rover. I don’t mind roughing it, but I have problems with cockroach wannabes.”

  “I thought that’s what you’d choose.” He passed her a handful of towelettes. “Get some of the dust off you while I pour you a cup of coffee. Do you want to eat now or later?”

  “Later. I’m still inhaling that dank cave.” She was wiping her face and neck, then hands and arms. At least she felt a little cleaner now. She took the coffee cup he handed her. “How very ‘gracious’ you’re being,” she said mockingly. “Are you trying to teach me by example?”

  “No, I’m only making you comfortable. That’s what all of this about. Even sending you to go brave the scorpions and cockroaches.”

  “Sending me? You didn’t send me to—” She stopped. “Or did you? Manipulation, again?”

  “I merely guessed which way you’d choose to go. I told you this was coming. But I could feel you becoming more tense all day. You needed a distraction to make it easier for you.” He went back to the fire and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Sit down.”

  She slowly came over to the fire. “Only you would choose cockroaches as a distraction.”

  “I didn’t know about the cockroaches. We were discussing scorpions and snakes. That would have been much more interesting for you.” He lifted his cup to his lips. “But what we weren’t discussing was a horse called Chaos. Talk to me. Why did finding out Chaos was going to be in that
race put you in a tailspin?”

  “I wasn’t in a tailspin.” She dropped to the ground beside him. “Or maybe I was.” She made a face. “But you didn’t need to hand me a distraction as if I was a kid who couldn’t handle it.”

  “I don’t think many people were handing out distractions to you when you were a kid. Maybe I thought that I’d like to be the first.” He met her eyes. “Stop stalling. Chaos.”

  She moistened her lips. “Chaos belongs to Sasha.”

  “One of the horses you bought for her when she agreed to become your ward?”

  “Not exactly. Chaos came later. He’s only a three-year-old. Sasha had already started school at St. Eldon’s when she heard about him from Antonio Rossi, the breeder who had sold the four horses she used in her act to Zeppo, the circus owner. She’d been writing to Rossi, asking questions about care for her horses ever since her father died and she’d taken over the act. They didn’t become friends, but they were both crazy about horses and Rossi could see how his horses responded to her. Sometimes he’d find ways to bribe Zeppo to let her come out to his farm so that he could use her when he was trying to gentle a horse.” She paused. “Or when a mare was birthing. Sasha was magic…Anyway, a year after Sasha left the circus and went to St. Eldon’s, I received a letter from Rossi politely asking me to bring Sasha to his horse farm to help deliver a foal. And Sasha called me from school right afterward begging me to let her go. She was more excited than I’d ever seen her. She said she knew the mare’s background and she was wonderful, and the foal was going to be very special. What could I do? We were on the next flight back to Italy.”

  “And that foal was Chaos?” Korgan asked. “Not an encouraging name for a supposedly special foal.” He tilted his head as a thought struck him. “But maybe it is when you think about chaos theory.”

  “What?”

  “The branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behavior is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.”

  “You would make that connection,” she said dryly. “Rossi named him. And I don’t believe he was thinking about a mathematical theory when he did it. It’s more likely that he thought Chaos might cause a total upset in everything around him.”

  “Isn’t that what I just said? Was he as special as Sasha thought he’d be?”

  She nodded. “He was gangly and awkward like all colts, but even at birth you could see how beautiful he was going to be. Sasha fell in love with him the minute she helped him come into the world.”

  “And you tried to buy him for her?”

  “There wasn’t any way I could. Antonio Rossi, the breeder, wasn’t going to let him go. He’d been trying for decades to breed a stallion of his own with pure Nisean blood. Besides, not only was Chaos absolutely unique, Rossi was sure he was going to take the racing world by storm and make him millions, if not billions.”

  “So much for being crazy about his horses,” Korgan said cynically. “In the end it all goes back to money.”

  “I believe Rossi did care about the foal, at least in the beginning; it was only later that he became dazzled by the potential he saw looming. Like I said, Chaos was unique. The chances of his bloodline being duplicated were almost nil. Niseans are considered extinct.”

  “What?” Korgan was suddenly alert. “I never heard of the breed, but then I’m not into horse breeding. But extinct automatically means cash in the bank in most categories. I imagine that’s why you suddenly went into a panic. Let’s go back and start over where you should have begun. Why is a Nisean horse so unique?”

  “All kinds of reasons. I didn’t know about them, either, but Antonio Rossi had almost brainwashed Sasha about them over the years. That was why she was so excited.” She drew a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll be as brief as I can. The Nisean horse breed was once native to the town of Nisaia, located at the foot of the southern region of the Zagros Mountains in Iran. The first written reference was in around 430 BC in Herodotus’s Histories when the king was given ten sacred horses that were said to have been of unusual size. They didn’t have the smaller Arabian head but a more robust one that was like that of a great warhorse. The Nisean horses were known to be the most valuable horses in the ancient world and the most beautiful alive. The Chinese called him the Tien Ma—heavenly horse—or Soulon, vegetarian dragon. Two gray stallions pulled the shah of Persia’s royal chariot and four others pulled the chariot of Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of Medea and Persia. Cyrus the Great rode a Nisean when hunting lions. The Greeks imported them to the Iberian Peninsula, where they influenced the ancestry of the Barbs and Andalusians, among others. Marc Antony acquired the first Roman Nisean horses when he conquered Armenia.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Sasha could go on and on about their history, but I don’t remember it all. However, you can see that they were once the most desired horse on the planet, and there was good reason for it. Everyone wanted them. During the reign of Darius, Nisean horses were bred from Armenia to Sogdiana. The Greeks, mainly the Spartans, imported them and bred them with their native stock. Not to mention the nomadic tribes in and around the Persian Empire that imported, captured, or stole Nisean horses.”

  “If the bloodline was that prevalent, it’s difficult believing it could become extinct.”

  “Yet records show it happened in 1204 at Constantinople. But who knows what really happened back then? Someone arbitrarily saying there were no longer any pure Niseans? Still, that announcement might automatically discourage a breeder from keeping the bloodline of his horses pure. Over the centuries, stating it was true could contribute to making it so. But Rossi regarded it as a challenge and spent decades trying to find any breeders who had kept those ancient bloodlines pure.”

  “One hell of a challenge.”

  “He did it, Korgan,” she said quietly. “He started at the beginning in Iran and then traced those horses up to those nomadic tribes I told you about. He’d decided the only chance he had was to find one of those wandering tribes whose people and horses had the least opportunity of being touched by civilization. He searched, desert, mountains, wilderness…Then bingo, he came upon this tribe of traders who also bred horses who seemed to fill the bill. Rossi even found out they’d sold some horses through the years, but that they weren’t of particularly good quality. It discouraged him, and he decided he wasn’t going to pursue it. But then he heard that same tribe also kept another smaller herd in a nearby canyon in the desert that they’d refused to sell. They wouldn’t even let a prospective purchaser go to look at them. They said that the horses were part of their heritage and tradition and must stay with the tribe.”

  “And naturally that would intrigue Rossi,” Korgan murmured. “Yet he managed to get a few horses?”

  “Just the mare and a stallion. But the stallion was only on loan and had to be returned to the tribe as soon as the mare was bred, and the foal reached full term. But they were as wonderful as Rossi hoped. Fantastically beautiful and the fastest horses he’d ever run across. He spent two years with the tribe before he managed to persuade the chief to let him buy the mare. He mortgaged everything he owned and sold off most of his own horses. He devoted that entire two-year time to studying the horses, verifying their pedigrees, and trying to learn the history and secrets of how they’d been raised and what would work with them.”

  “Work with them?”

  “They might be wonderful but that didn’t mean they weren’t major problems. In that nomad camp, those horses were treated like the heavenly bodies the Chinese called them. They were totally wild, and over the decades it became ingrained. They couldn’t be broken even if those nomads had wanted to bother. When Rossi got them home, he found that out, but he wasn’t about to risk damaging them.” She paused. “And then he remembered that little girl in the circus who had been able to do magic with those four horses he’d sold to Zeppo. Why not find a way to use her?”

  Korgan smiled. “It was just as we
ll that was pre-Alisa in Sasha’s life, or he would have found a reason why not. You would have killed the son of a bitch.”

  “But I wasn’t there, and Sasha only thought about having two more splendid horses in her life. She couldn’t have been happier. She spent three or four days at Rossi’s farm and settled the mare and stallion beautifully before she went back to the circus. Even those high-strung, wild Niseans loved her. That’s why Rossi wanted her back when the mare was about to give birth.” Her lips tightened. “That’s when Chaos came into her life. I should never have taken her back to Rossi’s horse farm. It was the worst thing I could have done. I should have found a way to keep her away from him.”

  “And you had a crystal ball that told you that? Not likely. Which brings us back to square one. You’ve practically given me the entire history of Chaos and his ancestors, which was interesting enough, but not really first on my agenda. Why is it so urgent that you get Sasha away from Masenak before the race with Chaos?”

  “Because of what Chaos can do and what he is. Why else would I tell you all that stuff if it wasn’t important? I could see that Masenak knew how good he is when he was talking to Reardon. He wasn’t being cocky as Reardon might have thought. He was excited. He must have forced Sasha to show him just how fast Chaos is.”

  “And how fast is he?”

  “Very. Remarkable. The last time I visited her at St. Eldon’s, he was tearing up the roads at blinding speed—and that was in the hill country.”

  “Comparison?”

  “No comparison. Rossi thought he was going to be better than any horse in history if he could find a jockey capable of riding him.” She grimaced. “All of the horses in that herd the nomads raised were superfast. Remember the descriptions of those ancient Niseans being bigger and more powerful than other horses of their time? Well, it would have been perfectly natural they’d be a hell of a lot faster, too.” Her hand was clenching on her cup. “The minute that race shines a spotlight on Chaos, it’s like a gun being aimed at both Sasha and the horse. What do you think happens when a horse with that kind of speed erupts onto the racing scene? He becomes a phenomenon. He sets records and he captures the imagination of everyone around him. Everyone will want a piece of him. The way an owner makes the big money on a racehorse isn’t from the purses he wins. It’s the stud fees. And since he’s a Nisean, and supposedly one of a kind, those stud fees will be enormous.” She was speaking fast, gazing into the fire. “Once Masenak and Reardon realize what they’d have in him, neither is going to let him go. They’ll end up by fighting each other, and whoever wins, Sasha loses. Because she’s the pawn and they’re both greedy. They’ll try to force Chaos, speed up the process of making him king of the turf. There’s a good chance that they’ll end up killing him.” Her voice was hoarse with pain. “But Sasha won’t let that happen. She loves that damn horse. She’ll fight them no matter if she has a chance of winning or not. And what kind of chance do you think she’ll have by herself surrounded by all those scumbags at Jubaldar?”