“As the Council was watching their instruments carefully, I could only help you in seemingly subtle ways. I would report back that you had escaped my grasp, while pushing you ever closer to get aboard the Silver Songbird, so that you might pilot it to the council’s headquarters. I dressed up as Chen, the fat merchant—the suit required for the job was quite sweaty—and shuttled you to Guangzhou. I posed as the monk on the island, in the hope that my philosophy would encourage you to harness the ship’s power for good, rather than evil. Naturally, I also pointed the way.
“There were times when I worried that Ching Shih would disrupt everything, or that your sister would reach the ship prior to you finding the trail. Nonetheless, my efforts have proven successful. I have just received notice from my instrumentation that a great temporal displacement has occurred. I will meet you at the Council’s headquarters, with the necessary fusion rod capable of destroying our headquarters—and all of my colleagues. I do not face death lightly, but I hope that it will preserve the lives of many millions. The Council has run the course of its usefulness. There should be no time travel available to anyone. It must be ceased. Please destroy the Silver Songbird, for if it falls into the wrong hands, the consequences could be dire. And now, I will help you with the final steps. One last thing— I have one project I was unable to finish…if you survive, please pursue the Diamond Dragon.”
Ben—or Chen, or the monk, or whoever he was—held up the golden rod in one hand, a silver button in the other. He reached over to unseat the camera, the picture wobbling. The last frame caught his finger pressing the shiny surface before the video faded to static.
There was a knock at the door.
Keene looked up to find a familiar woman with shoulder length, wild black hair looking at him with a smirk.
“How long you been there?” Keene said.
“I heard the whole thing.” Lorelei came over and patted him on the leg. “So Captain Keene saves the day again, huh?”
“I guess. I don’t know how I got back.”
“I carried you back to the Silver Songbird. Fired it up and sent us back here.”
“Thanks,” Keene said. He tried to read her eyes, but couldn’t. “And the ship?”
“It’s safe with Franz. I won’t be using it.” She turned to leave.
“Leaving so soon?”
“I got a lot of things to pay back,” Lorelei said. “Community service, we’ll call it.”
“You have something planned?”
“A couple things,” Lorelei said with a wistful grin. Then she walked out the door.
Keene stared at the laptop screen for a moment, then closed the video. The open folder indicated that there were a couple more files on the drive.
Keene clicked on the one named “last will and testament.” He whistled when he read the document, which granted him sole ownership of a Southern California beachfront estate.
Ben was a generous guy, apparently.
Then he closed the will and stared at the other file.
“THE DIAMOND DRAGON,” Keene said. “I’m gonna need some more morphine for this.”
He pressed the button clutched in his hand, feeling the warmth washing over him, then pointed the mouse cursor over the file. But before reading it, he shut the laptop and closed his eyes. Whatever was going to happen next, it could wait.
Right now, for once, everything was quiet. Or it could’ve been the morphine. Keene drifted off to sleep, his aching joints melting into the bed.
Probably just the morphine.
But hey, he was alive. Strike had pulled through, and the kid had found a way to be useful even without a supercomputer. And Lorelei had found her way again.
And while everything definitely wasn’t perfect, it was damn sure good enough.
Keene would take serenity. From what he knew, it was the rarest element in the universe, the hardest to corral and trap, even for only a moment. Like water, it never kept the same shape for long.
But change was life and life was change.
And, like water, those changes could either cleanse or destroy. As Keene’s eyes closed, he realized what the monk had meant.
He smiled, allowing sleep to grant him a brief respite before wherever life’s waters took him next.
End of Book 3
Flip the pages to read Samantha Strike’s origin tale. Yes, the mystery of the tattoos will be answered. And no, Keene will probably never find out.
If you enjoyed Kip Keene’s adventures, please leave an honest review of the box set on Goodreads or Amazon. Each one is a tremendous help. Thanks.
Kip Keene and Samantha Strike return in THE DIAMOND DRAGON, an adventure that takes them deep in the heart of the mythical land of Shambhala, on the heels of an ancient prophecy. Get it on Amazon at: watchfirepress.com/dd
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Bonus Novella - The Amber Alligator
1 | The Safe
“You can’t have the fossil,” Alyssa said. “It’s the only valuable thing in this house.”
“But it’s mine, Liss, and I swear if I don’t get it, something bad is gonna happen.”
“Then you should’ve thought of that when we hashed out the papers.” Alyssa drained her glass of whiskey. “Planned ahead.”
“Goddamnit, you told me you’d think about it over the phone,” Christen Alger said. He slammed the heavy tumbler down on the ringed table. A vase of roses shook, petals trickling off into the air. This was supposed to be going far better.
“Don’t raise your voice at me,” Alyssa said. “Don’t you dare.” She reached a slender hand out to stop the vase from shaking. Her green eyes flashed with anger. Worse than anger. Disappointment. Disgust.
“It’s gotta be in the paperwork,” Christen said. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and extracted a crumpled mess of documents. This time, he took deliberate care to place them gently on the table. But Alyssa didn’t reach for the divorce papers.
“I didn’t agree to anything,” Alyssa said. She grabbed his whiskey tumbler instead and walked into the kitchen. Their kitchen. Not any longer, though. It hadn’t been that way for what, eight or nine months? And now the divorce papers, the fees, seeing his old house—it was gonna kill him. She was gonna kill them both, if she didn’t hand over that chunk of amber in the safe.
Lord knows he’d tried to get it while she was at work. Jimmied the window closest to the garage, entered the old code to the safe. Their anniversary date. But she’d changed it.
So here he was, begging for it, half-drunk.
“I wasn’t finished drinking.”
“You’ve had enough,” she said, and emptied the contents of the glass down the sink they’d chosen together in better times. Or she had chosen, and he’d gone along with. Had it always been like that? It was like that now. The terms in this agreement were a joke.
He needed what was in that goddamn safe and she’d agreed to hand it over. Told him, sure honey, no problem. It wasn’t like it had any value to anyone but him. Well, maybe ten or twenty grand on the antiquities market. That was nothing in comparison to his life. Her life. But now she was hanging him out to dry for every damn last object, even the ones he’d brought to the table beforehand.
“I’ll throw in some extra cash,” Christen said. He followed her into the kitchen and reached out to touch her arm, but she backed up like she’d been snake-bitten. “You can have the entire house. I just need the safe, babe.”
“I’m not your babe.”
“Look, fine, Liss, I’m trying to be civil.” He shoved his hand back into his pocket and stared at the walls. She’d painted them a new color. An off-pink. Had she painted the kitchen, or had someone else painted it for her? His fist balled up in his jeans when he thought about someon
e else sitting in his bed. The doc had talked about this. He just needed to breathe. “It’s a fair deal.”
“Why do you want the amber so bad?” Not curious in a gold-digging way, just curious, because, Christen realized, he hadn’t ever really displayed all that much interest in anything. Besides the gun range. Everything else might as well not have existed. And now a chunk of useless amber lying in a safe that hadn’t been opened since they were married—since they threw all their birth certificates and passports and expired licenses in there—was suddenly the most important thing in the world.
He rubbed his forehead and sighed. Christen really looked at her for the first time since he had come in. It kind of hurt to take her in, since she was done with the relationship, but it wasn’t done with him. Not by a long shot. She’d dropped a couple pounds, gotten a chic new haircut, one with bangs. Had a tan, nice and even, definitely professional.
Not that she was ugly before, but this just made everything worse.
“Christen. Chris.” She sounded alarmed. He realized he’d been playing with his sidearm, undoing the strap with unconscious repetition. A safety valve, coping mechanism.
He stopped and sighed. “Sorry.”
“Tell me what’s important about the amber and you can have it.”
“It just is, Alyssa.”
“Not this bullshit. Never telling me anything. At the end, just this once, you let me in. You owe me that.” She stood with her hands on her hips, the kitchen island dividing them, symbolizing an entire universe of screw-ups and miscalculations. Christen figured that at least half were hers, but when it came to actually tallying up the score, that didn’t seem quite right.
Do the right thing for once and at least it ended on a good note.
It hurt to breathe when he thought of the end.
“All right.”
Her eyebrows raised in marked surprise. “You’re kidding.”
“You wanna know, I’ll tell you,” Christen said, leaning against the countertop with his elbows. He sighed. “But you’re not gonna like it.”
“You told me it’s just some antique.”
“To you, sure,” Christen said. “But me, with the trouble I’m in, it’s like—what’s more valuable than gold?”
“Platinum.”
“You were always smart.”
“Save it, Casanova.” But she gave him a thin smile. It flickered out pretty damn quick. She coughed and went to the sink, scooping water into her mouth from the faucet.
“I owe a couple guys money,” Christen said. “And you know the bureau doesn’t pay anything.”
“It bought us this house.”
“This is real money. With multiple commas. I don’t get that amber, Liss, it’s not safe here. For me—and, well, for you, too.”
“You dragged me into this?” Alyssa’s voice was raspy. She stumbled backwards, away from the sink, and propped herself up against the refrigerator. Her face flushed and the whites of her eyes went bloodshot. “I—I just have something in my throat…”
She tumbled to the hardwood floor in a heap.
Christen rushed around the island and knelt by her. “Babe, what’s wrong?” He felt her pulse, which was erratic and weak. Her neck was swelling up and her entire face was turning brighter by the second. “Babe? Babe!”
“Help,” she managed to croak out, before her eyes shut and her body began to convulse on the floor.
Christen called the paramedics.
But by the time they arrived five minutes later, Alyssa was already dead.
And then the cops showed up.
And they were very curious to know just how a woman had been poisoned while only her ex-husband was present.
2 | A Favor
“Nice groupings, trainee.”
Smoke trailed from the barrel of Samantha Strike’s pistol. She removed her safety glasses and looked over her shoulder at Christen. He gave her a thumbs up. She checked her watch. Not bad for eight in the morning.
“Better than you,” Strike said. She didn’t bother to look at the target as it came closer. She already knew she’d hit everything, even with the nasty kick on this sidearm. “Best you ever had.”
“Watch it, Strike,” Christen said with a dark smile. “I’m your superior, after all.”
“Says the guy who hasn’t shot since I’ve been here.”
“I’m going through some things,” Christen said. “Told them I was experimenting with new techniques.”
“I turned out pretty good, right?”
“Yeah, you’re a natural.”
“Never said it was because of you, old man,” Strike said. She flashed him a nervous grin. Christen was only old from a twenty-three-year-old’s point of view, the same way seventh graders look like giants to fifth graders. He couldn’t be more than thirty-one or thirty-two, although his black hair was already dappled with specks of gray.
Rumor was he’d broken down when he’d caught his wife having an affair. Just couldn’t get it together after that. Stopped shooting completely, although he still taught and ran the range. Strike didn’t know the full story, or even half of it. She’d only been at Quantico for eighteen weeks. Just two more until she graduated.
To her, this person before her was Christen. But apparently he had been far more lighthearted and fun with his previous groups. The only one he had really taken a shine to in this class had been her. Strike couldn’t tell if it was because she was the best shot, or because she carried some of the same darkness.
Christen didn’t grin back. His face tightened into a serious expression. “I need a favor.”
Strike ran her hand through her shoulder-length blonde hair and didn’t respond. What the hell could this guy possibly want from her? He’d shown no interest, so it wasn’t that type of favor. From what she could tell, he was still in love with his wife. Lost in thought half the time, somewhere else. Maybe on a beach in Mexico, lying naked with her.
Even if it was that kind of favor there wasn’t much Strike could do. Trainees slept in the dormitories and drilled constantly until the twenty weeks were up. Many of her classmates had already washed out or given up. Training was her life, until she became an agent.
Then the whole grind would begin again, just at the office and in the field.
Strike wouldn’t have it any other way. Not like she was good at anything besides shooting stuff, anyway.
“Ask one of your friends.”
“I don’t think I have many of those left,” Christen said with a pained smile. “Besides, I need a fresh face. Someone who can fly under the radar a little. If I could just explain.”
“I gotta eat lunch, then we got a group run later—”
“Five minutes.” He gestured towards the door. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
“I’m busy today.”
“You owe me.”
The words made Strike’s gut twist. She hated the feeling, hated him for bringing it up. But it was true. So she gritted her teeth, and said, “You can only cash that card once.”
“Consider it cashed,” Christen said. “You’ve heard stories about me, right?”
“A couple, yeah.”
“You know why me and my wife split?”
“Obsessed about the gun range. She cheated on you,” Strike said, then looked at the floor. Too forthright. He was still her teacher, favors be damned.
“Yeah,” Christen said with a grim nod, “that’s part of it. The other was the ponies.”
“Like gambling?”
“I owe a lot of money to the wrong people,” Christen said. “And I tried to hide it, save my job, but now, it’s all about to come crashing down around me.”
“Shit.”
“I figured you’d understand.”
Strike followed him from the gun range, up the stairs to an empty debri
efing room. Christen checked both ways outside the door before he slammed it shut and locked it. As an extra countermeasure he rolled one of the chairs up against the door handle.
“Can’t have anyone bothering us.”
Strike’s heart began to beat faster. This was stupid. She’d left her gun down at the range. There’d been all sorts of stories about this guy over the past weeks. About how he didn’t sleep, sometimes just spent all night in the range, staring out into space. That maybe his wife didn’t sleep with someone else, that he had a hell of a hair-trigger temper and she’d finally had enough after some unspoken incident.
Sure, Strike was his favorite student. But how long would that last if she decided that his favor wasn’t enough to cover whatever he was asking her to do? What then?
Trusting your mentors too much could be a dangerous thing. Strike swallowed, feeling the dry spittle catch in her throat. She tried to wear an easy smile, but that was impossible given her nerves.
Instead, she put her short boot on top of a rolling chair and rested her forearms on her raised knee. That was the right amount of not giving a shit that she was looking for, even if she wasn’t feeling it.
“This the part where you tell me aliens are real?” Strike said with a small, sad laugh.
Christen didn’t smile. “Samantha.” The next words took a few seconds to come. “I’m in real trouble.”
“Get a lawyer.”
“I have one. Two, actually,” he said with a bitter laugh. “Although, I guess, given the circumstances, their retainers will no longer be necessary.”
“What circumstances?”
“My wife was murdered last night.” Christen cleared his throat, like he was trying to choose his next words carefully. “While I was there.”
“Jesus.” Strike’s leg kicked the chair out from beneath her, and she almost fell over in a heap. “I gotta go.” She made a half-hearted move towards the door. Christen made no effort to stop her, which gave her pause.
“It’s only been three minutes.” Christen tapped his watch. “You promised me five.”
The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3 Page 49
