by Jon Land
The veiled figure, meanwhile, stepped over one of the police officers’ bodies and kicked at the next as if to make sure he, too, was dead.
“I wear this veil for your own good,” the man began, his voice measured and even, almost mechanically calm. “Because if you saw my face, I’d have no choice but to leave all of you dead. I believe you’ve heard of me. I believe all of you know who I am.”
A few of the old women crossed themselves, muttering words indistinguishable to those even next to them who were mumbling the same thing.
“Now,” he continued, rotating his eyes about the crowd, “there’s something your village has that I want. Where is the archaeologist you have become familiar with?”
The villagers exchanged blank stares, none offering a response.
“A woman in her late twenties,” he added. “An American familiar with your ways and language.”
More silence.
“Please don’t make me repeat myself,” he addressed them, in the same measured tone. “If you know who I am, you know what I’m capable of.”
“Diavol,” a villager uttered in little more than a whisper.
“Close enough,” said the dark man.
THIRTY-ONE
VADJA, ROMANIA
“Black Scorpion,” someone in the crowd muttered.
The villagers closest to the dark man caught a flash of white behind the front portion of his veil, a hint of a smile.
“I see you are acquainted with the name both myself and my organization are known by. So it would seem no further introductions are necessary, and we may attend to the business that has brought me here so you may return to your normal lives.”
Standing before those cowering in fear, Vladimir Dracu seemed not to blink, his gloved hands clasped before him. Some days he had to remind himself of his own name, since he was almost never addressed by it, and could count on a single hand the number who knew him by any name at all. And Dracu was glad for that, since the years in which he’d gone by his real name were riddled with nothing but misery and memories better forgotten.
But Dracu couldn’t forget; not everything, not even most. The tortured experience of those times had forged the essence of the man who became Black Scorpion and one could not exist without the other. The bridge between who he’d been and who he was was soaked in blood, lots of it, shed by those both powerful and weak, the latter not unlike the hopeless lot gathered in the square before him now.
Dracu walked into the cluster of villagers, his huge bodyguard following at a discreet distance behind him. Dracu circled amid them, feeling their fear and hearing their sobs at the realization that a dark legend had come to their town. The rain stopped, the clouds moved on, and the sun’s rays hit him like a spotlight, turning his black garb and veil shiny, more like a sheen of paint slathered over his skin than clothing. Parents drew their children in closer, clutching them as if that might provide some protection.
“Yes, I am real,” Dracu continued. “Not a legend, or a nightmare, or some phantom conjured by the organization to which your village has been paying tribute for so many years now. But I will be here only as long as it takes someone among you to tell me where I can find this American female archaeologist, where she might be hiding.”
No one spoke. A few of the villagers exchanged taut glances.
Dracu shook his head again, expression tightening, angered now instead of regretful. “Who speaks for you?” he asked the villagers clustered before him.
There was no response.
“I ask again, who speaks for you?”
Hesitation followed once more, before a big bearded man wearing an old black hat faded to gray in places raised his hand.
“Me, sir,” he said, voice muffled by his hood. “I am Arek, chief elder of the village.”
Dracu moved to him, close enough to feel the heat and fear on his breath. He stretched a hand outward and laid it atop Arek’s shoulder, feeling the man stiffen fearfully.
“Can you feel my touch? Because it’s the touch of a man. See, I’m not a monster, am I?” He turned toward the massive figure behind him. “Armura isn’t a monster either, in spite of his appearance. Show him, my friend.”
With that, Armura tore off his sleeveless military-style jacket to reveal one side of his chest and neck to be horribly scarred by what looked like crisscrossing claw marks.
“Appearances, you see, can be deceiving. Armura means armor in Romanian because as a young man growing up in Siberia, his face was mauled by a tiger he ended up killing with his bare hands. He paid for that with the loss of his senses. Armura cannot touch, taste, or smell. He sees and he hears, and that is all he needs. But I call him Armura because he has felt no pain since that fateful day and is physically incapable of ever feeling it again. Some days I envy him for being shielded from the painful world in which we live.”
Dracu turned back toward Arek. “But this doesn’t have to be painful for you. The real monsters are the outsiders I’ve already rid you of like a plague. And now I’m going to give you the chance to make things right, Arek. I’m going to give you a chance to tell me where I can find the young American woman I came here for.”
“I cannot do this.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not know.”
“But you know her.”
“That I have not denied.”
Dracu eased himself closer to the chief elder. “Tell me what you’ve heard, these stories and legends that make you fear me so, while embracing those who would do your people and your ways such harm.”
Arek’s face tightened into a scowl, showing no fear. “I’ve heard how you burned villages, sold young women and children into slavery, left those who crossed you impaled on stakes by the roadside, even stole infants from their cribs.” That final line spoken while he cast a tentative gaze toward the blue bus at the back of the parked vehicles.
“All lies, but all true at the same time,” Dracu told him with a smirk. “Because I’ve never done anything of the kind to those who support my efforts. Such acts are aimed solely at my enemies, not my friends. Yes, I have burned villages that betrayed the old ways, taken the women and children of those in my land who have crossed me as retribution, and made examples of those who foolishly opposed me. It is a terrible thing to be misled. So I don’t blame you fully for this transgression, I blame the Romanian government that sees fit to welcome foreigners to our land to take what’s rightfully ours in pursuit of their own ambitions. All you need do to set things right, Arek, is tell me where I can find this young woman.”
Arek swallowed hard and straightened his spine, revealing the true breadth of his shoulders forged by forty years of hard work in the fields. “I already told you I do not know.”
“So what are we to do, Arek?” Dracu asked, sounding genuinely mournful. “What choices are we left with? Only one, I’m afraid,” he said, drawing a blade from inside his jacket. “A gypsy knifemaker forged this for me out of the finest Damascus steel,” Dracu continued, holding the blade so the sun shined upon its perfect shape. “The leather sheath is hand sewn and includes his signature. Perhaps the two of you are acquainted.”
“We have no loyalty to the government, no loyalty to anyone other than ourselves and our own ways. We want no trouble, from you or anyone else. We can’t help you.”
With that, an old gypsy woman next to Arek dropped to her knees, hands flailing at the air. “He speaks the truth! Please, please, believe me! I beg you to spare us!”
Dracu looked toward the old woman, passing the knife from his left hand to his right. “You know this archaeologist?”
“I have seen her. She has been here. But she is not here now.”
Dracu turned his gaze up toward those hills, squinting into the sun through his veil. He felt, sensed, someone watching him from there.
“I’d tell you more, if there was any more to tell,” the old woman was saying. “But there isn’t. Arek speaks the truth.”
“You agree with th
e old woman, Arek?”
Arek stiffened even more. “She speaks the truth, just as I did.”
“And would you have her die in your place, too?”
“No,” the big man said rigidly.
“Then I applaud you for that much, anyway,” Dracu said. And, with that, he gently helped the old woman back to her feet and looked her straight in the eyes. “I believe you.” He stepped back toward Arek. “Which makes you useless to me.”
Dracu’s right hand, the one now holding the knife, shot up from its dangling position, the motion so fast as to be little more than a blur. Arek was still staring at him defiantly when the slit in his throat opened and blood began to cascade out. His hands clutched instinctively for the wound. Arek’s eyes bulged, looking both shocked and puzzled, before he sank to his knees, then keeled over face-first into a widening pool of his own blood, writhing toward death.
THIRTY-TWO
VADJA, ROMANIA
Ilie tried to bolt down the hill, but Scarlett latched onto the boy and pulled him back behind their meager cover, holding tight while making sure he could see her lips.
“No! There’s nothing we can do!”
But that’s my grandfather, the boy signed. My grandfather!
Scarlett pulled the boy in close, hugging him to spare him further sight of what was transpiring below. He’d witnessed the dark man murder his grandfather, just as she had watched the gunmen murder her entire dig team.
Scarlett had hoped the village would have provided respite, sanctuary and, ultimately, salvation in the form of the Romanian police. At the very least, she wanted to get the boy home and herself to the safety of the nearest American consulate. But now Ilie’s grandfather was dead, and Vadja had become a place to run from instead of to.
Scarlett crouched slightly and took Ilie by his bony shoulders. “We have to go,” she said, making sure he could see her lips. She had to get to a phone and call for help, with her cell having been smashed when she dove to the hard ground back at the dig site to save the boy. “Do you understand?”
He nodded stiffly, then signed, Yes.
Through the woods, she signed this time, to make sure he grasped her whole meaning. To that bigger village.
Bună Ziua, he signed.
Yes. Can you get us there?
Ilie nodded just once. This way, he signed, and tugged her toward the rise leading deeper into the mountains.
Wait, Scarlett signed back, resisting his effort as her gaze returned to the village below. Something’s happening.
THIRTY-THREE
VADJA, ROMANIA
Dracu waited until Arek’s body had stilled before running his gaze back over the residents of the village. “See what happens to those who defy me? How many more must I kill before you tell me what I want to know? Who among you is brave and loyal enough to prevent that from happening, who will speak the truth before more die needlessly?”
“Please spare our lives!” the old woman pleaded from nearby, hands held up and out in a position of prayer “I beg of you to leave us in peace, in the name of God!”
“Don’t you know the old Romanian saying?” Dracu grinned. “Până ajungi la Dumnezeu, te mănâncă sfinţii. ‘Before you reach God, the saints will eat you.’ I’m not going to eat you, though. My punishment for your insolence and silence will be much worse.”
He ran his eyes around the children standing close to or pressed against their parents, believing the adults could protect them.
“This is your final chance,” he said. “Tell me where I can find the archaeologist or I will take that which you love most in her place.”
Dracu walked among the villagers, watching them cower before his step, waiting for a response.
“Very well,” he said, looking toward the nearest of his men when none came. “Round up the children. And every young woman you can find.”
* * *
Dracu watched the last of the children and young women being loaded onto the blue bus from the backseat of his SUV through its windows tinted black to prevent anyone from seeing in. Amazing how clear, though, the view was looking out. An apt metaphor for life, he supposed, which so often worked only in one direction.
Watching the last of the young women climbing onto the bus, he couldn’t help but remember being herded into the back of a truck himself as a frightened little boy. He remembered the pleas and cries for help once its rear door was hoisted open, how they’d quickly faded out once he was tossed on board and the truck began rumbling forward. Those sounds were replaced a few miles down the road by the retching of kids vomiting from fear, the claustrophobic confines, the darkness, and the bumpy ride. The process fed off itself until all the other children became sickened by the awful smell.
All but one.
The people of Romania genuinely believed in the stories, that he was the devil. The truth was they weren’t far off, because he knew the devil’s ways so well. He knew what evil was and he knew only evil had enabled him to survive when none of the other children from that truck had. All dead within a few years, while Dracu endured, focusing not on where he was, but where he’d be someday.
To seek his revenge.
To become the man he was now.
To distract himself from the memories, he focused on a beautiful blond girl, sixteen or seventeen maybe, who’d squeezed her face out an open window of the bus. Dracu slid down his window and smiled at her through his veil. Their eyes seemed to meet and Dracu cast a wave she, of course, did not return.
Her beauty was rare for its depth, stretching all the way to the purity of her very soul. The sight of her left a lump in his throat and he slid the window back upward to deny himself anything further. Having been reared in squalor and depravity, ugliness had been so long and so much a part of his life that he appreciated beauty more than anything. Beauty made for the greatest distraction. In beauty there was hope.
The girl seemed to stare at him straight through the dark glass of the SUV. She held her green eyes, wet with tears, on him even after the bus started rumbling forward, Dracu finally able to breathe freely when it at last slipped from view.
THIRTY-FOUR
LAKE LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
“Tell me what you’ve learned about the blackout,” Michael said to Alexander while standing at the rail of his third-floor balcony, from which he tossed his big cats their evening meal. They circled beneath him, growling with impatience and standing on their hind legs to better reach the food.
“Nevada Power, AT&T, and Verizon can’t offer any explanation for it at all.”
“Including how it could have possibly affected cell service?”
“Apparently every cell tower serving the city was taken off-line, along with everything else.”
“I thought they operated on an entirely separate independent grid.”
“They do,” Alexander told him.
Michael dropped two more roast-size hunks of beef down to his waiting cats. “And what about the walkie-talkies that don’t operate on any grid at all?” he asked Alexander. “What about our backup generators?”
“Not just our walkie-talkies and generators, Michael; every casino was affected the same way. But no transformer blew or overloaded and the readouts at the main distribution and transmission facility never even approached the red. What took place during those five or so minutes is entirely inexplicable.”
The cats that had snared their meals pranced off with the meat clamped within their jaws, while the rest snapped at each other while waiting their turn. Michael dropped two more chunks down to them.
“Computer hackers?” he resumed to Alexander.
“Not if the system safeguards and backups are to be believed. This was a hostile action, Michael. We just don’t know who pulled it off, how, or why. Not yet. It’s as if those five minutes never happened at all.”
“Tell that to Edward Devereaux, Alexander.”
Removing his remains from the Daring Sea had proved a difficult, close to impossible, task. A larger
robotic submersible, complete with hand-like pincers, had to be lowered to collect them after Robbie proved not to be up to that task. Once the larger submersible recovered what little was left of Edward Devereaux, Michael ordered a second feeding time be added for his sharks in the crowd-driven Red Water spectacle to keep them away during its return trip to the holding area where the medical examiner and Las Vegas police were waiting.
“Why only this one room?” Michael said, down to his last three cats now. He emptied the rest of the tray for them and peeled off his gloves as they charged off already munching. “How could it possibly have been targeted by itself, with no collateral effects on any of the neighboring glass walls?”
“I’ve looked at the video footage taken of the suite a dozen times now. There’s no blast residue, no evidence whatsoever of even an extremely limited and focused explosion.”
“Something blew out a wall twelve inches thick with triple-layered safety glass, Alexander.”
“I know, Michael. But it wasn’t caused by anything conventional, anything we can identify. According to the access log,” Alexander continued, “Devereaux entered his room twenty-one minutes before the blackout struck.”
“We need to find out who he really is, what he was doing at the Seven Sins.”
“Ahem,” Naomi said from the doorway leading onto the balcony that overlooked his painstaking re-creation of the great beasts’ native habitats.
Michael held up the empty tray, still swimming with juice. “You missed all the fun.”
“Good, since they don’t need to be fed again until morning,” she continued, “and we need to talk now.”
