The Arkana Mysteries Boxed Set

by N. S. Wikarski

  “It’s supposed to be a funny song, see, but there’s two versions of it. The clean one and the dirty one. I learned the dirty one a long time ago when I was in the army. You’re gonna love it.” Without further prelude, Hunt launched into the song.

  Daniel paused in his search to listen. The mercenary’s voice was a passable baritone. The tune was catchy until Daniel actually started to realize what the song was about. After hearing the first two stanzas, he scampered as far away from his companions as possible. The lyrics were filthy. There were many slang words which Ilhami didn’t understand. Whenever the Turk seemed puzzled by a line, Hunt obligingly paused in his performance to explain its meaning in salacious detail. Even though the scion hiked to the outer boundary of the cemetery he still couldn’t get out of earshot. He tried to distract himself by inspecting a particularly interesting headstone. He pored over the single cross chiseled into the rock as if it contained the entire book of Genesis and all the prophesies of the diviners besides. Daniel remained fixated on his task until he could hear Hunt’s voice subside. By this time, Ilhami was rolling on the ground with laughter.

  As Daniel came back down the hill, he saw the Turk sit up eagerly.

  “Now you teach me. Is good song!”

  The scion groaned inwardly. Ilhami’s morals were already questionable without Hunt corrupting him further.

  Daniel interposed himself between the two men. “It’s getting late,” he suggested mildly. “Perhaps we should be moving on.”

  “Whatsa matter, boy?” Hunt asked thickly. “Air gettin’ a little too blue fer you?” He shook his bottle disappointedly, realizing it was empty.

  “The day will be gone soon, Mr. Hunt. We don’t want to be stranded up here after dark, do we?” Daniel turned to Ilhami. “Where should we look next?”

  The Turk regarded his doubtfully. “Is all.”

  Daniel squinted at him. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  Ilhami shrugged expressively. “Aiya Anastasia. Last place to look on mountain.”

  Daniel felt the color drain from his face. “You mean there are no more?”

  “Where we are is very high up mountain. No more churches above this.”

  The scion slumped down on the grass and buried his head in his hands. “I just need to think for a few minutes.”

  “Take yer time, boy.” Hunt leaned back against the tree trunk and dipped his cowboy hat over his eyes.

  Daniel conjured a mental image of the lecture his father would give him if he returned home empty-handed. There had to be something he had overlooked. But what? He turned to the guide. “Are you quite sure there’s no place else? Think very hard.”

  Ilhami screwed up his eyebrows in a look of intense concentration. After several seconds of facial contortion, he gave Daniel a sheepish smile. “Is all churches. No more here.”

  Daniel rose with a heavy heart.

  The guide added in a small voice, “Maybe we go to big rocks, yes?”

  The scion whirled to stare down at him. “What big rocks?”

  Ilhami was taken aback by his intensity. “Long time ago before sultans. Somebody put big rocks in circle.”

  “You mean a stone ring of some sort? Megaliths?”

  “Just big rock circle. You want we go look there?”

  “Does it face east?” Daniel asked eagerly.

  Ilhami nodded doubtfully. “On same side we are. Yes. Only up high. We have to drive long time.”

  Daniel looked at the position of the sun overhead. “Can we get there today and still have time to drive down the mountain?”

  The Turk nodded. “If we go now.”

  Daniel roused the dosing Hunt with the toe of his shoe. “Then we go right now!”

  Chapter 36 – Captivating Companions

  The trio of relic thieves held Cassie at gunpoint while they conferred unintelligibly in Turkish about what to do with her.

  The pythia took stock of her situation. Surprisingly, she didn’t feel afraid. She flashed back briefly to the moment when Sybil had first broken the news that their parents were dead. She’d been plenty scared then. A scared, confused little kid. And when Sybil herself died, Cassie felt like a slightly older but equally scared and confused kid. Then the Arkana entered her life, and everything changed. Faye and Maddie and Erik and Griffin were her people now. She thought of them and felt a grim resolve she hadn’t known she possessed. Nobody was ever going to screw with her or her people again. Not ever! She had an idea.

  “Hey! Any of you guys speak English?”

  They stopped chattering abruptly. The two younger men gaped at her.

  “I speak little bit,” the man with the cap answered. “Where your friends?”

  “They aren’t here,” she lied. “How do you know about my friends?”

  The man laughed. “We see what you do. You bury something in ground. Why you bury gold like that?”

  Cassie shrugged, appearing innocent. “It was a joke. A joke we were playing on some people we know.”

  The man gave her a shrewd look. “We play different kind of joke. We take gold things out of ground and sell them. We not put things in ground.” He glanced back briefly at his companions. “Except sometimes people. We put them in ground if they take from us.”

  Cassie maintained a stony expression. Animals could sense fear. These guys weren’t that much farther up the evolutionary ladder.

  “Where your friends?” the man with the cap asked again.

  The pythia brazened it out. “They’re waiting for me at the Jeep. I had to go back to the stone circle because I dropped my room key.”

  The Turk fished in his vest pocket. “This your key?” He held it out for her to see.

  “Yes, that’s right. Can I have it back?”

  The Turk chuckled. “I keep for now.” He placed it back in his pocket. “Why you follow us?”

  “To get my key back, of course.”

  The Turk didn’t appear convinced. “You think you take key back from us by yourself?”

  Cassie gave a little shrug. “Well, I wasn’t going to rush you if that’s what you mean. I just wanted to see where you went and then I was going to get my friends and have them take it back.”

  The man said nothing.

  “My friends are waiting for me.” She tried to sound bold now. “If I don’t get back to them, they’ll come looking for me.”

  The man smiled grimly. “They not find you.”

  Cassie couldn’t believe her own composure in the face of the threat. She felt nothing but an absolute stillness at the core of her being. It helped her keep a clear head. She took a step forward. “I’m worth more alive than dead.”

  The Turk paused to consider. “What you mean?”

  There it was. He was interested. She pressed her advantage. “I mean ransom. For me and the golden bee. I work for an organization that will pay you.”

  The Turk ogled her, walking around her in a slow circle.

  She read his thoughts and nipped them in the bud. “And I mean intact. You don’t get to sample the merchandise. If you touch so much as one hair on my head, the price goes down.”

  That stopped him short. Apparently, money trumped lust. His two associates were whispering to each other trying to understand what was being said in the foreign tongue.

  The man with the cap rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  The pythia slowly lowered her arms. “Name your price. My people can afford to pay you twice what you’d get on the black market for that artifact.”

  “Plus, they pay extra for you,” the man corrected her.

  “Absolutely!” She nodded and folded her arms across her chest. Cassie thought about her teammates standing above and hearing every word she said. She spoke a little louder for their benefit. “Now take me someplace where I can write a ransom note. It has to be in my handwriting, so my friends will know it came from me. You should enclose the room key with the note as extra proof. O
ne of your men can take the message to the hotel where we were staying.”

  The Turk’s face took on a crafty expression. “If you play joke on us, we bury you. Maybe you not dead when we bury you. Then we have good joke.”

  Cassie returned his stare without flinching. Animals could sense fear. In a humorless voice, she said, “I’m not joking. You deliver me to my friends unharmed, and you’ll get the money just like I said.”

  The Turk turned to address his companions. After a lengthy and very heated conversation, they fell in line and headed down the forest path. The man with the gun nudged Cassie forward.

  ***

  The Arkana team let out a collective sigh of relief as they watched the party disappear around the bend.

  “That chick must have brass ovaries!” Erik’s voice was filled with admiration.

  “You usually refer to her as a kid,” Griffin reminded him.

  Erik grinned. “No kid would have had the brains or the raw nerve to do what she just did. She’s definitely been upgraded in my book.”

  The three of them rose to follow at a safe distance.

  “Game faces, guys,” the security coordinator told the others. “Time for us to save a kick-ass damsel in distress.”

  Chapter 37 – Rustics Retreat

  The sun was well past its zenith by now. Its beams slanted downward to the forest floor. The Turks and their captive traveled in silence for about a mile. They followed a single well-worn trail though several other paths crisscrossed theirs along the way. Eventually, they came to a small stone cottage hidden among the evergreens. It was a single-story building with a low-pitched roof that hung over a wooden porch. The structure was run down. The stucco was grayish and cracked in many places, exposing the stone wall underneath. Broken terra cotta tiles had slid off the roof and lay scattered around the foundation.

  The man with the cap pushed the weathered wooden door open. It wasn’t locked.

  The Turk with the rifle shoved Cassie through the entrance. She looked around as her eyes adjusted to the dim interior. The whitewashed walls were as gray as the exterior. Black streaks from innumerable cooking fires ran up the wall above the hearth. There was a central room with two deeply recessed casement windows. The glass was so grimy it afforded very little light. A pair of doors led off to other rooms which Cassie guessed to be bedrooms or storage areas. The house smelled musty as if it had been abandoned decades before.

  “You live here?” she asked the man with the cap.

  “Sometime we stay here,” he replied cryptically. “Now you sit.” He gestured toward one of the chairs drawn up next to a rough plank table in the center of the room. This might once have been the kitchen though there was no running water or electricity that Cassie could see. An unlit oil lamp sat in the middle of the table.

  The man with the cap walked over to a cupboard and began rifling through drawers and shelves. After a few minutes, he returned with the nub of a pencil and a torn piece of paper.

  “Now you write,” he commanded, handing Cassie the objects.

  His two companions stood looking over the pythia’s shoulder as she formed the unfamiliar characters on the page.

  The Turk named an outrageous sum of money for the ransom. Cassie and he haggled over the price until the pythia convinced him to ask for something reasonable. She thought that agreeing to his terms too readily might make him suspicious. He settled for a smaller sum which she dutifully copied down on the page. She guessed that her companions must be somewhere outside by now. Again, she deliberately spoke in a loud enough voice for them to hear.

  “Are you sure your friend knows where the hotel is?” She tried not to shout.

  The man with the cap conferred with the member of his party who didn’t have the gun. The fellow nodded.

  “Yes,” The Turk replied. “He know where.”

  “He must ask for a man named Erik,” she instructed.

  Once more, the Turk translated for the benefit of his associate.

  Cassie folded up the ransom note. “Here, wrap this around my room key.”

  The man with the cap didn’t argue. He took the key out of his pocket and folded the note around it several times. He then handed the packet to the messenger.

  The younger man took it wordlessly and left the building.

  “It’s a long way,” the pythia observed. “How will he get there?”

  “We have truck.” The Turk didn’t choose to elaborate on where the vehicle was hidden.

  “This could take a while,” Cassie noted.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Now we wait.” He ambled over to the shelf above the fireplace and took down a pipe, filled it and struck a match. Then he took a seat across the table from Cassie and smoked in silence. His remaining associate dragged a chair over by the door and stationed himself there, cradling his rifle.

  About fifteen minutes passed, though to Cassie it seemed much longer, when their silent vigil was shattered. A thumping sound came from the back wall of the building as if something heavy had been thrown against it. They all jumped to attention. The Turk with the gun was on his feet. He tried peering through the grimy windows without success.

  The man with the cap spoke rapidly. The other man nodded and warily opened the door. Nothing was moving outside. At the urging of the older man, he went out to investigate, shutting the door behind him.

  “Maybe your friends come looking for you,” the man said.

  Cassie stared at him in what she hoped was an expression of blank surprise. “How could that be? They thought I went up to the stone circle. How could they find me here?”

  The Turk shrugged and puffed on his pipe. “If they come, we give them surprise, yes?”

  The pythia frowned. “Well, you better not shoot them if you hope to get your money.”

  For some reason, the man found this remark funny. He slapped the table and laughed out loud.

  Five more minutes passed, and the man with the gun still hadn’t returned. The Turk with the cap rose from the table and attempted to peer out the filthy window. Then he walked slowly to stand behind Cassie.

  “I think he come now,” he said.

  Cassie could hear footsteps outside, running across the gravel by the front door.

  In one deft move, the Turk pulled her out of the chair and drew out a hunting knife which flashed under her chin. He positioned them both facing the front of the house.

  Seconds later, the door burst open to reveal Erik pointing the rifle, flanked by Griffin and Fred.

  The Turk had backed against the far wall of the cottage, holding Cassie in front of him as a shield. He pressed the knife close against her throat. “You put down gun or she die!”

  Erik hesitated for a split second.

  It was all the time Cassie needed to raise her leg and grind her foot down on the man’s instep as hard as she could. He lost his balance, cursing in pain as a bullet whizzed past his cheek and grazed his earlobe. He dropped the knife, putting up a hand to stop the flow of blood. Cassie flew out of his grasp and ran across the room toward her teammates.

  Erik handed the gun to Fred. “Cover me,” he commanded before springing across the room. He grabbed the Turk by the arm and twisted it behind his back.

  “Listen you!” he growled. “This has already been a bad day on a cosmic scale, and you’re not gonna make it suck any worse. Do you know who we are?”

  The Turk shook his head, too rattled to speak.

  “We belong to an organization that’s got enough resources to hunt you down and kill all of you if you meddle in our affairs. You understand what I’m saying?” He twisted the man’s arm harder for emphasis.

  The Turk nodded, wincing.

  “And if you or your crew go anywhere near that stone circle again, I will rain down more vengeance on your heads than Keyser frigging Söze! You got that?”

  For the first time, the Turk looked confused. “I do not know who is this. Who is Keyser Söze?” />
  For a second, Erik was too speechless to reply. “Oh, give me a break. We’re in Turkey for crissake, and you don’t know who Keyser Söze is?”

  The man with the cap shook his head nervously.

  “Hey, Hollywood,” Cassie called from the doorway. “Give it up.”

  “OK, fine.” Erik appeared completely nonplussed. He searched for an alternative explanation. “How about this. You or your crew go near that stone circle again, and you won’t live to tell about it afterward.” He twisted the man’s arm once more. “Did you understand that sentence?”

  The man nodded vehemently.

  “Good, looks like we’ve come to an agreement.” Erik scanned the room. “What’s behind that door?” He gestured toward a small door in the far corner.

  Fred went over to investigate. “It’s some kind of storage room.”

  “Does it have a lock? I can’t see from here.”

  “Yup. One of those old-fashioned key locks.”

  “Good.” Erik dragged the Turk over toward the storage room.

  “I found this outside.” Griffin held out a coil of rope. “I thought it might prove useful.”

  “Cass, why don’t you help us tie up our friend here,” Erik suggested.

  “With pleasure,” the pythia replied.

  “Time to drag in those two other guys we knocked out earlier.”

  The Arkana team retrieved Cassie’s room key and bound the three Turks before locking them in the storage room.

  “That won’t hold them long,” Cassie commented as they exited the cottage and hurried up the trail that led back to their Jeep.

  “It won’t have to,” Griffin said. “We’ll call for sweepers when we get back to the hotel.”

  “Sweepers?” Cassie repeated. “You’re going to tidy up the cottage for them?”

  “It’s a special unit we have,” Fred explained. “Sometimes we run across black market types who interfere with our work. We have a sweeper squad that secures them and turns them over to the authorities. Those guys will be cooling their heels in a Turkish jail for quite a while.”