The Last Bazaar

by David Leadbeater

  Alicia glared at Kenzie. “Can I gag her?”

  “Not without a hell of a fight,” Kenzie shot back. “But Torsty can, just for fun.”

  Drake rose, hands out, feeling a little like a parent trying to calm squabbling kids. “Tomorrow is our last day. Let’s grab a little rest. Doing this thing in daylight will only make it more dangerous, but we can’t go creeping around every single tent at night. One way or another, tomorrow, there’ll be a hell of a fight.”

  The mood turned somber, the pitch of conversation quieter. Drake plonked himself down beside Alicia and Dahl at the front of the tent, peeling back one half of the flap and staring into the black, seeping jungle, counting down the hours. They talked quietly, murmuring of their exploits, their past and their better times together. After a while, as moonshine appeared over the heights of the trees, Kenzie crawled over to join them.

  “I’ve been listening to you guys,” she said quietly. “You’re real heroes, huh?”

  “Nope,” Drake said shortly. “Just soldiers doing our jobs.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Dahl said. “I’ve been more than heroic on several occasions.”

  “I was heroic once,” Kenzie said unexpectedly, staring straight ahead. “An agent with Mossad. We took people like this—” she waved a hand outside. “Down every day. And every day more rose. What is it they say? Kill one of us and a thousand more shall arise? I don’t know . . . but it is true.”

  “So you became dispirited?” Dahl asked.

  “No,” Kenzie said quietly. “I became a victim.”

  They fell silent for a time, and then Kenzie shuffled a few inches closer. “One time I stopped a firebomb attack from two thousand meters.” She clicked her tongue. “Two shots. Two kills.”

  Drake wanted to believe her. “I killed Dmitry Kovalenko, the Blood King, up close. Put an end to his savagery.”

  “I think you’ll find that was me,” Alicia said.

  “Nah, you put down the guy in the bullet-proof kill-suit. With a knife.”

  “True. I did both.”

  “Another time,” Kenzie said. “During a stakeout, the cell we had under surveillance received a tip-off. They torched the entire floor of the apartment block to escape, but we caught them and pulled everyone to safety. No casualties that night.”

  Dahl sighed. “Well, where do I start? Odin? North Korea? Earlier—”

  “You defeated Odin?” Drake blustered. “Wow.”

  Kenzie allowed a small smile. “I never had what you have. The companionship. My team was never that. We were always for ourselves and so were our superiors.” She shook her head sadly.

  “Truth be told,” Drake said, also despondently. “It’s much the same everywhere. Our team? It’s different, but it works.”

  “But you have lost people along the way?”

  Drake nodded but said nothing.

  Kenzie massaged her forehead as if to wipe away memories. “I lost everything. We were in the field, isolated, dependent upon our satellite office. Our superiors were sat on their fat behinds in Tel Aviv, feeding the bullshit that they wanted us to believe. My team were caught without hope; we were exposed, identified, our families laid bare.” Kenzie paused, swallowed and then went on. “They were slaughtered as our superiors rubbed their hands and accepted bribes. And then we were allowed to live as punishment, as warnings to others that law enforcement didn’t work.”

  “You took your revenge?” Dahl asked, his eyes far away.

  “Of course. Every one of them saw my face covered in their jetting blood before they died. And now I am a fugitive, a criminal, a terrorist,” she spat.

  Alicia cleared her throat. “All that withstanding, you do smuggle artifacts, guns and drugs.”

  “It is safer than being a Mossad agent.”

  “So you are a criminal.”

  “A girl’s gotta eat.” Kenzie jerked her head up, as if shaking off a terrible, old nightmare and fixed on Dahl. “Speaking of which . . .”

  “He’s married,” Drake said.

  “Oh. How about you?”

  “I’m . . . umm . . . I’m—”

  Alicia laid a hand on his arm. “He’s under offer, and you can’t match the highest bid, bitch.”

  “Uww, snappy, snappy. And you said I had a dirty mouth.”

  “I could match you for insults any day.”

  “Really? Then let’s—”

  “All right.” Dahl stepped in quickly. “Playtime’s over. We all need a little rest before it starts to get light.”

  Kenzie looked away. “The last time I slept properly I was in my twenties.”

  Drake made a motion to include the entire tent. “You won’t need to keep one eye open here, I guarantee it.”

  “That’s not really the problem.”

  “Yeah,” Drake agreed quietly. “I know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  In the blackest, darkest watches of the night a great evil stirred. It stalked the narrow paths, watchful as it progressed, mindful to sneak a glance inside every open tent. It saw things it enjoyed and others it simply dismissed. It catalogued each spectacle and stored them for later. Perhaps it could make use of the pick of the bunch in its own delicious endeavors. But this night was not for distractions; this night was the culmination of a lifetime of investigation.

  Beauregard went ahead, vetting the way. Tyler Webb paced in his wake, basking in his preeminent status, his untouchable prestige as the leader of an organization that had brought America to its knees, and knowing that its success had been dependent entirely upon him. This trip, this little journey, sealed his legend.

  Webb was in such high spirits that he knew the trees would not drip on him; the rain would make way. The ground, though slippery, would not make him fall and the face of the moon had emerged primarily to light his way. Such were the perks and expectations of greatness. All he needed now were half a dozen men and women to lie along his path to stop his boots from getting muddy.

  Something to work on.

  Webb couldn’t remember a happier time. This was the allotted hour when Ramses had promised to offer up the scroll—the very document Webb had been working toward for over thirty years. The Pythians might have been formed to further his quest for Saint Germain, but the scroll was the answer to every riddle, the gate to eternity.

  Goodbye Pythians, Julian Marsh and New York. Hello Tyler Webb and the entire meaning of my life.

  Beauregard stopped and peeled apart two tent flaps, shaking the material first so that it wouldn’t drip on Webb’s bent head as he entered. Webb found himself inside a small place, lined and floored with padded quilting the color of blood, stitched with gold. A man dressed in a loin cloth sat cross-legged opposite him, arms covered with bracelets and wristlets, and ears pierced, his lobes pulled taut by tear-shaped weights. The man was dirty looking, and greasy as if smeared with oils. His lips were almost black and his eyes were pits where poisonous snakes and spiders fought for supremacy.

  Webb halted, surprised. “Where is Ramses?”

  “He is . . . engaged.” The despicable individual’s voice was deceptively smooth, vowels rolling like well-lubricated cogs. “I am . . . the man whom you seek.”

  “This is not what I was promised.”

  “Is it not? How do you know? You have not yet seen what I offer.”

  Webb remained tight-lipped. He wasn’t about to blurt out his life’s greatest secret to a stranger. To the man’s right, he now saw, lay a large, haphazard mound of Egyptian rugs and discarded furs, beneath which something moved very slowly. A human shaped mass if ever he’d seen one, and no doubt one of this man’s bought slaves.

  Webb’s euphoria got the better of him. “All right, do you have it? The scroll? I mean—how could you? I can verify its authenticity so do not try to dupe me.”

  The unusual figure studied him for such a long time Webb almost called on Beauregard’s assistance. Finally though, he began to speak. “Ramses did indeed tell me about what you seek. Y
ou know there is a prosperous trade in everything illicit—from scrolls and parchments to enormous bronzed statues, from Akkadian to Mongol and from the bones of gods to the skeletons of Alexander and Genghis Khan themselves. They are the prized possessions of the filthy rich, trophies with which to impress and control your peers, currency in which to trade. How many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of scrolls are out there, my friend?”

  “I only want one,” Webb snapped.

  “And that is why you are still searching. It would have been easier to find an honest man on Wall Street.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Webb decided he’d gone off topic and a prompt might be in order. “Have you done it?”

  “Wall Street? No. But I do have your scroll.”

  “Prove it to me.”

  Shifting a little, the peculiar man drew a long, deep breath. He took a moment to rearrange the rugs at his side, affording Webb the view of a pale, naked flank, before completely covering the slave, and then clucked what Webb could only assume was a black forked tongue.

  “Well . . . well. To business. The German, Leopold—I am sure you know his name—was an addict. A man much like yourself—obsessed with this legendary figure they called Le Comte de Saint Germain. A wealthy explorer, he spent most of his life searching for clues. He was considered the world’s foremost authority on the Count.”

  Webb knew everything there was to know about Leopold, but it helped to hear this man speak of him. He had been trying for decades to gain access to the man’s archives, his vaults, even his home, but had always failed to find a single shred regarding Saint Germain. Leopold’s craftiness was just too sharp even for Webb, it had seemed.

  “This scroll fell into the wrong hands following Leopold’s death. As you know it forms part of the journal he took around the world, cataloguing every find, every quest, every single strand of evidence. From Stonehenge to Paris and Milan, it is a scruffy, well-used tome. Inside Leopold has used many pens, always hurriedly, a moment stolen in time as he continued his endless quest. It will need collating, but it is the real deal and it is worth more than the life of any normal man. What would you offer?”

  Webb would offer the world, but kept his face neutral. He knew that with his additional knowledge and familiarity with Saint Germain, with his wealth of contacts and data, he stood the best chance of cracking history’s greatest secret . . .

  Who—or what—was Saint Germain and where are his greatest treasures?

  To believe in one acknowledged belief in the other.

  “I offer . . .” he paused, mindful of the fact that the expected monetary accoutrements arising from Marsh’s New York escapade would now never materialize. However . . .

  “Everything I have,” he said seriously, holding up his black pre-paid credit card. Material possessions did not matter anymore. He could find the man and the treasure on his own and with what little he had frittered away elsewhere.

  “Then we have a deal,” the man said, taking the card and swiping it through some kind of reader. The numbers must have pleased him, for Webb saw his eyes widen. Quietly, he then issued an order.

  The rugs and furs slithered away from a rising shape. Webb averted his eyes from the man a moment too late, leaving a lingering scar across his memory.

  “Take it.”

  Webb reached out and took a proffered pouch about the size of a small backpack, feeling the supple brown leather between his fingers and then turned to leave. It took a moment to remember to check the disorganized contents, but he did so briefly for he wanted to save the luscious pleasure of full revelation for a most intimate moment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Hayden Jaye stayed low and well away from the barge’s round windows as she spoke on the sat-phone. The interior was in semi-darkness, illuminated only by one dim lantern, but that was good. Several times these last few days she had seen guards venturing close, as if trying to see inside. Smyth had positioned himself on deck, the eternal guardian and soldier, and Lauren had busied herself by helping out with the “guests” and their food. The news coming back from the bazaar was hardly reassuring; the revelations surrounding Secretary Robert Price and the CIA particularly damning. Trouble was, Hayden wasn’t entirely sure what their next move should be.

  I don’t like this one little bit.

  Part of the reason a leader became a leader was that they acted well under pressure, made the right decisions and brought their people home. During this mission Hayden had acted more than a little impetuously, reacting immediately upon Beauregard’s tip and dragging the entire team into the jungle. She wondered what Price would have said about it if she’d had chance to consult him.

  None of this matters. Yes, she was crowding her brain with unnecessary evils. What mattered was Price, the CIA, Tyler Webb and Ramses.

  And now Kenzie.

  Dahl spoke rapidly on the sat-phone, explaining the latest developments. Hayden listened with amazement, surprised that Alicia had come across her latest nemesis in the midst of the Amazon, then accepting as she heard what the ex-Mossad did for a living. Dahl’s description of her was somewhat colorful—at first tempered with dislike and wariness but later also with a little pity and maybe even some respect. He didn’t explain why, but she sensed a kinship somewhere.

  Hayden checked her watch. Coming up for 8:00 a.m. now on the last day of the last bazaar. No matter what happened, this was the end. The variables though—they were endless.

  “We know where Ramses’ tent is,” Dahl was saying. “But not Webb’s or Price’s. We’re still outgunned and outmanned, though several players have already left. The worst of the bunch though—they’re still here, cavorting until the very end.”

  “Distraction?” Hayden sipped from a bottle of water.

  “Hard to pull off. The guards are well laid out and unlikely to bunch.”

  “Shock and awe?”

  “If we had reinforcements.”

  Hayden wondered about that. Time was fast running out, and they were eight against hundreds. Their direct boss couldn’t exactly help them. She saw only one course of action.

  “Dahl,” she said. “Give me an hour. I have to call someone.”

  *

  The connection was verified, passed through countless channels and then verified again. One more time, one more connection, and she addressed the most powerful man in the world.

  “Sir?” she said.

  President Coburn’s voice held tones of stress but came across as warm as summer DC sunshine. “Hayden Jaye. What can I do for you?”

  Hayden took a huge breath and then gave him the bare facts, straight up. This was no time for embellishments, and Coburn listened without interrupting. When she had finished he stayed silent for about a minute.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Jaye, I’m here. Just picking myself up off the floor. And there’s no chance Price might be there undercover, like yourselves? No chance he’s playing this Ramses character?”

  “From what my team saw and heard,” she said. “No chance at all.”

  Coburn fell silent again. Hayden could imagine the thoughts running through his head—of black bag and need-to-know, of rendition and dark sites, of intelligence gathering and the lives of ordinary Americans.

  “The logistics are . . . thorny,” Coburn said. “Brazil’s Department of State are working well with us at the moment but assets in the region are too minimal to make a difference. Unless . . .” he paused, and Hayden could almost see him smile. “Unless there’s something I don’t know, of course. Which is perfectly possible. An additional problem is the region you’re in—it is teeming with criminals, desperadoes, gangsters, you name it.”

  “It’s okay, sir.” Hayden heard the regret in his voice quite clearly. “We can still do this. I only want . . . clarification . . . on Price.”

  “Ah, well, that’s not such a gray area. Resolve that situation, Jaye. In any way necessary.”

  The comment surprised her a little. She had fully e
xpected Coburn to insist that Robert Price be allowed to return to the States to stand trial, or face interrogation, but instead he’d given her carte blanche. As a soldier in the field, she couldn’t ask for more.

  “Understood, sir, and thank you.”

  “What’s the time scale on this?”

  “Eighteen hours, maximum,” she said. “We’re counting down, sir.”

  “I want to know the moment you settle this,” Coburn said. “Good luck to you and your team, Jaye. And please, be careful.”

  “We always are, sir,” Hayden said, her head filled with images of Torsten Dahl grinning like crazy and Matt Drake leaping after him into battle. “Our team is as sane as they come.”

  Coburn hesitated. “All right, then.”

  The call died. Hayden put her face to the window and viewed what she could of the bazaar and the lightening skies. The conversation had turned out better than she had hoped in one way, but worse in another. Price was expendable, but they were on their own.

  Again.

  She called Dahl back and told him the news. “I did tell the President that we would be careful,” she said. “And that we’re all well-balanced, rational human beings able to make sound decisions in the heat of battle.”

  “Fuck, yeah,” Dahl growled.

  Hayden closed her eyes. “Have at it then.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Drake listened as Dahl picked up the bazaar’s laminated agenda and read out a relevant part.

  “On the last day at 10:00 a.m.,” he read. “Morning speech, thank yous and final acquisitions,” he said. “Wind up. It’s the best news we’ve had since we arrived. Everyone should be there.”

  The Yorkshireman nodded. “And if we plan it right, we can use it to pick up on all our targets. Let’s assign villains.”

  “I’ll take Webb alone,” Alicia said. “Beau will help.”

  “Are you sure?” Drake met her eyes.

  “Jealous much?”