Bolthole

by Jeff Mariotte

  When armed men were put into proximity to objects of great value, and vast piles of cash, there was no telling what might occur.

  Whatever it was, Callen would have to be prepared.

  But prepared for what? That was the question.

  And everything rode on the answer.

  * * *

  Sam watched a black Humvee drive past, slowly and deliberately. The windows were tinted almost to the point of being opaque, but he was pretty sure there were four people inside. Once it was out of sight, he checked the image on his tablet. The vehicle cruised up the street, and turned into the driveway of the house Callen was in.

  It was on.

  Deeks had already called, so Sam picked up the phone again. “They’re in,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Roger that,” Deeks said. Sam heard him say “Go” to Kensi, then heard the sound of their engine. “We’re a few blocks away.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be in there for a while,” Sam said. “But hurry.”

  “We’re on the way.”

  “See you soon,” Sam said, then disconnected and dropped the burner into the passenger seat. He cranked the engine and pulled away from the curb. He fought the urge to race around the corner, instead taking it slow and quiet. The last thing he wanted to do was draw anyone’s attention from the house out toward the street. He parked halfway across the driveway, not blocking it all, but ensuring that the car couldn’t be seen from inside. The gate had been left open, probably because the visitors were expected, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to manually close it from here—or if trying to do so would set off an alarm inside.

  A few minutes later, Kensi and Deeks came around the other corner. He motioned them across the driveway, nose-to-nose with the Challenger, blocking any potential vehicular egress. They got out and joined him, each carrying a Heckler & Koch HK416 that matched his. “Do you think we need more bodies?” Deeks asked. “Like maybe an army?”

  “Be an army of one,” Sam said. “I’m a SEAL, and Kensi’s—well, she’s Kensi Blye. Anybody dumb enough to mess with her deserves whatever he gets.”

  “You’re not really expecting a firefight, are you?” Kensi asked.

  They’d been over this several times, but once more couldn’t hurt. “I doubt it,” Sam said. “If there’s going to be a fight, it’ll be inside. Hopefully not, though. We just need to be in place to stop them once they’re out of view from the house. They’ll see that they’re outgunned and surrender. Even if they don’t, they won’t be ready to shoot, and we will.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Deeks said. “It’s just that in the LAPD, we’d have brought in a lot of backup for an op like this.”

  “Yeah, but most of those people would be LAPD officers,” Sam said. “You’d need a lot of them to equal the three of us. Especially if they were anything like the two who tried to roust me today.” He gestured up the driveway. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get into position. We want to get the drop on them as soon as they come outside.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Kensi said. “Deeks?”

  “Yeah, I’m right here. Let’s do this.”

  Heads low, hoping no neighbors had looked outside and seen them with their assault rifles, they headed up the drive.

  * * *

  “I think that was them, Hugh,” Betsy Peabody said.

  “Who?”

  “Agent Blye and her partner! In that car. That Jeep or whatever it is, the black one.”

  “Where?” Hugh asked.

  “They were just sitting there, in front of the Italian place, like they said. Then they pulled out like a bat out of Hades.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to see you.”

  “Maybe they didn’t think we were coming because you drive so dang slow.”

  “Guess we can go home, then.”

  “No, we can’t go home. Follow them.”

  “Follow who?” Hugh asked.

  “That black one!” Betsy pointed down the road. “It’s right there.”

  “I don’t see—”

  Her vision had always been better than his, and even more so these past several years. At an age when many of her friends were dealing with cataracts or macular degeneration, she could still spot a white-breasted nuthatch in a tree at three hundred paces. “Use your eyes, you old fool! Or move over and let me drive.”

  “If I move over, I’ll go out the door.”

  “That might not be the worst thing ever.”

  “Why are we following them?”

  “Because we have pictures for Agent Blye. And because if she can find out anything about what happened to Susan, we have to know. I have to know. Just follow.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Betsy sighed. She had loved Hugh since her teens. She still did.

  But sometimes she wondered how she had put up with him for so long. How any woman ever put up with any man.

  Probably, she thought, it was about as easy as it was for any man to put up with any woman.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” she said. “Go, before they get away.”

  32

  A black Hummer pulled up the long, circular drive and came to a stop on the flagstones outside the house. Yegor watched from a window, sitting in plain view, his weapon just as clearly visible. Callen stood a few feet back, close enough to see but far enough to duck if it became necessary.

  Four men got out of the vehicle. He identified them from the photographs he’d seen. Faulk, with that massive neck and shoulders and the shaved head. Dark, lean Wehling. Brower, with the sharp nose and red curls. And finally, Shogren, who’d let his brown hair and beard grow out since that old military ID photo had been taken, but who couldn’t disguise his bright green eyes.

  They were all wearing black tactical gear. They’d come for a business meeting but dressed for combat. Callen hoped that could be avoided. As long as Belyakov played his part right, it would only get tricky if the Russians witnessed the arrest of the contractors, or if Belyakov told them he wasn’t being allowed to keep the tablet.

  Pasha opened the door and stood aside, silent as ever. Callen had never heard him speak, and wondered if he was mute.

  The four visitors stepped inside. They didn’t have weapons in their hands, but they were holstered at hips and ankles, clearly visible. Nobody was pretending the situation wasn’t fraught. Ordinarily at the outset of a high-stakes negotiation, he’d expect to see smiles, however phony. There were none here, just grim faces.

  Brower carried a black Kevlar bag, with something heavy in it. Vadim and Belyakov had already brought similar bags into the living room and set them beside the biggest chair. That would be Belyakov’s chair, Callen figured—the closest thing available to a throne. Belyakov wanted everyone to know this meeting was ultimately about him, and what he wanted. The contractors were there to deliver his prize. Whatever he was paying them was worth more to them than it was to him, and that gave him the position of power.

  “Welcome, gentlemen,” Belyakov said, without a trace of good cheer. His English was Russian-accented, but fluent. “It’s nice to finally see you face-to-face.”

  “Glad to be here,” Shogren said. “We’ve been holding onto this item for a long time, looking for a good home for it. Looks like you’re the lucky one.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” Belyakov replied. “Come, in here.” He waved the men into the living room. “Sit.”

  Before they could, he crossed to his chair, flanked by the big bags of cash. The contractors followed him in. Evgeni and Yegor hadn’t left the room; Callen, Vadim, and Pasha trailed the others in, then took their prearranged places against the walls while the contractors sat, two on a couch and two in separate chairs. There was a heavy wood coffee table in front of the couch. It didn’t match the rest of the furnishings, so Callen guessed it had been brought in because it was sturdy enough to hold the tablet.

  Among the Russians, only Belyakov was seated. Callen’s station was at the doorway between the living r
oom and the foyer. Probably, he thought, Belyakov wanted him there because if there was trouble, somebody was bound to shoot the guy standing between them and the way out.

  “We all know why we’re here,” Belyakov began. “You brought the item in question?”

  Shogren nodded toward Brower. Apparently the “dead” man was the designated spokesperson. “We have it. Go ahead, Wendy.”

  Brower lifted the heavy bag into his lap, unzipped it, and pulled out a package about seventeen inches tall and fourteen wide. With a tactical knife, he sliced through packing tape holding pieces of cardboard on each side, then peeled away bubble wrap to reveal a stone slab. Age had yellowed and stained it, and its edges were ragged, hewn from whatever its origins were by primitive tools. He put the bag on the table, then laid the slab on top of it, face up.

  Callen was good with languages, but he wasn’t up on his Sumerian or his Akkadian. He didn’t think a stone tablet that allowed one to be translated into the other had much real-world utility these days—certainly there was an app for that, if anybody needed to do it. What made this thing valuable was not its function, but its age and its rarity. What made it particularly valuable at this moment was the size of Belyakov’s fortune and his eagerness to possess things that nobody else could.

  Callen didn’t understand collecting. The only certainty about life was that it would end, and when it did, what good was it to have amassed a bunch of objects one would have to leave behind? He never wanted to collect so much of anything that he couldn’t stuff it all into a couple of bags and take off whenever it became necessary. Maybe that was his bolthole—not a rigidly defined place or identity, but the ability to go anywhere and be anyone, at a moment’s notice.

  When Belyakov looked at the tablet, his eyes almost gleamed. Callen was afraid he might start salivating. He rose from his chair and hovered over the table, examining the rock slab from a foot away. “It looks authentic,” he said.

  “It is,” Shogren replied.

  “You don’t mind if I—”

  “Pottery Barn rules. You break it, you bought it.”

  Callen was tempted to point out that Pottery Barn had no such rule, but he figured a Russian thug who’d just done a stretch at Lompoc probably wouldn’t know that.

  “Understood,” Belyakov said. He crouched beside the table and lifted one end of the tablet. He studied the edges, then set it back on the bag and traced his fingertips over the etched-in symbols.

  “There are several ways to date such an object,” he said. “Most require a lab, which we do not have available to us here. And of course, we cannot take this particular artifact to any commercial lab. But there is another, only slightly less specific dating method, which requires only human expertise. I’m not being boastful when I say that I am as expert in the field as any other living human.”

  He raised the end again, then slid a hand underneath it and hoisted the entire thing off the table. He felt the weight in his hands, turned it over and eyed the back side, then put it down again. “I am satisfied,” he said. “That is no forgery. It’s the real thing.”

  “I told you it was,” Shogren said.

  “Of course. But then you would, wouldn’t you?”

  “We don’t have all month. Do you want it, or not?”

  Belyakov returned to his chair. He was smiling now, the grin of a little boy who has just found enough money in his pockets to buy the toy he’s had his eye on. “I do.”

  “We agreed on a price.”

  “We agreed on a price range, pending authentication.”

  “You just authenticated, right?”

  “Right. Now we must narrow the range down to a precise sum.”

  “We said fifteen to twenty. Let’s just meet halfway. Seventeen-five.”

  Callen hadn’t been sure until just then what kind of money the tablet might fetch. He was sure they weren’t discussing thousands, though. And the language would be different if it was hundreds of thousands.

  That left only millions. Was there twenty million dollars in those bags?

  And if so, could either side resist the urge to keep both the money and the tablet?

  “Not so fast,” Belyakov said.

  “What’s the problem? You said it’s real. It’s what you thought it would be, right? What I said it would be.”

  “Yes, it appears to be. But there are other… concerns.”

  “Like what?” Shogren was getting angry. Maybe he’d expected, after all these years, that this part would be easy. Wishful thinking.

  “Perhaps to you,” Belyakov said, “the difference between fifteen million dollars and seventeen million is an abstract exercise. Essentially meaningless, because the sums are too large for you to truly grasp. But for me—”

  Shogren cut him off. “You’d spend that on a trip to the mall.”

  “My point exactly. You don’t understand how much money that is. You have no basis for understanding it. The things it could do. Money isn’t just for buying things. It has power. It does things. It changes things.” Belyakov sat back in the chair and laced his fingers together. “It changes people.”

  “Hal—” Wehling began. Callen was surprised they were using their real names. He supposed as long as they were confining it to first names, it wouldn’t be too dangerous. Still, he would have used code names, in their position.

  In any event, Shogren interrupted him before he could say any more. “We didn’t come here for an economics lecture,” he said. “We came to do a deal.”

  “And a deal we shall do. On my terms.”

  “On mutually agreeable terms,” Shogren corrected.

  “I am the one with the money,” Belyakov reminded him. “You’re the ones with an object for sale that you’ve been holding onto for a long time. Costing you money without earning anything. You’re more desperate to sell than I am to buy, and I am fully aware of your situation. I think that means I dictate the terms, don’t you?”

  Callen didn’t like the sound of that. He was already on edge, but Belyakov’s words spiked the tension even higher. If the contractors thought the deal was going south, they might just try to snatch the cash and run.

  He was trying to read physical cues. Shogren and Brower were on the couch, and he could see both their faces. Shogren was the more relaxed of the two. He still thought this was a negotiation, and maybe it was. Brower wasn’t so sure, though. He was biting his lower lip so hard Callen thought he might draw blood. His hand was twitchy, and kept inching toward the gun holstered at his side. Wehling was in a chair with its back to Callen, so he couldn’t see much of the guy, just his feet and the top of his head. Only the balls of his feet touched the floor—he was ready to spring into action. Faulk sat in a chair beside the couch, so Callen could see about three-quarters of him. He looked relaxed on the surface, but his fingers were digging into the chair arm with almost enough force to rip through it. If things went sideways, Faulk was the one he’d worry about the most. On that side, anyway. On his own side, Yegor, with his dagger tattoo.

  “You’re not backing out, are you?” Shogren asked. “Because if you were, then we’d have a real problem here.”

  “I am not backing out,” Belyakov assured him. “Simply trying to delineate the playing field.”

  “The field is, we got it and you want it.”

  Belyakov shook his head. “You misunderstand. You have what I want, but I can walk away without it. I have what you need. If you had other buyers, you would use them against me to raise the asking price. But you don’t. I could offer you eight, and that would still be more money than any of you have ever seen in your life. Two million apiece, no? Would you turn that down?”

  The contractors shot each other angry looks. Callen understood—none of them wanted to be the first to agree to a deal so much lower than what they’d been promised. But nobody wanted to walk away from two million dollars, either. They’d held onto the tablet so long, and now that the time had finally come to sell it, they’d murdered and robbed and
put themselves at risk of long prison terms, or worse. To give up now, to leave empty-handed, was unacceptable. So was hanging onto the artifact and trying to find another willing buyer. Belyakov had them over the proverbial barrel, and he was letting them know it.

  Callen even thought he understood why. He wouldn’t be allowed to keep the tablet. If he could, he would probably hand over twenty million dollars without a fuss, but since he’d have to give it up, he wanted the purchase to cost him as little as possible. Callen couldn’t blame him for that. He just didn’t want the deal to be blown.

  Or the meeting to erupt in gunfire.

  Especially that.

  33

  Shogren came out of his chair wearing a furious scowl.

  “This bastard thinks we don’t have any other buyers,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Hal,” Wehling whined. That single word gave away the whole game. It was Belyakov, or back to the drawing board.

  “Sit,” Belyakov said. “It’s obvious that I am your only option. So the only question that remains is, what will you take for it? Two million is a lot of money.”

  “Two mil is crap,” Shogren said. He wasn’t sitting, but he wasn’t leaving, either. The tablet still lay on top of its bag, on the sturdy table. He came from money, Callen remembered. Maybe not millions, but his family had lived in an upscale Pasadena neighborhood, and had a cabin in the Hollywood Hills, where low-rent districts were few and far between. It was just possible that two million dollars wasn’t terribly meaningful to him. Clearly it was to Wehling. Brower looked like he was about to explode, too, but Callen couldn’t tell if it was from anger or frustration.

  Belyakov waved him back toward the couch. “I see two million is not worth your time. Perhaps two and a half, then? An even ten, split four ways?”