“I look at in terms of paying the bills. And unless Ibis is feeling generous, that’s going to get harder until our next job.”
Rick cocked a split eyebrow. “We’re not broke?”
“Not yet. But rent isn’t cheap anywhere on the Third Coast, and the cost of water being what is is…” Kai shrugged. “Just saying. We’ll probably have to tap into our emergency savings before we get paid again.”
“So we’re fine,” Rick said breezily.
Kai grunted. No, they weren’t exactly hurting for funds. Their savings were strong enough to live on for a year, thanks to a pretty solid track-record of success. Houston was the first time in a while they hadn’t come out feeling peachy. Well, and Glasgow.
And Cusco. And Hong Kong.
They fell into a silence that was cozily companionable. Kai checked the feed from their home security cam on his wristband. Amy was passed out on the couch, tail thumping silently in time to some dream or other. He surreptitiously tilted his wrist to hide the screen from Rick, who was determined to keep her off the furniture. Rick, however, was busy solving the various riddles and puzzles scattered around the restaurant. He’d cracked all of them their first time here, and they never changed, so most of the challenge was lost. It didn’t seem to impact his enjoyment whatsoever.
Agent Michaels soon returned, as promised, bearing Rick’s thirty-dollar homegrown USDA hand-pattied beef, and Kai’s veggie burger. Rick thanked him with a smile, which unfortunately split his lip a bit wider and came off as more pained than charming.
“How was that?” Rick asked, the moment the waiter had left.
“How was what?”
“That.” He grinned in demonstration. It looked quite manic.
Kai paused in demolishing his burger. “Don’t tell me that was you trying to flirt.”
“Yes?”
Kai bit his veggie burger in half to avoid answering, and after a moment Rick began to attack his. He looked like he was taking out a great deal of frustration on it.
“So,” Rick said, after several minutes of silent carnage. “You want to contact Ibis, set up the drop?”
“I can, yeah. You don’t want to try and fix the flask first or something?”
He shook his head. “Nah. To do it decently would cost -- well, a lot. Plus, Ibis would probably notice anyway. Honesty, that’s the best option here.”
Kai narrowed his eyes. He had never heard Rick speak favorably about honesty in any setting. “You just want to keep it for yourself, don’t you?”
“What an accusation! No. Set up the drop, mention the, ah, complications, but sweeten it with the wreath. At the very least, we’ll still have his curiosity.” Rick bit into his burger and added, “An’ if he don’ wan the flashk, then, y’know…”
“Uh huh.”
Rick swallowed. “I mean, it would be nice to have a memento from that place.”
“Would it?”
“Hey, it was a shithole, don’t get me wrong. But it was our shithole, Kai. Our shithole. And…” His expression darkened, growing distant. “You should’ve seen the mess in the archives. It always bothered me I couldn’t take anything with us the first time. This makes up for that, a little.”
“Couldn’t have just grabbed something else from the archives? Something Chilton wasn’t wearing around his neck?”
“Well, I wanted to kick Chilton’s ass, too. So, y’know. No.”
“Uh huh.” The wooden bench creaked as he settled back, his plate bearing witness to the brutal murder of a black-bean patty. “Alright, I’ll set up the drop. Was thinking Gateway Plaza?”
“Mmm.” Rick traced a finger idly around the lip of his martini glass. “Works for me. I’ll hit the Club tonight. See what’s new on the boards. Maybe something international this time. Nostalgic or not, Houston left a bad taste in my mouth. Wouldn’t mind getting out of the States for a while.”
Kai arched an eyebrow over his beer. “Sure, or, we could, y’know, just leave for a while. Doesn’t have to be a job.”
“Come on. We’re both useless when we have free time.”
“You are, maybe. I’m great at doing nothing. It’s my favorite thing to do. Plus, we just got back, and I don’t want to leave Amy alone again any time soon.”
“Of course.” Rick shrugged. “We don’t have to jet off right away. I’m just saying, we should start looking. Planning our next move.”
“This is my next move,” Kai sighed, and he closed his eyes, hands resting on his stomach. “Wake me when you’ve figured out yours.”
* * *
They walked home, leaving through the false phonebooth that concealed the rear exit. It was growing late and the humidity had finally broken.
Their apartment in the historic Third Ward was only a few miles south. A cool breeze was coming in off the lake, carrying with it the sound of gulls and distant thunder. Yet the sky overhead was clear of everything but stars and airplanes, so Rick wasn’t worried. He took his time, enjoying the late-night emptiness of the city and the pleasant buzz of the martini resting deep in his bones.
They followed the Milwaukee River south, through the busy financial district that had exploded in the decades after Radical Dynamics established a base in the city. Their office was visible from pretty much any downtown corner; currently it rose to Rick’s left like an immense curving blade of dark glass, greenery reminiscent of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon draping over the rooftop and trailing vines above the massive glowing sign. Everywhere Radical Dynamics showed up, they made their mark; and for a change, locals usually didn’t complain. It was hard to, when the company was responsible for transforming the Great Lakes area into a booming hub of technology, innovation, and culture that had come to be known as The Third Coast.
The apartment Rick and Kai shared was a corner studio on the fifth floor that overlooked the river as it coursed through the Port of Milwaukee and into Lake Michigan. Kai was snoring like a jet engine only minutes after he put on one of his favorite UFO documentaries, Amy resting sprawled across his lap. Rick spent a few fruitless minutes hissing at her to get off the couch, but the pitbull only looked at him and thumped her tail, so he gave up. Everything in the apartment already smelled like her anyway.
After a quick shower, he grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and settled into bed with his laptop. The pallid glow of the TV limned the sparse furnishings of the apartment. Besides a sofa, a table, a small kitchenette, and the two beds, there wasn’t much room for anything else. Whatever space remained was occupied by a collection of mangled dog toys, Rick’s bird-watching books, gear for when on the job, and carefully-placed artifacts and keepsakes, gathered over the years from various excursions. The ivory Mughal flask rested in two pieces on a shelf beside the Myrtle wreath, but they were the most valuable items in the apartment. Most of what Rick collected held little value, beyond historicity. A Roman coin, both faces worn down until they were almost smooth; the small stone head of a jaguar, collected from a cave outside Cusco; a mummy portrait from the Fayum, bearing the strikingly-lifelike face of a woman dead for more than two thousand years.
Rick always took a moment to admire it all, these pieces of history that surrounded him. It was like sitting in one small nexus of a vast and endless web that connected him to the lives of foreign people in strange eras. It reminded him how much bigger the world was than himself, and that had always come as an odd comfort. Especially in Houston. Reminders that the world was more than what he saw had been much-needed.
The windows flared with purple heat, pushing back the shadows. Two beats later and the sky rumbled, echoing across Lake Michigan and rattling the dishes piled in the sink. Abandoning Kai, Amy jumped up to settle her bulk beside him, and Rick pulled himself out of his reverie and focused his attention on his laptop. He unfurled it and booted it up, then connected to his VPN and opened his ghost-net client.
The splash page of Club Nabonidus greeted him seconds later. To all outward appearances it looked like the website of
some ivory-tower history professor, generated way back in the Angelfire days of internet prehistory. He logged in with his unique, randomly-generated credentials -- entering them into the field for subscribing to a newsletter -- and accessed the real Club Nabonidus.
[W]: 14th Century Qur'an, Gold print on Black silk. Last known location Kabul.
[H]: 100,000cc upon delivery.
[W]Looking for coyote – Long-term. Must be comfortable working in extreme climates and DISCRETE. Pay negotiable. Contact for more info. Serious enquiries only! DNC PLEASE!!!
[W]Urgent: Need SKILLED PROFESSIONAL to rep. at Dorotheum Auction House, Vienna. 3 pieces desired. Spending limit and pay/expenses will be discussed via PM. Must be able to adapt if bidding is lost. Possibility of long-term contract
[H]: Confederate coins, mint condition
[W]: 500cc each (shipping not included)
Club Nabonidus was where those enthusiasts with too much money found those professionals with too few scruples. The site was hosted on its own ghost-net, a fully independent, fully distributed internet in miniature, running in the background on the devices of all its users. Invite only, and anonymity was strictly enforced – anything looking like a genuine identity was flagged and promptly removed. Nobody knew who originally set up Club Nabonidus, or whether it was being supported by anything other than a tangled web of administrative bots. Rick’s theory was that it was an intelligent and fully-autonomous piece of software, although that didn’t really solve the key mystery. Someone had to be making a profit from it all, or why bother?
He had first discovered it their second year out of Houston. They were living in a halfway house in Iowa, working for scraps in a food dispensary by day and fencing what valuables they could scrounge up by night. After narrowly surviving a bit of nasty business involving a set of Civil War-era pistols, Rick had been given a card by the same rival crew that had nearly murdered him and Kai only hours earlier. On it was a dark web address and a password – his invite to Club Nabonidus.
Apparently he and Kai had proven themselves, young though they were. That was the first thing they learned about the Club: Honor among thieves was more than just a tired maxim. It actually meant something, though in the Club it had been reworded: Protect the tribe. If you were in, then you were in. The other crews might be your rivals, but they were also your people. In the field, anything was fair game. But off it, everyone was bound by a sacred covenant, an understanding that the world was a hard and brutal mistress, and their place in it was only secured by a set of niche skills and a mutual interest in not getting caught. Put a bullet in your rival’s head while on the job? Fair play. Break the covenant and reveal the Club? Your credentials were instantly burned, and all the crypto in the account tied to the Club was sent back into the ether. And that was the good news, because odds were several of the people you just betrayed would decide to tie off loose-ends and slit your throat.
He scrolled through the postings, unsure of what he was really looking for. A good job had to meet several criteria, and a generous payout wasn’t even the first on his list. For now, he was just browsing. It never took long for the restlessness to return, to seep into the space between jobs like a bad drink. Kai might be content to put up his boots for months at a time, but for Rick it was just short of torture –
He paused his scrolling, frowning at the screen. The posting that had caught his eye had nothing to do with a job, yet it demanded attention:
ANOTHER CREW GONE! Something FUCKED UP is happening. THEY ARE AFTER US!
Despite the click-baity nature of the post, it chilled his blood. Kai was the one into conspiracies, but Rick knew this was no tinfoil theory. Mostly because it wasn’t the first of its kind he had come across. He opened the posting and read the frantic message. It claimed to be made by the survivor of a job gone south in Chicago. They’d hit a museum for a client and made a clean break, only to be ambushed on their way to the drop-off point. By whom, they didn’t know. Two were dead, and now this lone survivor was on the run. The offers of sanctuary were only slightly outweighed by the declarations of doom and suggestions that the Club go dark.
> Can provide safehouse. PM for details.
> This shit keeps happening
> Amateur
> Go 2 cops. Best option now
> That’s it, I’m done. So long CN – not worth being hunted like this
> Shut the Club down. We’ve obviously been compromised
It was the last message that worried Rick the most. If Club Nabonidus shut down, what then? He’d done his research. Club Nabonidus was the biggest game out there; the rest of the antiquities trade was a wasteland of two-bit tomb raiders and forgery pushers trying to make enough money to get clean water and food for a week. He couldn’t go back to that.
Rick perused the same thread for another half-hour, feeding his anxiety, until some unconscious threshold was met and he’d had his fill. He rolled up his laptop and set it on the bedside table. Amy leaned her entire warm bulk against him, and after a few minutes of staring up at the ceiling and listening to the ravings of some abduction-wacko on the TV, he drifted towards the edge of sleep.
A sky-shattering peal of thunder yanked him rudely back to awareness. Rick started, heart suddenly racket-balling its way around his chest. Amy was looking out the window with as close to an expression of stern disapproval as her face could manage.
Rick got up, double-checked the locks on the door, and lay back down. Yes, the matter of crews being picked off like flies in a frog-haunted swamp got to him. It had only been brought to the attention of the Club in the last year or so, but rumors suggested it had been going on for much longer. All over the world, crews picking up what appeared to be standard jobs dropped off the face of the Earth. Those that did resurface rarely did so in ideal condition. No one knew who was behind it, or if they were even connected -- though it was a hell of a coincidence if they weren’t.
He’d watched the panic spread throughout the Club like wildfire, yet had managed to remain detached from it all. Now, however, Rick was feeling it scratch at the back of his mind where the lizard brain resided.
They were due to make their own drop tomorrow. And that, apparently, was when all those other crews had fallen into a black hole.
Hard rain began to drive against the window, a sound like nails chucked against glass, and it was a long time spent frowning into the darkness before he found sleep again.
Secure link acquired…
Encryption enabled…
X: Where are you?
I: Where I need to be.
X: Chicago?
I: That business is concluded.
X: Then why am I hearing rumors of loose ends?
I: Don’t believe everything you hear.
X: That’s not a fucking answer.
I: It’s being handled.
X: How?
I: No details. That’s how this works, remember? The less you know.
X: I’m beginning to rethink our arrangement. We all are. Faith in your capabilities is less resolute than it once was. If you’re no longer able to remain discreet…
I: Keep reminding yourselves that you don’t want blood on your hands. That you need someone like me to do the hard work.
X: Someone like you. But perhaps not you specifically.
I: There’s no one else. You know that. Chicago was a success, and any potential loose ends are being taken care of.
X: So you are in Chicago.
I: No.
X: Paris, then?
I: Milwaukee.
X: Where the fuck’s that and why are you there?
I: Third Coast. I’m here to check in on a couple investments.
X: Investments.
I: New assets. I think they’ll be useful. Help us move forward. Accelerate our timetable, achieve maximum throughput. That’s the sort of synergistic business bullshit you like to hear, right?
X: I like it when things go according to plan. Which has been a fucking rarity of l
ate. So you’d better start explaining before there’s yet another mess to clean up.
I: The Ark. We can get to it first.
X: Ok. I’m listening.
Six
Hôpital Bichat-Claude-Bernard
Paris, France
After his third seizure in almost six hours, the doctors put Martin Kingston into an induced coma. It was the safest course of action, they told Estelle, the thinking being that it would prevent his brain from damaging itself any worse than it already had. It did nothing to mitigate the extreme fever he was running, or the dehydration caused by diarrhea, or the fact that his immune system was already compromised by rheumatoid arthritis and persistent MRSA. That was the worst part, they informed her. In any other man his age, things might not be so dire. But Martin Kingston was so damaged already.
The prognosis came back around 5 AM the next morning, once they’d gotten him stabilized. Estelle hadn’t gotten so much as a catnap in since the frantic ride to the hospital, and so it took a few moments before her brain could chug its way towards comprehension.
“Malaria,” she repeated tonelessly.
The doctor nodded, her face expertly poised amid a frame of silver hair. “Plasmodium falciparum. Cerebral malaria. All the symptoms are there. The parasite causes inflammation of the brain, which is where the fever and seizures have come from. Everything else, I’m afraid, can be attributed to your father’s weakened immune system.”
They were in the hall outside her father’s ICU suite, in a wing of Hôpital Bichat-Claude-Bernard that seemed to have remained completely deserted ever since Estelle arrived. As if everyone were clearing out to make way for the inevitable. She leaned against the wall beside the door, hugging herself and squinting at the absurdity of it all.
“How could my father have gotten cerebral malaria in Paris?”
The doctor – Bezou, that was her name – gave the most professional shrug Estelle had ever seen. “It is not unheard of for malaria-carrying mosquitoes to cross the Mediterranean and make it this far north. Rare, but not impossible. Has he done any travelling recently? South America, Africa, India?”
A Covenant of Thieves Page 9
