In the doorway stood a man about forty-five years old, in shorts and a pair of very dark sunglasses, but the most striking thing about him was the garish Hawaiian shirt he wore open to his navel.
“Magnum P.I. called. He wants his clothes back,” Tom whispered to Cloutard.
“François!” the man called, then he ran to the Frenchman and threw his arms around him warmly.
“Is there anywhere in the world where you don’t have friends?” Tom said, amazed.
“This guy!” the man said, clapping Cloutard on the shoulder. “He saved my life when some nasty KGB boys were about to draw and quarter me.”
“You stole their money,” Cloutard pointed out.
“No. I borrowed it. I was planning to give it back. One day.”
“Tom, I would like you to meet Modest Gagarin,” Cloutard said. “And before you ask, no, his father is not named Yuri. Modest, this is Tom Wagner.”
Modest nodded. “I’ve heard quite a bit about you already. Come in, come in!”
Not far away, a black SUV had been standing for several minutes. The Kahle, sitting inside, had watched as Tom and Cloutard got out of their taxi and entered the farmyard.
42
Mostostroi Architecture and Construction Company, Nizhny Novgorod
“Please have a seat,” the man said, waving toward two chairs in front of his chaotic desk. “I am very happy that you have come to me for advice. Sheremetev Castle was one of our most ambitious projects. Unfortunately, the investors ran out of money.” He held his shoulders excessively straight and his chin raised. “We tried—”
That was as far as he got, because Arthur jammed a stun gun into his neck the moment the door closed behind them. They caught the twitching man as he fell and lowered his unconscious body gently to the floor.
“It was a boring conversation anyway . . . ” Arthur said and winked at Hellen. She frowned and tilted her head questioningly. “Star Wars. Han Solo.” Arthur rolled his eyes and laughed.
“At least now I know where Tom gets it from. He’s always quoting films. But we don’t have time for that now. And since we don’t have R2 with us, you’ll have to use the Force to find the plans. To work!” Now it was Hellen’s turn to smile at him, and Arthur laughed. “You take that plan cabinet, I’ll check the computer.” She tapped the spacebar to rouse the old PC from sleep. A password field appeared on the screen—in Cyrillic.
“Forget it,” she said. “I’m never getting in here.”
Despite the minor setback, she turned her attention to a second plan cabinet, sliding the first drawer open as quietly as she could.
“Miss Moneypenny out there could walk in any second with the snacks I’m guessing her boss asked her to get earlier,” Arthur said.
“She’s an ‘executive assistant,’” Hellen said, screwing up her nose at Arthur’s unflattering choice of words, as fitting as it might be.
They frantically pulled out one drawer after another, flipping through the various plans and papers inside. Hellen pulled a large folio out of the bottom drawer and laid it on top of the cabinet. She opened it and leafed through the plans.
“I’ve got something,” she whispered.
“Me too.”
Arthur came to her and looked at the plans in front of her.
“That’s not the castle. I’ve got that here.” He held up several plans rolled together.
“I know, but look at this. These are the original plans from the 19th century.” She pointed to a spot on the drawing and her finger followed several lines across the paper.
“Pack it up,” said Arthur urgently. “We have to get out of here. We can look at it later.”
“Okay, got it.” She rolled the plans up and they hurried to the door.
Hellen was already reaching for the handle when the door swung open from outside. The assistant was suddenly standing in the doorway, grinning broadly and balancing a tray of coffee and cookies on one hand. The first things she saw were her boss’s legs, sticking out from behind the door. Her smile vanished.
“What is going on here?”
“He was so overwhelmed by the news that he fainted,” said Hellen, and she pushed past the woman. The secretary dropped the tray in fright and dashed to her boss’s side, screaming and cursing Arthur and Hellen in Russian as they fled. They ignored her and got out of the building as fast as they could.
Father Fjodor started the car as soon as he saw them running from the building. The building’s concierge emerged just behind them, shouting, a telephone in his hand, already calling the police.
“What happened?” Father Fjodor asked.
“Hit the gas!” Arthur shouted once he and Hellen were in the car.
“We’re a stunning team, literally!” Hellen cried happily as she waved the plans in the air. “And I know how we can get your father out of there!”
43
Outskirts of Nizhny Novgorod
As soon as Tom and Cloutard stepped inside the main building, it was clear that the decrepit exterior of the farm was camouflage. The contrast could not have been greater. The room was the size of a small hangar and looked like a cross between an electronics superstore and a junkyard. The tables and shelves were stuffed with technical gear and spare parts spanning decades. Tom saw the open case of an old Commodore 64 lying beside an early LaserDisc player and an Apple Newton. Beside those lay a brand new high-end drone, state-of-the-art night vision gear, VR goggles, and a silver box with “PlayStation 6” on the side.
Farther back, Tom saw a large table holding a ridiculous number of automatic weapons. Some he recognized, others he had never seen before. There was too much stuff lying around in their to take it all in quickly.
“Nice little collection,” he said, looked around and grinning with enthusiasm.
“You’re probably thinking I must have hacked the accounts of a few Russian oligarchs to put all this together. What can I say? You’d be right.” Modest grinned maliciously. “François told me that you need weapons and maybe a few other bits and pieces. He didn’t go into detail and, frankly, I don’t need to know about it.” He turned to Cloutard. “I trust you.”
Modest led them past the table of automatic weapons to a door at the end of the hall. He tapped a code into the keypad by the door. There was a beep and the door swung open, and for a few seconds Tom and Cloutard could only stand and gape. The gear inside far exceeded their expectations.
“Impressive!” Tom said. “What do you do with all this stuff?” He was looking at an enormous collection of weapons of every kind, mounted to the walls all around. Like exhibits in a museum, every weapon had a plate beside it with the model name and a few facts about it. Tom saw pistols, revolvers, submachine guns, and sniper rifles from every maker in the trade. Here, too, were several models completely unknown to him.
“It’s my hobby. I collect weapons.”
“What for?” Tom asked. “The zombie apocalypse?” Even he found this many guns a little suspicious.
“For fun. I just love these things.”
“Where did it all come from?”
“After the Soviet Union fell apart, the black market was flooded. You could get almost anything, from atomic missiles to U-boats. Someone else got the U-boat I wanted, unfortunately. It would have been a great toy. No idea who has it now.”
“Do you sell, too? Or just collect?”
“Sometimes I sell. Usually to the same people whose accounts I plundered a few months earlier.”
Cloutard chuckled knowingly. “Oh, yes. We used to do that all the time.”
“A lot of super-rich people are on the lookout for exotic weapons,” Modest said. “And they’re prepared to pay well for them. The best part is that they mostly just want bragging rights and the weapons never actually get used.” He looked at Tom seriously. “I am not some unscrupulous arms dealer, if that’s what you think. Go on, help yourself. Take whatever you want.”
Tom picked three hand grenades out of a wooden box and began to juggle
them, smiling at Cloutard as he did so.
“Mon ami, you know weapons are not really my forte.”
“Don’t be like that. It’s not like we’re going to war. I just want to have something in my side when the bad guys show up. Just think about Ossana,” Tom said.
At the mention of Ossana Ibori, Cloutard nodded eagerly and reached for a Walther PPK. “The gentleman’s weapon of choice,” he said.
Modest laughed and pointed to a large cupboard on one wall. “Ammunition is in there.” He turned to Tom. “Anything else?”
“Yes. We’ll need comms,” Tom said as he stuffed a silenced FN P90, a silenced Glock, a holster, a bulletproof vest, a knife, and the hand grenades into a black bag.
“So we have to live with you in our ears again?” Cloutard said.
Gagarin led them to one of the many tables back in the hall. Tom’s face lit up when he saw the latest AV combat communications gear. “Perfect,” he said, adding a few selected pieces to his bag. “We’re going to need wheels, too,” Tom said, more as a joke. He did not actually believe Modest would have anything like that to offer.
But Modest smiled. “I think I might have just what you need.”
Cloutard and Tom looked at each other in surprise and followed the Russian, who pushed open a wooden door at the end of the hall. Tom’s heart skipped a beat. In front of him was a brand new Toyota Tundra 6x6 Hercules with all the trimmings.
“Will this do the trick?” Gagarin asked rhetorically.
“Oh, definitely,” Tom said.
Modest rummaged in a drawer and took out two keys that he handed to Tom without hesitation.
“The usual rates?” Cloutard asked.
Modest nodded.
Without warning, sirens began to wail, like in sci-fi films when something in the ship goes haywire.
“What the hell is that?” Tom shouted over the din.
“The doorbell,” Gagarin said with a laugh. He looked at a bank of monitors. “An old man, a young woman, and . . .” Gagarin’s voice faltered for a moment. “ . . . a priest?”
“Sounds like the start of a joke, I know, but it’s just our friends,” Tom said. “We have friend-finder activated, so we always know who’s where.” Gagarin was not happy at all to hear that. He cherished his anonymity. But friends of Cloutard were friends of his.
A little later, once the introductions had been made, Hellen spread the plans of the castle and the nearby church on one of the large tables and explained to Tom what she had discovered. They studied the plans closely and took another look at the satellite imagery. Then Tom turned to Gagarin.
“Modest, you don’t happen to have a helicopter or a light plane, do you?”
“No. But I have something even better,” Modest said, wiggling his eyebrows mischievously.
As dusk settled over the old farm, the hulking Toyota Tundra thundered out through the gate. From where he was, the Kahle could not see what had taken place inside the farmyard. He’d been sitting in his parked SUV for hours, out of sight of the entrance, watching. When the Toyota was gone, he climbed out and slowly approached the farm gate. He hammered on it several times with his fist.
44
Orthodox Church of the Archangel Michael, near Sheremetev Castle, Yurino
Hellen steered the enormous pickup into the narrow side street that led to the north gate of the church. She stopped the car and she, Arthur and Father Fjodor climbed out.
“I’ll take care of this. Wait here,” said Father Fjodor and he went ahead to the large iron gate. He tugged on the bell pull hanging at the entrance and waited.
It was almost ten in the evening. Father Fjodor rang the bell again. Finally, there was movement inside. A light went on in the house that bordered the property and an old man peered out of a window.
“Who’s there?” a hoarse voice asked in Russian. Father Fjodor explained to the old man that the Patriarch of Moscow had sent him. A short while later, locks clicked, the door opened, and the old priest, in his robe, let Father Fjodor inside.
“I’ll be right back. This will just take a minute,” he said to Hellen and Arthur, and he disappeared into the house.
Outside, the silence was almost complete. In the small town of only 3,500 inhabitants, nothing much happened at that time of night. No cars. No people. They could hear crickets chirping in the grass, and a dog barked now and then. The cloudless sky glittered with stars, and the moonlight doused the night in a mystical, blue-white light. Hellen and Arthur did not talk at first, but after a few minutes of unbroken silence, Arthur said: “So why aren’t you two still together?” The question caught Hellen unawares. It was the last thing she was expecting.
“Ummmmm . . .” She was lost for words for several seconds, then finally managed to say, “Arthur, I don’t think this is really the right time to talk about Tom’s and my love life.” She crossed her arms and leaned back against the truck.
“I’ll second that,” Tom’s voice suddenly said on Hellen’s headset. She fumbled frantically with the radio and pressed “mute.”
“But you were such a great couple,” Arthur said. “You were really good for him, and it broke his heart when you went off to work for that old count. I’m happy to see that you’ve found a way back to each other again.”
Hellen gasped. “We’re not . . . we haven’t . . .” she began, but just then the door of the local priest’s house opened and interrupted her attempt to protest. Father Fjodor came out, smiled, and presented them with a heavy old bunch of keys.
“Well, shall we?” said Arthur. He took the keys from Father Fjodor and soon unlocked the heavy iron gate.
Hellen switched on her flashlight, Arthur and Father Fjodor turned on their small LED lamps, and they entered the churchyard.
45
Eight thousand feet above Sheremetev Castle, Yurino
Tom had been skeptical when Cloutard’s friend had presented this aircraft to them. But his sense of adventure had quickly been aroused, and now he sat beside François eight thousand feet in the air in a little gyrocopter. The McCulloch J-2 was a strange craft, with a special feature that differentiated it from other gyrocopters: the cockpit could seat a pilot and passenger side by side. At first glance, the machine looked like a small helicopter, but from a technical standpoint it was quite different. It could not take off or land vertically, nor could it hover like a normal helicopter. The rotors were not driven directly, but generated enough lift to carry the craft only when the rear-mounted prop gave the aircraft enough forward velocity.
“A little taste?” Cloutard asked, holding a hip flask in front of Tom. Tom shook his head, but the offer made him smile. Cloutard shrugged, then took a long draft from the elegant metal flask.
“Thank God I always have this with me. This rotten little piece of junk does not even have a minibar,” Cloutard laughed, and took another mouthful.
“Oh, what the hell,” Tom said, and he accepted the flask from Cloutard’s hand and took a swallow. “To our anniversary,” he added. It was exactly a year since they had both been in a similar situation. The only difference was that, back then, they had been fleeing from Ossana and her henchmen in Tunisia, and they had been in Cloutard’s own luxury chopper, which did have a minibar. Today, they were sitting in a rusty beast almost sixty years old, in the middle of Russia, on their way to stir up a hornet’s nest.
“You have really gone overboard this time, haven’t you?” Cloutard said with a quick sideways glance. Tom looked like a modern-day Quasimodo on his way to battle. With the parachute on his back, the bulletproof vest, the silenced P-90 strapped to his chest and the grenades hanging from loops beside it, the magazines stuffed in countless pockets, not to mention the pistol and knife strapped to his thigh, it was difficult for Tom to even sit upright in the tiny cockpit.
“I’ll second that,” Tom laughed. Cloutard was amazed that Tom actually agreed with him, but Tom shook his head and tapped his headset. “Sorry, Grandpop’s interrogating Hellen. You should turn your ra
dio on,” he said to Cloutard, who had obviously not heard what Hellen said.
“Pardonnez-moi,” Cloutard said, immediately correcting the oversight.
“Ha! She’s muted it.” Tom grinned. “Grandpop was pestering her about why we’re not still together.”
“Ah. So, why aren’t you?”
“Really? You too?” Tom rolled his eyes. “Let’s talk about it over a whiskey sour or two, not at eight thousand feet when I’m about to jump out of a flying lawnmower.”
“Assez juste. But do not think you can worm out of it so easily. One day I expect to hear the full story from both of you.”
Tom gave him a pained smile and adjusted his throat mike. Sitting like that was getting increasingly uncomfortable. “Are we there yet?” he asked, sounding for a moment like a kid on a road trip, squirming impatiently in his seat.
“Now do you understand why I miss all my expensive toys?” Cloutard asked.
Tom’s headset crackled. He heard Hellen say, “We’re in position.”
“En avant!” Cloutard said.
“Finally,” added Tom. He opened the door of the small aircraft and the noise increased exponentially. He turned to his left, ready to jump, but looked back at Cloutard once more. “And to answer your question earlier: No, I haven’t gone overboard at all.” With a grin, he pulled his goggles over his eyes and dropped into the clear night.
46
Orthodox Church of the Archangel Michael, near Sheremetev Castle, minutes earlier
“The crypt of the castle’s last owner should be on the south side of the church,” Father Fjodor explained.
They made their way past the almost ridiculously quaint, but nevertheless impressive church. Russians considered the red-and-white structure one of their most beautiful Orthodox churches, but it had not always exhibited its present-day splendor. It had been almost destroyed in the 1930s and had then been repurposed, first as a cinema and later as a techno nightclub. Not until the 1990s had it been restored to its original function as a house of God.
The Invisible City (A Tom Wagner Adventure Book 3) Page 11
