King Solomon's Tomb

by Preston W Child

Andrew came round and blew a white substance in the driver's face. The man slumped behind the wheel and went to sleep; Andrew pushed him over and took the driver's seat.

  He drove the limo away.

  —

  Thirty minutes later, the driver's phone rang, and he drove back around. Emilio Batolini wrangled in.

  He hacked a cough and spat sputum in a napkin.

  "If this cold doesn't kill me, nothing else will," he complained.

  "I'm sorry about that, sir."

  Emilio froze in his seat. He knew that voice. His hand hung in the air; the napkin fell off his hand. He sniffed, stared at the face in the rear-view mirror, and froze.

  Then he relaxed. He looked out the window. "Andre."

  "Father."

  "Are you going to kill me?"

  "No, not yet. First, you'll tell me what's going on."

  "You don't want to know, Andre. You don't want to know."

  —

  Andrew Gilmore drove the car into an abandoned warehouse he had prepared the previous day. The area was also an abandoned industrial section of the Borgo that used to be part of a government project that was now discontinued.

  It smelt of old air. Rusting beams dripped brown water on the floor. Broken electrical appliances hung from the roof where pigeons have converted whole sections to avian quarters. The little light that filtered in came from broken glass in the windows high on the corrugated walls.

  Andrew turned around in the passenger's seat.

  "Start talking, Father."

  The old man chuckled. "What do you wanna hear, a confession?"

  "That would be a good start."

  He shook his head and wiped his leaking nose of the clear liquid coming down over his lips.

  "You were the only one who always saw through my self-pity. I guess you deserve to know the truth."

  Andrew stared on without emotion.

  "Everything I've done for months now, I've done out of self-preservation. They'll kill me if I don't do it—"

  "Who's they?"

  "They call them the Table. And you and your sister have pissed them off for a while now. The camel that broke the straw—"

  "The straw that broke the camel's…" Andrew corrected him.

  "Yeah, that's it." He mopped his nose. He looked out the window. "What is this place? I should buy it, don't you think? Or maybe you should. You are very rich now, I suppose. You and your sister are very rich now. All that gold you stole from the Inca temple some months ago, huh. Peru. Yeah, we knew about it—"

  Andrew feigned surprise. "Who told you about Peru? Is that why you tried to have me killed?"

  "Not me, them. The Table." He leaned forward. His breath smelled of boiled fish and potatoes. "You and your sister think you can just go everywhere, taking treasures, without repercussions? They know, they see, and they exact an account for every treasure you take."

  He leaned back and exhaled. Emilio Batolini looked defeated.

  "But there's a last cache of treasure, perhaps the greatest of them all, and the most precarious. These people are not going to let you have it. Olivia, your sister, is a slap on their face. She solved riddles no one has been able to solve for hundreds of years, and she took the treasures. Well, finders-keepers, right? The last of them is even bigger."

  Andrew frowned, and said, "Then why do this…Table people, just go on and take the treasure, why try to kill us? Olivia doesn't even know about it—"

  "Oh, she does now. The old man told her, I presume."

  "What old man?"

  "The curator. Arsenio Rodriguez. He died in Brazil."

  That's why Olivia is in Brazil, Andrew thought. But Emilio didn't answer his question.

  "You don't deserve to live, Father. I should kill you right here and now. You must tell them to stop. Tell the Table to back off me and my sister, and the team—"

  Emilio chuckled again, that dry inauspicious laugh. "The team," he said dryly.

  "They can keep all these treasures you talk about. We don't want it. We have everything we need. Tell them to back off—"

  "Or what?" Emilio looked at him, his eyes narrowed.

  After a moment, Andrew said, "Or they'll have a war on their hands."

  "You don't get it, Andre. You just don't get it. Do you think they can't see you right now? Right here? You think you are safe now, stealing me off the street like some piece of clothing off a line in some peasant's backyard?"

  Andrew felt a cold sweat break out on his back. The hair on his arms sprang to attention. Emilio was laughing again. He wiped his cold and laughed. He just won't stop, and Andrew heard the click as the locks in the doors went down.

  He moved fast as dark shadows entered the warehouse through the entrance.

  He ducked as the bullets pelted the bulletproof windshield, leaving webbed cracks in the places they hit.

  Emilio cackled on.

  Andrew pulled his gun and blasted the central lock on the driver's door. He kicked it, and the door flew open.

  "Oh, wow, ingenious." Emilio smirked and wiped snot.

  Andrew shot the first dark shit that appeared. They wore shades; he shot that man in his head. Two more were coming around with automatic weapons at the ready. Emilio stopped laughing and lay down in the back of the limo.

  Andrew flew out of the car, ramming into the nearest guy. Using that one's body as a shield, he shot two more in the neck. He broke the neck of the guy on him and rolled him off. The others waited on the other side of the car; Andrew dropped to his knees and saw two shiny shoes under the vehicle. He shot them. Two guys went down, screaming, "Fuck!"

  Andrew had already prepared a contingency.

  There was a door in the dark wetness of the far wall, but he would have to go up a short step, open that door, and plunge into an adjoining street that would take him to freedom.

  He felt the car's lock system disengage. Emilio came out on the other side of the vehicle. Two suits took charge of him, and as they escorted him to safety, Andrew charged up that short step. Shots followed his progress. Two slugs grazed his feet, one took the thread off the side of his denim.

  He ducked behind a metal pillar and sent out three rounds.

  The killers ducked out of sight. Andrew was on the move again, hoping that the building wasn't surrounded in the back. It was. He opened the metal door and jumped into the street below and was gone.

  —

  That night when Andrew spoke with Olivia Newton, he was told that Lawrence Diggs had been captured. Olivia was hiding up on a farm because right after Diggs's arrest, and shortly after seeing it on a piece of breaking news on the TV, she heard them coming.

  She was expecting it. She slinked out of the safehouse carrying Diggs’s equipment. She had walked half a mile around the neighborhood, hiding behind homes and backyards before ending in a vacant apartment where she hid until she no longer felt the police behind her.

  "They can track us. We have to get the tracker out of us now," said Andrew on the phone.

  "Who's tracking us?"

  "They called themselves the Table. Familiar?"

  "No. What do these people want with us? Did they kill Rodriguez?"

  Olivia struggled to not be hysterical. But even from across hundreds of miles away, Andrew detected the pulled string in her voice, strained.

  "We have to get you out of Brazil. Olivia, you have to get out of there."

  "No, I'm not leaving Diggs here. We are not safe anywhere; we have to find a way to end this!"

  "These people are pissed at us. That's what Emilio told me. They want us out of the way. There's something big going down. It's going to be a heist, I think. They were afraid you'd hear about it and beat them to it—"

  "Rodriguez," Olivia whispered.

  "What?"

  "That's why Rodriguez came to Brazil. That's what he was trying to tell me in the book he sent to me too. Diggs went to the Militar office to get his Roddy's phone from their evidence there, but they caught him. If we know who he talked t
o before he was killed, maybe we'd know exactly what's going on."

  "What's in the book?"

  Olivia rummaged in her bag and got the book; she opened the letter from Rodriguez.

  "He mentioned these words: the lair of the wise man. He said there was a treasure of the greatest worth. So, it was with some treasure. The tone of the letter, everything he said, the way he said it. He was going after the treasure, but he wasn't sure about it yet. He wanted us to know of it. I think these Table guys you mentioned, they got to him."

  "It is just as Emilio said; all the treasures are connected. When we took them one after another, we pissed them off. It was a slap in their face. Now the last one, they weren't to take for themselves or something. It just doesn't make sense. Olivia?"

  Olivia got up from her crouch and peered over the window of the shed. The temperature was dropping outside. A strong breeze rose and rustled the leaves and trees. She thought she heard the drone of a motor engine.

  "I think they found me," she murmured, not hiding the tremor in her voice now.

  "Shit. Get out of there, hide!"

  Olivia put her phone away and slunk through the door and ran for the next street.

  —

  Andrew Gilmore packed a small bag and wrote Olivia's phone number in a diary. He then broke his phone and threw it out as he left the apartment. He went into an all-night store and bought a new phone and number.

  He purchased an airline ticket online and called a taxi.

  Minutes after, almost midnight, he drove to the hotel and took a late flight to South America.

  —

  Olivia put her back between two cars in a parking lot. She had just stumbled into the place. She peeked over the hood of the car there and saw it was a hospital. Lights flooded half the lot. An ambulance was pulling out, followed by a police car.

  She looked at her wrist and made her decision. Each member of the team had an implant, a tracker in their left wrist. It had been Anabia Nassif's idea, and they had all bought into it. The only ones who didn't have it were Reno and Andrew, well, because they didn't consider themselves members of the team. Andrew was stubborn like that.

  It was a peripheral insertion. Yet Olivia would need something sharp to get it out. There was no doubt now that the people after her had somehow gotten a way to track them with the device.

  Olivia picked herself up and walked around the hospital. She found a back exit and went in.

  She was in luck.

  She was in a dimly lit hallway; the sound of hospital activity came to her softly. Someone was screaming to her right, in the wards. Another wanted her nanny. The smell of disinfectant filled her nose. She heard the whine of a gurney, or it could have been the janitor and his bucket of water. They were making buckets with wheels now for cleaners. Olivia had seen one on occasion when she went to see Betty at the Miami General with Tom Garcia.

  The thought of the sheriff crossed her mind then as she tried several doors, but none yielded to her query.

  Tom Garcia would freak out if she told him she'd almost been captured by who knows who twice now.

  Olivia got the last door before the end of the hallway open. She let out a sigh of relief. Boxes were stacked on shelves. She got one down and peeled it open; it was filled with syringes and needles.

  "No, no, scalpels, no scalpels?" she whispered.

  She brought another box down and checked. There was silverware for hospitals in it, and more syringes and needles. She paused and looked at the spot on her wrist where the implant was. She felt a slight bump when she rubbed the tip of her index finger over it.

  She looked at the needles. "It’s gonna hurt, Olivia. It will hurt, alright."

  She picked up one of the needles and plucked it out of its protective case. She poked the bump; first, it stung her. She winced.

  She sucked in a breath and dug deeper. The needle punctured her skin, pricked at the tiny metallic implant. Olivia gritted her teeth, her head banged with the pain. This is insane, her mind screamed; she pulled the needle out, and blood flowed. Olivia searched the shelves for cotton wool or gauze, but there was none. She took off her denim shirt and tore one of the sleeves. She dabbed at the blood.

  She sucked in another bite of air and closed her eyes. She brought the needle down again; it didn't find the metal still. God, oh, God. Tears spilled from the corners of her eyes. She bit down on the scream that wanted to tear itself out of her chest.

  Her lips trembled. The needle's point touched the metal again. She puffed; the pain was exquisite.

  She tilted the needle in a fourth-degree angle, and she saw the metal, shaped like a capsule, pop out of her wrist. It was so tiny she wondered how something so small was able to transmit signals strong enough to lead her pursuers to her.

  The pellet fell on the red tile. Olivia picked it up and examined it in the light. She looked around at the mess she'd made, the cartons she opened, the blotches of blood, and her torn shirt.

  "Okay, Olivia, move."

  She put the pellet in one of the cartons of syringes. Then she took her torn shirt and tied it around her waist. Now she had only a white t-shirt on.

  She stepped out for the room and locked the door gently. Still, no one had come around there. Hospital noise continued to fill the corridor. She started back towards the exit and saw her reflection in the glass in the door. She waited to see.

  My appearance. I need to change what I look like now.

  She turned back towards the wards, looking for the toilet.

  Two cars with Militar written on them pulled into the front of the hospital. Eight cops with their guns drawn poured out of the cars and up the steps of the hospital; the police in the lead pressed something in her ear and nodded down a hallway.

  They marched off, staring and moving on without explanation.

  The stopped at a small corridor. That cop pressed the button in his ear again; he cut the air in that corridor with the side of his palm. The policemen rushed down that corridor and stopped at a door, which they opened.

  It was empty except for the shelves of brown hospital cartons and bloodstains on the floor.

  "She's here," the cop said into the radio in his ear.

  Four cops went in while two secured the door, and two struck for the door at the end of the corridor.

  At the end of their search, they came back together.

  "She's gone," the cop said again.

  They went off as obtrusively as they came.

  —

  Olivia Newton was wearing a doctor's white coat without a nametag, but she didn't care. She wore broken glasses she picked out of the same trashcan she got the doctor's suit. Olivia wore dark pants and black shoes. She held an old file against her chest. She wore a shocked look—like the rest of the nurses, doctors, and patients watching the spectacle of the policemen's arrival and exit.

  The most striking difference in her appearance now was the hair: she had cut it short and dyed it brown.

  The cops passed her in the children's ward without even so much as a glance.

  When they were gone, she put the old file away and touched the crying baby's nose on her mother's lap. The baby smiled; the mother grinned at the very nice doctor. She asked her if she was going to administer medicine now.

  Olivia said in English, "Oh no, that's Doctor Moreno's job. I just make them smile is all."

  The woman started with other requests in Portuguese, but Olivia was already off. She made it past the lobby, where clinical activities were back to normal. There was a TV hanging from the ceiling in the waiting area; in-patients watched Lawrence Diggs’s face with much interest.

  Olivia stepped into the Brazilian dawn with a new streak in her face, and an urgency in her walk.

  —

  The moment that he landed at the airport, Andrew Gilmore knew he was being watched.

  He took his bag and slung it over his shoulder. He put on his dark shades and walked out to the airport to find transportation.

  Callin
g Olivia right away was dangerous. Yet he didn't have a clear idea of what to do next. He'd just find a neutral place away from the crowd, but not too isolated to contact.

  Everyone he saw posed a potential danger to him. When a taxi stopped in front of him and asked him where he was off to, he instinctively knew he had been spotted. He jumped in.

  "Copacabana Beach," he said.

  The driver was a cheerful, chubby man. He wore a flat cap and had a brush of wispy white goatee. He wore a black leather jacket; he didn't play the radio—a real taxi guy in a foreign country played the radio for his foreign charge. He checked the side mirror too often.

  "Copacabana, it is," the driver announced in a cheerful song.

  The two hands on the steering wheel looked like those that held something harder and more dangerous than car wheels. It was a gut feeling that Andrew had. And he was almost always never wrong about his intuition.

  "I used to be a priest," Andrew said, "back in Rome."

  The driver looked in the rear-view mirror. "What?"

  "I can tell who people are from the way they hold things," Andrew continued. "Their voice or even their eyes."

  The driver sat still. Suddenly his presence behind the wheel was like seeing a robot work in a factory.

  "Why don't you tell them I'm in town? Oh, they know already. Tell Emilio Batolini I'm here, and when I'm done getting my sister out of here, I'm coming for his ass. I'm going to kill him."

  The driver then did something strange; he smiled. Andrew watched him through the mirror. It wasn't a sinister one, but an assured little chuckle. He took a phone from his pocket, dialed a number on it, placed it against his ear, and waited.

  The driver handed the phone over his shoulder at Andrew.

  "He wants to speak with you," he said.

  Andrew took the phone coolly. He listened.

  "Hey, Andrew. It's Paul Talbot. We have to talk—"

  "Paul?"

  "Yeah, that Paul you are thinking about, the douchebag who fucked it up in Rome some years ago. I'm sorry about that—"

  "What do you want?"

  "Why don't you let Gregory drive you to where we'll meet, alright? I promise it's safe."

  "What makes you think I'd want to talk to you? I could just kill Greg here and burn his body with the car—"