The Pretender's Gambit. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ another brief hesitation, Montgomery walked toward the back rooms. Pousao trailed him, silent as the man’s own shadow. Only a few minutes later, while Calapez watched the group milling in front of the apartment building across the street, Montgomery returned with the camera. The telephoto lens was long and large, professional quality.

      “Do you know how to use this?” Montgomery held on to the camera.

      “I do.”

      “I still don’t understand why you need to borrow—”

      Calapez nodded to Pousao and the younger man drew a short, wide-bladed knife. With a practiced motion, Pousao shoved the blade into Montgomery’s neck at the base of the skull. A surprised look of pain filled the man’s face as life left him. Calapez snatched the camera from the dead man’s hands as the body sagged to the floor.

      While the man quivered, Calapez returned his attention to the apartment building across the street. “Put the body in the bedroom. Find a few more things to steal and we’ll make this look like a burglary gone wrong.”

      Pousao grabbed the corpse and pulled it away.

      Focusing on the apartment building, Calapez looked through the camera and adjusted the lens to bring the apartment into focus. He couldn’t see anything, but he knew it would be a matter of time. Perhaps the police would find the elephant he had been sent there for. Then all he’d have to do would be to retrieve it. The task was more difficult, but he knew Sequeira would not accept anything less.

      “Jose.”

      “Yes.”

      “I see television reporters out there. Turn on the television and find the coverage. We need to know who the chief investigator is and if they have found the elephant.”

      Pousao turned on the television and searched the channels till he found one reporting live from the scene. “I have discovered the woman.”

      “Who is she?” Calapez kept the camera aimed at the apartment building.

      “Her name is Annja Creed.”

      “Is she police?”

      “No. She is an archaeologist.”

      An archaeologist possibly meant the NYPD knew something about the elephant. Sequeira talked to people such as those. He had cultivated a number of resources within that circle. Calapez had visited with some of them himself, to get things Sequeira wanted. A few of those people Calapez had killed to obtain those things. Calapez didn’t understand what his employer saw in antiquities, but there was no denying Sequeira’s interest.

      Calapez took down the archaeologist’s name in his official-looking pad, then he extracted his cell phone and placed a call to his employer. Despite the lateness of the hour, or the earliness, depending on a person’s point of view, the phone only rang twice before it was answered.

      “Do you have it?” Sequeira sounded fully awake. His voice was deep and full-bodied, as if rumbling from a huge chest. Sequeira was a broad man in his forties and worked to stay in shape.

      “There has been a complication.” Calapez hated giving his employer bad news. Sequeira was not one to easily accept such a thing.

      “I have been watching the news. You killed the old man?”

      “Not me. He was dead when I arrived there, and the elephant was not to be found.”

      “Then you must locate it.”

      “I will. I only wanted you to know where the situation stood.”

      “I have faith in you, Francisco. Otherwise I would have sent another in your place.”

      “I will get the piece for you when I can, but there appears to be additional interest in the old man’s murder. The police have summoned an archaeologist to the old man’s home.”

      “Then they must suspect what the elephant means.”

      “Perhaps.”

      “Find out, my friend. I must know. Perhaps there will be another way to get at this thing.”

      “I will.” Calapez heard the anticipation and frustration in Sequeira’s words. Calapez did not know why the elephant piece was so important. His employer kept him in the dark about many things. “I hesitate to ask, but would it be helpful at this point if I knew more about the elephant? What makes it so interesting?”

      “There is a legend about the elephant, a thing I must know from it in order to pick up a trail that vanished hundreds of years ago. For me to explain would take hours. Know only that the elephant is but the key to a mystery that has lain buried for hundreds of years as that piece wandered through the hands of queens and warriors. And there is a treasure. I want that treasure, and to find it, I must solve the mystery of the elephant.”

      “Then I will bring you the elephant.”

      “See that you do.” Sequeira broke the connection.

      Calapez returned the phone to his pocket and continued watching the apartment building.

      * * *

      NGUYEN RAO STOOD in the shadows that filled an alley across the street from the police cars and gawkers. The constant strobe of the flashing light bars had ignited a small headache deep within his skull, but that could have been the effects of the cold, as well. He wasn’t used to this weather. Cambodia, where he was from, was much more temperate.

      He was tall and athletic, dressed in a dark gray business suit under a long coat that was not warm enough. His eyes watered against the chill, or it may have been because he had not slept. The plane ride from Phnom Penh had drained him. He had flown a lot during the time he had been getting his education in England, but he had never learned to relax during the flights.

      The arrival at JFK International Airport had been delayed in England, and then there had been confusion with New York Port Authority security that had forced a longer postponement of his assignment. As a result, he had arrived at Maurice Benyovszky’s apartment too late to talk to the man regarding the sale of the elephant. Listening to the reporters and the gossiping people in the streets, Rao had learned of the old man’s death and was saddened. Life was something meant to be treasured, each a treasure to be enjoyed and to further a person’s education of self and that person’s place in the world.

      He wondered if Benyovszky’s murder would in some way dim Vishnu’s Eye. Actions impacted many things. Then he wondered when he had started believing in the old legend enough to even question such a thing. He wasn’t given to idle fancy.

      But there was something to the story. The fact that the elephant existed proved there was some validity to the myth.

      A story is only a myth till it becomes part of history. At that point, myth turns into fact. Professor Beliveau had often stated that in his classes. And he would go on to state that they were in the business of separating myth from fact, yet maintaining both because sometimes it was important for a culture to have its myths and legends. Those things shaped generations and gave them a shared history.

      If the elephant exists, then the way to the Lost Temple exists.

      But the СКАЧАТЬ