One of the soldiers attempted to enter the black tunnel behind him, to go after the others. The pop of a pistol discouraged him.
“I have a man at a bottleneck down the passageway!” Painter called out without turning. “He’s got plenty of ammunition and can pick you off one at a time. Stay back. I know what you want! We can settle this quickly!”
Painter continued forward, step by step, heading toward the bridge.
Across the way, a thin man broke from the knot of soldiers and moved toward the bridge, too.
One of the mercenaries accompanied the man forward. Painter recognized the commando who’d shot Professor Denton back at the university lab. He pictured the blood on the dog leash. It was smeared on his pants where he’d wiped his hands. That was another death he knew he could lay at that soldier’s feet.
I’m sorry, Nancy . . . I should never have involved you.
Darkness narrowed his vision as he studied the helmeted giant.
But now is not the time for revenge.
That was clear enough. The commando was dragging a young man behind him, all trussed up and gagged. It was Jordan Appawora. Painter was not overly surprised to see the young man here. He’d already worked out in his head that someone had to tip off the Guild team to his location in Arizona. That left few choices.
Outnumbered, he had to get their attention and gain some control.
“I’m not going for a weapon,” Painter called out, and slowly reached to the open side pouch in his pack. With one hand, he carefully extracted the two gold tablets and held them aloft. “I believe this is what you came after, yes?”
From across the bridge, the thin man eyed Painter suspiciously, clearly struggling to figure out what angle was being played here. After a long breath, he simply relaxed with a shrug, perhaps deciding he still had the upper hand.
“Monsieur Crowe, my name is Rafael Saint Germaine.” His accent was French, cultivated, with just a touch of a Provençal lilt, placing his origins somewhere in the south of France. He pointed a cane. His arm shook with a very fine tremor, which continued down the length of the cane. The palsy was unusual for someone so young, likely something he’d been born with, made worse by the climb down here and the heat. “I believe I will take those from you.”
“Of course,” Painter said. “But you can have them freely. As a sign of good faith.”
Still, a soldier stalked up from behind and tore them from his grip.
The Frenchman motioned for the soldier to hurry over, but his focus never left Painter. Despite the air of frailty about the man, a dark cunning shone from his eyes. Painter dared not underestimate him. A hunted animal was most dangerous when it was wounded, and this man had been wounded since birth. Yet, despite that, he’d survived amid a group that tolerated no weakness—and not only survived, but thrived.
Rafael examined the plates. “Such generosity is most confusing. If I may be blunt, I expected more resistance. What is to stop me from killing you right now?”
Weapons were cocked behind him.
Painter took another step forward, stopping at the edge of the bridge. He wanted to make sure this man understood.
“Because,” he said, “that was a sign of my cooperation. Because what we found down below makes the worth of those two plates pale in comparison.”
The man cocked his head, turning his full attention to Painter.
Good.
“May I?” Painter asked, reaching to the open pouch on the other side of his pack.
“Be my guest.”
Reaching inside, Painter removed the sculpted top of the gold jar they’d found. He held up the wolf’s-head totem.
The man went weak at the knees at the sight of it, barely catching himself with the cane, slipping into French in surprise. “Non, ce n’est pas possible . . .”
“From that reaction, you must know what we found.”
“Oui. Yes.” The man struggled to collect himself, raw desire shining in his face.
“At the moment another of my companions is far below. If I don’t return, he is ready to cast the gold bottle into another boiling mud pit, where the sludgy current will carry it away forever.”
The man trembled, frustrated, but his eyes also danced with the challenge. “Fair enough. What are your terms?”
“Your men will pull back from this side of the bridge. I want the boy as a sign of your goodwill. Then I will go below and fetch the jar. After that, we will make our final trade.”
“For what?”
“You know very well what I want.” Painter let some of the fierceness he’d been suppressing leak out. “I want my niece.”
6:28 P.M.
Très intéressant . . .
It seemed these negotiations had suddenly become far more challenging and exciting. Breathless, Rafe stared at the sculpted gold lid. He indeed knew what it represented. Such bottles had the potential to be the Holy Grail of nanotechnology, a key to a lost science of alchemy that promised a vast new field of industry and a source of incalculable wealth. But more than that, it would allow his family to buy their way further up the hierarchy, to rise perhaps as high as the one surviving True Bloodline.