The Long Way Down (21 page)

“I’ve only made one buy in the past couple of months, from my trip to the sandbox.”

“Saudi,” I said, “the big score you were talking about at the Tiger’s Garden?”

He nodded and gestured for me to follow him through the house. Mahogany bookshelves lined one wall of his study from floor to ceiling, looming over an overstuffed leather armchair and an antique standing globe. He gave the upper half of the globe a twist, pulling it back on concealed hinges. A snifter of cognac and a pair of glasses waited inside.

“We do not have time—” I started to say, but he cut me off with a wave of his hand.

“Under normal circumstances,” he said, lifting out the bottle, “I wouldn’t show this to anybody. I’m gonna have to ask you to keep quiet about it.”

He reached into the recess, hooking his fingers around a catch, and gave it a tug. A section of the bookshelves clicked and swung open.

“Welcome to my safe room,” Spengler said.

Twenty-Five

T
he room behind the bookshelf was about ten feet square and fortified like a bunker. Grainy footage from outside the house, front and back, flickered on a bank of monitors along with a bird’s-eye view of the street from what looked like a camera mounted on a tree branch. To the left of the security console, a pump-action shotgun and a pair of stubby handguns hung from a chrome wall rack.

I whistled low, tracing a finger along the shotgun’s barrel. “You planning for a siege?”

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst,” Spengler said, pulling the door shut behind us and twisting a lock that looked like it belonged on a bank vault. “I’ve got about two months of surplus military MREs and bottled water in those boxes behind you. The room’s fireproof, with a rooftop ventilation system that draws and purifies air from outside. I can shut off the ventilation in an emergency, but only for a couple of hours.”

“Better odds than the Alamo, but I still think we should hit the road. Show me what you found in Saudi Arabia.”

He pulled back a green tarp, unveiling a wooden crate against the back wall of the safe room. Its weathered slats bore customs stamps and faded brands from half a dozen nations.

“Getting it back here was almost as hard as finding it in the first place,” Spengler said, lifting the lid, “but totally worth it.”

Nestled in a bed of sawdust and paper clippings, the crate held an ebony casket just big enough for a toddler. My first instinct was to recoil, to yank the crate lid from Spengler’s hand and slam it shut, to seal the casket away in darkness.

“I know, right?” he said, reading the look on my face. “You get used to it, but the first reaction is pretty strong.”

I shook my head and took a step back. “There’s something in there.”

I didn’t know how I knew it. I just knew it. Something lived in that casket, something much older, much crueler, than any infant. Something with the patience of a trap-door spider and nothing but time. Swirling carvings adorned the casket’s face, hard to make out at first. I traced the lines with my eye and they resolved into the figure of a man, impossibly thin and long, clutching a pan flute.

“What is it?” I asked, trying to tear my gaze away.

“It’s the Etruscan Box.” His eyes blazed with a mixture of pride and raw greed. “
The
Etruscan Box. My holy grail. I’ve been chasing this thing for a decade, putting out feelers from here to Siberia, and finally I picked up its trail. Poor bastard I bought it from had no idea what he’d inherited from his old man.”

“But what is it?”

“Lotta stories about that,” Spengler said. “Legends passed down from explorer to explorer, all from people who spent their lives hunting the Box and never caught a glimpse. Remember, we don’t know a whole lot about the Etruscans before Rome finally rolled over them, but they were around for a long time, a
really
long time. They had some savage witchcraft up their sleeves.”

He reached into the crate. I held my breath as he grabbed hold of the casket’s lid, but it refused to budge.

“See? It doesn’t open. It doesn’t want to open. Doesn’t matter. I’m just selling the box as-is. I put it up on the Internet under a coded auction listing, and you wouldn’t believe the people I’ve got bidding on this baby. Some of the biggest players in the occult underground from coast to coast—throwing cash at me like it’s Judgment Day and they’re trying to get rid of all their money before Jesus comes back. The top bid is already over two million bucks and climbing.”

“So these stories,” I said, “what do they say is inside?”

“The stuff that dreams are made of. They say it’s your heart’s desire, whatever you want most in life, just waiting for the first person to open it up and reach on in. All you have to do is figure out how it unlocks and everything you ever wanted is yours for the taking. It’s like Excalibur in the stone.”

I reached up and closed the crate lid. I still felt the casket and its occupant, buried in darkness, listening to us.

“Excalibur,” I said flatly.

“That’s the story, but who knows? Nobody’s ever gotten it to open, and if you ask me, nobody ever will. Some ancient wizard’s bad joke. As far as my heart’s desire goes, well, you know me. My dream is cold, hard cash. This is the score of a lifetime.”

Spengler was bush-league compared to the rest of the regulars at the Garden, just magically aware enough to qualify for entry, but no real talent. Even so, I couldn’t believe how casual he was, unable to feel the chill radiating from inside the crate on the wings of a gale-force wind.

“Let’s hope you’re right about it staying sealed,” I said, backing away from it.

“Why’s that?”

“Because something is alive inside that casket,” I said, “and I think it hates us.”

The doorbell chimed.

We looked at each other, then rushed to the security monitors. A pretty girl in her twenties, platinum blond with a California tan, stood on the doorstep and smiled hopefully up at the security camera.

“Candi,” Spengler breathed.

I slapped his arm, glaring. “You were supposed to tell her not to come over!”

“I did! I swear I did! She was almost here when I called, and she said she was going to turn around and go home!”

She gave a little wave up at the camera, flashing a perfect smile, and pressed the doorbell again.

“Something’s wrong.” I paced the safe room.

“Dan, if she’s on the doorstep when these guys show up, what will they do to her?”

“Nothing good,” I said, eying the screen, “but we have to think about this. Are you sure that’s her? Absolutely, one hundred percent certain?”

“That pleated skirt,” Spengler said, pointing at the tiny screen. “I asked her to wear that for me. Even if somebody was screwing with the camera feed, projecting an illusion or something, there’s no way they’d know what she was going to be wearing. It’s her.”

If something looks like a trap and smells like a trap, it’s a trap, but we’d be safe as long as we hid inside Spengler’s armored nook. Staying put offered our best chance of making it to dawn in one piece. On the other hand, if I was wrong, an innocent girl was standing in the line of fire with no idea what kind of horror was heading her way.

Another smile, another ring of the doorbell.

“Shit,” I said, drawing my deck of cards from my hip pocket. “We have to risk it. Bring a gun. We grab her off the porch, we drag her back to the safe room, we stop for absolutely
nothing
, got it?”

“Got it,” Spengler said, grabbing one of the bulky pistols from the wall rack and checking the clip.

I shuffled my cards as we jogged through the house. The glossy cardboard crackled under my fingertips, pregnant with raw energy and eager to play. I stood back from the front door and nodded to Spengler. He clutched his gun behind his back, reaching for the doorknob with his other hand.

He hauled open the door, reached out and grabbed Candi by her wrist, and roughly yanked her inside. I ran up and slammed the door behind her.

“No time to explain,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you’ve gotta come with us, I’ll tell you everything in a second—”

Reaching for the lock, I caught a glimpse of Candi’s face in the corner of my eye. Her real face. Heart sinking, I turned.

“Spengler.”

“C’mon honey, don’t argue, it’ll all make sense in a minute—”

“Spengler,” I said more firmly.

“—I’m not going to hurt you, you know me, you can trust me—”

“Spengler!”

He looked at me, clutching Candi in his arms, startled.

“What?”

I pointed. “Look at her. Take a deep breath, clear your mind, and really
look
at her.”

The thing in Spengler’s arms was nothing but a life-size mannequin, carved from jointed wood like an artist’s posing model, with a crudely painted face. It wore Candi’s clothes. A gash in the sweater where her heart would have been, stained with fresh blood, told me what had happened to the real girl.

“Shit,” Spengler said, and then the mannequin turned its head toward me.

I didn’t have time to shield myself. Its puppet-head lolled back and its mouth opened wide. Golden sigils glittered inside its maw, a glyph-spell primed and ready to fire. A Trojan horse.

The pulse of magic blasted through the room with the force of a flashbang grenade. Spengler fell backward, the mannequin clinging to him like a lamprey as he desperately rubbed at his eyes, reeling. My muscles didn’t want to obey me. Chimes in impossible keys rang in my ears in the aftershock. Behind me, a boot kicked the front door in, slamming it into me and sending me sprawling to the carpet. Cards flew from my outstretched hand.

“I told you arts and crafts were kinda my thing, right?” Meadow Brand asked, standing over me. “We didn’t buy your reporter routine for a second, by the way. Half an hour after you left my office we had a full dossier on you. Weren’t sure you’d put the pieces together, but I figured I should bring out the big guns just to be safe.”

Behind her, other forms filed into the room, hazy in my light-flooded vision.

“Silly locals,” Lauren Carmichael said, “always having to throw their weight around. You made a mistake, Mr. Faust. You should have sided with us.”

“Candi—” Spengler said, finally pushing the mannequin away and crawling back on the carpet. His pistol lay abandoned a few feet away. The mannequin twitched. “Those are her clothes. What did you
do
to her?”

My vision cleared. Tony hovered by the door, looking nervous, and Sheldon Kaufman stood at Lauren’s shoulder like the grim reaper come to call. A pair of cards still nestled in my palm. I could take two of these bastards down, if I used them just right, but then I’d have to deal with the other two. I held my move and kept the cards out of sight.

Lauren looked down at him. “Your whore is dead, Mr. Spengler. Necessary for Ms. Brand’s little jest to work, I’m afraid, but no great loss to society. You may or may not join her in the next few minutes, depending on how cooperative you are.”

“
Fuck you
!” Spengler screamed, lunging for the gun. He grabbed it and swung it up, aiming for Lauren’s head. Suddenly he shrieked as his wrist snapped backward, as if twisted in the gears of some horrible invisible machine. Bones cracked like dry twigs. The gun fell from his convulsing fingers, too far away for me to reach.

This all ends tonight
, I’d told Caitlin. Somehow this wasn’t the ending I’d been hoping for.

Twenty-Six

“R
emember me, lover-boy?” Meadow asked Spengler with a satisfied smile. Clutching his destroyed wrist and biting back another scream, he looked up at her with sudden recognition.

“You—” was all he managed to say, his breath strained.

“We knew he’d gotten to the Box just ahead of our people,” Meadow explained, looking down at me, “but not how he was shipping it or where it would be. Your friend and I met at an airport bar in Atlanta the night he came back from Saudi Arabia, thanks to a carefully planned coincidence. He was waiting for a connecting flight. I was waiting for him. We got tipsy, and then I let him ‘convince’ me to bring him up to my hotel room. Such a pick-up artist.”