The Artifact Read online

  When she had finally initiated a computer search for Geoff’s past flight plans and found a preponderance of trips to Machias, Maine from Manassas’ Whitman Strip private airport, a few miles off Route 66, south of the Capitol, her spirits had soared from the depths of impotent anger she had experienced upon learning that the agents on the detail to apprehend the Preacher Lady’s killer at Arlington had not been briefed on the priority search for Callaghan.

  The day after the funeral, Paula commandeered a Bureau Gulf Stream jet from Dulles Airport in DC that was cleared for takeoff at 1630 with a team of twelve SWAT agents. During their flight north, she had ordered a dedicated computer team at WFO to conduct a wide-sweep probe of all case elements, which had determined that Samuel Simkowski had chartered a helicopter from Butler Aviation at National Airport and had filed a flight plan for Machias, with a handicapped woman and two other passengers.

  Although electronic tracking equipment on the Gulf Stream allowed her to determine the location of Andrea’s cell phone when active, her signal was weak due to either low battery or spotty coverage of her target area. As soon as they were airborne, Paula called ahead to their Bangor office to order all federal agents in the area on alert; to provide them with transportation from Machias; locate the airport manager, real estate brokers or anyone else who could tell them where several men had bought or leased a home in the area within the past two years; and/or specifically, where Geoff or Simkowski had gone after landing that afternoon. She was due to land in twenty minutes.

  At the sight of the reflection of their headlights on the chrome bumper of a vehicle ahead on the rutted road through the woods, Johnnie Shiv switched down to the parking lights of the Jeep station wagon, killed the engine and stopped about 50 yards in back of it. A late-model Cadillac sedan behind them carrying six men followed suit. The six Mafiosi emerged from the two vehicles just as a single shot echoed through the cold night air. A battered Peugeot parked beyond the SUV came to life with racing motor, its headlight beams thrusting suddenly into the darkness reaching halfway up the rutted drive toward the house.

  Eddie jabbed a fist against Johnny’s bicep. “Stop him.”

  The placid-faced ‘made’ mafia soldier flicked his right arm at the ground to slide an eight-inch stiletto into his hand as he jogged hunched over to the left side of the van behind the Peugeot. He looked inside then continued to the little vehicle ahead, pulled the door open and thrust his right hand into the car. He turned off the headlights and engine before bending down to wipe the length of his switchblade on the wet snow, a local Iraqi slumped over the steering wheel.

  “The shot came from there,” Eddie told Johnny when he returned, pointing toward the woods to their left with the unlit flashlight. “See what’s up.”

  “Zannelli,” Eddie addressed the tall young man standing next to him in Irish tweed cap and double-breasted navy overcoat that reached his ankles. “Check the whirlybird, but quiet-like.”

  The young man nodded, pulled a sap from his pocket and trotted up the path. The remaining men in dark car coats and caps gathered around their young leader with somber expressions.

  Eddie squinted through the penumbra extending over the treetops of the horizon created by the reflection from the canopy of brilliant stars thousands of miles above on the glistening snow and the impenetrable darkness of thick woods on either side of the road. Six-hundred yards ahead, the silhouette of the farmhouse was enhanced by interior lights streaming through the ground floor windows in elongated patches on the white surface below.

  “Follow me,” Eddie said.

  Five men pulled pistols out of their pockets or shoulder holsters, save one man with an AK-47, another a shotgun, the sixth man remaining with the cars. Eddie lead the single- file procession up the furrowed path, his .38 revolver drawn, stepping along the edge of the woods lined with thick boughs of broad pines, stopping several yards ahead of the Peugeot, where the first floor lights of the otherwise darkened farmhouse enabled him to see the silhouette of a presumably armed figure in a second floor window. A slight turn of his head reassured him that Sal Zannelli was running crouched to the back of a peaked roof barn to approach the rear of the helicopter squatting off to its right.

  The thin soles of Johnny Shiv’s city shoes were soaked through to his socks as he picked his way through the knee-high brush and towering trees, stepping high over the uneven ground screened by snow covered branches fallen from deciduous trees and needles of conifers, pushing at stiff branches with outstretched arms thirty yards from the access road behind him as he followed the tiny beam of his halogen flashlight.

  Johnny froze in mid-step as a second rifle shot split the air, its strobe-like flash illuminating the head and shoulders of the shooter some thirty feet off toward the edge of the woods. He doused his light and slipped off his shoes, stepping gingerly over unseen rocks and tree roots toward the muzzle flash of the rifle. He stood behind the dim shadow of a man kneeling against a tree, his shouldered weapon apparently loaded, sighting down the barrel, his finger inside the trigger guard. Johnny shook his forearm to slide the sharply honed blade into his hand from its resting place strapped to his right arm inside his coat sleeve. He took several careful steps, then a flying leap, knocking away the Iraqi’s trigger finger and slitting his throat in a single motion.

  Sammy tensed again when the second shot rang out from the perimeter woods, starting a turn toward Samarri that was met by a quick thrust of the Uzi, the pain in his kidney bending him forward with an involuntary grunt. “If your goon hurts that woman,” he gasped, “I’ll strangle both your scrawny chicken-necks with my bare hands!”

  The Iraqi pushed Sammy toward the troopers on the floor and backed a few feet toward the foyer for better coverage of all five captives, waving the Uzi at them menacingly, yelling at Callaghan: “Get up to feet!”

  The general had changed from his dress uniform to mufti, a navy turtleneck under a wool shirt of red and black squares and khaki trousers tucked into polished black jump boots. “I have men in the woods,” he said, as he stood. “You won’t get out of here alive.”

  The Iraqi’s grin was mirthless, his manner nervous. “As do we. The treasure immediate or woman in helichopper die.”

  Callaghan and Sammy stood together, the three soldiers still prone, their pistols holstered, rifles on the rug where they had dropped them.

  Callaghan raised his hands in resignation. “OK, OK. Palagi, get the document.”

  “Document?” Samarri said.

  “It wasn’t a trunk of gold icons,” Callaghan told him wearily. “Just an old papyrus scroll in some ancient language we can’t even figure out. You went to a hell of a lot of trouble for nothing.”

  Samarri seemed uncertain. “Get.”

  The general nodded to Palagi who moved to a stout gray safe squatting in the corner of the room. He dialed the combination and extracted a battered leather briefcase.

  “Give it to him,” Callaghan said.

  Samarri hesitated as Palagi extended the case. “Open.”

  Palagi unlatched the clasp on the worn leather flap, spreading it open for the Iraqi’s inspection of the contents. Samarri shifted the Uzi from his right to left hand to extract one of the pages as Callaghan raised his voice, “OK?!”

  The closet door in the hallway burst open as a tall man with a thick brush mustache and horn rim glasses took a single step to press his M231 port firing rifle against the back of Samarri’s head, simultaneous to Palagi swinging the briefcase at the Uzi, knocking it out of the Arab’s grip.

  “Stalemate,” Callaghan said, drawing his .45 automatic, as the others stood and picked up their rifles from the floor.

  “The woman will die!” Samarri shouted, then began screaming in Farsi until the mustachioed ex-Sergeant Hector Alvarez bashed his skull with the butt of his rifle, and the Arab crumpled at his feet.

  Eddie DiBiasio walked in the front door of the farmhouse, through the foyer and into parlor, Zannelli wheeling Andrea behind him,
his snub-nosed revolver pressed to the back of her head, followed by two brawny thugs armed with Glock 19mm automatics. “Put ‘em down, gents. Maybe we aren’t as ruthless as the A-rabs, but you don’t drop the weapons now, my friend with the broad is going to get nervous.”

  Eddie had gambled that the rifleman in the second story window would not fire on them while they walked from the helicopter in a tight group led by a bruised Razzaq, with Zannelli pushing the female reporter through the snow . Eddie canted his head at the briefcase Palagi was holding. “Is that it, General?”

  Callaghan had dropped his pistol on the floor, after gesturing for his troopers to do the same, shaking his head in apparent resignation. “I’ve been a damned fool with this. We don’t even know what it is, yet. These ragheads killed poor Mitchell and now it doesn’t look too bright for any of us.”

  Eddie laughed. “Bullshit, General. You wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if you thought it was worthless.”

  “You’re welcome to reach your own conclusions.”

  “So the experts you hired to authenticate the so called treasure were really translating a document. It’s not that pile of paper you were gonna pass off on the A-rabs. Where is it?”

  Callaghan sounded desperate. “It hasn’t come back yet!”

  “I’m going to count to three,” Eddie said, “like the bad guys do in the movies.” Zannelli pressed his pistol onto Andrea’s crown. She jerked her head away angrily, but said nothing.

  “One....”

  “All right!” Callaghan said. He turned to the stairway leading to the second floor, shouting, “You heard the man, Gerlach. Leave your weapon up there and bring it down.”

  A short, swarthy man with broad features came down the stairs in navy watch cap, the bulk of layered flannel shirts cinched beneath a wide leather belt and heavy gray trousers bloused into black leather jump boots. He held an aluminum case in both hands at waist level as though presenting some precious offering to royalty.

  “Open it up,” Eddie demanded, handing his weapon to one of the men behind him. Eddie thumbed through the sheaf of typescript, scanning the Arabic paragraphs quickly. “Where’s the translation?”

  “It’s incomplete. Still being assembled from the individual segments from the translators.”

  “Bullshit,” Eddie told him. “It’s almost over, General. Give us the goods, we take care of the A-rabs, you live happily ever after.”

  Callaghan expelled his breath in resignation. “Right there,” he said, pointing at the sturdy safe behind Palagi.

  “And the original?”

  The general officer stared at the floor, hands thrust deep in his pockets.

  “You have no options,” Eddie said impatiently.

  Callaghan lifted his squinting gaze to meet Eddie’s look of triumph, then turned to Palagi. “Get them.”

  Palagi returned to the safe, lifted a false bottom and withdrew a second metal case identical to the one Gerlach had brought downstairs. He dialed the combination on the case, popped the latches and handed it to Eddie, who opened the lid and extracted a thick scroll of yellowed parchment in a plastic sleeve and more than one hundred pages of double-spaced English text spiral bound between plastic covers. Eddie frowned at the faded words in the undecipherable script, then flipped through the translation. “How do I know this is really the right goods?”

  “You tell me,” Callaghan answered. “Steal an Arab dictionary. Get these clowns,” nodding at Samarri and Razzaq, “to verify it for you.”

  “You could have faked these and hidden the real ones anywhere.”

  “You want to search the house?”

  Eddie seemed torn between doubt at having achieved his objective, and elation at attaining it. The original and translated documents looked real, but how could he tell? And how many ploys to mislead his adversaries could the general create?

  Callaghan spread his hands before him in apparent resignation. “Look, you caught us off guard. I don’t know who the hell you are or how you found us, but we were trying to figure out what to do with the damned thing. You think we had the time or resources to create a whole raft of phony documents?”

  Eddie seemed skeptical. “You must have read some of the translation, what does it say?”

  “We just received the translated document back and got it reassembled. I haven’t had time to give it a thorough read or figure out how to prove its authenticity without getting the entire paleographic community in an uproar. At first glance it seems to be some historical text about the Jewish uprising against the Romans in the first century.”

  Eddie slipped the bound translation and ancient scroll in its protective plastic envelope back in the metal case and retrieved his pistol from the thug covering Sammy. He instructed his men to collect the soldiers’ rifles and frisk them all for hidden weapons and cell phones, then sent a man outside to cut the phone lines.

  “We’re going to leave you tied up, but not so tight you won’t squirm loose in a couple of hours. Don’t try any heroics, ‘cause we got a pretty long reach. Around the world, even.” He lifted the aluminum case toward Callaghan. “Same goes for this. If you’re pulling my leg. Capice?”

  They forced the troopers to lie on the floor, then bound their hands and feet with plastic ties, securing Andrea’s wrists to the arms of her wheelchair. Two of the mafia thugs prodded Samarri toward the front entrance, dragging a battered and groaning Razzaq unceremoniously out of the house as Eddie threw a mock salute at Callaghan and closed the door.

  The local Mafiosi stood behind the bright patch of rutted drive reflected in the Peugeot’s headlights with Samarri and Razzaq standing warily beside them, four inert forms lying in the trampled snow at their feet, another in the driver’s seat of the Peugeot leaning over the steering wheel.

  “Did you get them all?” Eddie asked.

  “Seven,” Johnny Shiv answered. “One inna woods, one at the chopper, two covering the back of the house. Plus the two you got inside. This one,” Massoub winced as the Italian jabbed his ribs with his gun barrel, “drove up the road while you was in the house, seems like the leader.” “Claims he called in some locals with the Peugeot and SUV, then flew up from Boston.”

  “How convenient,” Eddie said, peering into the rear compartment of the Peugeot where several artillery shells stenciled “ME Nat. Guard” were wired to a car battery and detonator. “Wow! A car bomb!” A few Mafia soldiers took a couple of steps backwards. Eddie turned to Massoub. “How do you activate this friggin’ thing?”

  Zannelli pulled a cell phone from his coat pocket. “I found this in his jacket.”

  Eddie studied the phone carefully for several minutes. “Only one number in the memory, must call the detonator.”

  “Boom!” Zannelli said.

  “Put the four dead guys up on the porch,” Eddie told them.

  “May Allah see you burn in hell!” Massoub shouted.

  Eddie cocked his head, frowning. “Gee, I thought this was the way all you Muslim pricks wanted to go.”

  “Fuck your sister, American infidel!”

  Eddie pointed at Massoub. “That guy goes in the trunk.”

  Eddie stood holding the metal case at his side, waiting for the men to return from dragging the Arab corpses up the porch stairs.

  “Who wants to do this?” he asked them.

  The tall youth grinned as he shrugged out of his long overcoat, handing it to an associate. Eddie walked away toward the Jeep with the document case followed by the rest of his men, one preceding them with a flashlight probing the dark path ahead.

  Zannelli turned his tweed cap backwards, walked around to the passenger side of the Peugeot where he opened the door and slid into the front seat beside the wide-eyed Iraqi driver with a stream of blood coagulating down his neck and chest from the gash in his throat. Zannelli started the motor, pulled the automatic transmission in gear, jammed the dead Arab’s foot on the accelerator and rolled out of the car into the snow as the Peugeot gathered speed up the
drive toward the farmhouse front porch steps.

  Eddie had barely shut the entry door, when Callaghan shouted, “Stay low, get in the cellar!”

  Their wrists and ankles bound with plastic ties, the ex-army grunts began crawling on their stomachs, drawing their knees up to push across the parlor rug with their boots, toward the threshold of the doorway that lead to the kitchen.

  “What about Andy?” Sammy asked.

  Callaghan’s reply was breathless as he crawled toward her wheelchair. “We’ll never get her untied and down to the basement before they set fire to the house or whatever else they have planned. Push her into the pantry.”

  “Like hell!” Sammy muttered, as he struggled to his feet with the aid of a chair.

  A black man sporting a thick brush mustache burst in the back door, grabbed the knife strapped to his calf on the run, quickly slitting the bonds of his comrades slithering across the kitchen to the door to the basement.

  “If those pectorals are more than show,” Geoff told Sammy, “you take her and I’ll get the chair.” He sliced through Sam’s plastic ankle cuffs, then freed Callaghan.