'A' for Argonaut (37 page)

“This is an historic moment for the Museum as well as for the people of Boston. We’re honored to have here tonight, the lynchpin, the keystone, the maestro of our four hundred twenty-five million dollar Master Site Plan drive. Please welcome our own, the distinguished Chinese scientist‌—‌the Boston art community’s adopted daughter, Anita Li.”

“
It’s her.
That’s Chiang!” Amber whispered.

The director stepped away from the microphone, beckoned the tall Asian to come up to the stage. He held a large plaque up for the audience to see.

Anita Li, patron of the arts, a/k/a Alberta Chiang, approached the stage. She mounted the side steps. The three musicians burst onto the stage from behind the theatrical curtains. Maran recognized the South African R6 assault rifles they brandished. They were there, he realized, to eliminate Alberta Chiang.

“Vangaler!” Maran exploded and ran at him.

“You again! Asswipe. Not this time you don’t,” Vangaler shouted, leveling his rifle at the stage.

Maran reached out and sliced an ax-like hand across Vangaler’s wrist as the terrorist fired a volley towards Alberta Chiang. The bullets missed, pockmarking the wall behind her.

All around them people hit the floor, dove under tables. Screams for security guards rent the air. Those near the exits ran out the doors.

A claxon alarm wailed.

Vangaler turned away from Alberta Chiang and trained his R6 on Maran. The terrorists spread out across the stage.

The guest of honor somersaulted off the stage into the crowd.

“No!” Maran screamed, his H&K now in hand as he saw the tongues of fire flash from the ugly weapons. He felt the spray of blood against his face. On the stage, the museum director had run into the line of fire. His body shook violently. Arms flailing, legs pedaling, he back-walked off the stage.

Art patrons, society celebrities, local dignitaries fell throughout the courtyard. Maran saw Alberta Chiang as she dashed through an open door. Bullets splintered nearby buffet tables, splashed fruit and salad bowls, chipped into the marble of the adjacent walls.

Sergei leaped protectively at Amber. He dragged her to the floor, shielded her body.

Another bullet hit a patron in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground. Maran dropped to one knee, fired.

The five terrorists jumped from the stage as two security guards appeared. They fired blindly into the crowd as they followed the men through the door she had used for her escape.

Amber pushed Sergei aside.

“Get off! I have to help him.” Amber’s surface crumbled. Tears rolled down her cheeks as her eyes met with the wounded director’s. The pain she saw was her own. She could feel it. She rose and pulled him to safety. Maran sprung from the floor; he ran after Vangaler and his men. Sergei followed. They kicked open the door and ran down a hallway lined by Impressionist paintings.

Nothing!

They followed the hallway until they hit an intersection. Two more security guards joined them.

“Serge, the two of you go that way!” Maran ordered. He grabbed the other guard, headed down the next corridor. They ran past a black Greek vase. Maran remembered the orange pigment on the vase that showed several naked satyrs as they chased a frantic woman.

Omen?

Another juncture in the hallway. Maran and the guard split up.

Now Maran was alone. He heard the stamp of feet ahead. Sweat ran down the sides of his chest, the back of his neck. He pushed himself to his limits, spurted down the hall and raced into a hall filled with African tribal war masks. He flew around the corner into the hall, braked sharply to avoid a carved wood Dan mask. He slipped, threw an arm in the air for balance, drew the other hand in to protect the gun and tumbled to the floor.

Vangaler’s weapon spat. Maran struggled up. One of the bullets grazed through an inch of his shoulder flesh. Others smashed holes in the walls, a series of stone sculptures. Sirens screamed. Vangaler stepped from behind a large wooden statue of a Congo fertility icon. Maran fired. One of his shots blew the R6 out of Vangaler’s hand. The weapon skittered across the floor. The brute was on Maran before he could get off another shot. He kicked Maran’s gun out of his hand.

“You die now, Ass-fuck Face Maran,” Vangaler grunted. He slammed Maran’s stomach with another kick. Maran was wounded, one of his arms rendered useless. Vangaler was no better. The injuries forced them each to fight with one arm and their feet.

Maran heard a click. Vangaler’s good hand produced a gravity knife. He drove it at Maran’s neck. Maran dove to the side; he swerved away from the thrust. He grabbed the knife hand, shifted his weight on the balls of his feet, swung Vangaler’s body over. Before he could finish the maneuver, Vangaler was up. He kicked Maran so hard in the groin it lifted him off the ground. As Maran fell, the African poleaxed him in the head and fled down the empty hallway.

Maran was still alone and down for ten minutes when Sergei joined him. The other security guards were gone, looking for the terrorists.

Sergei helped him up as Maran came to.

Guests and patrons were screaming, piling up at the exits on Huntington Avenue and through the hallways leading to the back exits on the Fenway. Outside sirens began to blare.

Guards shouted orders. Several new uniforms arrived. They surrounded Maran and Sergei, guns drawn, demanding I.D.s until Henry Forbes Gavion, the trustee who greeted them at the front door, ran over to join them.

Maran was on his feet, holding on to Sergei’s shoulders with one arm.

“These are not the men who were shooting,” Gavion shouted. “Let them go! Go after the gunmen!”

He turned to Maran and Sergei and apologized.

“There are ambulances out front on Huntington Avenue. Go out there and have an EMT take a look to see if you have a concussion,” he suggested, breathlessly. He rushed away to see how he could help.

“Chiang!” Maran exclaimed.

“Gone,” Sergei said.

As his head cleared, the worst shock of all struck Maran full force. It hadn’t even occurred to him.

“Amber!”

“Also gone. The bastards took her.”

Outside, Maran commandeered an ambulance from the paramedics who had rushed to treat the survivors. Sergei took the wheel. Maran rode shotgun. As they careened through the city streets, Maran fought panic, more brutal than anything he had ever experienced. He retrieved an emergency dressing in a first aid kit in the console between them. He quickly pulled off his tuxedo jacket and shirt and wound the tape around his shoulder and under his arm and struggled back into the clothes. The wound in his shoulder burned, bleeding through the gauze. His head burned.

Sergei sped down Huntington Avenue; Maran concentrated, fighting like a wolverine for control while he studied the directional indicator on the hand-held GPS. If they could get close enough it would home in on a satellite signal from the tiny sending device they had clipped on the inside of Amber’s bra cup. Maran’s hopes dimmed with every minute.

Where will the hellhounds take her?

Forty-eight

Castle Island, South Boston

“T
ake the next left,” Maran gasped, his breath quickened.

He had the receiver in his hand, but there was no signal on it. Amber was too far away for it to register. They would have to circle the area fast in the hopes of picking it up.

In the ambulance, Sergei spun the steering wheel. The vehicle screeched around the turn. He turned on the siren, hit the accelerator, swerved in time to avoid a traumatized driver in a compact convertible.

“Go! Go! Straight. Straight ahead. We’ve got to get to her before those…shit!”

“Keep your tool cool,” Sergei’s words rolled. “You’ll piss your pants, Bra-zzee,” he said in his Russian accent using the tongue-in-cheek Army nickname he reserved for his partner, “Brass Balls,” a testament to Maran’s loyalty to his men in the face of abusive higher officers. He hoped to calm him, flashed the maniacal smile Maran had come to rely on. On the verge of panic, Maran rallied once again. He faced this new peril with resolve. Normally unflappable, the gravity of Amber’s problem weighed heavily on his heart.

The ambulance accelerated down the painted median strip on Ruggles Street in Roxbury. It swerved in and out of traffic, across the strip into the oncoming lanes, careened up the wrong side of the busy street, and forced a Domino’s Pizza truck up over the curbstone. Sergei managed to maneuver through the traffic without hitting anyone. They didn’t have time for convention as they crisscrossed through the city streets in a pattern of maddeningly wider circles around the MFA.

No signal!

Maran teetered on the brink. It was taking all of his resolve to hold it together. Nothing mattered but getting to Amber on time, and time was an enemy as it ticked along mercilessly, ten minutes, twenty, an hour, two. A deadly spirit was up and about in places in the world that had been cursed with a long history of it. Now that darkness had touched down on the United States. It had penetrated deep into their lives. Maran would do anything to snatch Amber in time from the evil that held her in its grip. His brain was numb.

What can it mean? What is happening? Why?

The coldly efficient attack team could have been from the Animal’s band of devil-worshipping African terrorists, from the diamond cartel or from the corrupted officers at the head of SAWC or …? Nothing was as it seemed. The promise of life with meaning was disintegrating.

The time ticked by. It became apparent that they would be unlikely to reach Amber in time to save her from whatever fate the terrorists had in store.

They circled the streets.

More than two hours went by. Adding to their anxiety was the fact that they were driving a stolen ambulance. They were pulling off the Fitzgerald Freeway at the Andrew Square exit when the first weak signal slowly materialized.

The small receiver had picked up her Emergency Locator Beacon.

The seaport!

They headed into South Boston. The signal intensity grew. Down through Andrew Square, the route to the maritime unloading docks from the Turnpike or the Freeway. Up Dorchester Avenue, heading for City Point. At Perkins Square, the locator jumped to life.

Castle Island!

His younger years flashed in his mind. A mixed blessing. The “Island,” now a peninsula, came with its own twisted history since an 18-year-old Edgar Allen Poe had served there in the Army in 1863. It was that dungeon-like structure that he used in his bizarre story of revenge: “The Cask of Amontillado.”

An ironic twist on Amber Chu’s plight.

When Maran and Sergei
finally arrived on the scene, the first thing they discovered inside the fortress was the security guard’s mutilated body, staked out in a mock crucifixion. The venerable old fortress was now a shrine to the hideousness man can reach.

It was Maran who discovered the industrial-sized trash compactor outside the fort.

He plucked Amber’s bloody bra off the side of the trash compactor. The transmitter was on the ground under it, lying next to a crushed discarded teddy bear. More blood spotted the sides of the steel box in thin, diluted trails. It colored the small rain puddles around him. Panic rose in Maran’s throat.
Amber!
He almost screamed her name. In the distance, a ship sounded a farewell to the city as it steamed out of the harbor past Boston Light. The moon blinked momentarily through the storm clouds.

Fear of failure overcame him. His skin felt like it was going to crawl off his flesh. He started to choke, gasping. His face flamed with hot flashes. His body began to tremor. His chest burned; his heart went on a rampage, pushing him to the edge of sanity. This was too much pain: first, the divorce; then Dennis stricken down; then Cabinda‌—‌and now Amber gone, the one who had so briefly brightened the darkness that blackened his life. Every insecurity that had ever haunted him flooded into his brain.

Have I now failed her, too?

He wished he could just lie down, give it all up. That thought immediately gave rise to a kind of fury he never felt before. It had been simmering; now it was about to boil over.

Hatred.

Adrenaline surged through his body. The aggression side of his ‘fight or flight’ response took over. He could kill anyone and everyone he could find who had anything remotely related to Amber’s kidnapping…

…And Cabinda!

His mind flashed between theologically moral principle and the human drive for retribution. And retribution was winning the battle. He could not; he would never give up. He would uncover his enemies, those behind the plot, whoever they were, whatever it was.

Nothing could stop him now.

He dialed into his office information exchange and got the number he needed, the Boston Harbor Telephonic Marine Intelligence Service run by the American Maritime Association. The number gave him instant access to a private telephone line to the unit’s 24-hour Marine Intelligence Center.

“Top of the morning, buddy. You’re in luck. You’ve reached TIMS, the around-the-clock marine intel, sometimes, service.”