Black Scorpion (38 page)

“Not yet.”

Dracu's expression flirted with a smile. “I wouldn't hold your breath, if I was you.”

“You're not me.”

“Not yet,” Dracu said, Michael's own words thrown back at him. His expression had gone stiff as plaster in the sunlight. “My mother died that night when I was six, but her heart had already given out years before when her only true love, our father, never returned. How I came to hate him in the years that followed; it was that hatred more than anything that kept me alive in Turkey. Imagine what it was like when I got my chance to kill him while working for those pirates, when I recognized his face from that newspaper I stared at every night I can remember until they took me to hell. Imagine what it felt like to see this man I'd been told was so brave and strong nothing but an ignorant farmer.”

“You blame him for not coming to your rescue, even though he never knew you existed,” Michael charged.

“Because he never came back for my mother. He promised and then he didn't, left her waiting by the window, looking for her one true love without realizing he was a peasant and a scum. An ant in the afterbirth whose life amounted to nothing. You know that in your heart as well as I, Michele. You just don't dare admit it for fear you're no different, a coward just like him in the end.”

Michael felt the urge to rush Dracu then and there, to risk the hail of bullets on the chance he might be able to kill him before the gunshots took their toll.

“I knew our father, you didn't,” he said instead, opting for a different means of attack. “You said it yourself, Vlad, he was a hero. If he'd known you existed, he never would've let you become the monster you are.”

Dracu sneered, his eyes holding the glassy look of a man about to be sick. The sun streaming in through the hole where the ceiling had been caught only half of his face now, leaving the rest in shadows and seeming to cut him in half.

“Or maybe he would've just left me as he left my mother,” he said. “He didn't care about her, only about the Nazi monsters he was hunting. Like Hans Wolff, the SS legend he let escape.”

“In order to save
your
mother.”

“And then he abandoned her and broke her heart. He should've just let her die.” The sun ducked behind a cloud, placing all of Dracu in the shadows. Contempt had twisted his features into an angry knot, the flat softness of his pale features turning even more hateful, as Michael watched. “You fancy yourself a genius, the billionaire boy wonder of Las Vegas who beat the boys' club. And the name you took, Tiranno, I imagine you fancy yourself a tyrant, too, so perhaps we have more in common than just blood.”

“We have
nothing
in common.”

“Really? So you've never killed, Michele, never taken a life or ordered one to be taken? Because I seem to recall a freighter called the
Achilles
and its captain who went by the name of Skouros. He worked for me. That ship was mine, along with the twenty crewmembers who died at your hand or the hand of someone you sent, your warrior probably. I should've sent you a bill for sinking it.”

“They all deserved what they got.”

“But that doesn't change the fact that you think of yourself as a high and mighty hero dispensing justice, when what you really were was a cold-blooded murderer, just like me. You see, it takes one to know one. But imagine my surprise when I put it altogether. Imagine another blessed twist of fate delivered to me when I learned who you were and then followed who you became. I've been watching you since you showed up in Las Vegas as Michael Tiranno, Michele, following your rise to fame and fortune, thinking you had it all without realizing I could strike at any time and take it all away.” He shook his head, smugly satisfied by the effect his words were having. “Look at you: A tyrant, a tycoon? Hah! You're nothing but a peasant who happened to find a relic. It was the relic that made you, so I guess you could say that
I
made you, Michele, my coming here and killing the rest of your family. Without me, you might still be planting crops, milking cows, and shoveling shit today. You should be
thanking
me, brother.”

“I'll pass on that, if you don't mind. But you do seem to know an awful lot about my medallion.”

“Because it's rightfully mine.”

“You don't deserve it, Vlad.”

Dracu laughed, shaking his head when he finally stopped. “Oh, so you believe yourself less wicked than me? You think I don't know all you've done to get where you are, all the sins you've committed, all the men who paid with their lives for standing in your way? The time has come to make you pay for your sins, Michele. I've watched you long enough.”

Michael maintained the stare that held them together. “Watched me through that veil?”

Reflexively, Dracu stepped farther back into the shadows, clinging to them now to avoid the sun altogether. He started to raise a hand to lower his veil again, but stopped in mid-motion.

“What's it for?” Michael continued. “To hide your face or your intentions? You're ashamed of your past, of yourself, of the ugliness that's permeated your entire life. But hiding behind a mask changes nothing. You're still the same person when you take it off. Were you hoping to scare me with it like you scare everyone else? Sorry to disappoint you, Vlad, but I don't scare so easily. And I could see right through that veil to the man you really are even before you raised it for me. I may have hidden in the barn as a boy, but who's the real coward now?”

Dracu started forward once more, getting only as far as the sunlight stretching across the floor. “I've lived in darkness long enough. It's time to try the light, see if treats me as well as it's treated you. Your relic will be mine, Michele, everything you have will be mine.”

“By killing me, taking my medallion? You think it's as simple as that?”

“You're missing the point. But this is a point you can't possibly see. Nobody can, not yet. But soon everyone will, the entire world. That's when what I started the day I killed our father comes full circle. Fitting, don't you think?”

“I think you're a psycho.”

“All geniuses are a bit crazy, Michele, even you. The difference is my rise to ultimate power comes without any help from a piece of gold our father gave to you instead of me. And now it's just you and me, Michele.”

“Really? Are you sure you got everyone that day?” Michael heard himself say, as if it were someone else talking, the long disparate pieces of his past falling into place. “Are you sure there wasn't a little girl? You said the orders you disobeyed came from a man named Adnan Talu. What you don't know is that Talu adopted the little girl you missed killing and raised her as his heir, probably out of guilt over what you'd done against his orders. Our sister, Vlad.”

Dracu's expression tightened, his brow starting to furrow when he seemed to rein his emotions back in. “Then I'll find and kill her too, but not before I kill you, not—”

And that's when the first shots rang out.

 

EIGHTY-FOUR

C
ALTAGIRONE,
S
ICILY

The barrage of gunfire into the house was sporadic but precise, a single shooter or maybe two repositioning themselves as they fired. Chips of stone, mortar, and wood flew into the air to mix with the dust, concentrated toward Dracu before he dropped to the remnants of the floor covered by what remained of the walls. Shouts and more gunfire erupted from beyond, Dracu's men obviously as confused by the barrage's origins as Michael was, shooting in what sounded like wild, erratic bursts.

Michael had no idea where the shots crackling through the farmhouse were coming from or who was firing. He'd instructed Alexander to remain at the airport and protect Scarlett no matter what. But if it wasn't Alexander, then
who
was it?

He'd barely formed that question when Armura burst through what remained of a wall and, covered in chips of paint and plaster, rushed to help Dracu. Michael could see the top of his veil popping up behind the jagged remains of a wall and knew this was his chance.

While Armura hoisted Dracu to his feet, shielding him with his own body, Michael risked the bullets still pouring into the house and leaped through a chasm at its rear. Then he dropped down the stairs into the darkness of the root cellar. With gunfire continuing to flare in all directions above him, he felt about the earthen wall. He tapped as he went with the butt of the flashlight he'd recovered until he struck something hard, still with his father's journal tucked under one arm. He threw his shoulder against it, felt something buckle, but not give. On his third thrust a camouflaged wooden door shattered inward, snapping off at its rusted hinges.

Michael charged down a narrow tunnel carved out of the ground beneath the farm. The meager spill from the root cellar lasted only until the first bend, after which he switched on the flashlight to illuminate his path forward.

Michael rushed on, looping through the tunnel's jagged design. He imagined it had been forged this way to avoid the shale and limestone deposits, along with the powerful root structures of the farm's biggest trees. His father must have dug the tunnel with any number of additional hands shortly after settling here. Effectively burying Davide Schapira, a hero of a secret operation launched by the West to hunt down Nazis hiding years after World War II, down in the root cellar along with his journals and memorabilia of that time.

In the end, though, that had had nothing to do with the massacre, the roots of which lay in a trip a desperate Vito Nunziato had made to get his precious relic appraised. Fearful of losing the farm, losing everything that defined the man he became, he'd come very close to selling it. That trip, if Vladimir Dracu was to be believed, had set the wheels in motion for the Turkish pirates to come after the relic at all costs, hired by a mysterious third party, some rich American, to do the deed.

Michael looked ahead into a darkness broken only by the narrow spray of his flashlight beam and saw the final truths of his past revealed at last. His feet thrashed through the soil covering what must've once been a hard-packed floor. The tunnel was barely wide enough to accommodate a single person's width, its claustrophobic confines mirroring the tightly knotted truths that formed Michael's true past.

He trudged on, flabbergasted this tunnel even existed as further proof of his father's secret life. Wondering if it had an end, wondering if he'd been shot back in the gunfight and this was the road to whatever eternity wrought. Not a warm bright light at all, but a darkened labyrinth through which he was doomed to roam forever.

Michael felt his feet pounding now, felt every thud of his heart against his rib cage, as each breath drew in more flecks of soil and dirt kicked upward into the air. He stifled the urge to cough several times, feeling the tunnel path alternately dip and rise, drop off and climb, carved through the old grounds that must have despised its trespass.

Michael ran like he was running from everything left in his wake from the day of the massacre, from the moment he'd lifted the gold relic from his father's sock drawer and claimed it as his own. No matter how fast or far he ran, though, the past felt like a cold hand stretching out to graze his spine. A featureless force refusing to let go of a hold on him that had tightened with Vlad Dracu's revelation.

We're half brothers. I guess I'm home, too.

But this wasn't Michael's home, not anymore. It was a graveyard of memories and pain, a landscape where the world had gone dry and spoiled, no longer able to sprout life. A place where only death resided instead.

It was that place from which Michael was running as much as the gunmen and bullets. A straightaway brought warmer temperatures and drier walls baked by thicker air. Slivers of light appeared outside the range of his beam and, before Michael could judge distance or placement, he found a wooden hatch and shouldered through it back into daylight.

He'd emerged just short of a back road he remembered from his youth. It led to a small stream where his father had taken him fishing. Now, though, Michael wondered if the dirt-paved road was real, if any of this was real. Thought of Scarlett, rescuing her from the
Securitate
so they could be together again.

And only then did he know the road was real, all of this was real.

But Michael wasn't in the clear yet, not by a long shot with Black Scorpion gunmen certain to be giving chase. He tried to run, then jog, but felt cramps seize him on both sides. Still, he rushed on, fighting back the pain. Clinging to the side of the road rimming the woods, when an SUV encased in dirt screeched to a halt before him, sideways across the road.

The passenger door flew open.

“Get in!” Raven Khan yelled to him from the driver's seat.

 

P
ART
S
IX

THE FORBIDDEN CITY

 

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.

William Shakespeare

 

EIGHTY-FIVE

L
AS
V
EGAS,
N
EVADA

“What am I supposed to call you?” Naomi Burns asked the chubby man with thick glasses, uncomfortable as they walked around the nearly pristine iron and steel husks culled from Las Vegas history to be gathered in this museum formed by neon signs.

“It varies,” the man said, winking. “How about Samuel?”

“Closing time was hours ago, Samuel.”

“That's why we're here,” Samuel said, sweeping a hand through hair that looked overly long for someone in his mid-twenties. “I know who you work for. Last thing I wanna do is take any chances and risk pissing him off.”

“You don't need to be frightened.”

“Only thing I'm frightened of is not being brilliant enough. We're talking about Michael Tiranno here. Anything that puts me in the dude's good graces, well, let's just say I'd welcome the opportunity. I'm not about to disappoint him, believe me.”