Trouble and Treasure (#1, Trouble and Treasure Series) (4 page)

I mouthed another silent swearword as I
heard the sound of heavy footfall coming from up the hall.

Instinctively I ducked to my knees,
crouching and sidling awkwardly until I was hiding behind the
island bench, back pressed up against a jar full of dried pasta and
a knife board.

The gun was still in my hand, and I held it
at an awkward angle – afraid of the damn thing, but not willing to
let it go when there were more unwanted guests traipsing through my
great-uncle's manor.

I had no idea if they were good or not. Just
as I had no idea if Shaw had been honest. Somehow I doubted it.
When it came to rescuing people from break-and-enters, the police
had that covered – shifty men in suits, no matter how dashing,
didn’t. Whatever Shaw was doing here, and whatever that helicopter
and that van had to do with it, I doubted any of it was legal.

As I sat there, heart thumping so violently
I could feel it through my clenched teeth, the footfall got closer
and closer. I guessed there were several men, but not once did they
speak to give away their exact number.

It was all so professional and all so
frightening. The burglar at the door and the mercenaries in the
drawing room had been one thing – hell, even Shaw had been
manageable somehow (if you count manageable to mean I’d spent most
of the time crawling away from him in the mud). But there was
something about the silent way these men walked up my hall, the way
each step was so damn precise and light that I had to strain my
hearing to even pick it up.

Christ, Christ, Christ. I slammed a hand
over my mouth, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to make it all go
away. I wiped my eyes, tears forming and streaking down my cheeks.
That was when I realized I still held the gun.

I gave an involuntary and audible
squeak.

The steps stopped. They’d been heading up my
stairs before, but after a pause, they headed my way.

My heart could have popped; never before had
I felt such intense, pressured stress. I could hardly breathe and
my eyes were so tear-streaked I could barely see.

I’d closed the kitchen door behind me, but I
hadn't had the presence of mind to shift a table or something heavy
in front of it.

So there wasn’t anything but an unlocked
door separating me from whoever the hell was beyond it.

If it was the police, if it was somehow
the army – if it was some legitimate Government security force –
they would announce themselves. They'd shout out a quick “This is
the police, we're here to help you, ma'am, and we're here to catch
the bad guys.” Sure as hell the guys outside my kitchen door hadn’t
paused to reassure me they were here to help.

I clutched the first thing I could find –
which happened to be a jar of dried pasta and not one of the knives
on the magnetic rack across from me. With the jar of pasta in hand,
I lurched towards the back door.

It was at that point it opened towards
me.

I skidded to a stop, a dark, tall, large
figure before me framed by the moonlight. The man took a step
forwards as the kitchen door behind opened with a soft clunk.

I’d never been so desperate in my life, and
my body, pumped with fright, did the first thing it could think of,
and struck out at the figure before me with the jar. The pasta
rattled around as the jar struck home on the guy's upper arm.

“
Ow,” the man protested as a red dot of
light crossed his face and drifted to my upper arm.

I screamed. I'd seen the movies; I knew what
was coming next.

“
Hey, hey, hey – it's fine. Maratova, she's
fine – she's fine. Occupant of the house,” the man, who I realized
was Shaw, spat his words out in quick file, his hands
up.

Despite his words, several more of those
red-pointed lights flew over the room and settled on or around
me.

That's when I chucked the pasta jar right at
Shaw's head, ducked around him, and bolted out of the back
door.

I heard the jar shatter against the floor,
heard someone swear, but didn’t stop to clean up the mess and make
sure everyone was wearing shoes lest they slash their feet on the
glass.

I flew across the path, arms pumping, feet
stumbling in the dark, but never stopping, gun still held awkwardly
in my vice-like grip.

Sebastian Shaw

“
Did that woman attack you with a jar of
pasta?” Maratova snorted like a bull.

I didn't answer. I turned to follow her.

“
We've got this, Shaw,” Maratova blurted
gruffly.

Was that the click of a safety going off?
Maratova was no idiot – his safety would have been off the second
they saw that van. Nope, he would have clicked it on again so he
could click it off to give me a pointed message.

While I often worked with the Special
Operations Unit, we couldn't be classed as friends. Not me and
Maratova anyway. I had a certain history with that raving
idiot.

It was a violent history.

That wasn't the point. Amanda was now
running down a dark garden path, seconds from falling in a ditch
and breaking her neck. Or worse. As far as I knew, there could
still be more bad guys – amateurs or professionals – roving those
woods. It wouldn't take Amanda long to realize her gun didn't work.
Nor would it take long for her to be taken down.

“
She's the owner,” I said, “She's scared,
she has no idea what's going on—”

“
And she's got a gun.” Maratova signaled
two of his men to stay behind while he and another one headed for
the back door.

“
It's not loaded,” I spat back, trying to
get it through his thick skull that Amanda was as much of a threat
as his own grandmother (though, knowing Maratova's particular
upbringing, maybe that wasn't true).

“
How the hell do you know that?” Maratova
shoved past me roughly, pausing to listen to my answer. It was
obvious he didn't think Amanda could give much opposition. He
probably thought he'd pop out and she'd be hiding stupidly behind a
painted flower pot.

But that girl could run.

“
My gun,” I snapped back. “I gave it to
her.”

The guy next to Maratova snorted and
Maratova gave a growl. “I don't even want to know why.” With that
he turned stiffly and stalked out the door, gun raised.

“
It's not loaded,” I screamed
back.

“
Way to go to break our cover,” one of the
guys said – Jefferson, I think. He raised his gun and took position
near the kitchen door. “Everyone in this house knows where we are
now.”

As if Maratova's loud, guttural, annoying
tone hadn't already done that.

Rather than point that out, I sidled closer
to the door. I was playing a dangerous game here: I was on their
team, technically, but that technically could see me with cable-tie
handcuffs tied around my wrists and a black eye if I didn't respect
their rules.

Yet something was niggling deep in my gut.
It was the way she'd looked at me out near the turning circle – the
whites of her eyes glinting in the moon light, her lips slack and
her mouth open.

It was miles away from the light, breezy,
frankly ditzy way she'd been when we'd first met. When she'd walked
into that auction room, smiling nervously, the auction house owner
tittering excitedly at her shoulder, I'd been ready to write her
off as a new secretary or PA – a vague and flakey one. When she'd
sat through the auction, shock plastered over her face as the
innocent spotting globe she'd put up for sale started to go for
millions, I'd realized something was up. It wasn't until Narcina –
a shady Egyptian antiques dealer – walked right up to her and asked
her to withdraw the item from sale and sell it to him for an even
higher price, that I knew something was wrong.

That's when she'd done it. Shock still
plastered over her cute face, her button nose crinkled and her blue
eyes popping, she'd stood up, blinked at the man, and stuttered, “I
have more of them. I have a set of... five I think.”

God, you could have dropped a fucking
grenade in that building and not one single person would have
moved. They were all of them in there for one reason: the spotting
globe at auction was worth potentially hundreds of billions of
dollars in lost treasure. We're talking Spanish galleons stuffed
with doubloons, Roman hoards, Egyptian tombs, treasures the Nazi's
stole and squirreled away through the war. While each globe was
valuable, they didn’t work as a map until they were combined. There
were five globes in total – and when Amanda had innocently admitted
to the room that she owned the whole set... well.

My heart could have stopped at that point.
I'd been searching for a hint of those globes my entire career,
only to have one pop up for freaking auction down the street from
my office. I hadn't had to battle bandits in South America for it,
hadn't had to fight through the war-filled valleys and mountains of
Afghanistan, hadn't even had to pull out my gun.

They were called the Stargazer Set. And
among those in the know, they were the most famous, previously
elusive, and most highly desired treasure maps in the world.

Ditsy Amanda had them. All of them,
apparently.

I was sure she didn't have a clue what they
were, nor, it was obvious, did she understand what was happening to
her.

What was happening was what happened when
you blurted out you had the Stargazer Set in your basement.

“
Come on, Jefferson,” I tried, voice at
normal volume, as I was sure there was no one left conscious in the
house, “You know Maratova: he's going to scare the shit out of her,
or worse. You want that?”

Jefferson wiped his nose with the thumb of
one of his combat-glove-covered hands. “She threw a pasta jar at
you – I don't think she's a fan.”

“
She has no idea what's going on. She isn't
the criminal here. Let me...” I trailed off, not sure what I
wanted. Did I want to be the one to go out and pull her out of the
ditch while she flailed at me with the butt of my own
gun?

Nope. But I owed it to the girl. She'd been
dumb telling everyone in that auction room she had the Stargazers,
but I'd been worse for not warning her when I'd had the chance.

The trouble was I wanted those globes. The
only person who knew where the rest of them were, and the
legitimate owner (not that anyone in this building – good or bad –
cared who officially owned the things) was pelting through the
forest trying to get away from me. Maratova, despite my insistence
that her gun wasn't loaded, would still treat her as armed, and
he'd use protocol on that. That same protocol wouldn’t be kind to
Amanda. The poor girl would explode if she was tackled by a trained
soldier or had several M-15s pointed in her face while Maratova
screamed at her to drop the weapon and drop to her knees. In other
words, she was in trouble.

There was a lot of trouble going on here
tonight, and I doubted it was over yet.

Amanda Stanton

I kept running for my life. My heart beat so
fast and violently a cold pressure spread through the top of my
chest.

I’d managed to make it down the dark garden
path, my bare feet grating against the rough stones and soil as I
headed towards the forest below. When I hit it, despite the leaves
and sticks and god knows what else on the forest floor, I kept
running.

I hadn't had any time to think since the
moment I’d rolled out of bed and walked down stairs to meet the
first of my attackers.

They were after my globes, like the one I’d
been so foolish to sell at the auction house earlier that week.

When I’d come to my great-uncle's estate,
entrusted by my great aunt to sort through his junk, I’d never
expected to find anything valuable. Great-Uncle Stanton had only
ever collected junk. From the mountains of yellowed paper in the
drawing room, to the boxes of old tattered photos in the lounge
room, to the cupboard full of used baked-bean cans, old Great-Uncle
Stanton, though a collector, was a collector of rubbish not
treasure.

That had all changed the Tuesday before last
when I'd made my way up to the attic. I could still remember
heaving the door open and recoiling from the loud bang as the old
wood swung back on its hinges and impacted the floor. A massive
cloud of dust spilled towards me, and I almost fell off the ladder
from the coughing fit that ensued. When I pulled myself up and onto
the floor of the attic, everything had been worth it. All those
weeks of going through all that junk, of trawling through the
millions of old newspaper clippings, cigarette tins, postcards,
stamps, and badges, so yellowed, bent, and rusted with age I had to
wash my hands every half hour – all of it had been worth it.

For there was treasure above. While the
majority of the manor, from the bottom floor to the top, was filled
with glorified rubbish, the attic was a sight I’d never seen
outside of a fancy museum. Statues were pressed up against the side
walls. Old urns had toppled on their sides, coins spilling in a sea
of gold. There were fancy desks and seats, covered with
leather-bound books and parchment manuscripts.

On a side wall amongst all this treasure sat
a simple desk. On top of the desk were two things: one worn leather
notebook and one old hideous spotting globe. Amongst all the wonder
that surrounded me, that simple sight caught my attention.

My old Great-Uncle Stanton had been the
black sheep of the family, having left medical school halfway
through his degree to take up treasure hunting instead. The rest of
the family thought he was mad. They’d also thought, incorrectly,
that all his years of traveling and toiling had brought him naught
but further insanity.