Kevin Anderson - Artifact

“Go, girl,” someone yelled. Someone else turned the spotlight on her.

Frik.

She had noticed him among those who preferred to watch. Now she saw that his gaze was riveted on the pendant she was wearing around her neck.

At the end of the song, the musicians closed their set.

Frik moved toward her, took her arm, and guided her down into the cabin, where a huge black form lay growling.

“Quiet, Sheba!”

The dog sent out one more test growl, objecting to the invasion of her territory, then stopped.

Peta followed the Afrikaner through the boat’s small galley and forward to his private study. The cozy wood-paneled cabin curved with the prow of theAssegai until it formed a point. Cushioned benches lined both walls, broken only on the starboard side by a locked cabinet which she knew contained an entertainment center and his communications equipment. Where the curving walls brought the benches together, a low trapezoidal wooden cabinet served as a display table. Standing in the middle of it was the small wire frame which held the two pieces of the artifact that Frikkie had so far recovered.

“Thank you, again, for coming,” he said. “And for bringing the piece.” Safely out of sight of the revelers, he reached out toward the pendant.

“Not so fast,” Peta said, enjoying the look on his face as she backed away. Smiling, she asked him to give her the privilege of placing the fragment into the model herself. “Just a whim,” she said. “Humor me.”

A trifle impatiently, Frik agreed.

Heart pounding, praying that Ralphie’s work was as perfect as she thought it was, she removed the pendant from around her neck, pushed the fragment out of its bezel and into the space he indicated.

It slid in and—Thank you, Ralphie—connected perfectly with the real pieces of the artifact.

“That just leaves Selene’s fragment,” Frik said. “And the one that’s in New York with Arthur’s effects.”

“I’m curious,” Peta said, trying to sound casual. “How did you know about that one?”

“Ray told me just recently,” Frik said. “Is that a problem? Itis mine, you know.”

“A problem? N-no. I don’t suppose it is.” She had never been completely sure that Frik knew about the piece in New York or, if he did know, just how he had learned about it. Her suspicions about the Daredevil stuntman returned tenfold.

“Ray says the piece is in New York, with Arthur’s effects. I’d like to go and get it,” Frik went on, his voice carefully benign.

Damn it, Peta thought. How was she going to get out of this one? “It can be released only to me, personally.”

“So I understand. Why don’t you let me fly you there. We can—”

Peta held up her hand. “I have a practice. I have students at the medical school coming in this week to begin the new semester and I need to prepare. There’s no way I can leave Grenada right now.”

“But—”

“Don’t pressure me, Frik. I’m not one of your flunkies.” Her anger finally overrode her caution, adding heat to her words. “I give you my word I’ll retrieve the piece in time for the New Year’s Eve meeting in Vegas. That’ll have to be good enough.”

37

On the night of the August new moon, Terris McKendry stood on theValhalla platform and wondered if he would ever again be able to trust a night of such darkness. To him it seemed that the world was holding its breath, waiting to unleash some hidden terror. His uneasiness had returned each month since the night on theYucatán when he and Joshua had first encountered Green Impact—the night that had cost Keene his life and made him into a cold-blooded murderer who would shoot a woman in the back.

Restless, he walked the metal decks at the wellhead level, high as a skyscraper above the placid water. Level after level, he climbed from one yellow-painted staircase to another, pacing, working off his nervous energy as he stared out into the night.

His heavy boots rang loudly in his ears, even against the hiss and thrum of the ever-working mechanisms of the production platform. The rig was a constant drone of machinery, effluents hissing through pipes, waste-gas flames crackling at the long ends of boom derricks.

McKendry gripped the warm metal railings and peered a hundred feet down to the water.Valhalla produced too much background noise, too much light and sound. It cast a bubble of restless civilization around them, like a campfire driving off predators in the wilderness.

Pacing around to the western corner of the platform, he saw the two exhaust flares extended like spitting dragons into the darkness, bleeding off belches of unwanted gases from the simmering oil well deep under the waters. On the opposite side, the living quarters rested under the helideck. At this time of night most of the workers would be off shift, playing billiards, watching action movies, cheating each other at cards. Separate from the habitation modules, the shack of the radio room was lit; undoubtedly Hercules, the Trinidadian man on duty, was chatting with radio pen pals from across the world.

As his uneasiness built, he strode to one of the phones that allowed communication between the distant parts of the rig and punched in the code for the small coffee room where his security men often took a break. “Gonzales. Get everyone outside. No more breaks this shift. Do your rounds every fifteen minutes tonight, not every half hour. I want all of you to keep an eye out.”

“What’s wrong, sir?” Gonzales said.

“Just do it. There’s nothing wrong with being on your toes.” McKendry made sure his men did their jobs, but never bothered to get cordial with any of them. He couldn’t imagine why the guards would rather sit in a confined room on plastic chairs drinking sour coffee instead of walking around the rig decks in the warm night and stretching their legs. In the Tropics he had found that some men just plain took pride in their laziness.

On the other end of the line, Gonzales grumbled to the others in the coffee shop, “It’s the dark of the moon. Makes him paranoid.”

McKendry scowled and said in a gruff voice, “You can complain to Mr. Van Alman if you don’t like my orders. I’m sure he’ll be happy to let you find another job.” Angrily, he hung up. Maybe he was being overcautious, but it only took one mistake, as the captain of theYucatán had discovered.

He walked to the edge of the platform and again scanned the vast stretch of water between the rig and the invisible mainland of Venezuela.

Why did he really care what happened to theValhalla ? Because he’d promised Frikkie that he’d protect the rig? It wasn’t as if Frik was much of a friend. After the assault on the Green Impact camp, the billionaire had been concerned only with the recovery of his mysterious artifact. The dead mercenaries on his side and the half dozen dead terrorists on the other didn’t matter to the man. All he cared about was that somehow Selene Trujold had gotten away, even though she had been shot.

After what the terrorists did to Joshua, McKendry thought, it matters to me.

Drifting across the water like a black fly on a dark lily pad, Joshua Keene closed the distance to theValhalla platform. He moved without lights, circling his motorized inflatable raft to the Trinidad side of the rig so that he could come in opposite the additional glow of the exhaust flares at the ends of their extended booms.

As he turned the Zodiac toward the rig, he cut the motor. In the ensuing silence he could hear the industrial buzz, even from a distance of more than a mile.

Entering the rich, warm waters around theValhalla, he trailed streamers of potent shark repellent. Though sharks rarely attacked inflatable rafts, he wanted to avoid any commotion at all.