Tyranny of Coins (The Judas Chronicles, #5) Read online

  “Yes, we’re fine. Just wanted to hear your voice, and let you know the weather is holding up. We should reach Auschwitz by eight o’clock, as planned,” I said, cheerfully.

  “I miss you, too, William. It seems nuts to be visiting Auschwitz at that late hour. I hope Krontos knows what he’s talking about. Try not to get arrested for trespassing.” She laughed weakly.

  I laughed with her, feeling better about her and Amy’s immediate welfare. It seemed Krontos wasn’t around after all. Still, it wasn’t wise to linger, in case he watched her remotely.

  “Darling, keep your phone handy,” I advised, signaling to my comrades I was about to hang up. “I’ll call you as soon as we have some good news.”

  Keeping my voice cheerful, I moved to close the call. Beatrice sounded more assured… it worked.

  “You look pleased,” noted Roderick. “Anything we should be concerned about?”

  “No. Beatrice sounded upbeat. So did Amy in the background,” I said. “They’re fine for now.”

  “I heard you tell Mom that you’ll check in with her later tonight. When you do, I’d like to visit with Amy for just a moment,” said Alistair. Krontos had confiscated Amy’s phone at lunch, when we agreed to limit the conversations between Beatrice and myself. Two phone calls per day, until we returned to the castle.

  “We’ll see, son. If Krontos isn’t hovering like a hawk, maybe you and Amy can visit for a minute.” Pained by the longing in his face, it was the same for me in regard to Beatrice. I loathed the hypocrisy I felt for my privilege to speak with my wife. “But, the sooner we complete our task, the sooner we can get back to them.”

  For the next several hours we continued our trek, stopping for supper in Nowy Sacz, roughly two hours from Auschwitz. By the time we finished our meal, a heavy snowstorm that started in the afternoon made the going slow and arduous. It became apparent we wouldn’t fulfill our assignment from Krontos that night.

  “Looks like we will need to stop somewhere, and pick this up again in the morning,” I said, after Roderick translated a local radio weather report. The snow was supposed to cease around midnight, but the treacherous driving conditions wouldn’t improve until mid-morning the next day. “Either that, or find a local peasant pulling a sled.”

  “We should try to reach Krakow,” Roderick suggested, ignoring my joke. “One of us will have the unenviable task of contacting Krontos with the news our arrival at Auschwitz and Berlin will be delayed. Hopefully, we can visit the camp in the morning when it opens, and be on our way to Germany by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I bet that’ll be fun,” jested Cedric, while he watched the snow mercilessly pelt the Mercedes as Roderick fought to keep it on the road. “Didn’t you say the other night that Krontos’ temper was like a scorpion backed into a corner? Right? I know one of y’all said it.”

  “Pops did.” Alistair seemed subdued, as if the snow had derailed much more than our Auschwitz assignment.

  “I should be the one to call him, Rod,” I said, offering a hopeful smile to my kid, who waved me off. “I doubt he’ll be happy about it, but he needs to frigging remember two of us are immortal, and two are not. If the youngsters catch their death of cold, all of us will be up shit’s creek trying to make this crazy assignment work.”

  Roderick agreed.

  “He shouldn’t get too upset,” added Cedric, snickering. “If he does, I’d ask him how he expects us to find anything in this weather. In fact, I’d bet he never expected us to find anything out here anyway. With all the agency tricks I’ve taught you, Willie Boy, you should see right through his shit screen.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” I asked, warily. My former CIA field supervisor wasn’t always the epitome of nobility during my days working for him. However, more often than not his instincts and observations were spot on. “What shit screen?”

  “The one that says he never expects us to find jack at Auschwitz,” said Cedric. “I can’t see what you and Roderick see or sense. But I felt something at Auschwitz. A second visit ain’t gonna help anything. Nothing will be any clearer, man. My gut tells me Krontos knows it, too.”

  “Then, why did he send us out here?” asked Alistair, worriedly.

  Great. This was all we needed. More frigging drama… I began to envision strangling Cedric if he didn’t shut the hell up.

  “Well, even though your dad is super pissed at me for sharing my honest thoughts, and Roderick might be, too, I bet Krontos is laughing at us. This asshole—and he’s probably listening in right now—doesn’t expect us to find anything. So, why did he send us back to Auschwitz? That answer I don’t know for sure yet. But do y’all recall what he taunted us with this morning? He said whoever took the coin in Berlin had a superior understanding of dimensions and how to move through them—much better than all of us combined. If that’s the case, what idiot worth any salt would assign a group of ‘dimensional amateurs’, like us, to do a job only a pro could handle?”

  I wanted to hit him. Really I did. But, I also felt like a bigger asshole than the one he taunted. Cedric was right, and the answer about why this aura-following adventure had felt doomed from the beginning was staring us straight in the face.

  “Well, then what do we do now?” asked Roderick, glancing repeatedly in the rearview mirror, as if expecting Krontos to suddenly appear behind him. “Do we continue to Krakow, since it’s getting late?”

  “What? So we can hole up in a hostel and discuss this silliness further?” Cedric sounded amazed and disgusted. This had to be a sweet moment for him, on some level.

  “Touche, Boss,” I said. “I don’t know the right answer either. Maybe no one does.”

  I reached for my phone. None of the guys tried to stop me from dialing Beatrice again. I didn’t know what to expect, but began to worry when the fourth ring arrived. Just before getting routed to a Polish cellular network recording, my wife answered.

  At first I couldn’t hear her, and assumed we had a compromised call connection. Prepared to hang up and try again, I heard screaming. Amy screaming.

  “William?! He’s gone mad!” cried Beatrice. “I can’t hear what you’re saying, William! If you hear me, please come back! Don’t leave us here! Don’t—”

  “Beatrice!”

  The line was dead. Worse, my ensuing calls to her phone were unsuccessful.

  The decision what to do next had been made. Roderick spun the SUV around, sliding dangerously in the snow near a guardrail, and headed south—praying we’d get back to the castle before the unthinkable happened.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I should have expected betrayal. Especially, given my very personal past with Krontos. I doubt anyone would blame me for the fantasy of tearing the little bastard limb from limb. I could justifiably subject him to the same tortures he delivered to Roderick and me long ago as a Cardinal Inquisitor. Dracul may have been the one administering most of our excruciating torments, but the Hungarian monster was never far removed from the events, like a closet pervert.

  But for the moment, none of that mattered. All I could think of was reaching my beloved Beatrice and Amy before something horrible happened to either one, or both. My wife’s panic repeated in my mind as I urged Roderick to drive faster, egged on by the mental echoes from Amy’s terrified screams.

  “You’re going to have to let me drive without distraction, William. You’ll get us killed if you don’t!” he warned, after nearly taking the Mercedes over a steep embankment. Cedric and Alistair clung to seatbelts and door restraints with white-knuckled tenacity. “We can only go so fast!”

  “Think about the mortals in the backseat, Pops—I’m freaking out just as badly as you about Mom and Amy! Don’t get us killed trying to reach the castle at breakneck speed!”

  Alistair’s complexion had taken on a green tint. One more hairpin turn taken at my suggested ninety-kilometer clip would surely expose the front seat to a shower of vomit, if we didn’t flip over a guardrail first.

  “Okay,” I
said, drawing a deep breath and holding it for a moment before slowly exhaling. It wasn’t fair for me to suddenly behave like I was the only one in the vehicle with something precious to lose. “Drive safely, then… but work the road to the best of your ability, Rod. You know all too well what Krontos is capable of—despite his cheerful façade the past two days.”

  “Yes, I do,” Roderick agreed. “I still have scars from when he burned my flesh away in Madrid. Remember? I showed you them when we caught up with each other in Athens, 1494. It was nearly ten years after you disappeared, when Dracul killed you.”

  “How could I forget?” I said softly, my heightened eagerness subdued by the memory. “I woke up in Cairo, in a ghetto, and was soon arrested for stealing a small loaf of bread.”

  It wasn’t our first Inquisition imprisonment together, but it was the first time I succumbed to the physical tortures involved. Serious wounds to vital organs bled faster than my body could heal. Nearly two hundred years since my last death and immediate reincarnation, I had forgotten the raging hunger that accompanies these rebirths. Four years fighting for my life in another dingy dungeon followed, under the watchful eyes of Egyptian taskmasters. By the time my joyful reunion with Roderick took place, nine years had passed since we last spoke. Fearing his death at the hands of the Inquisition, my constant worry was that I’d be forced to walk the earth alone.

  “I didn’t bring this up to reopen old wounds,” he said, eyeing me compassionately. “I just wanted you to never forget that I know what kind of fiend we are up against.”

  “What was it like to face this asshole back then? Did he make you feel naked on the inside, and violated when he invaded your private thoughts?” Cedric frowned as if he never intended to share anything he personally experienced with Krontos.

  Roderick shook his head and I barely acknowledged Cedric’s questions, as well. But when Alistair echoed Cedric’s curiosity, there wasn’t a way to cleanly avoid an explanation.

  “He was more of an annoyance than anything else,” said Roderick, glancing warily at me. “Always there, lurking. I could feel him… boiling over with rage and hate I assumed at the time was merely ignorant jealousy of my youth. Bitter for the years it took him to find the right elixir to grant him eternal life, Krontos loathed the fact he would be a crotchety old man for all eternity, while people like Judas and me would not. But, did I fear his sorcerer skills at the time? No. And, I never experienced what you say you dealt with, Cedric. Maybe this is something new. Like the dimension manipulation talent he has since been endowed with. He didn’t possess that ability back then.”

  “I never experienced anything like what you described either, Cedric,” I said. “But the cleverness he employed to track us down and imprison us—once in the fourteenth century and twice in the fifteenth—speaks to the same compulsion to invade a person’s privacy. Whether that means a hostile takeover of one’s life or mind, the violation is the same.”

  “That’s a lot to assume, Pops,” commented Alistair, chuckling. “You can’t equate the two behaviors so simply. What seems more accurate is to say the two invasive habits are related to Krontos’ psychopathic curiosity.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about, Ali?” Cedric straightened in his seat to better regard my boy and his smugness—the last vestige of the once-grandfatherly history professor at Georgetown. “You’re becoming more and more like your old man every day.”

  “Krontos is nothing more than a control freak,” said Alistair, smiling playfully. “A control freak with serious issues.”

  “Murderous issues,” I corrected him, beginning to worry about Alistair’s steady drift from the balanced pragmatist he once was. “Make that a murderous psychopath with an opportunistic flair.”

  “What?! See what I’m talking about, you two? Don’t feed us more bullshit, Judas!” Cedric’s brow furrowed deeply as he shook his head disgustedly.

  “It’s not bullshit, Cedric. If you stop and think about it, Krontos is not so different from the host of miscreants that joined the Nazi movement. Everyone from Himmler to Mengele, and so many who later returned to peaceful lives after World War II, were drawn to the opportunity to act out their psychopathic compulsions—largely because there were no consequences for having such designs,” I explained. “Mengele and Klaus Barbie made a great impression on their South American neighbors, and no one who knew them in their later years could believe they were the vicious monsters who tortured and murdered thousands during the war.”

  “Do you think Krontos will act like these war criminals to Mom and Amy?”

  Alistair’s worry deepened. I suddenly wished I had just agreed with him and avoided my mini-lecture on Krontos’ Nazi affiliations and bent toward similar wickedness.

  “Not before we get there,” I sought to assure him. “I refuse to believe The Almighty will allow us to fail. But you have seen enough of the man’s wiles since we left Abingdon to know we must come up with an effective plan. Otherwise, he will have us all in chains if we can’t surprise him.”

  As if on cue, a powerful gust of wind swept across the highway and nearly shoved us into oncoming traffic.

  “Better start working on a plan right now,” Roderick advised when he regained control of the Mercedes. His eyes were swirling hot pools of blue and gold, like a kaleidoscope on fire. “I can get us there in about five hours, but we need the details ironed out before we reach the castle grounds first.”

  * * * * *

  The plan we came up with was a good one. Some aspects were exceptional, I thought. But the trouble with plotting against a fiend with access to awareness beyond normal comprehension is the likelihood that whatever we came up with, Krontos would remain a step ahead. Of course, if we had simply acknowledged that fact, then why even bother? A complex attack would be just as ineffective as a bull rush to storm the castle gates.

  The first idea was Roderick’s, and with better access to GPS maps than either of us expected, we altered our route just enough to not retrace our path back to the Mátra Mountains. Instead, we returned to the outskirts of Budapest and headed east to the mountains—similar to the route taken by Krontos’ hoodlums the night before.

  But we should’ve known any attempt to invade the ancient sorcerer’s stomping grounds undetected would fail. Subtle at first, Roderick’s and my wariness picked up something predatory as we neared the southern border of Slovakia.

  “You feel it?” I asked him, quietly, when he took his eyes off the road to peer out the passenger windows.

  “It started near Lučenec, and has steadily grown stronger,” he replied. “Maybe it will fade… maybe it isn’t him.”

  “Who?” Alistair poked his head between the front seats. “Are you talking about Krontos?”

  “Yes,” I confessed. “But it’s nothing to be concerned about yet.”

  “There you go again… when you should realize the James Bond clandestine approach won’t work,” said Cedric, his head next to Alistair’s. “Not on us.”

  Roderick smirked and shook his head, glancing at me with a wan smile.

  “Okay.” I released a low sigh, hoping it would buy me a moment to think of a diversion to discuss anything other than the brooding presence of a paranoid immortal watching from some unseen vantage point. But there was nothing. Just the truth of what I felt—what Roderick, and probably Cedric and Alistair, felt, too. “He knows we’re coming.”

  “See, Pops? That’s exactly what I warned you about in Poland, when you wouldn’t let me try to call Mom and Amy!” said Alistair, angrily. “If nothing else, I could’ve made sure they were all right!”

  “Or, ensured their demise,” said Roderick, butting in before I could offer the same rebuke. His response lacked the ire that surely would’ve come with mine. “Especially with Krontos on the move, spiritually, when he is at his most unpredictable. Likely, he is listening to us now. It would be in everyone’s best interest to remain calm, follow the plan we laid out three hours ago, and let me drive.” />
  “Rod’s right, Ali,” I said, as the pair sat back in their seats, while releasing their own frustrated sighs. “This is a time for faith in doing the smartest things, and not giving in to thoughts of panic. We will save Beatrice and Amy—trust me, if you can’t trust anything else.”

  Yeah, that sounded flimsy to me, too. As we crossed into Hungary, the feeling of impending doom suddenly intensified. Like an inquisitive fly that had drifted too close to a black widow’s nest. Obviously, we couldn’t turn around and look for a haven back in Slovakia. Regardless of what we’d soon face, time was not on our side, and Alistair’s worry about our cherished women would be well founded if we took too long to reach the castle.

  “I don’t know about you two, but I definitely don’t like the way this feels,” said Cedric. “Whatever you guys felt twenty minutes ago has got to be worse now.”

  “It’s stronger,” I told him, peering at him and my boy in the back seat. Both were grimacing as if we had just run over a small army of skunks. “Try to clear your minds, and don’t linger long on any one thought. I’ll explain why this works later on. For now, just trust me.”

  Roderick smiled for a moment, in what I supposed was some level of admiration for my advice. Then his expression turned somber, and worsened once we veered onto the highway that would take us to Krontos’ castle in the mountains.

  I believe all of us were afraid to say anything else. Other than making a pit stop to refuel and grab a bite to eat, we were focused on reaching our destination as quickly as possible. And, our plan? The idea was to get as close as possible to the castle without encouraging a face to face confrontation with Krontos’ men—nearly two dozen by Cedric and Roderick’s estimation. Since we’d likely need the car to make a getaway when we retrieved our precious cargo, I suggested cutting the engine and headlights once we crossed a slight incline in the road, roughly a hundred meters from the castle grounds to avoid detection. The optimal hope was to coast down the road until within easy sprinting distance of the gates, and making our final approach on foot.