Preston W. Child
Nazi Gold
Chapter 1 — The Untimely Caller
Nina woke to find herself in a pool of sweat.
The nightmare had been worse than all the others, but still it had maintained that same aura of mystery and that smell! That smell was so prevalent throughout all the dreams and she just could not pinpoint what it was. As far as she knew she could not remember ever smelling it in her woken state, yet it was familiar. She shook her head to get the horrid sensation from her mind and started carefully rolling over. These days she could never be certain of what she would encounter, slipping in and out of states of hallucination which sometimes granted her a look into places she would never have thought surrounded her. Nina wondered if this was what it was like to be psychic.
Of course her reluctant clairvoyance came courtesy of the poison still in her veins. It only gradually dispersed from the muscle tissue in her arm where the twisted ideas of villainous Nazi doctors had planted the slowly releasing poison several months ago. They had engineered the strain so well that conventional treatment did little more than leave a dent in the potency of the vile stuff. But thanks to an equally malicious concoction brewed from the blood of her nemesis, Nina’s body was able to combat it. Now it was a waiting game for it all to work its way out of her system, a time-consuming method fraught with unfortunate psychological plagues. It appeared the latest was the torment of nightmares. They were not brought forth predominantly from past experiences, but pressed more on Nina’s fears, her lifelong concerns.
Then again, some of them were just good old horrific dreams, filled with a sickening feeling of abandoned hope and pursuing evil at her heels. Nina swallowed hard. Her throat was cork dry and slightly swollen from the medication she was on, but that was quickly remedied with some milk and a cigarette. She had taken up the destructive habit again after her Viking ordeal which ended in the loss of too many good new friends. At least the friend she valued most above all still remained. She looked at the wall mounted picture of them posing with the bikers they had befriended while they searched for the famous Hall of the Slain, Valhalla the previous year.
“Sam,” she smiled as she eased herself out of bed and slipped on her heavy alpaca knit sweater that a correspondent friend in Chicago sent her for Christmas. It came a few weeks early, but she was not complaining. Scotland was entering a rather testing Christmas season and she would need all the insulation she could get, especially something as aesthetically pleasing as a soft black and white sweater that reminded her of white noise on a late night TV screen.
Nina strolled through the dark hallway to the kitchen on the other side of the second floor. It seemed she would now be a permanent occupant of Wrichtishousis, the manor on the estate of her missing boyfriend, David Purdue. His lust for adventure always led him into dangerous situations and the company of questionable people. Many people had warned the billionaire, including Nina herself, but his pursuits for the arcane things that so fascinated him drove him into perilous predicaments, one after the other. Finally he had ventured into something he could not, or would not, apparently, return safely from.
After numerous attempts at locating him, with the employment of the best detectives in her service, she had abandoned her search for him. He was Dave Purdue, ever prepared for any eventuality and capable of paying or talking himself out of just about any situation. Fiercely independent and fearless, she trusted the man did not want to be found and would return once he was good and ready. Every now and then the thought of his lifeless corpse being pecked at in some remote mountain range did cross her mind, but she found it almost ludicrous that such a thing could befall Purdue. Nevertheless, she stayed in his lavish home, enjoying the perks of being his partner.
It had been years since she heard his defiant chuckle when challenged by some academic or philanthropist at one of his beloved parties. Nina took the milk from the fridge and drank straight from the container; something she would preciously had frowned on in her refined nature. It was amazing how liberating the doors of death could be for the morals and etiquette of a sophisticated human being. She lit a cigarette and sat down in front of her computer with a handful of pills she had to take daily to maintain her health while the arsenic based substance gradually worked itself out. Nina ran her dainty wrist across her lips to wipe off the white moustache the milk left behind and sucked hard on her first fag for the day.
It was still dark, but she could not spend another moment in bed. Lately she woke literally an hour or two after going to sleep, so much so that she had become accustomed to insomnia as a natural body timer. Besides, it gave her more time to get things done. After her close call with death Nina came to realize that sleep, although a necessity for the body, was utterly insignificant to the curious mind and its need to be sated. She found that it was literally a waste of precious time. She logged in to a site, her large dark eyes darting here and there on the screen while the white luminance of it highlighted her beautiful features. In the white light her fair skin was even more in contrast to her long lashes and dark tresses, accentuating her high cheekbones with shadow play. Her pouty mouth moved under imperceptible words as she read the information on the screen, occasionally dragging the cigarette into a flare of orange coal and ash.
Suddenly the buzzer to her intercom shattered the silence of the early morning and she jumped, “Jesus!”
Nina extinguished her fag in the soil of the large potted plant next to her desk and dragged her feet lazily toward the device on the wall. It was Security.
“Dr Gould, so sorry to wake you,” the crackling voice said over the radio, “but there is someone here to see you.”
“This time of the morning? What the hell do they want?” she snapped. Before her first deep roast coffee of the day Nina was not the kindest soul to engage.
“The lady says it is urgent. She needs to see you before she leaves for an expedition in the Amazon, but she refuses to say anything else,” he replied. Nina rolled her eyes and raised one eyebrow in astonishment.
“Well, that is convenient, isn’t it? Does she have a name at all? Or is that a secret too?” the pretty historian spat in her cocky way that was so well known to all those who knew her and often found themselves victims of her sarcasm.
“She says her name is Professor Petra Kulich.”
“Don’t know her,” Nina mentioned in thought, “Tell her to leave her contact details and I’ll get back to her…”
A sharp female voice in a heavy accent shot through the speaker, “Doctor Gould, it is imperative that I speak to you… now!”
A scuffle could be heard over the intercom and Nina stood puzzled, listening to the scratchy chaos of the security guard reclaiming the device from the stranger. She ran her hand over the speaker, waiting for some response. Finally she heard the guard’s voice again.
“We will relay your message, Dr. Gould. If you don’t know her, we will take care of it,” he said firmly. Nina listened in on the other side of the line.
Vaguely she could make out that the woman was persistent and kept repeating that she had to see Nina. The guard reiterated that he would be happy to obtain her details so that Nina could contact her at a more convenient time, but the woman began to scream torrents in her own language, which sounded like Romanian, perhaps Czech or Moldovan to Nina. As she plodded back to her computer, the historian tried her best to remember anyone by that name who could possibly have met her previously, but the woman’s name was entirely unfamiliar to her. Maybe she had been referred to her? But by whom and what for? Nina regretted sending her away, because now she had a hundred questions seeping into her mind about the strange visitor at her gate. It would have been better if she had just let the woman in and satisfied her curiosity, but then again, Dr. Nina Gould had become a bit less trusting of those who move in academic circles of late. Most of her foes had titles like ‘doctor’ and ‘professor’ and unlike before, she now viewed them less as scholars and more as highly educated villains. After all, what was it worth having all that knowledge and not utilizing it to obtain treasures of the past and hidden gems of immeasurable value?