“Thank God I let Cassie buy the hideous color of phone she wanted, or else I would never have been able to see it in the dark,” Paddy said out loud, groaning in anguish, remembering the debate over the color of the phone between him and his wife a year or so ago. “Thanks, baby!”
He dialed his local precinct, the very people who had just that day withdrawn the arrangement to have a squad car at the premises every night. “Yeah, this is DCI Patrick Sm— this is Agent Patrick… oh, Christ, Tammy, can you just send an ambulance to my house quickly?”
“Right away, Pat.”
Tammy, the operator at the station, knew Patrick Smith’s voice well and promptly dispatched the emergency vehicles to his address in Blackford. Patrick collapsed, more out of relief than blood loss. His breathing slowed a bit as he relaxed, but it revealed an unnerving sound from the corridor where he thought he had left the burglar.
A guttural groan sounded like words, suppressed by the carpet on which the man had turned his face down to crawl. Paddy felt his adrenaline rush at the newly emergent danger. His weapon was lying in the doorway, just out of reach unless he crawled to it, but such an action would make him visible to the attacker. Again the wheezing grunt formed a word, as if the intruder was saying something. Paddy sat dead still, taking deep breaths as not to hyperventilate and bleed out sooner.
The chafing of the black figure’s clothing on the carpet announced his presence not a foot away from Paddy’s gun. It was now or never for Special Agent Patrick Smith. Waiting for the EMTs felt like an eternity, and now he had a dangerous intruder to protect them from when they arrived. Trying to ignore all the pain and discomfort to move, Paddy lunged at the gun and landed hard on his side, screaming from the blunt ache that shot through his hip and torso on impact. But this time he did not shoot, he only held the barrel level to the figure’s head.
“Don’t move or I’ll finish ya off!” he roared, trying not to lose consciousness. Again the intruder mouthed something inaudible that sounded remarkably like a name. “What? What are you saying?”
“Pat-rick,” came the word clearly, and Paddy’s face turned pale.
“Who are you?” he asked the struggling man.
“Nev-nev-ille,” he replied, his throat drenched in blood and his voice box ruptured.
“Oh, God!” Paddy gasped, but his head felt heavy as a boulder and he knew he would not be able to stay awake for much longer. “Why did you shoot me? What are… why are you here? Did you come to finish what you did to my wife?” he screamed, regardless of the excruciating pain it caused in his contracting abdomen. Paddy inched himself nearer to Neville and pulled off his balaclava, revealing the torturous contortion of the Indian man’s face.
“I thought you were out. All I wanted wa-… I–I wanted the gener-rer-rator… or they kill me,” he uttered a disturbing chuckle at his last statement. “Looks like you d-did it for them.”
“Who? Who wanted the generator?” Paddy asked with his last good breaths.
Outside the house the ambulance came to a screeching halt. Through the thin drapes of the living room, the lights pulsed while the EMTs hammered the door down.
“You could just have contacted me! But you destroyed my poor wife, you fucking pig. She is forever changed because of what you did! You should have killed me when we were in that cavern, because you just fucked with the wrong man’s family!”
“Patri… Patrick, beware the Vril.”
Paddy tried to squeeze the trigger, but an officer swiftly grabbed it from his grasp.
“He’s dead, Smith! He is dead, all right?” shouted Detective Williams, an old colleague of Paddy’s from their days at the precinct.
“Vril,” Paddy repeated, afraid he would forget the word spoken by the only man who knew what faction of criminals would attack a man’s wife to obtain the dreaded object.
“What is he saying?” Detective Williams asked the medical technician.
“It sounds like Vril or something,” the young lady told the detective.
“Is that the name of the attacker, Smith? Smith! Who is Vril?” the detective repeated loudly as he watched Patrick Smith lose consciousness.
Paddy was taken to the same hospital as Cassandra. Now, with their home unoccupied, the place was open to be ransacked. Detective Williams did consider this and asked the station commander if they could perhaps keep watch there until the investigation was concluded. But still, nobody knew what had happened in the Smith household, or what Patrick Smith was mumbling about. One thing was certain — the two incidences at the house within a week of each other were no random house robbery. The level of violence perpetrated was evidence to something far more grave and substantial that only Smith had knowledge of.
“Whatever it is, it is probably somewhere in this house. And I bet you a year’s rent money that there will be more intrusions in the next few days,” Detective Williams told his officers. “I want an ID on that bloke and what he had to do with the Smiths.”
He checked the rest of the house for any other unauthorized presence and then walked through the crowd of residents to get in his car. “Oh, and officers, contact me as soon as Smith wakes up.”
Chapter 25
Just before nightfall over the Gulf of Finland the police and coroner pulled out of Osmussaar, unaware that Sam, Nina, and Purdue were still traversing the island to the farthest edge from the location of the lighthouse. Thomas and his men had traveled to the island by boat, so obviously Purdue decided to use their vessel to return to Helsinki. On his tablet he searched the island for moored vessels and found only three by the time the sun began to fade. One of those had to be the vacant boat their pursuers used.
“How will we know which one it is?” Nina asked.
“It doesn’t matter, really,” Sam replied, looking at the snapshots he took of the crude etching in the wall paint. “When we find an empty boat with fur everywhere, you know, cat hair, dog hair, ape shit, we’ll know it’s theirs.” He loved playing with Nina’s yeti theory, especially now that he had seen these men firsthand and agreed that the famous yeti sightings were precisely what they resembled.
“What do you think is happening back there, Purdue? Is there a way your tablet could log into some satellite camera and show us if the coppers discovered the bodies in the lighthouse yet?” Nina asked Purdue as they reached the last few yards of the island’s landmass. Two fishing boats were moored there, both unattended.
“They must have found them by now,” Sam reckoned, and he jogged ahead to the light blue boat nearest to them. On the side, in cursive white, it said Kullervo. A bit farther away there was somewhat larger trawler called Tuonelan Joutsen, a red and white fiberglass boat with twin engines fixed to the stern. Under the name it was written in Russian as well.
“Either way we have to get off this island. And we have to match Nina’s underground railroad theory with the inscription on the wall. What was the exact line again?” Nina asked.
“It said, ‘to the Grave of Odin will no compass yield. But his Wisdom lies beneath where the white eye looks.’ Once we find where the white eye looks from the three clues on the symbol, we’ll know to dig under it,” Purdue affirmed.
“But for now we have to get a ride out,” Sam said, leaping up on the blue boat.
“Why not the better, faster boat?” Purdue asked Sam, as the journalist checked the controls of the small blue trawler.
“We don’t want to be conspicuous,” Sam explained.