Read Online Carpathian by David Lynn Golemon - Free Book Online

and women were screaming. Lee just started pushing women and men toward the stairs. Alice turned and the last thing she saw of Lee was him disappearing into the panicked crowd of secret bidders. The lights flickered and then went out to the accompaniment of more screams and shouts. Somewhere in the darkness a gunshot sounded. Then that was followed by another. Garrison found a woman on the flooded floor and assisted her to her feet. It was the haughty French woman who had given Lee a most distasteful look earlier in the evening.
    “This is unacceptable, unacceptable!” the woman screamed as she tried to push Lee’s hands from her.
    “Well, you’re going to find out there’s a hell of a lot more that’s unacceptable in a minute if you don’t get your fat ass up those stairs.” He slapped her hard on her behind, sending the shocked socialite through the water. As Lee watched her leave he saw a small black-painted wooden statue float by in the churning water. His eyes widened when he saw the wolf’s head and the articulated hands depicted on the carved wood. Lee reached out and grabbed one of the surviving auction pieces and then shoved it into Ben-Nevin’s jacket pocket. “Get this to your people and tell them they’re hemorrhaging antiquities and the bloodsuckers are getting rich. Now go!” Lee pushed Ben-Nevin away even as his eyes didn’t understand.
    As the eighty-plus guests and crew fought their way through the jumble of broken artifacts and buffet items, Lee saw that the water was rising far faster than the men and women were moving. The ship must have taken a shape charge directly to her waterline and possibly one to her keel. A very professional job if he were correct.
    The last twenty men and women were close to the top of the stairs when something blew. It knocked several people back and over the top of the darkened stairs. Lee saw agent Ben-Nevin hurled into the far wall where he hit and slid into the water and then slowly regained his feet. Garrison pulled the intelligence agent to his feet and pushed him toward the now bent and burning stairs.
    The fire was now spreading across the ceiling of the salon. Lee’s escape was blocked both at the main salon entrance and the exit leading to the galley.
    “Oh, this is good,” he said as he shoved the Colt back into his pants and then scanned the interior of the darkened and fire-lit salon for Alice, but she was nowhere to be seen. For the first time in many years, Garrison Lee was frightened. Frightened that he had lost someone he really cared about. He shook his head as the flames and the water were coming close to meeting in the middle, one from above, the other from below.
    As he fought his way back into the center of the salon, he knew then that he loved Alice, had from the very first moment he had laid his one good eye upon her in the hospital in Washington, D.C., in 1945 when she had come to inquire about the husband she had lost in South America during the war. Why he thought the most beautiful woman in the world would, or even could, love a man as scarred as physically and emotionally as Lee, he could never figure out. But Lee knew he had to try. As flames reached from above and water from below Garrison Lee made a quick decision and then dove headfirst into the gaping hole where the stone block and its strange animal had vanished when it crashed through the deck to the spaces below.
    “You!” The shout came from behind Lee just as he surfaced into chaos on the third deck. As he turned he saw their host, Lord Harrington, standing between two of his guards. They had guns pointed his way. The Englishman was soaked and his hairpiece looked as if it had hit an iceberg. “I don’t know who you are, but you did this!”
    Lee was beginning to wonder if his real identity and intentions had been stenciled on him. First the girl and now this antiquities thief seemed to be excellent guessers at his true vocation. Garrison felt the weight of the old Colt