Chapter 246

She knew perfectly well that her fighting skills were no match for this crowd of desperate men, so her job tonight was simply to verify whether the artifacts were real.

She walked up to the container and saw the wooden crates stacked in neat rows. A few of them had been pried open at one corner, exposing the edges and engravings of silver drinking vessels underneath — consistent with the batch she had authenticated before.

"This is it," she said.

Arthur signaled to his men, and the two SUVs along with the black off-road vehicle started moving, pulling up alongside the target container.

They began transferring the wooden crates from the container into the vehicles, fast and coordinated, like they'd done it a hundred times before.

Ronan's men were closing in from their side. One of them had taken a hit to the shoulder, which a teammate had wrapped in gauze as a temporary fix.

Vivian stood to the side and watched the crates come out one by one.

The wind kept blowing, stirring up dust and scraps of paper from the dock and letting them fall again. Among the crates being carried out, she spotted a smaller box. It didn't look quite like the others — no label on the surface, and the latch style was different. She crouched down and opened the lid. Inside, a thick layer of velvet lined the bottom, and in the center sat something wrapped in soft cloth, roughly the same shape as the jade axe in her bag.

She didn't unwrap it.

She just closed the lid, set the latch back in place, stood up, and said to Arthur, "Keep this one separate."

Once all the crates had been moved, Ronan's people started pulling out.

Two of the off-road vehicles left the dock first, heading down the cargo road toward the port gate. One SUV took the injured man a different way, toward the hospital.

Arthur's remaining men stayed behind to deal with Raymond's crew. Those men had their phones and other communication devices taken, their weapons stripped, and their hands zip-tied behind their backs as they were gathered near the cars.

One of Arthur's men came over and stood beside him: "Raymond's not here. He wasn't on site."

"I know," Arthur said. "What do we do with these people?"

"Mr. Scott's team will take them. His people can't directly get involved in the interception, but picking up a few guys is fine."

Arthur nodded.

Of course Raymond hadn't shown up. A small haul of artifacts wasn't worth his personal attention — and that was exactly why Arthur had felt comfortable being here himself. This way, Raymond still wouldn't know that Arthur had already decided to cut ties with him.

He glanced over at Vivian. She was standing next to the small box, and in the darkness he couldn't read her expression.

"Let's go," he said.

They walked a stretch down the cargo road toward the exit and got into a car waiting in the shadows at the bend in the road.

The car drove without its lights on, looping around the outer edge of the port twice to make sure no one was following, then merged onto the main road.

Vivian sat in the back seat. The small box rested at her feet, and she had one hand resting on its latch, feeling the metal slowly grow cold.

After about twenty minutes, the car pulled up in front of an unremarkable building.

Vivian picked up the box and got out, then followed Arthur up to the second floor. The room was small — a table, a few chairs, and a desktop computer in the corner.

Arthur set a briefcase on the table and opened it. Inside was a satellite phone and a stack of documents. He pulled one out and handed it to her. It was from Ronan's side — follow-up logistics, concise and to the point, covering the transfer timeline and route for the shipment, along with current intel on Raymond's movements.

Vivian read it through and set it down, then placed the small box on the table, unlatched it, and lifted the lid. The cloth-wrapped object lay still in the center of the velvet. She reached in and unwrapped it, revealing something close in form to the prehistoric European jade axe in her bag, but with different markings — two faint curved lines along the edge, and a different pattern of weathering.

She set both prehistoric European jade axes side by side on the table and studied them under the light for a long moment. The material was similar, like they had come from the same source and the same period, but the fine details of the carving were different — the work of two separate hands.

"There's more than one piece in that shipment," she said.

Arthur came to the table and leaned down to look at the two axes. "Both were planted in there?"

"Not sure about the second one. But it was wrapped the same way as the first, and it was sitting right in the center of the crate. If it wasn't part of the same shipment, then the same person put it there."

Vivian wrapped them each back in soft cloth and returned them to the box, then closed the lid and fastened the latch. When she looked up, she could see a thin line of grey-white light beginning to show on the horizon outside the window. She sat back in her chair and closed her eyes.

From the direction of the port, a few ship horns drifted over, muffled by distance, traveling across several city blocks, low and heavy — like sounds rising up from underwater. The wind pulled them apart, then pushed them back together, and they slowly scattered out toward the open sea.

It struck Vivian that she actually knew very little about what Arthur had been through during his years in Country M. And the people he had shown up with tonight — how much of his real strength did they even represent?

It wasn't fully light yet when the car stopped in front of the villa where they usually stayed.

Vivian stepped out onto the ground and her legs felt unsteady. The sounds from the confrontation at the dock hadn't quite cleared from her head.

She followed Arthur upstairs, moving slower than usual. The stairwell light was motion-activated — it lit up one floor at a time and went dark behind them as they climbed, the light dropping away in sections.

Arthur walked ahead of her. There was a dark smear on his jacket — not blood, probably from the dock ground, or maybe something metal had caught it.

He slipped the jacket off and draped it over the back of a chair. Vivian took hers off too and laid it on the arm of the sofa, then sat down at the table and looked at the two prehistoric European jade axes lying side by side.

She reached out and touched the edge of one. It was cold.

Her fingertip traced along the faint curved line, slowly, from one end to the other, following the full arc of it.

"Your men," she said. "How long have they been with you?"

Arthur sat down too. The chair legs shifted quietly against the floor. He was quiet for a moment. "The one who's been with me longest — seven years. The other three, around four years each. It's not a straightforward hire-and-pay situation. Some of them I brought out with me from somewhere else."

"Where's somewhere else?"