In this full chapter from The Final Heist, fourth in the Eddie Grant Saga of Paris, World War II, lost treasure, and revenge, Eddie pulls all the strands of the story together. He is aboard the obsolete and creaking Victory ship SS Andalucia, under tow as it chases a seagoing tugboat heavily laden with crates of gold and driven by Viktor Gregoriev, the ex-KGB agent whose Kremlin masters have told him he can start a war in Czechia and extend the Russian empire to the border of Germany—if he can pay for it. As this chapter begins, Viktor is trying frantically to ferry the gold across the Mediterranean from Spain to Morocco, a few miles east of Gibraltar, but Eddie has caught up with him and is looking down at the tug from the bridge of the Victory Ship.

Chapter 73

MEMORIES OF THE NEXT FEW MINUTES would haunt him for a long time. Viktor went to the open door of the wheelhouse and pointed to the narrow space between the tug and the ship. Then he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

Two Russians came from the wheelhouse holding Ahmed’s son by the arms. Without ceremony they dumped him over the rail into the boiling sea between the two ships, then went back inside.

The instant Eddie saw the pair in daylight he understood the entire story. They were the men in the bad suits standing by the window at the mayor’s reception. They had pressed the button that killed Franz, and they had furnished the pistol that might have killed him if Grace hadn’t intervened. They had, somehow, been smuggled out of Paris.

There was no longer any doubt. They were part of Viktor’s hired army. Viktor had been behind the murder of Franz. The gold had been Viktor’s all along, hidden for the rainy day. Which was today. That was the explanation for the strange reaction Eddie had witnessed when Viktor first came to his office and he hadn’t understood that Viktor was the man behind the entire plot.

Viktor had been the puppeteer behind Khan. Viktor had killed his wife, his son, his father, Franz Bauer. Khan got what he deserved in a small car under the Seine; today Viktor would receive his due.

A sense of finality flooded over him. He understood the entire story, and it would come to an end today. Here. On this ship. Eddie Grant would be the instrument of its completion.

He crouched low under the bridge window, rifle at the ready. In seconds, the two returned, holding Gloria tightly by the arms between them, her feet off the deck, pedaling furiously. She screamed for help. She looked up and saw Eddie stand and lift his rifle. He read her lips as she pleaded with him to save her.

He took careful aim at the Russian closest to him. He wanted the point of maximum density, the chest, but the bullet struck home several inches to the right, making him wish once again he had had time to sight in the scope. He adjusted his aim and fired again quickly. The shot was true and the man fell back against the wall of the wheelhouse, releasing Gloria. She fell to her knees and tried to scramble away but the other man picked her up like a stuffed doll.

“Give me some cover from that side, please,” Eddie said calmly to Amélie, who took the other rifle to the open door of the bridge. From there she could suppress Viktor’s fire if he returned.

Gloria’s struggling body was now a shield. She was smaller than the burly Russian, but still covered most of his body, so there wasn’t much of a target—except for his head, which kept ducking in and out behind her. A shot at his body might work, but also might hit her, so he took the second-best choice.

Carefully, he braced his elbow on the bridge window ledge, well aware that he was himself a clear target. He centered the man’s head in the scope, adjusted for the setting error, remembered to control his breath, and waited what seemed a long time to pull the trigger but was in reality only a second. The head exploded into a cloud of pink haze that sprayed the wheelhouse window behind him. He fell backward, dropping Gloria to her hands and knees on the deck. She began to scuttle away and might have made it to freedom if she hadn’t chosen the wrong direction.

As she passed the open door of the wheelhouse, an arm reached out, grabbed her leg, and pulled her inside. Almost immediately, her body came flying back out of the door, up and over the railing and into the boiling sliver of sea between the two ships.

It was Viktor’s arm. Eddie prepared for another shot.

The Andalucia’s bow wave pushed both of the struggling bodies away, toward the tug, and then it pushed them under. Eddie craned his neck, looking to see if they had escaped, but seconds later there was a bloom of blood and tissue behind the tug as both bodies were heaved back to the surface in pieces, hacked beyond recognition by the racing propeller. For a few seconds his stomach churned and he came very close to throwing up but there was no time.

Viktor came out and looked toward the stern at the bodies, then as they sank ran back to the wheelhouse to take control. The tug immediately began to turn away—it was his bomb in the engine room; he knew what was about to happen. A hand reached back out of the wheelhouse and gave Hannah’s rifle to one of the Russians, who crouched behind the gold. His partner, pistol in hand, ducked behind another stack.

Eddie moved to another bridge window and took up his shooting position once again. Amélie watched the Russian with the rifle, and when he lifted it to his shoulder she took a shot in his direction with Ahmed’s stainless-steel assault rifle. At almost the same instant, Paul fired his pistol from the flying bridge.

Both shots missed, but chips flew off the crates in front of him and he ducked behind the pile.

Amélie nudged the freighter to port, its engine straining far beyond its capacity. She needed to be as close as possible to the tug. She wanted to become one with it. She now had control of the convoy and Aldéa followed her lead, falling back until Aurore was sheltered behind the freighter. Walker stood at the Samson post with the silver-plated axe in his hands.

Eddie kept watching the tug’s wheelhouse through the scope. As the bow of the freighter nudged the tug, he saw Viktor come out of the wheelhouse to reconnoiter and moved his index finger to the trigger, but at the last second he stayed the shot and lowered the rifle.

To their right, Aurore had slowed to match their speed. Her horn gave a short warning toot.

“We need to get out of here right now!” Amélie told him urgently. She told Walker later that Eddie had a strange, small smile on his face when he lifted the rifle’s sling over his shoulder. When she asked about it later he told her he decided on the spot that Viktor did not deserve the mercy of a quick death by gunshot, when a much less pleasant alternative was about to visit him.

Eddie dashed out of the bridge and knelt in the shelter of its wall on the walkway. Amélie followed close behind and shouted, “Eddie! Aurore is ready. Let’s go! Now!” A volley of rifle and pistol fire crashed into the bridge windows over her head as she ducked down the stairway to the main deck. She reached for the arming cord but Eddie told her to wait and put his hand over hers.

“Now we’ll both do it,” he said. His large hand enfolded her small one and they pulled together, felt the switch click at the end of the cord, and ran for the gangway. Paul came through the cross-deck corridor of the deck house a second behind them. The bodies they left behind would be buried at sea.

When they reached the deck of Aurore Walker cut the tow line with two quick strokes of the axe and shouted to Aldéa: “Line cut! Get us out of here.” She turned the wheel sharply to starboard, determined to keep the freighter between Aurore and the two guns for as long as she could. The turbines screamed louder than Eddie had ever heard as Aurore’s twin propellers bit into the sea.

Eddie watched through his binoculars as the Victory ship, still following Amélie’s command to turn, nestled against the tug and pushed it to port in a slow dance of death.

He had not checked the time when they’d scrambled off the ship, but he estimated several minutes had already passed, and he was right. He heard the roar of high explosive and saw the gout of water and foam as the explosion tore through the hull under the engine. With a shriek of tearing metal, the ship began to break in half just behind the deckhouse. A fuel tank burst and spewed its contents into the water, engulfing the stern section. In seconds, the entire oil slick was in flames.

He turned to Walker and said, “I can’t imagine what it must have been like to live through a torpedo attack during the war. If there is a hell it must be like that.” Walker, speechless, simply nodded.

The broken halves of the sinking freighter began to separate, connected only by cables on the deck. The doomed ships continued to turn together, bringing the tug into full view of the fascinated watchers on Aurore.

The two remaining Russian crewmen watched helplessly as the front half of the freighter began to sink. Eddie could see their eyes follow the massive hull as water rushed into it, forcing the bow down and the broken end into the air. They jumped into the water and tried to swim away, but soon ran into the wall of flaming diesel. Their cries of pain and fear were clearly audible above the roar of the fire and of the water rushing into the ruins of the ship but stopped quickly, leaving only the sound of the wind and the flames, and the diminishing whine of the yacht’s turbines as Aldéa reduced speed.

Viktor had realized what was happening. He pushed the smaller ship’s engines to their maximum and turned it away from the dying freighter in a desperate attempt to avoid the gray hull looming above him. He ran out of the tug’s wheelhouse and stopped next to the largest stack of gold crates, looking around helplessly for a way out.

As the ruined forward part of the ship began to slip under the surface it fell on its side, capsizing the tug. Like King Canute, Viktor tried to hold back a stack of crates but failed, as Canute failed to hold back the tide. Tons of gold swept him off the deck and into the sea. The tug and the bow of Andalusia followed, all to meet again on the bottom a mile below.

Viktor might have been sucked through the propeller like Gloria, but it didn’t matter. Propeller or a mile of water and tons of dead weight crushing him, he would be exactly where Eddie wanted him—dead in a very painful and terrifying way.

Eddie stood at the railing and delivered a final malediction to the man who had brought so much grief into his life. He wasn’t conscious of his words, but Walker told him later he raised his fist and intoned, “This was for my father Artie. This was for my wife Lauren. This was for my son Ben. This was for my friend Franz. Que Dieu te damne à l’enfer éternel!”

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Treasure of Saint-Lazare, first in the series, was chosen the best historical mystery of its year in the Readers’ Favorite writing competition.

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John Pearce
Washington, DC