The Atlantis Scrolls

Chapter 34

Agatha Purdue crawled along the dirty cement floor of the basement where she woke up. The agonizing pain in her chest attested to the last injury she sustained at the hands of Wesley Bernard and Joost Bloem. Before they put two bullets in her torso she was brutalized by Bloem’s sick depravity for hours, until she passed out from the pain and blood loss. Barely alive, Agatha’s sheer will pushed her to keep moving on skinned knees toward the small square of wood and plastic she could see through the blood and tears in her eyes.

Fighting for her lungs to expand, she wheezed with every grinding drag forward. The square of switches and currents on the dirty wall beckoned, but she did not feel like she could make it that far before oblivion would take her. Burning and throbbing, the raw holes left by the metal slugs buried in the flesh of her diaphragm and upper chest area bled profusely and it felt as if her lungs were pin cushions to railway spikes.

Outside the room there was a world unaware of her plight and she knew she would never see the sun again. But one thing the genius librarian knew was that her attackers would not outlive her by much. When she accompanied her brother to the fortress in the mountains where Mongolia and Russia meets, they vowed to use the weapon they stole against the council at all costs. Instead of risking another Renata of the Black Sun to rise by the demand of the council, should they lose their patience in finding Mirela, David and Agatha decided to also eliminate the council.

If they did away with the men who chose the management of the Order of the Black Sun, there would be no-one to elect a new leader when they delivered Renata to the Brigade Apostate. And the best way to do this would be to use the Longinus to destroy them all at once. But now she was faced with her own demise and had no idea where her brother was, or if he was even still alive after Bloem and his brutes found him. Determined to do her bit for the cause, though, Agatha risked the chance of killing innocent people if only to avenge herself. Besides, she was never someone who let her morals or her emotions overwhelm what needed to be done and she was going to prove it today, before she exhaled her last breath.

Presuming her dead, they had tossed her coat over her body to dispose of once they returned. She knew they were planning to find her brother and force him to give up Renata before killing him and then deposing Renata to hasten the implementation of a new leader.

The power box invited her ever closer.

With the wiring in it she could reroute the current to the small silver transmitter that Dave had fashioned for her tablet to use as satellite modem back in Thurso. With two broken fingers and most of the skin off her knuckles Agatha had rummaged through her sewn-in coat pocket to retrieve the small locator she and her brother fashioned after they returned from Russia. It was designed and assembled especially according to the Longinus’ specifications, serving as a remote detonator. Dave and Agatha were going to use it to destroy the council headquarters in Bruges, hopefully eliminating most of, if not all, the members.

As she reached the electrical box, she propped herself up on the broken old furniture that was also dumped down there and forgotten, just like Agatha Purdue. With great toil she worked her magic, gradually and carefully, praying she would not perish before she had completed the set-up to detonate the insignificant looking super weapon she skillfully planted on Wesley Bernard just after he raped her the second time.