The Lost Crown of the Knights Templar

11 Wake Up Call

Sam could not sleep for the third night in a row. The thing with Nina bothered him immensely, and to exacerbate his misery, he had no way to make up with her, since she was not answering her calls. He’d used the first sleepless night to complete the editing for his riot coverage for Channel 15, and submitted it the next morning.

Since then, however, only personal toils populated the night. Lying in the full moon that occasionally peered through the slow progression of dark clouds, he could not help but think how it controlled the brightening and darkening of the room. Just like his life of late, Sam realized that the light and dark repercussions of events, regardless of what they were, were out of his control. All he could do was to draw the curtains, but he couldn’t control what happened in the sky, naturally.

He had to sleep, but such thoughts permeated through his subconscious constantly, penetrating whatever veil Morpheus had managed to weave. It ripped the soft fabric of slumber into a clear wakening once more with every new notion, making it impossible for him to settle down. Hoping that Nina was not furious enough with him to maintain the aggressive stalemate for good, he refrained from calling her again. She would be awake at this hour, because she was a night animal, but if she still had not returned any of his calls by now he took it as a clear signal that she did not want to talk.

Sam sat up. The clock announced that it was just past 3 a.m., so he avoided the whiskey and went for a cup of chamomile tea like a good boy. He winced at the weakness of the beverage on first sip, but he had to be alert and the tea would hopefully calm him enough to make some clear decisions.

The LED screen on his desk glared ominously, still wearing the image of the Islamic persecutor on freeze frame.

“No fucking wonder I can’t sleep,” he hissed, sweeping the mouse across the pad and closing the player. Momentary reconsideration prompted him to set the tea down and open the player again. “Can’t believe I am doing this.”

Again and again, he watched the clip that had been secretly recorded over his footage. Much as he hated the nauseating feeling it brought him, Sam felt that he had to familiarize himself with the man’s face, mannerisms, and voice. In places, there was something sincerely amicable about the dark-eyed villain, but Sam also intuitively picked up on an unmistakable hostility just beneath the surface, waiting to be provoked.

Obsessively, the journalist reran the piece, forgetting about the rest of his tea. One thing was certain. The deadline had passed without incident, because, unlike the general consensus among the men who demanded delivery of the woman, Sam did not have to deliver in the first place. He could not give her up, obviously, and he was not about to return to London to try and save her once more after her less than grateful response the last time.

She would never agree to accompany him to All Hallows by the Tower anyway, let alone to be given back to her attackers. Sam lit a smoke, jumping at the brush of fur against his calf.

“Jesus, Bruich!” he mumbled around the cigarette as the tobacco took, illuminating Sam’s face in an orange glow. “You want to give me a heart attack?”

Suddenly the silence was shattered by his ringtone, jolting Sam backward a second time. “For fuck’s sake!” he moaned in frustration as the sharp, repetitive tone irritated his ears.

I told you so, he heard Nina say in his mind. Long ago, she’d told him that he should use a favorite song as ringtone, but he found that then he could not hear his phone ringing, or he would prefer to listen instead of taking the call.

Before Sam could reach for the illuminated screen to see who it was, it stopped short. The sudden silence was deafening. He looked at the clock. It was near 4 a.m. already. The phone screen revealed nothing but a private number notification. Bruich purred on Sam’s feet. He had a new thing to be befuddled by. Had it been Nina, there would have been a text at least. Her calls would bear her name and her calling from an unknown number was highly unlikely.

It would not be Purdue, because he and Sam had more than five different devices to communicate on. The billionaire genius had devised prototypes that he had finally perfected and built especially for times he had to get hold of Sam in tight situations. Apart from them, Sam was not really in contact with anyone personally.

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed, as it hit him out of the blue. “The fucking terrorist!”

That is what Sam called the man on the screen, just for convenience. He knew how extremely accusatory and discriminating such a moniker would be in public, but he could not help but see a Taliban interrogator every time he looked at the man. Sam was convinced, and with a secret number at this time of the morning it would be a safe assumption. Still, he couldn’t do anything about it. He could not call back, nor did he have any desire to do so.

“I may as well be up — officially. Hey, Bruich?” he told his cat, running his free hand through his hair. The cat was sleeping. Sam sighed, “Bastard.”

At once, the phone lit up again in its cacophony. Sam got such a start that his hand propelled the device onto the table with a clatter that sent Bruich speeding down the corridor to safety. “Christ!” he shouted, finally fed up with the intrusion on his fabricated peace. He grabbed the phone that still showed no caller identity and yelled, “What?”

A quick pause revealed a background of people talking and the ambient noises associated with an office, but at four in the morning? Sam frowned, momentarily contrite for his rudeness.

“Sam Cleave?” a woman’s voice exclaimed. By her tone, she was not inquiring as much as exclaiming in astonishment. “Sam? Is that how you always answer your phone, dearest?”

“Who is this?” he asked equally standoffish. He was exhausted, stressed about the video message threat and its possibilities. This was no place for politeness, not at this time of the morning. The voice was vaguely familiar, but he had no clue where to even begin recalling.

“My apologies for calling at such a dreadful hour,” she apologized unconvincingly, “but I knew you’d be up. You were always nocturnal, like the rest of us journalists and reporters.”

At once, it dawned on Sam, leaving him with an even more rancid taste in his mouth than before he’d taken the call. “Jan Harris,” he stated.

“Well done!” she cheered, her voice still vexing him with the same intensity that it had back then, if not more. “I’m flattered that you remember my voice so well.”

“As a dying man recalls the shriek of a mandrake,” Sam replied sarcastically.

“Play nice now, Sam,” she warned, “…because you never know the ammunition held by the one you choose to insult.”

“Actually, I am quite surprised that you even grasped the meaning of the insult, but I guess you’ve learned to look things up since I last saw you,” he snapped.

“Oh, I did,” she concurred with a gloat, “but it’s not only research that makes a reporter, as you well know. Congratulations on the Pulitzer, by the way. Even if it came at a hefty price.”

Sam swallowed hard, trying to keep his composure when Jan referred to his late fiancé, Patricia, being shot in the face and killed right in front of him during an exposé on a gunrunning cartel.

“So sorry to hear about… Pat… was her name?” Jan stabbed mercilessly.

“Leave Trish out of this, Harris. You didn’t even know her. She was twice the reporter you will ever be,” he retorted.

“That is true,” Jan agreed, gearing up for another low blow. “Apparently she even got shot twice, right? I hear that half of her pretty face was ripped clean away. My God, the poor woman — and you watched?”

“Fuck you, Harris,” he sneered, his heart racing with rage.

“Just before you hang up, dearest, I have a proposition for you that you might want to have a look at,” she said quickly.

“As always, you fail basic communication skills. I said, ‘Fuck you, Harris,’” Sam growled and without hesitation hurled his phone against the wall. It shattered into three pieces which landed over a radius around the couch and two coffee tables. Sam could feel it well up inside him — the breaking point.

He had not felt this bottomed since, well, since he’d seen the love of his life get half of her face blown away a few meters from where he stood filming it. But the hyperventilation and sweat did not come from reliving Trish’s death, or even from being reminded of it. He had lost Nina’s affection because he could not cope with a chain of events he had chosen to become a part of. All of this, his fight with Nina, his predicament with the attackers of the thankless bitch he’d saved, Harris reappearing for God knows what reason — all these things were weighting down on Sam in an unprecedented manner he feared he would collapse under.

He wanted to weep. In fact, he felt the ache in his chest as there were an iron rod lodged there. Tears begged release, but he refused to buckle and he elected to even rebel against drink, which was usually his first pacifier. Sam had had it with his own weaknesses, much as he could not deny the pressure on him for another second. It was not about unhappiness or ineptitude. It was about staying out of matters he knew nothing of, the very antithesis of who he was.

Sam’s nature was engaged in battle with his common sense and both sides were bound to lose more than a healthy portion. What was pivotal, though, would be which parts of which facets he would retain long enough to stay sane.

An hour later Sam emerged from the shower, feeling somewhat proud of himself. Not only had he not reached for the alcohol, but he’d managed to formulate some sort of plan for the next day or two. Losing his phone to a fit of rage was a remarkably light matter for him, especially since he would not be able to receive calls from that bitch, Jan Harris. A less cheerful thought was that he now could not be in touch with Nina, even after she would have calmed down. But overall, these were good things. With the women unable to distract him, he could focus his attention on the other woman who has been causing him hell — Patient #1312.

The least he thought he could do, was to ascertain her whereabouts in case he was confronted by more than he could handle in the way of the men looking for her. After all, Sam Cleave was not exactly unknown to the media world and he could probably be easily located with the proper resources available, which he was sure the man on the video clip had.

“Better safe than sorry, hey, Bruich?” he huffed as he tried to get his jeans over his half wet thighs and ass. “Better know where she is just in case they get creative with their threats. It’s not like I have a lot of work at the moment anyway, right?”

The large orange feline simply peered at Sam, curling up on his master’s bed to do a bit of grooming. Bruich seemed to scoff at Sam’s desperate grasp for reason, but other than that, he paid attention only to his own needs, as cats do.