The Vault of Hercules

Chapter 34

Three days later a still devastated Nina arrived at her house in Oban. She’d received the details of Prof. Medley's funeral the day before. It was drizzling lightly over Oban, draping the small town in a gray blanket of cold, wet fog. She wondered what would become of Sam. And she still could not believe that Purdue was dead. It was so surreal to imagine her life without his flamboyant personality and his passion.

Even more shocking was that Sam had become so unhinged. She still loved him, somewhere deep inside, but could not bear to see him like that anymore.

With a weekend's worth of sherry and popcorn, Nina decided to just do nothing for a while. Her hoodie was swept back by the strong wind, exposing her hair to the frigid air of Scotland. “God, I love the cold,” she muttered, as she closed the car's passenger door, lugging her groceries up the walkway. Fumbling for her house keys she caught sight of something eerie that briefly appeared in her peripheral vision, an orange blur that shot in under her porch.

Nina put her stuff down and knelt to duck her head under the porch. “Bruich?”

The cat sat there, grooming himself in his usual, indifferent way. Nina smiled. She came back up and turned to unlock her door.

“Oh my God!” she shouted in elation. “Purdue!”

She ran into his embrace. “Easy, my tits are killing me,” he joked. Next to him stood Sam, having a good chuckle as his cat leapt into his arms. Nina held Purdue tightly, looking at Sam over his shoulder. The dark handsomeness of the journalist was a far cry from the brute she’d seen fighting Valdi, but he proved that he could go the distance.

“What?” he shrugged. “You didn’t really think I would shoot the old cock, did you?”

“After this week, there is very little I wouldn’t believe,” she sighed happily, still thinking about John Arthur Armstrong and his nameless grave.

Nina was relieved to hear that Paddy had only presented the parts of the footage that implicated Guido Bruno, Giuseppe Valdi, and Igor Heller as the architects of the recent human trafficking crimes. Nothing else came to light, not even the fact that Sam had arranged with Purdue to stage his death so that he could escape apprehension.

Purdue's butler, Charles, had contacted friends of his brother's from different covert government departments and arranged for Adjo and Donkor Kira to be liberated from Guido Bruno's holding cells in Fagal, Djibouti. Still, he too, had to be kept in the dark about Purdue's status.

Special Agent Patrick Smith did not know that Purdue was alive and that was good enough for now, because above all, Nina and Purdue had irrefutable proof that Sam was a loyal friend who did the right thing, even in the throes of hell, even under deadly threat in the Vault of Hercules.