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Author: Richard A Uhlig, Sr.
Publisher: Wild Child Publishing
Length: 271 pages
Sub-Genres: Action, Adventure, Mystery
Pete Barnes art thief with a knack for forging masterpieces gives up the life of crime to paint his own masterpieces. Settling in Switzerland, Pete falls in love with the beautiful Carly Sims, who eerily reminds him
of his first love Jenny who died unexpectedly of meningitis.
Pete is thrust back into the world of crime when Carly is kidnapped. To get Carly back, Pete must steal the Remsky Portrait, a hi-tech work of art, from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The planned exchange of Carly for the portrait goes awry when the Russian Mafia interferes, and Pete and Carly find themselves on the run from the kidnappers and the Russians.
The stakes elevate considerably when an unknown entity marks Pete and Carly for assassination. Surviving several close encounters while chased across two continents, Pete discovers that Carly is not who he thought she was, that love is not easy and that the Remsky Portrait is anything but a work of art.
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The Moscow Institute of
Physics and Technology, MIPT, actually lies twenty miles north of Moscow in
Dolgoprudny, a municipality of 80,000 including 5000 students. Pete and Carly made the trip from the Moscow
airport to the rail platform near the institute in a mere 30 minutes on the elektrishka.
Caught up in the flux of
renewal MIPT lost its Old World gothic charm in exchange for brick buildings
with unimaginative flat roofs. New
buildings sprung up all around the Cybernetics and High Technology Laboratory
where giant cranes hoisted steel beams and loads of brick ever skyward. The campus reverberated with the sounds of
jackhammers and rivet guns. Pete and
Carly located the Cybernetics Lab and with an hour to kill before the scheduled
appointment with Dr. Divov, they stopped at a restaurant on Pervomayskaya
Street several blocks from the lab.
They sat at one of the
empty tables where Pete placed their small suitcase on the floor beside his
chair. Someone had left a newspaper on
the table, neatly folded, a picture of Vladimir Putin on the front page. Wood-framed photos of the Moscow Canal and
the boats that sailed it decorated the restaurant’s pastel orange walls.
Carly picked up the newspaper and pretended
to read as she glanced about the place.
Students sat at tables, sipping coffee, staring at laptops, arguing,
joking, laughing, backpacks slung across chair backs. Workmen in hard hats crowded the bar. Ever since leaving the Moscow airport, Carly
sensed that someone was following them, watching from the distance, just out of
sight. She had been taught if your
instincts tell you something’s wrong, then something’s wrong. She folded up the paper and smiled at Pete, giving
him no indication of her concerns.
Pete glanced up at a
framed aerial photo of the great Moscow canal winding through a wooded area of
the city, its grass-covered banks sloping sharply to the water’s edge.
“That canal was hand dug
by gulag prisoners under Stalin,” he pointed out to Carly. “Supposedly, the levees were filled in with
the bodies of overworked draft horses and prisoners. Stalin didn’t waste a thing.”
Carly eyes shifted from
the photo to a man and woman who had just walked in and sat down at a table
across the room. The woman wore a wide
brim hat from a bygone era. She was tall
and attractive, her inexpensive skirt flared just below the knees, her legs
shapely, her shoes tawdry. She carried a
large red purse. The man made it a match
set: six-foot tall, forties, dark curly hair, hooked nose, and a cheap-checkered
suit. He carried a tattered leather
briefcase.
Pete leaned across the
table and asked Carly, “This your first
visit to Russia?”
She nodded.
“You don’t speak
Russian, I suppose.”
“I was hoping you did,”
Carly answered.
“If Dr. Divov doesn’t
speak English it’s going to be a short interview. Say, I’m really hungry.”
Carly agreed with Pete’s
last statement. Except for a cookie on
their flight to Moscow, they hadn’t eaten since dinner last eve in Metz. When the waiter came, they ordered by pointing
to pictures on the menu. The waiter
walked away mumbling to himself.
Pete leaned back in his
chair. “I’ve no idea what we
ordered.” He straightened a bit and
asked, “Do I look like an American reporter?”
“A handsome American
reporter,” Carly replied. Once again,
she glanced around and saw nothing suspicious.
Several minutes later,
the waiter brought their food over. It
had the appearance of omelets covered in a red sauce and cheese. The bread was hard. It tasted good. They chased the food down with coffee.
Another fifteen minutes
passed and Pete glanced at his watch.
“We better go. The Cybernetics
Laboratory is a good fifteen minutes from here.
“You go on, Pete. I’ll stay here with the suitcase and pretend
to read the newspaper.”
“You sure? This could take a while.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Pete laid some money
he’d exchanged at the airport on the table and gave Carly a long, lingering
look. “Two hours tops,” he said.
Carly watched him walk
out, and then hide her face in the newspaper.
She planned on giving him a minute or so and then following him to make
sure no one else was following him. She
didn’t like the nervous feeling in her gut.
She took a long sip of
coffee, put down her cup, and noticed the woman in the brim hat staring
directly at her, almost smirking. The
woman quickly looked away. Her
counterpart, the man in the checkered suit was gone and so was his
briefcase.
Carly’s heart thumbed
heavily against her ribs. The woman had
a purse and no doubt there was a gun inside.
The man might be SC in which case his duty would be to take Pete alive,
and if he wasn’t SC, he was probably an assassin like those who fired at her
and Pete on the bus in London. That
meant the woman was an assassin too.
Either way, nothing nice was about to happen. Carly eased back into her chair. She figured the moment she stepped outside
the restaurant the woman would try to waste her.
Carly pretended not to
notice the woman. Seconds seemed hours
as Carly stared blankly at the newspaper.
She took another sip of coffee, drew a deep breath and scooted the
suitcase to the side of her chair where the woman could see it. She stood up, and leaving the suitcase on the
floor walked to the back of the restaurant.
She recognized the Women’s Room from the emblem of a skirt on the
door.
The only stall in the
restroom was occupied by a waitress who had entered the restroom just ahead of
Carly. Finding no place to hide, Carly
quickly exited the restroom and walked through a second unmarked door, which
opened into an alleyway. She fought the
impulse to run.
Standing the alley,
Carly cracked the door open a sliver and watched the woman in the brim hat walk
slowly back to the restroom, her right hand inside her purse. The woman listened for a moment at the
restroom door, looked around, removed a handgun with a silencer from her purse
and went inside. The sound of several
muffled shots told Carly the woman must have fired into the stall thinking
Carly was there. The waitress was
probably dead.
Carly waited in the
alley for the woman to come through the door, and when she did, Carly slammed the door back, driving
the woman’s head hard into the doorjamb.
The brimmed hat sailed off her head and she fell face down into the
alley.
Carly immediately went
for the red purse. Before the woman
could gather her senses, Carly removed the handgun from the purse, a Russian
.375 caliber with an eight-bullet clip.
The woman rolled over, looked up at Carly and snarled something in
Russian.
“I don’t have time to argue with you,” Carly
said, and calmly fired a round point blank into earthen alleyway just inches
from the woman’s head. The back door to
the restaurant swung open. Carly glanced
over her shoulder at the waiter standing goggle-eyed in the doorway. He quickly jumped back inside.
Carly fired the next
round into the woman’s left knee, the bullet tearing a gaping wound in her
flesh and shattering her kneecap. The
woman screamed.
“That’s so you won’t
follow me, honey.” Carly turned and took off down the alley as fast as she
could run.
Richard Uhlig, Sr., an Osteopathic Physician in Family Practice, Medical Director of a rural health clinic, Medical Director of a cardiac rehab unit and a long term care facility. Dr. Uhlig wrote the health book, "Live Thin, Live Long."
October 11 - S.J. Maylee
October 31 - Speculative Friction
4 comments:
This is a great book. It's action and adventure, mystery and of course romance all in one. The author gets the foreign setting right, all the way down to the feel of the location.
Click it, buy it!
wow great i have read many articles about this topic and everytime i learn something new i dont think it will ever stop always new info , Thanks for all of your hard work! teddy bears
Is it sad that I actually cannot figure out this riddle?
Wow your site is a wealth of interesting stuff! Seriously I enjoyed exploring and learning more. Thank you!
Happy Halloween!
Belinda G
belgre@comcast.net
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