The Navigator - Cussler Clive - Страница 27

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“Enough,” he growled.

Baltazar squeezed the cell phone in his mailed fist, tightening his thick fingers like a vise, until he felt the satisfying crunch of plastic and metal. He tossed the ruined instrument to the groom holding the reins of a giant gray sorrel. He took a steel helmet from the hands of his waiting squire and lowered it onto the padded cap on his head.

With his sturdy frame encased in gleaming armor from head to toe, Baltazar resembled a hulking robot from a science-fiction film epic. He was far more agile than any metallic monster, however. Even wearing armor that weighed seventy pounds, he easily pulled himself into the stallion’s high-backed saddle.

The squire handed Baltazar a fifteen-foot wooden lance. Called a courtesy lance because of the blunt steel tip that distinguished it from a sharp-pointed war lance, the weapon was still potentially lethal when propelled forward by the power and strength of the huge Belgium horse. Baltazar had bred the animal from a long line of great warhorses that were known as destriers in medieval times. The animal was twice the size of an ordinary riding horse. Even without its protective armor, his mount weighed more than a ton.

Baltazar rested the lance across the thick, arching neck. The squire handed him a shield that came to a tapering point at the bottom. The head of a bull was emblazoned in black on the white shield. The same bull’s-head motif decorated Baltazar’s tunic and a flowing cloth that was draped over the horse’s body.

With the lance at rest, Baltazar bent forward until he could see through the occularium, a narrow horizontal slit set high in the face of the helmet. On his left was a low, solid fence known as the tilt. On the other side of the tilt, at its far end, was a rider, also dressed in full armor, who was mounted on an equally large horse.

Baltazar had singled the man out of his mercenary corps. His practice opponent had a sturdy physique and was an accomplished rider. Like a sparring partner for a professional boxer, he usually came out on the losing end in his jousts with Baltazar. He was paid extra to compensate for his bumps and bruises. Baltazar tended to treat his opponent lightly, not because of any sympathy. He simply didn’t want the bother of training a new practice knight. But after learning about the failure of the hijacking, Baltazar was in a murderous mood.

He glared at his unsuspecting opponent with blood in his eyes. He had refrained from unleashing his vicious temper on Adriano. The young Spaniard he had rescued from a murder charge was intensely loyal. Despite Adriano’s size and strength, Balthazar’s personal assassin was in some ways as delicate as a fine watch. Threatening or scolding Adriano would have sent him into a spell of despondency, and he might have dealt with it by going on a self-destructive and awkward killing spree.

Baltazar clenched his teeth and tightened the grip on his lance. A herald dressed in a gaudy medieval costume raised a trumpet to his lips and blew a single note. The signal to charge. Baltazar raised his lance and put his long gold spurs to the horse’s flanks.

The massive animal dug its hooves into the sod and moved out in a deceptively slow amble known as pacing. The smooth ride kept the rider in his saddle where he was better able to aim the lance. Both riders kept their lances pointed toward their left at a thirty-degree angle. Each man kept his head two feet from the tilt and his right hand three feet. The left hand was protected by the raised shield.

The horses accelerated with a thunder of hooves. At the midpoint of the tilt the riders clashed. Baltazar’s opponent was the first to score. His lance hit Baltazar’s shield dead-on. The fluted breastplate was designed to shunt off a lance head, diluting the force of the impact, but the shaft shattered even before it was deflected to the side. Baltazar’s lance found its mark a second later. The blunt tip slammed into his opponent’s left shoulder.

Unlike his opponent’s weapon, Baltazar’s lance stayed intact. Even the blunted lance had a battering ram impact. The force of the moving horse and rider, concentrated on one small spot, knocked his opponent out of his stirrups. He crashed to the ground with a noise like a junkyard avalanche.

Baltazar wheeled his horse around and tossed the lance aside. He slid out of the saddle and drew his sword. His opponent’s body was on its back, twisted at an unnatural angle. Ignoring the groans of pain, he stood over the man with straddled legs and held his sword high in both hands. The point was aimed down. He savored the moment, and then he drove the sword into the ground a few inches from the man’s neck.

With a snarl of disgust, he left the sword in the ground and strode off toward a tent covered in fabric that repeated the bull’s-head design. A medical crew that had been standing nearby hurried out to tend to the injured jouster.

Baltazar’s squire helped him remove his armor. Underneath his chain mail suit he wore a protective layer made of Kevlar. His opponent would have worn the more traditional suit of padded cotton, which offered little protection. Baltazar always liked to give himself an edge. His lance contained an alloy core that prevented it from shattering like that of his opponent’s wooden weapon.

Still wearing his chain mail, Baltazar got behind the wheel of an Umbrian red Bentley GTC convertible and drove away from the jousting field. He accelerated the twelve-cylinder, twin-turbocharged car to sixty miles per hour in less than five seconds. Although the car could go nearly two hundred miles per hour, he held it at half that speed. He raced along a road for a couple of miles before turning onto a driveway that led past manicured lawns to a vast pile of stone built in the style of a Spanish villa.

He parked the Bentley in front of the mansion and strode to the door. A house the size of Baltazar’s would have begged for a large staff, but he employed only one servant, a trusted valet who doubled as a chef of considerable accomplishment. Baltazar lived in a few rooms of the mansion. If he needed chores done, he summoned members of his private army, who lived in a nearby barracks when they weren’t patrolling the grounds of the vast estate.

The valet met him at the door. Despite his servant’s quiet household manner and skills, he was a master of martial arts and highly trained as an armed bodyguard. Balthazar made his way to his pool house and stripped to the skin. He swam half a mile in the Olympicsized pool and then soaked in the hot tub, letting the anger ooze out of him. After his bath, he slipped into a white hooded robe similar to those worn by monks.

Even dressed in the loose robe, Baltazar cut an imposing figure. The garment could hide the thick arms and legs, but there was no way to contain the wide shoulders. Baltazar’s imposing head looked as if it had been sculpted out of granite that by some miracle of alchemy had been transformed, almost, into flesh and blood.

He left orders with his valet that he not be disturbed and locked himself in his portrait gallery. The walls of the huge room were covered with pictures of Baltazar’s forebears going back hundreds of years. Baltazar poured cognac into a snifter, swished the liquor around, and took a sip. He set the glass aside and went over to an eighteenth-century oil painting of a young matron that hung on the wall near the huge flagstone fireplace. He put his face inches from the portrait so that their eyes met. He placed his hands on the carved panels to either side of the painting.

Tiny sensors located behind the subject’s eyes probed his retinas and matched the findings with data in a computer database. Hidden scanners in the panels compared his hand-and fingerprints to those in a database. There was a soft click and a section of the wall opened to reveal a stairway.

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