The evening had been glorious. Michael and Dani decided to make the most of it by eating a picnic meal on deck and finishing a bottle of wine while the sun set over the ocean. As darkness fell the other boat, full of tired looking tourists, chugged off back toward Phuket taking them back to their respective hotels. Dani and Michael retired below-decks and fell asleep to the gentle rocking motion of the yacht.
Dani woke suddenly from a dream filled with blood and terror. The bracelet on her wrist lit the room with angry red swirling patterns of light. She took a deep breath and pressed her awareness outward, buoyed aloft by its arcane power. She became aware of the three large plastic lumps that pressed upward through the skin of Michael’s chest - two inch wide circular vents - that she perceived connected within his torso to a nuclear power cell and air-filtration unit. Arteries had been plumbed into the device and she sensed the oxygen transfer processes at work. The lung on that side of his chest was absent.
Momentarily distracted by the wonder of modern engineering that resided inside her lover, she didnt become aware of the incoming threat. The threat that her directed dreams had been preparing her for. The threat that she should have been able to counter had she not stared in school-girl wonder at that wondrous bare chest.
Outside the yacht the pleasure boat had returned. Its running lights had been dowsed and the engine cut. It coasted silently on an intercept course with Michael’s yacht. The tourists had been transformed also, from laughing and tired to cold, hard and carrying themselves with a military demeanor. They’d swapped their classic “American tourist” clothing for black cloth and webbing straps to give ample storage capacity for knives and guns. Dani perceived the whole scene with a sense of impending dread and guilt. She should have listened when it had warned her. Sara, the former wielder, would have known.
Four men dressed entirely in black moved through the Swiss National Museum like ghosts. They had arrived in Zurich three days previously with plans already in place. Their contacts had prepared the heist (and had been paid handsomely) but the final steps of the plan were on their shoulders alone. Each had arrived at the museum separately, with no prior contact, to perform their own tasks in coordination with the other members of the team. The black outfits and masks ensuring that if any were caught they would be unable to identify the others.
The team found its target in the “New Stone Age” exhibit. A tooth, triangular in shape and about seven inches along each edge. With singular precision the team extracted the original and deposited a fiber-glass replica in its place. The job done they each melted into oblivion leaving one member of the team as courier to take the tooth to its rendezvous.
A portly Shedd Aquarium security guard paced along the corridor sipping on a mug of vending machine coffee. Behind him a figure dressed entirely in black advanced silently. The guard paused, and spoke into his radio. His living shadow froze in place.
“Hey, Frank, things are dead silent back here in long-term storage. How’s it going on your end?”
The radio crackled and a voice answered, distorted by the cheap electronics, “The game’s going well. Get you ass over here and you might catch the cheerleaders and half-time show.”
The guard snorted and picked up the pace. His shadow hung in the shadows and waited until the corridor was clear before slipping through a door. Moments later the man in black emerged with his prize: three giant triangular teeth. He wrapped them in cloth and stowed them in his backpack before vanishing into the night.
At eighty-four years old, Sir Alasdair Johnston wasn’t a spring chicken and the stairs in his mansion were becoming tougher and tougher to navigate. Still he had to try, had to hurry, they had his grand daughter downstairs at knife point. He huffed and puffed his way up to the room that housed the family collection. It had been, what, fifteen years since he had moved among the various boxes and packing crates that filled the room. The pieces dated back three generations and chronicled a religious and cultural heritage of the Maui islanders that fascinated him even now. He remembered his grandfather telling him stories of the tribal chief, wielding the power of life and death, yet being subservient to the priests when they made their demands. He remembered his grandfather’s glee at having found one of the sacred teeth while on an archaeological dig.
So why now, after all these years? Why would four men in black enter his home and hold his grand daughter hostage, only to demand he bring them this one religious heirloom?
Sir Alasdair snorted, let ‘em take it. What’s a lousy old tooth in comparison to a child’s life?
The intruders were true to their word. Once the tooth was in their possession they vanished. Sir Alasdair and his grand daughter clung to one another and wept in the flickering light of the log fire, glad that they still had one another.
In the ocean, 90 minutes East of Phuket, a small pleasure boat glided silently across the water. Three men tall men in black listened as their leader, a petite woman, gave orders. The yacht that contained their target rocked quietly ahead of them, its occupants clearly sleeping. They had been warned to expect company though, a change in the plan that had been laid out so many weeks before. Initially the plan had been to enter the yacht when it was berthed at the marina, open the safe to retrieve their prize, and leave without any witnesses. Orders had come down to accommodate the possibility of company and to improvise accordingly.
Things were well in hand. Earlier in the day their cover - a diving trip to Shark Point - had given them the opportunity to mine the underside of the yacht. Should the need arise any one of their number could activate the explosives and sink the yacht.
Things went wrong as one of their number went below decks, looking for the safe. There was a strangled, gurgled gasp and a thump of something heaving hitting the floor. It was a natural choke-point and their leader refused to send anyone else down. They waited until a figure slipped out, clearly thinking they were going to take the fight to them. As she left the cabin, one of the men in black slipped in behind her. Sounds of a scuffle ensued. Moments later the man in black checked in to say the yacht’s owner had been subdued.
“Where is the safe?” the man in black hissed through clenched teeth.
“Get lost asshole!” Michael said, trying to wriggle free of the plastic ties that had cinched his wrists together.
“Bad answer!” his assailant said.
Sounds of a fight upstairs floated down to them, blows exchanged escalating to metal on metal … their leader was the only one with a short Japanese sword on her hip. The man in black dragged Michael up onto deck in time to see Dani whirling like a dancer, almost entirely naked except for a living exoskeleton of metal. It originated, like a metallic vine, from the bracelet on her wrist but wound upward across shoulder and upper back, diagonally across her torso, around hips and down her right leg. Dani’s hand, normally adorned with a silver slave ring, now held a single edged sword. She danced and whirled. Swords criss-crossed the air as her black clad assailant held her own in the blinding combat.
A knife was held to Michael’s throat and Dani faltered. She stepped back out of combat and her opponent mirrored her, not pressing the advantage. In moments the blade vanished. A man stepped up and pressed a knife to Dani’s throat. The petite woman sheathed her sword and spoke to Michael,
“The safe’s location and combination if you please.”
Michael looked pained, wanted to deny them the prize, but he couldn’t see any harm come to Dani. With a reluctant sigh he gave them what they wanted. The woman vanished beneath deck and returned moments later carrying the prize: a pair of rods about four feet long with shark teeth embedded along their length and a pair of massive triangular teeth. Massive teeth that ignoring their size, could have come from the same shark’s mouth as those embedded in the rods. Massive, prehistoric teeth of a shark that would have been a good hundred feet long given their relative size.
The woman nodded once. The man holding Dani reversed his grip on the knife and delivered a measured blow to her head. She slumped into a limp unconscious pile. Michael snarled in fury as they dumped her overboard, fighting free of his guard. He disarmed him and shattered his knee with a well aimed kick. In a swift move Michael advanced on the man who’d dumped Dani over the side and planted the blade into his neck. He hit the rail and slipped into the inky black water.
The woman’s instructions had been meticulous and had been re-affirmed when the orders had changed - it had to be surgical. Precise. Michael screamed as he felt her blade bite into his back. It was small. Low down. With a steady hand born of countless hours of training in the operating room she operated on him, a live patient, swiftly severing his spine. Michael crumpled to the deck unable to do anything but watch her walk away carrying his sacred charge, incoherent with grief at the senseless way Dani had been fed to the sharks.