Night Side of Dark by Caleb Pirtle III

Author:Caleb Pirtle III [III, Caleb Pirtle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: action thriller, historical thriller
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2022-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

42

Lincoln was scribbling notes on a small pad he carried in his shirt pocket. The cover was brown and scratched, the lines on the paper faded. The pencil had been broken on the crossing of the Vistula River, and its lead point was growing dull and flat. Lincoln tried to sharpen it with his teeth. The paper was damp, the light from the lamp becoming almost too dim. Lincoln did not mind. He had spent most of his life scratching out notes in the dark.

He had spent the past two hours trying to climb inside Ascher Bitterman’s mind, but the door was locked. He suspected that the aging professor seldom went there anymore. Too many doors leading to the past had been closed. Too many skeletons lay on the far side of them. Some memories should be buried in forgotten graves.

The twisted man with a twisted mind and tattooed face had spoken quietly and calmly. His was the voice of a learned scholar, yet none of his words made sense. It was as though they had been birthed by hallucinatory dreams.

As near as Lincoln could figure, he had been sent to a godforsaken and war-torn land to track down a religious painting that might or might not be a myth, a painting that was worth millions—at least it had been deemed priceless—so that somebody far higher up the chain of command than he could rip it apart and maybe even burn it.

Why go to all of this trouble?

Why didn’t they simply forget it?

The painting would no doubt fall victim to the war.

Perhaps it already had.

It could have been stolen or removed by a collector who found beauty and mystery in the past because he could no longer tolerate the present.

And the future?

Armies were doing their best to poison the destitute tomorrows of anyone left to walk among the junk piles of torn metal and the bones of the murdered. In war, there were few accidents. Those who died were meant to die. Maybe it was simply predestination. They had no other choice.

Lincoln had been given a choice.

He wasted it.

Now, for better or worse, he was living with it.

The painting might be hanging in the foyer of a church when bombs struck and tore the walls away. Perhaps it lay ignored among the ashes, its blacks and grays washed away by the rains and snows, its rotting bridge mildewed and eaten by the worms of the earth.

Perhaps the sacred and mystical work of an ancient and unknown artist had been thrown atop a dying fire by someone desperate and cold. Frankly, the odds of the painting surviving the war were quite small and even less if the Americans got their hands on it.

Lincoln kept adding two and two in his mind and never came close to finding four. There were too many variables, too many truths, contradictions, and lies—too many secrets connected to the painting.

That was the problem arising from any intelligence operation. Some fool wearing a cluster of stars sagging on his shoulder had decided who could be trusted and who should be thrown to the dogs.

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