The Takers

394 Pages·1984·1.05 MB·English

by  Ahern Jerry

The Takers
Jerry Ahern Copyright © 1984 by Jerry Ahern and S.A. Ahern.
Philippine copyright 1984. Australian copyright 1984.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization
of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography,
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is
forbidden without the permission of the publisher.
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the
author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or
names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or
unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
The Takers
A Peanut Press Book Published by peanutpress.com, Inc.
www.peanutpress.com ISBN: 0-7408-0644-0
Second Peanut Press Edition
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book that spans so many years, so much of the world and so many fields of
expertise requires a great deal of technical detail, and in the face of such detail,
the honest writer realizes there is a limit to gleaning information from
conventional and even unconventional avenues of research.
Time to call on the real experts. Apologies in advance for neglecting anyone—
but here is our best attempt at a list: Robert Beaton, U.S. Defense Mapping
Agency; Richard Darley, The National Geographic Society; Russ Minshew,
WSB-TV Weather, Atlanta, Georgia; Sue D'Auria, Department of Egyptian and
Ancient Near Eastern Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Dan Hart, Franklin
Sports, Athens, Georgia; Hugh Brock, Brock's Surplus, Atlanta; and Keith
Jenner-John, Rand McNally & Company, Chicago. In addition, we would like to
extend a most sincere thank-you to Desmond M. Chorley of Agincourt, Ontario,
Canada— he dove to great Page 1

depths in his research. The responsibility for any errors in technical information
of course rests with ourselves.
A special thanks is reserved for Jason and Samantha for being so patient with
their mother and father during the pursuit of the Gladstone Log.
JERRY AND SHARON (S.A.) AHERN
COMMERCE, GEORGIA
SEPTEMBER 1983
PART ONE
THE GLADSTONE LOG
Chapter One
The skirt of her gray dress was bunched up over her thighs, her slip nearly as
high, and her ankles ached where the ropes dug into them.
She was trying to keep her tongue still, trying to keep it from moving. When it
moved it made her start to gag, and then she sucked in her breath hard against
the adhesive tape pressed over her mouth and started to cough and choke. She
tried to sit perfectly still. This worked for a moment, the gagging reflex stopping.
But she had to move, had to wriggle herself away from the corner into which
they had put her, because her left hand— her wrists were bound behind her so
tight she felt they had to be bleeding— had no sensation at all in the fingers. It
was cold. Her flesh felt very cold.
She watched the three men and the woman in front of her. One of the men called
out to the woman in a hushed, urgent voice. He called her Sonia. She
concentrated her gaze on Sonia.
Sonia was black-haired, tall in her medium-heeled boots, and almost painfully
thin in her tight-fitting black jump suit. But there was something about the
woman, something more than the anger and hatred and the frenzied animal
quality that shone from her eyes. Something that she realized men would call
beautiful.
The men were pulling books down from the shelves, tearing them apart, while
the woman named Sonia was systematically ripping index cards from the
catalog. Finished with the last drawer, the woman turned toward the glass case
dominating the center of the reference section.
It contained a Bible brought to America in 1743 that was at least a hundred years
older than that date. Sonia spun like a ballerina on her right foot, her left foot
snapping out almost blindingly fast and smashing against the case, the glass
shattering. The black-suited figure approached the Bible, lifting it up in her
perfectly manicured hands. Glass tinkled as it fell to the floor from the old book,
then the woman flipped through the pages.
She watched, trying to scream through the adhesive tape. But the sounds she
made were unintelligible and the gagging and coughing started again. She held
her breath, lest she vomit and choke, and just watched.
Her captor ripped the center section from the Bible, shook the pages and dropped
them carelessly to the glass-littered library carpet. Sonia ripped more of the
pages free, shaking them, Page 2

dropping them, then held the half-destroyed Bible in both hands a moment,
raised a knee, braced the spine of the book against her thigh and ripped. Leather
tore, and loose pages flew everywhere. And then Sonia dropped the Bible.
"Keep looking," Sonia snarled to the men, then turned to the captive. "We have
torn apart your library. Now I think I'll start on you."
The woman advanced on her, glass crunching under her boots, her movements in
the black jump suit like the movements of a black leopard.
She heard herself trying to scream again through the adhesive tape. She felt the
tears— of her own fear, for the loss of the irreplaceable Bible, for the destruction
of the public library she had cared for these many years— welling up in her
eyes. She could hardly see for the blur they caused. Sonia was crouched in front
of her now, and Sonia's left hand, the nails as perfect as they had been when
putting on the adhesive strip, reached out to her face. She felt a scream start, then
die in her as the tape was torn from her skin. She stared in terror at the knife in
the woman's right hand, her eyes crossing as its point pressed against the tip of
her nose. She sobbed, from the pain where her skin was laid raw by the tape, and
from fear of the woman with the knife.
"I'm...I'm not...I'm not this...this Ethyl Chillingsworth. You have to—"
The knife pressed against the tip of her nose, and she could feel it puncture the
skin. She sucked in her breath to scream but didn't.
"I don't care if you call yourself Evelyn Collingwood. You are Ethyl
Chillingsworth. Ethyl-Ethyl Chillingsworth. I want it."
"I'm not Evelyn— I mean, Ethyl Chillingsworth.... "
Sonia smiled, her voice soft. There was almost a musical quality to it. "Oh, yes
you are, Ethyl.
Evelyn Collingwood never existed until 1953. She never had a Social Security
card, never had a driver's license.... "
"I'm Evelyn—" she started to scream, but then the knife blade— long, what they
always called wickedlooking in books— swept down across her cheek, and the
pain made her want to scream even more. But she knew that if she did, the knife
blade would move again.
"That's not a very bad cut, Ethyl— not at all. Now— I want you to give it to
me."
She sobbed, her head hanging down, her chin against her chest, her eyes riveted
to the tracing of bright red blood across the gray fabric of her clothes.
"What...what do—"
The almost singing voice began again. "You know what I want, Ethyl." The
voice rose and fell, up and down, like notes on some invisible scale. "I want it
now. Because soon I'll cut that ugly dress off your ugly old body. Then— just to
make sure you know what I want— I'll write it in your blood across your breasts.
Do you still have breasts? They haven't shriveled up... ?"
She slowly raised her head, staring at the woman with the knife, wanting to curse
at her.
Sonia continued to croon. "I want what you know I want, Ethyl-Ethyl
Chillingsworth. I really can't blame you for changing a name like that, especially
when there was no hope anyone would Page 3

marry you and change it for you."
She stared at the woman named Sonia, and hated for the first time in years.
The song went on and Sonia's hand stretched out and hooked the point of the
long blade into her left nostril, raising her head, forcing her head back against
her neck, making her start to choke, her breath coming in short gasps. "I want the
Gladstone Log."
"The— the—" She coughed, and blood spurted from her nose as she looked
across its bridge at her torturer.
"Gladstone Log," the woman with the knife cooed. "The Gladstone Log, Ethyl.
And I want it—"
"Sonia!" said one of the men, the voice a harsh whisper like the sound of a file
drawn fast across a stone. "Somebody's comin' "
Sonia moved the point of the blade. It was against her throat now. She could feel
it. Sonia hissed at her to be quiet, then the pressure of the knife was gone. The
woman's hands moved quickly, and another piece of adhesive tape was slapped
so hard across her mouth that she felt the hand ram against her teeth. She sucked
in her breath, gagging, sagging back as the black-clad figure stood up, moving
out of her line of sight.
Her eyes didn't follow Sonia and her long knife; they rested, wide open, on the
bloodstains on her dress. She shut her eyes and turned her head away so as not to
see the blood. Then she opened them and could see Sonia and the three men; the
men held guns with long things on the front ends. She had seen these bratwurst-
shaped black objects in spy movies. Silencers.
The woman held no gun, just the knife.
Sonia and the three men were edging back along the library shelves. She told
herself that if she could no longer see them, they could no longer see her.
She could taste the sticky adhesive as her tongue brushed forward in her mouth.
She blinked her eyes as tears filled them again.
She heard a very faint whistling. Someone was whistling. Michael, the night
security guard. She joked with him when she worked late— he always worked
late, of course— that he was the only person who worked for the library who
was older than she was. Now Sonia and the three men were waiting to kill him.
She let her body slump to her left, the impact hard against her left arm as she hit
the carpet. The floor was concrete beneath. She moved her legs, pushing herself
forward, moving like a snake or a worm. She realized Sonia and the three men
had reduced her to that, to crawling like a legless animal, a mute creature— one