The Relic Runner Origin Story Box Set by Ernest Dempsey (best desktop ebook reader .txt) 📗

A powerful current jerked him downward. His shoulder hit the sandy bottom with a thud. Then the tide ripped him forward, rolling him along the ocean floor like an underwater tumbleweed.

Dak's vision blurred. Everything spun around him. The flickering sunlight overhead twisted and curved under the rippling surface. The surface, Dak thought. I have to get to the surface.

He kicked his legs, but the fatigued muscles flopped impotently in the water. His arms felt like socks filled with pudding. Dak's lungs tightened with every passing second. He didn't have long before he'd need to inhale.

With the last gasp of strength he could summon, Dak shot his right hand toward the surface. Something slapped onto his wrist and pulled him up. When his head breached the waters, he spewed air out of his lungs and inhaled deeply several times. As the salt water cleared his face and eyes, he saw who held on to his arm.

Will squeezed Dak's forearm tight until Dak felt the sand dragging beneath him. He regained his orientation and stood up.

They were chest deep in the water, now deep enough to catch the next wave in. As the waters swelled again, the two men started swimming toward shore. They body surfed to shallow water and came to a stop.

Dak had never been so glad to see and feel wet sand, and for a moment, he was overwhelmed with gratitude for making it out of that scenario alive.

He glanced over at Will and nodded. His friend returned the gesture. Then after a few seconds of silence, Dak started to laugh. It began as a chuckle that crescendoed into a series of booms.

"What is so funny?" Will asked. His face twisted in confused disbelief.

Dak snorted. "Just the visual of you in that chair. We must have looked ridiculous with the paddle board, the chair, all of it."

He pressed the back of his hand to his lips to quiet the laughter.

Will merely nodded and bit his lower lip. "I still can't believe that worked."

"Me, either," Dak agreed.

Will's head froze and he lowered his eyebrows. "Wait. What?"

"Speaking of," Dak detoured. "Where is that chair?"

He looked past Will and got his answer. Two hundred feet down the shore, the chair tilted over at an angle, gradually burrowing into the sand with every wave that splashed by. A sparse collection of onlookers stood along the beach, away from the water, pointing at the oddity.

"Oh. There it is."

Dak pointed to the floating furniture. Will rolled his head the other direction and looked, just as the chair exploded in a fiery blast. Water and black smoke shot fifty feet into the air. The people on the beach screamed and retreated with reckless abandon, running toward the street.

Dak winced. Will snapped his head back around, glowering with accusation. "I thought you said the water would diffuse that thing!"

"Yeah. I mean. I did, it did," he corrected. "Honestly, I wasn't sure it would work at all. Or for how long."

He shrugged at his friend's silent fury.

"Anyway," Dak continued. "Glad you're okay. Now, we need to figure out where Bo Taylor went."

Six

Istanbul

Bo sat at a street-side table under a red and white umbrella. He sipped a cup of Turkish coffee, never taking his eyes off the building across the street. A young man in a black apron appeared for the third time to ask him if he'd like anything else. Bo's head only twisted an inch to the side, still keeping his eyes on the apartment building on the other side of the street. He knew the waiter would keep coming back, probably hoping to free up the table for the next customer.

"I'm fine," Bo said. "But I'll tell you what..." He reached into his pocket and fished out a wad of cash, thumbed through and found a couple of hundred euros, then held them out for the server. "Take this and bring me another coffee every thirty minutes. Other than that, I'm not to be disturbed. Understood?"

The young man took the money from his hand with a grateful reluctance. "Yes, sir. Of course."

The waiter turned and hurried back inside the café with more money than he would have made in two or three shifts.

Bo sighed, exhaling through his nose at the irritation. He couldn't complain. Good service was hard to find these days. If he wasn't staking out the building opposite, he'd probably have been kinder to the young man. Circumstances as they were, however, he needed to focus. The stop-and-go traffic on the street in front of him was more distraction than he cared for. The only distraction he permitted was to check the news reports coming out of Portugal during the last hour.

The headlines were easy enough to discover with a quick search. "Bizarre Explosion Rocks Nazare," "Two Men Seen With Office Chair Prior To Blast" were a couple he'd noted.

The articles didn't provide any information, though, on whether there had been any casualties. The reports were still coming in. Bo assumed Dak and Will had somehow managed to escape unscathed. He wondered why the two decided to take the chair down to the beach. That particular curiosity itched at Bo's brain for minutes. Dak must have been trying to save anyone who might have been in the building, Bo reckoned.

He'd rigged the bomb to blow with a shift in pressure less or greater than five pounds, and most attempts to bypass the current in the wiring would have the same result.

There were, of course, ways around every explosive device, but Dak wouldn't have access to those means—not on such short notice.

The only explanation that made any sense was that he'd tried to get the bomb as far away from the building as possible, potentially saving a few dozen or more lives.

Still, with every subsequent search, the updated articles detailing the events on the beach in Nazare suggested there were no injuries, and more disturbingly, no deaths. Were the Portuguese media outlets covering up the real story? Would it hurt tourism