by Alex Archer
The caller recited a new phone number, and Annja quickly memorized it.
But she wasn’t ready to be a pawn in someone else’s game quite yet. At least, not a pawn that didn’t attempt to retain a bit of its own free will.
“Why don’t you just tell me now, and I’ll grab the package later?”
It was the wrong thing to do.
There was silence on the end of the phone for a moment, followed by a shriek of pain that seemed to go on forever.
“Hello? Hello? Are you there? What are you doing to him?” she cried.
The voice returned. “When I give an order, I expect it to be carried out without negotiation or discussion. Each time that doesn’t happen, Mr. Morrell will pay the price for your obstinacy. Is that clear?”
“Crystal,” Annja replied through gritted teeth.
“Then what are you waiting for? Go get that package.”
And with that, the line went dead.
Annja sent the sword back into the otherwhere and hurried out of her room, clutching the phone tightly in one hand. She didn’t dare put it down just in case the stranger called again; she didn’t know what he’d do to Doug if he called and she wasn’t right there to answer it.
A group of tourists stood in front of the elevator so Annja hurried past it and took the stairs, rushing down them two at a time in her haste to get to the ground floor. She considered calling Paul and asking him to join her, but decided against doing so. There was no need to get him involved unless she had to, and she wasn’t sure yet if that was the case. It might be safer for Paul if she kept him out of it completely.
There was an elderly couple at the registration desk when Annja got to the lobby, and she had to stifle the urge to push them aside and ask about the package. She stood behind them, impatiently shifting from foot to foot as she waited for them to finish getting the directions they needed. The registration clerk gave her a sympathetic smile over their heads as they examined the map and Annja tried to smile back, but she was afraid it looked more like a death’s head rictus.
At last they were done and Annja stepped up to the counter.
“May I help you?” the clerk asked.
“My name is Annja Creed and I’m in room 402. I believe you have a package for me.”
“Ah, yes, Miss Creed. One minute, please.”
The clerk stepped into the back room, leaving Annja alone. A sense that she was being watched washed over her and she spun to look, but there was no one there.
Keep it together, Creed, she told herself.
The clerk returned carrying a thick manila envelope and handed it to her across the counter. Her name was written on the front with black magic marker.
“Were you on duty when this was delivered?” she asked the clerk.
He hesitated and then said, somewhat reluctantly, “Yes, miss.”
“Did you see who delivered it?”
“No, miss.” He looked down and then looked back up at her. “To be honest, I had stepped away for a quick smoke, and when I came in the envelope was lying on the counter. I looked around to see who might have left it, but there was no one about. I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine. No problem,” she told him, while inwardly she was cursing at having lost her best chance of getting a lead on who might be behind this.
Not knowing what it might contain, she didn’t feel comfortable opening the envelope in the lobby, so she’d wait until she got back to her room.
She was grateful the envelope didn’t contain one of Doug’s fingers or anything gruesome like that, just a folder with several pieces of paper inside and a DVD in a paper sleeve. She turned on the desk lamp and sat down, flipping through the pages briefly. They appeared to be military action reports of some kind.
That was enough for her; she didn’t have time to read them all. She could do that later.
She picked up the DVD and slid it out of its case, then walked it over to the entertainment unit in the suite’s living room. It took her a few minutes to work out which remote control worked which device, but once she figured it all out she fired up the television and then slipped the DVD into the player.
The screen remained blank long enough that Annja thought the player might not be properly connected to the television, but as she got up to check it, the screen suddenly brightened and an image appeared.
It was Doug.
He was tied to a metal chair in a nondescript room somewhere. His forearms were tied to the arms of the chair, his legs to the legs of the chair, leaving his hands free and his bare feet resting on what looked to be a wet concrete floor. The camera was close enough for Annja to see that his face was bloody and swollen, as if he’d been subjected to a thorough beating at some point in the past few hours. A thin line of dried blood ran from his cracked and swollen lips. When he raised his head and looked at the camera, the one eye that he could see out of was full of fear.
“Help me, Annja” he said, his voice little more than a croak coming from an obviously parched throat. It sounded as though he hadn’t had any water for hours. “You have to help me. I don’t care what he asks you to do or who he asks you to do it to. I’ll die here if you don’t do what he wants. Please, don’t let that happen, Annja, please.”
The camera zoomed in to show his face and then moved down to his body and stopped on his right hand. That close Annja could see that his last two fingers were broken and bent at odd angles.
She could hear Doug saying, “No, no, I didn’t do anything, don’t,” in a breathy gasp. She steeled herself for what was coming but she didn’t turn away, feeling as if she owed it to him to watch what was being done so that she could avenge him for all the wrongs he endured to coerce her into action.
A gloved hand reached into the camera frame. It was neither large nor small, so she couldn’t really tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s, though she suspected the former. Not because a woman couldn’t be that cruel—she knew from experience that that certainly wasn’t the case—but because her mystery man had claimed to be the one who had kidnapped Doug, and she had yet to see anything that made her think this was anything more than a single nutjob at work. As she’d expected, the individual took hold of Doug’s middle finger and without further ado snapped the bone. Doug let out a shriek of pain and the screen went blank.
Watching the kidnapper inflict pain on Doug for no other reason than to make her do his bidding filled her with a righteous fury. She vowed then and there to make him pay for what he had done.
He’d picked the wrong woman to tangle with.
Annja picked up the phone and entered the number the kidnapper had given to her.
It was answered almost immediately.
“You have the package?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen the DVD?”
Annja gritted her teeth and then replied in the same clear tone, “Yes.”
“You understand that I’m not kidding around?”
“Yes, I understand. Now get on with it. What do you want me to do?”
“In April 1945 a particular German aircraft went down somewhere in the Swiss Alps. I want you to find that aircraft and recover what is inside it. You have one week to do so.”
Find a plane lost in the Swiss Alps over fifty years ago? This guy was a total loon! Annja counted to ten to be sure she had a hold of her anger.
“So help me, if you hurt him any more than you already have, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
The man on the other end of the phone chuckled. “You can certainly try, Miss Creed. In the meantime, I would start looking for that wreckage. One week. I will call you at exactly noon seven days from now. Keep your phone handy.”
The kidnapper hung up.
Chapter 5
When Paul knocked on her door fifteen minutes later, Annja was sitting cross-legged on the couch, engrossed in reading the after-action reports the kidnapper had supplied. At the sound of his knock, she shouted, “Go away!” in the direction of the door and
just kept reading. When she looked up moments later to double-check something she’d read in a previous report, she found him standing there in the middle of the room, watching her.
“How did you get in here?” she demanded.
He held up a small square of plastic. “You gave me a key, remember?”
Annja grunted and went back to reading.
Paul walked over and picked up one of the sheets of paper. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t touch that!” she said, snatching it out of his hands.
Paul actually took a step back at the venom in her tone. The tension in the room felt like a physical presence.
“You’re scaring me, Annja. What’s going on?”
Annja ignored him, jotting down notes on the cover of the folder the pages had come in and moving on to the next page.
“Look at me!”
This time the sharpness in his tone caught her attention. She stopped what she was doing and looked over at him, actually seeing him for the first time.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said gently, “but whatever it is, you aren’t going to be helped by letting it get the better of you. Take a deep breath, calm down a minute and tell me what’s got you so riled up.”
Annja realized that he was right; she wasn’t going to help Doug if she went at this haphazardly and in a panic. Yes, the clock was ticking but this is what she did. She found things that had been lost or hidden away, often for centuries. She was good at it, too. She could do this; she just needed to stay calm and to stay focused.
“I’m sorry, Paul,” she began, then told him about the phone call, the package, everything.
He didn’t believe her at first. He looked at the papers, checked her call logs, even watched the video, though he turned it off in a hurry when he saw Doug’s bruised and battered face. That was all he apparently needed to understand it was real.
His first reaction was a reasonable one.
“We have to go to the police,” he said, reaching for the phone.
Annja stretched out her hand and put it over his, stopping him.
“No,” she said softly.
“No? What do you mean no? Your friend has been kidnapped, his life threatened. You need to let the police handle this thing so they can get him back safely!”
“But that’s just it, Paul. They won’t.”
He stared at her as if she’d suddenly grown a third eye in the middle of her forehead. “What? How can you say that?” he asked, bewildered.
“Because it’s true!”
Easy there, Annja, she told herself. He’s just trying to help.
“Less than one in two victims in kidnapping for ransom cases are returned unharmed when the ransom is paid. I know. I looked it up. And as crazy as it sounds, that’s what this is essentially. A kidnapping for ransom. Our kidnapper just happens to have a really unusual demand.”
Paul looked at her, a puzzled expression on his face. “That’s what I don’t get. What does he really want? And why kidnap a television producer in order to get it? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Actually it does, in a strange kind of way. He wants my expertise in finding lost artifacts but can’t approach me outright because he knows that I would require him to follow the law and turn the wreckage and any human remains over to the German government as befits a casualty of war.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Anything found within the wreckage would have to be turned over, as well. That means he wouldn’t get to keep whatever the plane was carrying, and that’s what he wants. Not the plane but the cargo.”
Paul frowned. “So knowing that you wouldn’t help him steal the cargo if you did, indeed, find it, he decides to kidnap the producer of your show?”
“Not just my producer. Doug is my friend, one of the few I have. And I have a reputation for going to the ends of the earth for my friends.”
Saying it aloud brought a lump to her throat and she realized that she was scared, afraid for Doug’s safety. Whoever the kidnapper was, it was clear that he wasn’t afraid to use physical violence to get what he wanted and of her friends, few though they may be, Doug was probably the one least likely to be able to deal with what was coming his way.
Which is precisely why he was the one who was targeted, she thought.
“But why hurt him like that? Why not just kidnap him and let you know that he was being held?”
“Motivation,” Annja answered. “Specifically, mine. He’s got a deadline for some reason, and he wants the plane found before that deadline expires. If I thought Doug wasn’t in any immediate danger other than being held captive, I’d stall every second I could on the search for the plane to give the authorities time to find him. By backing up his threat with a show of force, the kidnapper is taking that option away from me. I have no doubt he will hurt Doug, perhaps even kill him, if I don’t do what he wants.
“Which brings us to the second reason we can’t go to the authorities,” Annja continued. “Time. Reporting the abduction will take away precious hours, possibly even days, from my hunt for the aircraft, and I can’t afford that.”
“So what are you going to do?” Paul asked.
She looked up at him, surprised. “Find the bloody plane, of course. What else is there to do?”
“But you don’t even know what plane you are looking for. And last time I checked, the Swiss Alps are pretty damn big.”
“That’s where these come in,” she said, picking up the stacks of reports that she’d been going through.
“Mission reports from both the German Luftwaffe and the American Air Force for the month of April 1945. I don’t know how he got them, but he did and that’s all that matters. Somewhere in here is the clue I’m looking for that will tell me what I need to know—the identity of the plane I’m supposed to find.”
Paul shrugged. “Well, if you’re confident you’ll find it, so am I. Pass some of those over here,” he said as he sat down on the other end of the couch.
“What are you doing?” Annja asked.
“What does it look like I’m doing? Helping you, of course.”
She stared at him, at a loss for words. She hadn’t imagined…
Paul’s expression softened. “You didn’t think you were going to have to do all of this alone, did you?”
Annja gulped down a lump in her throat for the second time that evening, but this time it was for an entirely different reason. She’d been on her own so long that she’d just assumed…
Finding her voice, she said, “Actually, yeah, I did. This isn’t your fight and you’ve got things to do.”
Paul laughed. “Things to do? Are you nuts? A man’s life is at stake here. I think that’s a little more important than some stupid magazine article, don’t you?”
She nodded, unable to speak. She thought she just might be falling in love with this man.
She passed him half the stack of reports and settled down to read.
The clock was ticking…
Chapter 6
Annja found the information she sought nearly four hours later. Surprisingly, it was in a report from an American airman, Captain Dennis Mitchell, who survived the crash of his P51 Mustang in April 1945 and hid among the partisans at the Swiss border for three weeks before he was able to rejoin an Allied unit and relay the details of what had happened that day.
The report detailed an encounter between the pilot’s combat air patrol in a pair of P51s and a lone German Junkers Ju 88. Mitchell described how his patrol had come upon the Junkers flying low and slow as it neared the Austrian border. Figuring they had an easy target, the two Mustang pilots had gone on the attack. To their surprise the pilot of the Junkers turned out to be better than average and managed to elude their guns for several long minutes as they chased him over the Alps.
Just when they thought they had him dead to rights, the Junkers pilot had turned the tables on them, suddenly growing claws and becoming the cat instead of the mouse. A head-to-h
ead attack directed at Mitchell’s aircraft had critically damaged it and he’d bailed out just seconds before it blew to pieces. While floating to the ground under his parachute, he’d witnessed the destruction of his wingman’s aircraft, but also the fatal wounding of the Junkers. When last he saw it, the aircraft was flying southwest on a course that would take it deeper into the Alps, with smoke pouring from one engine and a full-fledged fire engulfing the other. He hadn’t thought it would get very far in that state.
Mitchell had landed in a valley between two peaks and had stumbled upon a partisan group as it crossed the mountain. They’d sheltered him from the enemy as the country fell apart around them and when the opportunity arose had escorted him back to Allied lines. He discovered that Hitler had committed suicide the previous day and the war in Europe was effectively now all but over.
There was a page added to the original report that stated post-war recovery crews had managed to find the wreckage of the aircraft belonging to Mitchell’s wingman, Lieutenant Nathan Hartwell, as well as his remains, which had been collected and shipped to the States for burial back home. The wreck had been in the mountains along the border near the Austrian city of Salzburg.
“I think I’ve got something here,” she said to Paul and then showed him what she had found.
“What would a German aircraft be doing flying alone and heading south at that point in the war?” Paul asked. “Didn’t we basically control all of Germany at that point?”
Annja nodded. Her particular field of specialty was European history, concentrating on the Medieval and Renaissance periods, but she hadn’t neglected her study of the modern era. “The last major battle between Germany and American and British Allied forces took place near Lippstadt in the first week of April. About the same time, Soviet forces broke the German lines in the east and marched all the way to Berlin, reaching it on the sixteenth of April. By that point, the war was all but over except for the surrendering.”
Paul thought about that for a moment. “The Battle of Berlin started on the sixteenth when Soviet forces attacked the capital. Hitler committed suicide on April thirtieth. But back on the fourteenth of April we have a lone German aircraft making a run for the border, flying ‘low and slow’ as Captain Mitchell put it. Sounds to me like somebody loaded his personal stash of loot and tried to get out of Dodge before everything came crashing down. What do you think?”
