by Alex Archer
“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” she demanded, but Roux fell silent yet again. He was really starting to grate on her nerves.
“Just drive. I’m tired. My leg is killing me. And before the night is out I am going to have to kill—or try to kill—my oldest friend. I don’t feel like talking to you right now.”
“Come on, Roux, you can’t lay something like that on me and just clam up. How have I failed you? Ever? How have I disappointed you? When have I never given my all for you? Done everything you’ve ever asked of me? Name one time. Just one. Tell me the truth.”
“The truth?” The old man shook his head. “What’s the truth? What if we have different truths? What if there’s nothing absolute about it. What if what is true to me is false to you? Whatever the truth is, you have to learn it for yourself, make your own decisions about who you are going to be, because your television show isn’t going to last forever. This thing we’ve got going on between us isn’t going to last forever. So, think about it, be the best you you can be. Don’t let someone else force their version of the truth upon you.”
It made little sense.
“Fine. You don’t want to talk about it, I get it. What about Garin? Why are you so sure he’s in it up to his neck? You’ve got to have a reason.”
“I wish I knew,” the old man said. “A life of disappointment, maybe?”
Annja shook her head. “That’s not it, and you know it. You’re lying to me.”
“Truth and lies again. It’s all subjective, Annja. Let that be today’s lesson. It’s all subjective. But perhaps we will get lucky this time. Perhaps Garin will deign to confess before I execute him. Or maybe winged bacon will be spotted over Paris.”
Despite herself, she half smiled at that.
“Every word that comes out of that man’s mouth weaves part of an elaborate web of lies. He has been weaving that web so tightly and for so long that he’s absolutely forgotten what the truth ever was. All what remains is his truth. I doubt we’ll ever understand why he does anything he does.”
“But we forgive him every time, don’t we? It doesn’t matter what he does. Sooner or later we let him back in.”
“Because he’s like us. Because he’s the only other one like us. All three of us may be different, but we have more in common than we would care to admit.”
He was right.
Annja knew that he was right.
And she hated that he was right.
There was loneliness in his truth. She didn’t want to live in a world where the only two people like her were constantly at each other’s throats, trying to kill each other. Where did that leave her? Alone.
She had no idea of how long her life would be, but she’d felt her body changing in so many subtle ways since that first time Saint Joan’s sword fused under her grasp, whole again. Hers wasn’t going to be a mortal span. It may not be as long as Roux’s, but her old age wasn’t going to be passed in a nursing home playing shuffleboard. The sword would make absolutely sure of that. She would be fit and strong as long as it needed her to wield it; that was the pact she’d made with the holy artifact. That was her legacy, the gift she’d inherited from Joan herself.
“Where are they now?” she asked when she caught sight of him looking at the screen of his cell phone again.
“They are still on this road, but we’ve closed the distance between us, which doesn’t make sense. He should be moving considerably faster than us. Our top speed is almost one hundred miles an hour slower than his. He should be leaving us trailing in his dust.”
“Don’t complain,” Annja said, accelerating again as they hit an open stretch of road, leaving the city lights behind them. “Maybe his passenger gets travel sick. Garin isn’t exactly a Sunday driver, even if he isn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.”
“Or perhaps he knows we’re tracking him,” Roux suggested, looking down at the little red dot in the center of his screen. It moved imperceptibly while he stared.
“That,” she said. “Or he figures we’re still clawing through the rubble back there looking for his beautiful corpse.”
“Which is always possible,” Roux agreed.
Somehow, though, she didn’t really think that was likely. Not after everything they’d been through.
“This isn’t right,” Roux said after another fifteen minutes. “Garin doesn’t do anything without researching every angle. He’s a stickler when it comes to thinking through every implication and possibility of any given course of action.”
“Well, you could always hit the kill switch on the sports car, right? Stop him dead in his tracks. That’d throw a monkey wrench in the works.”
Roux shook his head. “That won’t help. Right now we know exactly where he is, and we can follow him to wherever he’s going. Disable the car and we give him an hour to lose us without us being able to call in more favors to track him. No, we’ll just see where he leads us.”
“Actually, I think I know where he’s going,” Annja said, and it was true. It had been nagging away at the back of her mind since Lars first mentioned Germany. There was a link, tenuous, but a link nonetheless, between Benátky and Germany. “Okay, bear with me on this. It might sound crazy, and I’m almost certainly clutching at straws, but there’s a link between where we were and where I think we’re going.”
“Spit it out,” Roux said.
“What do you know about Kepler?”
“Johannes Kepler? He was a decent man,” he said. “Fiercely intelligent, ahead of his time, dedicated to his work. His first marriage was not a particularly happy one, I don’t think, but I understand that his second was much better.”
It wasn’t quite the response she’d expected, but of course this was Roux. Why wouldn’t he have met one of the greatest minds of the age? Any age? She’d known the old man long enough to take that kind of familiarity in her stride.
“Ours paths crossed on several occasions, most notably the year we lived together at the royal court in Prague, but there were several other meetings down the years. Why?”
“Where? Specifically.”
“Like I said, there was the court of Emperor Rudolph II, and Linz. That’s just across the border into Austria.”
“But Garin is definitely heading for Germany?”
“Without question,” Roux said, taking another reading from the GPS tracker on his screen. “He would have taken the last junction if Austria was his intended destination. I assume that supports your theory?”
“I don’t know. I told you, I found the killer’s coat in the observatory…”
“Which, as you know, was where Kepler worked when he first came to Prague.” Roux nodded. “He was still a young man then, of course, but already stretching the limits of understanding in terms of astronomy, though like many of the day he was compelled as much by astrology and the irrationality that the stars somehow controlled our destinies. But even then he was expressing ideas that would change the way we think about the universe, even if Brahe and his cronies took credit for some of the works they did together as master and apprentice. It’s funny how you forget some of this stuff after so much time, things that seemed so important then, like the ownership of ideas.” Roux shook his head. “No doubt you are aware a lot of our understanding about planetary orbits and motion come from his studies in that room?”
“Absolutely. We owe him and many others a huge debt.”
“Indeed, and Kepler was one of the very first and most important of those,” Roux said. “So tell me how finding the killer’s coat in his observatory is important beyond simply knowing we were within touching distance?”
She wasn’t sure. It made sense in her head, but saying it aloud would only demonstrate how thin the theory actually was. But if this was connected to Kepler somehow, it would make a kind of sense; it would provide a pattern that she could follow. Random events had no pattern. That was how serial killers hid or gave themselves away, patterns of behavior. That and the fact that Garin had to know tha
t he was driving a killer across the country.
“Are you sure about border control here?” she asked suddenly.
“No. The last time I traveled by train between the countries, the army ran checks on the train as we entered the country,” Roux said. “But I think that was before the Czech Republic officially became part of the union.”
“If Garin is taking the killer across the border, and there is border control, the killer would need a passport, wouldn’t he? If Garin wanted to move the killer without documentation he’d fly, surely? Grease the right palms at the airport, disappear through customs without ever officially coming or going. That’s who he is. That’s how he works. Whatever else he is, he’s not an idiot. Why risk being detained at the border?”
“Doesn’t seem like him, unless he knows there is no risk,” Roux agreed, not entirely sure he was following her line of reason.
“So just because we know that Garin had the killer with him when he left Benátky, we’re assuming the killer is still with him? That’s a big assumption.”
Roux fell silent.
“Here’s what I’m betting,” Annja offered. “It’s important in how we judge culpability here. If Garin takes the killer over the border, it will only be because Garin has provided him with forged papers, wouldn’t it? He wouldn’t risk being caught without the proper documentation. If he has done that, it means that the two of them are in cahoots. What happened back there wasn’t just a random meeting.”
Roux picked up the thread. “But if he doesn’t take the killer over the border, then maybe he’s still our boy. Is that what you are thinking?”
She nodded.
It was hard to argue with the logic, and somehow it seemed to fit with the way that Roux had felt right at the start. He had been convinced that Garin had been involved with this killer somehow. Providing the means of the killer’s escape from the Czech Republic would cement those suspicions beyond any shadow of doubt.
She watched the road ahead as the car ate up the miles.
Roux stared at the screen in his hands, without answering.
The gap was closing slowly, which it shouldn’t have been. The Ferrari should have been outpacing them by at least fifty miles every hour, maybe more if Garin was driving recklessly. But it wasn’t. And the little GPS tag’s stuttered journey across his screen didn’t give any indication the car had stopped, not even long enough to let his passenger out. Annja couldn’t tell if Roux hoped the killer was still inside the sports car or not. There was something disturbing about the old man’s expression. He appeared resigned to whatever fate had to throw at him.
“Okay, one last question,” Annja said after a while. “Is there anywhere you can think of in Germany with a connection to Kepler? I keep thinking he’s the alpha and the omega in all of this.”
42
The sound of her cell phone ringing caught Annja by surprise. The car’s Bluetooth system picked up the signal, allowing her to answer without having to take her hands from the wheel.
“Annja!” The familiar voice of Doug Morrell, her producer, filled the car.
“Doug. Dare I ask?”
“Things are hot here, hot and sticky, and not in the good way.”
“Sounds delightful.”
“I could live without it, if I’m being honest. Corporate is breathing down my neck all hours. So, speaking of the Evil Overlords, how are things going with the segment you’re working on? Tell me you’ve got something awesome planned to save my bacon here.”
“It’s all coming together,” she half lied. She doubted she sounded all that convincing, but he was five thousand miles away, so maybe her self-doubt wouldn’t carry.
“To be honest, I’d rather hoped we might have had some ideas from you by now.”
“I need to get permissions to film in a couple of places. Creepy tunnels, that kind of thing.”
“Excellent. And the million-dollar question…this is going to be workable live? The suits are hot on this whole social-media event angle.”
“It’ll take some planning, but yeah, we should be able to pull it off.”
“I’m serious, Annja. All the usual crap aside, I’m on your side here. If this doesn’t work, it’s not just you out of a job.”
“I get that,” she said.
“So you’re thinking big, right? Really big. Edge of your seat big. This needs to be the water-cooler event. We need everyone going into the office or on the street saying, ‘Holy crap, did you see CHM last night? Oh, my God!’”
“I get it. Big. I’ve got Lars getting some footage we can loop in between the live stuff so we can have a bit of control to the chaos.”
“Good thinking,” Doug agreed. “Look, we all know how boring these live events can be. So we’re going to need to fake some spice if needs be. Give ’em what they want upstairs, and it’s all good. We have a lot of loyal fans, Annja. People who tune in every week. We’ve got to find a way to interact with them.”
Meaning they had to find a way for Corporate to monetize them. The bean counters wanted cash. Advertisers kept the show afloat. Why would they possibly want to bite the hand that feeds? They wanted ratings. Ratings drove advertising, and like it or not, Chasing History’s Monsters wasn’t big enough to deliver the kind of numbers the network wanted.
They expected her to fail.
That was the unspoken reality of the situation.
She was absolutely sure they were already mapping out contingencies, developing some sort of reality show monstrosity of fake celebrities and their car-crash lives. “I’m on it, Doug, promise,” she said. “I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t, Annja. If I was going to put my life in anyone’s hands, it would be yours. But keep me in the loop. Silence spooks me, okay?”
“Of course,” she said.
She killed the call and adjusted her grip on the steering wheel. She hadn’t realized how tightly she had been squeezing it while she was on the phone.
Sensationalizing the story of the golem and the serial killer currently stalking Prague was ugly. It wasn’t her. But recalling those childish ink-sketch features of the killer, she wondered if the truth might actually be too much for viewers to believe. Or didn’t that matter anymore? Had they reached the point where excitement outweighed veracity? Was it their job to be the arbiters of truth? Or was it all just grist to the entertainment mill now as long as they gave the thrill seekers monsters to chase?
43
“They’ve stopped,” Roux said suddenly.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Where are they?”
“The border.”
“This is going to be some episode of the show, isn’t it? We chase a killer across the country only for border patrol to arrest him before Garin can smuggle him out of the country. I can see the suits loving that. I can also imagine the Twitter hashtags.”
“Sometimes it sounds as though we are speaking different languages, girl. Whatever happened to English?”
“It’s not compulsive viewing, is it? It’s not that pursuit where we have a helicopter tailing the killer as he attempts to flee justice. We’ve got a red dot on a cell phone. It’s a bit pathetic, really. What am I going to tell Doug?”
“There will be other stories if this doesn’t pan out, Annja. Europe is filled with monsters old and new. We will find you another one if it comes to that. Catching the monster must be our only concern here. And given what we know about the beast, the last thing we really want is for the killer to fall into the hands of the police. They would never understand what they were up against. It would be a massacre.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way.
When she did, it sent a cold shiver of dread down her spine.
But what was the alternative? Letting the killer escape? That wasn’t an option. That wasn’t part of the soul pact she’d made with the sword. She had to be there at the end. The sword had to be there when the showdown came. If anything could end the
unnatural life of the golem, it was Saint Joan’s mystical blade. What better weapon to fight an ancient evil?
“So what do we do?”
“We forget the show, for now. This is bigger than you or me, or your network. This is about the lives of innocent people, and nothing is more sacred than that. The sanctity of life is paramount. That is why we are here, not some evil curse that kept us from death. We are here because life is sacred and the Lord has chosen us as His warriors.”
She didn’t say anything; it wasn’t like Roux to speak like this, but sometimes she forgot how it had all started for him—a warrior of Joan of Arc, following a saint into battle. How could he not be deeply religious at the core? Did he believe his longevity was God’s blessing or the devil’s curse?
“He’s moving again,” Roux said. “He’s crossing the border into Germany.”
“Do we follow him? I mean…did Garin ditch the killer before leaving the country, or did he just smuggle him out?” There was no way of knowing, of course, not without understanding the significance of Germany in all of this. And that came back to the unanswered question: Was there anywhere in Germany with a connection to Kepler?
“We have no means of following the creature if it has parted company with Garin, so our only option is to hope they are still together.”
“We could always just call him,” Annja suggested with a wry smile.
“I think not.”
And that was the end of the discussion. Or, at least, that discussion. Roux steered it back toward Annja’s questions about Kepler.
“There is a university in Linz named after Kepler,” Roux said, picking up the conversation thread as if it had never been dropped. “Though it wasn’t built until a long time after his death. And a space station or a satellite. I rather think he would have appreciated the idea that something bearing his name would float out there for eternity, a man-made star. I’m not sure I remember much more that’s worth telling. I can’t recall any patronage from Germany, though of course there was no such nation at the time. Many of the wealthiest families in Europe were keen to be very visible supporters of the arts and the sciences. I’m sure some of the Prussian families were more than familiar with his work. He certainly benefited from patronage. He went where the money took him, I suppose, but aside from the obvious, that he was a German national by birth, you may be clutching at straws.”
