Tear of the Gods

by Alex Archer

  They’d gone another half mile down the road and been narrowly missed by another flurry of shots before they were ready. Annja watched the other vehicle closely, knowing that the success of their plan depended heavily on the timing.

  At her suggestion Gary eased up on the gas slightly, not enough to be obvious but just enough to let the Mercedes close the gap between them a little bit.

  She watched.

  And waited.

  When the time was right…

  “Now!” she shouted.

  Gary stood heavily on the brakes.

  Realizing at the last second what was going on, the driver of the Mercedes tried to do the same, but by then it was too late. The two cars slammed into each other, the big front grille of the Mercedes burying itself in the rear of the Renault so deeply that it was if the two vehicles had been fused together.

  Having known it was coming, Annja and Gary had braced for the impact, but the two men in the front seat of the Mercedes had not. No sooner had they been thrown forward by the impact of the collision than they were bouncing back in the other direction as the dual air bags exploded in their faces.

  For a moment they were both dazed by the impact and Annja took full advantage of the opportunity. The second the cars had stopped moving she was in motion, climbing through the open space of the rear window of the Renault and charging across the crumpled steel that had once been the trunk.

  The air bags were already deflating by the time her foot hit the hood of the Mercedes and she saw the eyes of the man in the passenger seat go wide as he watched her coming toward them.

  His right arm started to come up from where it was hidden below the dash.

  That’s the hand with the gun in it, a voice in the back of her mind told her, but it needn’t have bothered; she was already prepared to deal with that very threat.

  As she’d rushed across the hood of the Mercedes, she’d called her sword from the otherwhere. It blinked into existence inside of a heartbeat, and she thrust her arm forward just as the gunman attempted to bring his weapon to bear.

  The sword passed through the shattered glass of the Mercedes’s windshield like it wasn’t even there, impaling the man on the other side through the center of his chest.

  Life faded from his eyes almost immediately and Annja felt no remorse as she watched him go. He’d been trying to kill her, after all, and she was a big believer in doing unto others as they would do unto you.

  As she pulled her sword free and turned to face the driver, she discovered that the crash had already done her work for her. The other man’s head hung on his chest at an odd angle—the impact, or possibly the air bag, having snapped his neck.

  14

  “Where on earth did you get a sword?” Gary asked from behind her.

  Annja turned, wondering how she was going to explain this. Something must have shown on her face, though, some vestige of the hardness that came over her during combat, for Gary took one look at her and backed away quickly, his hands raised in front of him as if to ward off a danger of some kind.

  “You know what, I don’t even want to know,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re really doing here, and right now I think that’s for the best. I’m going to chalk it up to the Lord working in mysterious ways and leave it at that.”

  Annja could only stand there, mouth open in shock, as the young priest climbed back behind the wheel of his battered old Renault, threw it into drive and, with a wrenching shriek of torn and twisted steel, broke free of the other vehicle and drive off down the street as fast as the remains of his car would allow.

  It was only after he was out of sight that it occurred to her that she could have claimed to be an angel of vengeance, complete with a holy sword, and he probably would have believed her.

  She’d have to file that excuse away for next time.

  Annja released the sword, letting it disappear back into the otherwhere. They hadn’t seen another car in more than an hour but that didn’t mean that one wasn’t on its way. It would be just her luck to have the local constabulary come driving along at this point, catching her in the act, so to speak, so she didn’t waste any time.

  She dragged the bodies out of the car and laid them on the side of the road, hidden from immediate view by the bulk of the Mercedes itself. A quick check of their pockets didn’t turn up any identification—not that she’d expected there to be any. The clothes were off-the-rack items with all the labels removed, which wouldn’t prevent the forensics techs from identifying them but it would slow them down a bit. Clearly the two men were professionals. She found the same tattoo on each man, a red hand. The tattoo obviously meant something, but she had know idea what that could be. She assumed the driver must have been on his way to the dig site to rendezvous with the others and it was just her luck that he happened to see her as she got into the priest’s car.

  Both men were carrying pistols, 9 mm automatics, but Annja left them where they were. She was going to have to talk to the police at some point and she didn’t want to have guns tying her to a roadside assault, never mind the deaths of two men, when she did.

  A quick search of the car turned up nothing of interest. The car was registered to a Mr. Steve Jones, which Annja knew was a fake without even having to check on it. These guys had taken the time to wipe out the obvious clues to their identities; they sure as heck weren’t going to be driving around in a car registered in their own names. It was a fair guess that the license plates had been stolen from another vehicle, too. Still, she memorized the numbers, just in case.

  Having found everything she thought she was going to find, Annja considered her options.

  It probably wasn’t going to be long before the priest decided calling the cops might be the best thing, after all—if he hadn’t done so already. Given the investigation that was already under way at the dig site, she suspected they’d respond pretty quickly when he reported armed gunmen trying to run him off the road. He’d no doubt report the vehicle they’d been driving, as well.

  All of which meant taking the Mercedes, if it even still ran at this point, was a pretty big risk. Still, it was a risk she was willing to take for it gave her access to transportation that could potentially put some serious distance between her and her pursuers. And right now that’s what she needed most—room to figure out her next move.

  She called forth her sword once more and used it to slash the air bags free of the dash, using one of them to cover the bloodstains on the passenger seat and tossing the other onto the floor of the backseat. Releasing her sword, she smeared some mud from the side of the road onto the rear license plate, stood back to give it a look and then nodded in satisfaction. It partially hid the number without looking too intentional, which was the entire idea. Sliding behind the wheel, she said a quick prayer and turned the key. The engine hissed and spat for a moment before turning over with a growl of power.

  It looked like she was in business.

  Before she left she rolled the bodies off the side of the road and into the ditch beside it. Eventually they’d be found, but that should buy her a little time at least.

  Getting back in the car, she drove away from the scene of the attack without a backward glance.

  The car sputtered and whined far more than she wanted, and it had a strong tendency to pull to the left if she wasn’t paying attention, but it moved and that’s all she really cared about. She pointed the car south, set the cruise control for two miles an hour over the speed limit and sat back to let the car do the rest of the work.

  She almost made it, too. She was just entering the outskirts of London when the Mercedes began to buck and shake like a bull at the rodeo and she had to fight the wheel to get the vehicle over to the side of the road before it died completely.

  Once it had, she was unable to get it started again. A grinding noise came from somewhere under the hood when she turned the key and it got progressively worse. Finally it let out a big screech and stopped making any sound whatso
ever.

  “Great,” she said sourly. “Just great.”

  It looked like she was going to have to hitch another ride or go the rest of the way on foot.

  Before getting out of the car, she used the edge of her T-shirt to wipe down the steering wheel and any of the other places she thought she might have touched since getting inside. She didn’t want the police connecting her to the car or the two dead men who’d been driving it before her. She made sure to cover the door handle the same way when she opened it and got out once she was done.

  Night had fallen an hour or so earlier, so Annja found herself standing on the side of the road in a run-down section of town. Traffic was minimal and after watching several cars drive past it was obvious that no one was going to be inclined to stop in this area. Maybe they would have in the bright light of day, but after dark was a different story apparently.

  Still, that might work to her advantage. She’d been worried about the police finding the car, but in an area like this, the car might not be there long enough for the police to find it.

  Especially if she left it unlocked with the keys in it.

  She tossed the keys on the front seat, grabbed her pack out of the back and walked down the street, leaving the door open behind her, the interior light gleaming like a beacon in the night.

  A few miles down the road she came to a run-down motel, the kind of place that would let her pay cash without leaving a name at the front and wouldn’t say a word about the bloodstains on her shirt. Noting that the elevator was out of order, Annja deliberately took a room on the fifth floor. Without the easy access the elevator would provide, the fifth floor was high enough to discourage all but the most determined of human predators; the casual thief didn’t want to deal with climbing five flights of stairs when there were easier pickings elsewhere.

  She used the cash she’d taken from the driver of the Mercedes and paid for two nights in advance. When asked to sign for the room, a fit of mischievousness overcame her and she used the name of her well-endowed and wardrobe-malfunction-plagued cohost from Chasing History’s Monsters, Kristie Chatham. Imagining the look on Kristie’s face when some paparazzo asked her what she’d been doing staying in a slum hotel in the north end of London nearly made her burst into laughter right there in front of the clerk and she vowed to herself that she’d leak the information the first chance she got.

  Annja climbed the narrow flights of steps to her room. Once inside, she locked the door behind her and then dropped her pack on the bed. There really wasn’t much to the place; a bed, a beat-up old dresser and a small nightstand were the only pieces of furniture in the room. There was a small safe set into one wall, but the scratches around the lock plate let her know just how safe it wasn’t. Rather than risk putting the torc in it, she began looking for a place she could hide it for a little while. Her first thought was to tape it inside the toilet tank, but one look at it told her that opening it might require a hazmat suit and a week of detox, so that was out. She dismissed the air-conditioning vent for the simple reason that too many Hollywood movies had used it as part of their plots—it would be the first place someone looked, whether they were conscious of the association or not. Inside the ceiling tiles was out for the same reason.

  Then her gaze fell on the thin piece of baseboard that ran around the perimeter of the room. A few pieces here and there were coming free from the wall and she could see a narrow space behind them.

  That will have to do, she thought.

  With the help of a hanger from the closet, Annja managed to pry one of the sections of baseboard free from the wall without damaging it or the nails that held it in place. Whoever had hung the baseboard on the walls had cut corners and hadn’t taken them all the way to the floor but stopped instead, leaving a two inch gap between the wall and the floor, a gap just large enough to hide the torc. Once she had it in place, she replaced the baseboard and carefully pushed the nails back into place. Standing, she backed off a few steps and gave it a once-over, decided after she’d done so that the casual observer wouldn’t know it was there.

  Satisfied for the time being that the torc was in a safe place—or, at least, as safe as she could make it—she stripped off her clothes and took a quick shower. Under the spray of the water she took time to clean out the wound on her head, discovering as she did so that it wasn’t all that bad. It had just bled a lot, as scalp wounds are wont to do. Padding naked out of the bathroom on bare feet, she picked up her clothes and returned with them to the sink, scrubbing them in cold water. A few minutes of effort got most of the bloodstains out. There were a couple of small spots here and there, but she’d didn’t think they’d be noticeable. She’d buy something new the first chance she got, anyway.

  Her chores done, she collapsed onto the bed, pulling the sheet up over her. Within moments sleep had claimed her for the night.

  15

  As Annja was falling into bed in a London hotel room, Detective Inspector Ian Beresford was arriving at the dig site outside Arkholme. The local authorities had just completed the difficult task of freeing the bodies of the deceased from the waters of the bog and transporting them back to the main camp for examination. The mess tent had been commandeered for the task; large tarps had been laid out across the dirt floor and the bodies carefully placed on the tarps in neat, orderly rows. Standing just inside the entrance, Beresford watched as teams of forensic personnel moved among the dead, photographing the bodies, cataloging personal belongings and trying to identify just who it was they were dealing with. This was complicated by both the predations of the local wildlife and the fact that some of the bodies had been in the water for more than twenty-four hours.

  A twenty-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Beresford had transferred to the Counter Terrorism Command inside Special Operations just a few years before. In that short time he’d made a name for himself, cracking some high-profile cases and making the department look good, despite the fact that he had little to no interest in personal aggrandizement or celebrity. Beresford liked the intellectual challenge of solving high-profile crimes and he was good at it; that was all he needed to be a reasonably happy man.

  That was why Home Office had roused him in the middle of the night and sent him to supervise the investigation when the Territorial Police hollered for help.

  There was only one problem.

  As far as he could tell, this had absolutely nothing to do with his primary mission, namely bringing to justice those engaged in terrorism, acts of domestic extremism and other related offenses.

  He’d had a chance to review the initial report filed by his sister agency and recognized that it was more than likely going to be a political nightmare for the department. Among the presumed dead were a well-respected professor from Oxford, a dozen or more graduate students from the same university, a handful of foreign nationals and the host of a widely popular cable television show from the United States. It would be a three-ring circus for whoever had to coordinate all of the inquiries from the foreign police departments, but just because there were foreign nationals involved didn’t necessitate calling in CT Command. So far, it was still just a homicide case.

  A homicide with multiple and, in some cases, high-profile victims, but a homicide just the same.

  Stop whining and get to work, Beresford, he told himself.

  Knowing the techs had at least another hour, maybe more, before they could give him anything worthwhile, Beresford left them to their work and stepped back out into the night air. His assistant, Clements, was waiting.

  “Well? What are the locals saying?” Beresford asked.

  “To be frank, no one really has a clue. A million different theories, but nothing worth hanging our hat on.”

  Beresford grunted. That was to be expected. If they knew what had happened, they wouldn’t have called him in in the first place.

  “Give me the most likely scenario as you see it.”

  “Right,” Clements said, and took a moment to gat
her his thoughts. The two had only been working together for a few short weeks and Clements was constantly, but unnecessarily, trying to prove himself to Beresford.

  “Majority vote among the first responders, as well as our own people, is that it started out as a robbery and went wrong somehow. Rather than keeping their cool, the perps reacted before thinking it through and in the process hiked the charge against them from robbery to multiple felony homicide.”

  Beresford had been thinking the same thing. The black market in antiquities was alive and well, even here in merry old England. If the dig team had uncovered something seriously valuable, it wasn’t beyond comprehension that someone else would take it into their heads to relieve them of their find.

  “Seems a logical place to start. Take me to wherever they were storing the artifacts they uncovered,” he told his partner.

  Clements led him to a trio of tents a short distance away. Like the mess tent, these were bigger than the others, capable of holding several dozen people at once. Beresford had been to a dig site on vacation once, where he had the typical process explained to him. Each dig was split into gridlike sections and the items recovered from each section would be collected and cataloged together so that they could be studied in reference to one another. The easiest way of organizing such a project was to set up rows of folding tables, with each row representing a certain area of the dig and each table designated for holding objects recovered from a particular grid square.

  The scene that greeted them as they entered the first of the artifact tents was anything but organized. The tables had been overturned, the carefully cataloged objects they’d held scattered about the floor like so much trash. Mixed in with the pieces of pottery, clothing and various Iron Age weapons were several pieces of gold jewelry and even a large gold-plated cup that reminded Beresford of the chalice he’d drunk from at church last Sunday.

  He stood in the entrance, taking it all in.