by Alex Archer
Annja immediately recognized it as a Geiger counter.
Stepping back over to the laser where the torc still rested, Sebastian turned on the counter and waved the wand over the torc.
A sudden series of clicks erupted into the room from the side of the Geiger counter.
Annja knew what that meant without having to be told.
The torc was radioactive.
Sebastian, and his spectrometer, was right. As crazy as it sounded, the torc had been fashioned from a meteorite that consisted primarily of naturally produced plutonium.
At that moment, a phone began ringing.
Annja looked at Sebastian, expecting him to answer his phone, but he shook his head.
“Not mine,” he said.
Surprised, Annja realized it was her new phone. She hadn’t heard it ring before and didn’t recognize the sound.
She dug it out of her backpack and answered it, already expecting the caller to have hung up given the few frantic moments it had taken her to find it once she’d realized it was her own. “Hello?”
“If you expect me to call back,” Roux said, “it is generally a good idea to actually leave me the number where I can reach you.”
“Roux!” Annja exclaimed, surprised by the call but delighted to finally hear from him. She’d seriously started to worry that something had gone wrong on his end.
As it turned out, Roux was right. In all the craziness that was going on, she’d forgotten to leave her new cell phone number with him when she’d called. She endured a few minutes of scolding; as her mentor and friend, she figured he was entitled.
“I’ve been seeing your name all over the press, Annja,” he said. “Just what have you gotten yourself into this time?”
“Hang on,” she told him, then turned to Sebastian. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to take this call.”
He flashed his megawatt smile again. “Of course, why don’t you use the reception area, where you’ll have a little privacy? I’ll continue working on these results.”
A moment later she was sitting by a window in the front room, looking out over the street, and bringing Roux up-to-date on everything that had happened to her since finding the torc.
SEATED IN THE back of his limousine with Henshaw at the wheel, Roux listened to Annja’s story and as he did the pieces of the puzzle he’d been struggling to understand finally fell into place.
It was Annja’s dig team that had uncovered the torc. How Shaw had learned about it, Roux couldn’t say, but somehow he had and had decided to acquire it and sell it to the highest bidder. He’d sent his thugs from the Red Hand Defenders to acquire the torc from those who had uncovered it.
Annja’s presence at the dig site had prevented that from happening. When the intruders had shown a callous disregard for the lives of her associates, she’d hidden the torc and fought back.
Her explanation also revealed why she was so reluctant to go to the police to share what she knew; seeing one of her attackers wearing the uniform of a regional police officer would have caused Roux to question just who he could and could not trust, as well.
Learning of her escape, Shaw had sent some of his thugs after her, determined to recover the torc, while all along he’d been deceiving those he’d called together to bid on the object. He’d never had the torc in hand at all…
“Where are you now, Annja?”
“In Paris, at the offices of Dr. Sebastian Cartier, a geologist I’ve hired to analyze the chemical composition of the torc. And get this, we’ve just discovered that the torc was fashioned from a meteorite full of plutonium.”
“Plutonium? Give me his address,” Roux said, jotting it down on a piece of paper as she did so. Forget the meeting. This was too important. “Henshaw and I are going to…”
Roux trailed off in midsentence as the memory of the last conversation he’d overheard in Shaw’s office replayed in his mind.
“She’ll be at this address in the morning. Recover my property and then get rid of her.”
“What about the geologist?”
“Get rid of him, too.”
With a growing sense of horror, Roux realized Annja had the plutonium Shaw needed to turn his inoperable suitcase nuke into an operational one. Even worse, Shaw had known since sometime last night where Annja would be this morning and had already dispatched a team to eliminate her and recover the torc!
“You’ve got to get out of there, Annja!” Roux said urgently. “Drop everything but the torc and get out of there now!”
Annja didn’t understand. “What’s going on, Roux?”
“I don’t have time to explain,” he replied. “Shaw knows you’re there and he’s already sent his men to recover the torc. No matter what, you can’t let that happen.”
“Shaw? Who the hell is Shaw? And how do you know someone is after the torc?”
She was just about to demand that Roux explain himself whether he wanted to or not when she happened to glance out the front window. She was just in time to see a group of armed gunmen wearing black face masks exit the van parked across the street and head directly for the walkway leading to Sebastian’s front door.
Into the phone, she said, “We’re too late, Roux. Shaw’s men are already here.”
She then ran for the back room, calling her sword to her as she went.
38
Sebastian looked up as Annja burst into the room and she saw his eyes go wide at the fact that she was carrying a medieval sword in her right hand. With her pursuers only moments behind her, though, she didn’t have time to explain. She pointed at a door on the other side of the room and shouted, “Run!”
She expected him to jump to and do as she said and had taken a few steps in that direction herself before realizing he hadn’t moved. He just stood there, holding the test results in one hand and a pen in the other, staring at her in amazement.
“What’s going on?” he asked as he watched her dash across the room and grab the torc from inside the cutting crib.
Before she could answer him there was a resounding crash from the front of the house.
How long is that door going to hold? Annja wondered.
Sebastian tore his gaze away from her and looked toward the front of the house, uncertain.
They were wasting precious time. “In another thirty seconds armed gunmen are going to come swarming through that door, looking for this,” Annja said urgently, holding up the torc. “We need to be somewhere else when that happens.”
A crash of glass was heard and quickly followed by shouts from the front of the house.
Apparently the door wasn’t going to hold them for very long at all.
Sebastian glanced once more in that direction and then made up his mind. He turned and hurried over to the door on the far side of the room, Annja close at his heels.
“Is there a back way out?” she asked as they left the lab and its equipment behind and headed deeper into the building down another short corridor.
“Yes,” he told her as they emerged into another big room like the one they’d just left. To her left was a spiral staircase leading upward to the next floor. On her right was a makeshift storage area, with shelves overloaded with discarded equipment and boxes piled high with records that had yet to go to long-term storage.
As Annja glanced around, Sebastian hurried forward to the rear exit, half-hidden in the shadows against the far wall.
“This will lead us out in the alley,” Sebastian said, reaching for the knob.
Realizing what he was about to do, Annja cried, “Wait!” but she was too late.
Sebastian either didn’t hear her or was too caught up in the excitement for it to register. She was a few steps behind when he grabbed the door and yanked it open.
She didn’t know who was more startled, Sebastian or the gunman standing on the other side of the door, reaching for the knob from that side.
Unfortunately for Sebastian, the gunman was armed and he was not.
Sebastian shouted in surprise
as the other man brought up his weapon and put two rounds right into Sebastian’s chest at almost point-blank range.
The gunman only lived a few seconds longer than his victim however, for even as Sebastian’s body toppled backward to the floor, Annja stepped over him and thrust her sword forward, skewering the intruder through the chest.
Automatic gunfire split the morning air and bullets chewed up the door frame around her. Looking past the man impaled on the end of her sword, Annja could see two other intruders just entering the small backyard from the alley behind the house, firing as they came.
Ignoring the flying splinters and the whine of bullets as they zipped past her, Annja released her sword, snatched the gun from the dying man’s hand and then dove back inside the house. She dragged Sebastian’s body clear of the doorway and then kicked the door shut.
Bullets slammed into the other side, but the door must have been reinforced with steel or something similar for it held up under the assault. Annja took one look at Sebastian and knew he was gone; his eyes stared blankly at the ceiling above, unseeing.
She looked around, frantically hoping for a way out. Her gaze fell upon the staircase leading to the second floor and for a moment she gave it serious consideration, but she didn’t know what lay in that direction and the last thing she wanted to do was get cornered without a way out. Dismissing it, she chose instead to charge back in the direction from which she had come, thinking the gunmen wouldn’t be expecting her to retreat that way.
As she ran she glanced at the gun in her hand. It was an MP-5, a weapon common with SWAT teams the world over, and thankfully one with which she was familiar. She hit the release and let the magazine fall into her other hand, noting its weight.
About half-full, she thought. Gotta make every shot count.
She slapped it back into place as she raced into the lab.
The door leading to the reception area was still open, giving her a clear view all the way to the front of the building. Several figures were coming in through the front door and she didn’t have to see them closely to know they were up to no good. The guns in their hands and the ski masks over their faces kind of spoiled the surprise.
Annja dashed over to the workstation closest to the other door and took up position behind it. She pointed the gun in the direction of the intruders and sent a short burst their way before ducking down behind the counter.
Almost immediately a withering hail of answering fire came in her general direction, but most of the shots were inaccurate and she wasn’t seriously threatened by it.
The room around her, however, took a beating, as did the hallway leading from the reception area as bullets chewed into the walls, floor and ceiling.
Annja waited for a lull and then popped her head around the side of the island. Two of the intruders were headed down the hallway in front of her, trying to gain ground while she kept her head down.
Oh, no, you don’t.
She stuck the gun around the corner and held the trigger down.
When she looked again, the gunmen were on the ground, unmoving.
This angered their companions, for another blistering wave of bullets came in her direction. Annja simply hunkered down behind the workstation and rode it out.
Good thing she did, too, because as she rose to her knees to return fire, she glanced back the way she had come and saw three men crossing the storage area, headed for the door to the lab. The lead gunman saw her, as well, and snapped out a shot in her direction.
The bullet streaked past her ribs, coming so close as to tear the side of her shirt but missing her tender flesh.
Annja returned the favor by putting a bullet of her own right into the gunman’s face.
As the dead man fell back against the others struggling to get by him, Annja used the time, and the confusion, to scramble over and behind a different workstation. This one would give her more protection from the gunfire coming from the front of the house while simultaneously bringing her within arm’s distance of the door to the back hallway.
Once in place, she called her sword to hand.
As the first of the intruders moved cautiously forward into the room, his gun held out in front of him, Annja swung the sword downward, taking the hand holding the gun off at the wrist.
He started screaming, startling the man behind him, which gave Annja the split second she needed to step around the corner and fire past the injured man, taking out his companion in the process.
That should even up the odds a bit, she thought with satisfaction.
That was when she heard the clatter of something bouncing across the floor toward her.
Whirling, her eyes tracked the round egg-shaped object as it came to rest against one of the other workstations.
She was already moving as her mind registered what it was seeing, diving for the cabinets nearby, her only thought to get under cover as quickly as possible.
The grenade went off a moment later.
39
With his heart in his throat, Roux handed the address over the front seat to Henshaw, saying, “As fast as you can. Annja’s life depends on it.”
His majordomo needed no further urging. He stomped his foot down on the accelerator and with consummate skill began to weave the limo in and out of traffic as he sped through city streets, headed for Sebastian Cartier’s office.
Roux had made a trip like this once before, rushing off to save a young woman in his charge, only then he’d arrived too late and she’d perished at the hands of her English captors.
This time will be different, he told himself.
This time his young protégé would not be left to perish alone.
As they approached the address, they saw two dark-colored vans pull away from the curb and speed off in opposite directions. For a moment Roux considered giving chase; if they were Shaw’s men and they had the torc, this might be the only chance he would have to take them out. But his concern for Annja overrode his instincts and he watched them disappear down the street unhindered.
No sooner had Henshaw pulled to a stop in front of the house than Roux was out of the car and dashing toward the entrance, calling Annja’s name as he went.
The house looked like it belonged in war-torn Baghdad than on a quiet Parisian street. The door was open and from the walkway Roux could see that the room just inside—a reception area of some kind—had been riddled with gunfire. As he stepped inside, shell casings rolled underfoot and the air stank of cordite.
“Annja?” he called, desperately hoping for an answer.
Silence was the only reply.
He took a few steps forward. There were two exits, one to his left that opened into an office and another dead ahead that looked like it would take him deeper into the building. He could see into the room on his left, a ransacked office that appeared empty, and so he chose the other way out of the reception area.
A narrow hallway stretched out ahead of him and it was there that he found the first two bodies. He hurried forward, concerned, but upon getting closer it was obvious that they were both male. He couldn’t see their faces due to the ski masks they wore but that was fine; his interest in them immediately waned when he realized that neither of them was Annja.
The doors on either side of the hallway were locked, which left him only the direct route ahead.
Roux could hear sirens in the distance and knew he didn’t have much time. He had to find Annja and get out of there before the authorities arrived or there was going to be trouble.
He stepped over the bodies, being careful not to put his feet into the widening pool of blood that was seeping out of them and onto the floor, and then pushed ahead.
The room at the end of the hall was in even worse shape than the reception area had been. Cabinets hung half on and half off the walls, their exteriors riddled with bullet holes. Water shot up from a shattered sink and flowed down onto the floor where it mixed with a pile of broken glass and other debris. The ceiling and part of the wall in the far
corner had collapsed, burying the cabinets beneath in an avalanche of wood, plasterboard and ceiling tiles.
Sticking out of the pile of debris was the lower half of a woman’s leg, wearing blue jeans and a familiar style of hiking boot.
Annja!
Roux rushed over and quickly dug her out. Her face was covered in blood, a mask of crimson obscuring her features, and for a moment he feared the worst, but then he noticed the steady rise and fall of her chest and knew that she was merely unconscious. The blood was from a sizable cut at her hairline, and she was clearly bruised and battered, but she was alive and for that he was thankful.
He scooped her up and headed back the way he had come.
The sirens were louder, probably only a few blocks away now, and a small crowd was gathering outside. Henshaw was holding them off with stern looks and his impressive size, but it was obvious that it wouldn’t work for much longer. Several were already fondling their mobile phones, no doubt getting ready to take pictures of what they were seeing if they hadn’t already done so. It was time to get out of there.
“Let’s go!” Roux shouted as he rushed out of the house.
Henshaw had the back door open and the car running by the time Roux slid Annja into the backseat and climbed in after her. There were several shouts of concern from the crowd at that point, people openly wondering if they were witnessing a kidnapping, but Roux ignored them as Henshaw hit the gas and got them out of there just seconds before the police arrived at the scene.
Annja was still unconscious, but that was to be expected. Roux used the opportunity to give her a quick once-over, making certain he hadn’t missed any more serious injuries.
“Home or the hospital?” Henshaw asked from up front.
“Hospital.”
Definitely, a hospital. Just not one the public knew about.
As Henshaw drove, Roux picked up his cell phone again and made the call that he’d been putting off since earlier that morning.
