Celtic Fire

by Alex Archer

  He looked up. “I’ve got a tracker running on Roux’s phone,” he said. “He’s on the move and best guess is toward Holyhead. Be aware there’s no guarantee that it’s Roux. Llewellyn’s daughter could just as easily have put the phone in someone else’s car and be sending us on a wild-goose chase.”

  “That’s assuming she knows you can track it.”

  “Even a third grader knows this kind of stuff, Annja. It’s not magic.”

  The only relief was that she was heading toward the rendezvous point at the ferry terminal, which suggested Roux was with her.

  “Then we’d better get a move on.” In every thriller she’d ever read they’d made a point of saying how it was always better to reach a drop point well ahead of the other person, to get a good knowledge of the points of access and exit and control the scene. Awena was already a good hour ahead of them and time was wasting.

  “Eat first. You didn’t eat last night. I can’t remember seeing you eat since we got here. So we’re going nowhere until I know you’ve got some food inside you. No telling when we might get another chance.” Garin lifted the cloth from a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage and fried tomato.

  She wanted to argue with him, but this entire thing had always been about being two steps behind the Llewellyns, and without the mantle she and Garin had nothing to trade for Roux’s life.

  “So, you’ve met this Llewellyn woman. What’s she like? Apart from dangerously unhinged, that is,” Garin asked.

  “You mean is she capable of doing something stupid? Without a doubt. And given the fact we don’t have what she wants, well, stupid seems pretty likely.”

  “Meaning we’ve got a couple of hours to come up with some kind of plan to get Roux back.”

  “Nothing like a deadline to get the blood flowing and the brain working. So, any ideas?”

  “Beyond polishing off this plate of eggs and bacon? Nope.”

  “She saw us climbing the tower last night so she knows there are two of us.”

  “But she’s hardly likely to recognize me. She only saw me in the dark, and from a distance. That might play in our favor.”

  “It’s not a lot.”

  “Ah, you say that, but I can work miracles with a bit of gaffer tape and a smile.”

  “That sounds like you’re planning on kidnaping her yourself, MacGyver.”

  “Well, you did say she was pretty, didn’t you?”

  Annja shook her head. “Do women actually fall for your charm?”

  “All the time, especially attractive ones. Now, serious question—is she capable of murder?”

  Annja didn’t even have to think about it. There was only one answer, and it wasn’t the one he wanted to hear. “Yes. She would have killed me if I hadn’t been able to defend myself against her flaming sword.”

  “And Roux can’t draw Joan’s sword from the otherwhere.” Garin looked at the screen of his laptop, deep in thought. “Okay, well, that sharpens our objectives to a single point...we can’t let her get away,” he said. “We need to get that sword from her. Whatever the cost, we’ve got no choice but to pay the price.”

  “Even if it kills Roux, you mean.”

  “The old bastard’s not going to die,” he said. “He’s too wily and stubborn for that. And he’s been in worse scrapes than this down the years. Don’t write him off. We need to focus on what we can control, not what we can’t. Let Roux take care of himself. He’s been doing it all his life.” It was a good, rousing speech, but Annja wasn’t sure she believed a word of it.

  She wasn’t even sure Garin believed it himself.

  Chapter 39

  Awena bought limp wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches and lukewarm coffee from a mobile catering van parked on the side of the road. Following that she found a secluded spot farther away for them to eat without risking unwanted attention. She’d considered keeping the old man trussed up and feeding him one bite at a time, but if anyone had seen her they’d remember the sight. She had no real option but to cut him free and let him get out of the car to relieve himself.

  “Before you get any clever ideas, I’m younger than you and faster. And I’ve got the sword. You can run, but you can’t run far enough. And look around you—there’s no one to see if I cut you down. So let’s be grown-up about this. I get the mantle and no one gets hurt. That’s our endgame here. That’s the resolution that makes everyone happy. So don’t go ruining it by trying to run away.”

  “I’m an old man, Awena. I’ve got no intention of running anywhere again in my life.”

  “Good.” She felt a twinge of guilt at the sight of his wrists. They were red and raw after being tied for so long, but give him his dues, the old man hadn’t complained once. She looked at him. He seemed to have accepted his fate, whatever it might turn out to be. But that felt too easy. He could just be putting it on, wanting to lull her into a false sense of security while he bided his time, hoping the right moment would arrive. Well, there was going to be no moment. She was in control, and she was smarter than him.

  He ate slowly. She couldn’t blame him; as last meals went it wasn’t exactly the height of fine dining. She watched him.

  “What will you do when you have Arthur’s mantle?”

  “What will I do? Well, the very first thing I will do with it is use it to get revenge,” she said.

  “On Annja? She is an innocent in all of this.”

  “Innocent?” Awena said, incredulous. “How can she possibly be innocent? By what definition of the word? She killed my father. She would have killed me, too.”

  “Not Annja. You don’t know her like I do. She isn’t a killer. That’s not who she is. It’s not who you are, either, Awena. Believe me, if Annja Creed had intended to kill you, you’d be dead.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel...what? Like she saved me? Spared me? So I should feel grateful? Do you have any idea how powerful this sword is? Do you have any idea what it is capable of?”

  “I know that it is perfectly capable of killing old men who have never done anyone any harm.”

  “I don’t want to kill you, Roux. I just want what’s mine by rights. I want the mantle. Then you can go.”

  “I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about an old priest who only ever wanted to help people.”

  “I told you before that I don’t want to hear your lies. My father didn’t kill anyone,” she insisted. “He wasn’t that kind of man. He would carry spiders out into the field rather than crush them. He never hurt anyone in his life.”

  But even before the words had left her lips she knew that she was lying to him. Worse still, she was lying to herself. Once upon a fairy-tale time he hadn’t been capable of hurting a fly, but not so long ago, when she was too old to believe in fairy tales, she’d seen him lash out at Geraint, his own son, with the sword and knew he had been capable of much more harm. He hadn’t been able to control himself. So if Roux said that he had killed someone it wasn’t as out of the question as she wanted to believe.

  “I saw his body,” the old man said. He didn’t push, didn’t raise his voice, nor did he lower it to manipulate her into believing him. He simply told her his version of events. His truth. “There was an unmistakable burn on the corpse. You know about the burning, don’t you? You know what happens when an heir of the Last wields that sword. So tell me, who else could have done it?”

  “It must have been an accident,” she said. “Like when your precious Annja ran him off the road. That was an accident, wasn’t it?” she sneered. “Or maybe it was self-defense? Have you thought about that?”

  “It’s possible, of course, but explain to me why he hid the body under a bridge. As you said, why not call an ambulance, why not try and do everything possible to help him, even if he knew that the man was already dead?”

  She wanted to lash out
and hit him, just to shut him up.

  She couldn’t stand to hear what he was saying because it was true and she knew it. Until she’d held the sword herself she couldn’t have imagined herself capable of hurting someone, deliberately hurting someone, but that had changed the moment she wielded the blade against Annja Creed. And that hadn’t been self-defense. She’d planned it. Awena had enticed her to the house with every intention of killing her. And now she had a bigger plan, a plan that would right an even bigger wrong.

  So if the blade somehow brought out the killer in her blood, why was it unreasonable to think it had done the same for her father? The answer, of course, was that it wasn’t unreasonable at all.

  “Eat up. We’re going.” She produced another plastic tie to restrain him again, and as Roux raised his wrists for them to be bound she saw again the amount of damage that the first restraint had caused to his wrists. They were a bloody mess and only likely to get worse left untreated. She thought about slipping the tie around his ankles instead. That might stop him running away, but it wasn’t likely to stop him getting up to any dirty tricks—and with his hands free it was inevitable he’d make a grab for the sword.

  “This’ll hurt,” she said, but she didn’t cinch them as tightly as before. They wouldn’t slip off without him using the blood to work them loose, though, and that would hurt plenty. “Try anything and I’ll pull them so tight they cut through to the bone. Understand?”

  He stared back at her, holding her gaze unblinking, then nodded slowly.

  Once.

  It was enough.

  She slid behind the wheel and started the engine. The drive to the ferry terminal in Holyhead wouldn’t take more than half an hour. She wanted to be there as soon as she possibly could, though. Every extra minute there could make all the difference. She’d get to see the lie of the land, for a start. There would be places perfect for ambush and other places made for hiding in. But she was interested in the most public of places. Areas where they’d be at low risk of someone doing something heroic, especially Annja Creed. Places where she wouldn’t be able to pluck a sword from thin air without being captured on security camera and raising a lot of questions she wouldn’t want to answer.

  Once Awena had the mantle she wanted to be able to get out of there as quickly as possible. She didn’t care what happened to Roux; she didn’t need to hurt him. Her plan, when it came right down to it, was to slip away unnoticed once she had the mantle in her hands.

  And with something capable of turning her invisible to the naked eye, surely that wouldn’t be too much of a challenge....

  Chapter 40

  Traffic was backlogged more than a mile as the queue to the ferry terminal ground to a halt.

  Annja was glad that they had set off early, not that it looked like it was going to make a lot of difference. She glanced in her wing mirror to see that Garin was still a couple of cars behind her and not moving, just as he had been for the past half an hour. Things would start moving when they opened the ferry doors, no doubt. They’d decided that it would be best if they arrived separately on the off chance Awena wouldn’t realize Garin was there. They didn’t know how much she really knew about their team; it was unlikely Roux had betrayed them with any meaningful details, but she could have been watching them a lot longer than they’d suspected. There was no telling what precisely there was left in the whole element-of-surprise department, but there was no point simply assuming the worst.

  They had two cars, so use two cars. It was as simple as that, really.

  She edged forward another car’s length in the time it took for the DJ on the radio to spin another track, then another during the news bulletin as the queue slowly eased forward.

  It was still going to be a while before she reached the front but at least she was moving.

  The clock on the dash flashed 12:03. She had less than an hour until the rendezvous.

  She regretted giving in to Garin’s demand that they should eat before they left the hotel.

  That plate of greasy breakfast could prove to be the difference between a decent recon and going in blind. It was stupid walking into a prearranged meet with no idea what was waiting for you. This was Awena’s meet. She’d chosen the place for a reason. Annja didn’t know what that reason was, which meant that Awena had at least one trump card if not all of them in her deck. She knew something about the site that they didn’t. Local knowledge.

  Her phone lay on the passenger’s seat beside her. She kept glancing across at it in case it was ringing and for some reason she couldn’t hear it. There was a lot of noise around her, not just the incessant blather of the DJ, who seemed intent on proving he was the funniest man alive with the aid of prerecorded skits.

  It wasn’t a watched pot that would never boil; it was going to ring. And the closer it got to the allotted time, the more likely it was to happen.

  Two more songs, a few more yards of ground crept across.

  It rang.

  Annja snatched it up.

  “I can see you,” Awena said.

  “Hard not to, I’d think,” Annja replied.

  “Quite. Coward’s yellow. Follow the signs to the short-term parking lot and wait for me to call you back.” She held on for a response. The phone went dead. She hadn’t asked if she had the mantle. Annja had been prepared to lie if the question was raised.

  A car behind sounded its horn; the cars in front of her had moved up, opening a gap between them.

  Annja raised a hand in apology to the driver behind her, then muted the radio and called Garin, using the hands-free speaker to try and hide the fact she’d made the call.

  “She made contact?” he asked.

  “Yep. Short-term parking and wait for her to make contact again.”

  Despite the hands-free precaution, she didn’t want to stay on the line too long. There was every chance Awena could see her, not just the car, and talking to herself wasn’t exactly normal behavior.

  “I’ll keep eyes on you. Don’t do anything stupid. I won’t be far away if you need me.”

  “Nothing stupid apart from getting out of the car to meet a woman who’s just kidnapped Roux and has already tried to kill me once this week.”

  “Right, nothing stupid.” He killed the call from his end.

  She followed the sign for the short-term parking. It led her away from the ramps where most of the cars were crawling single file. Cargo bay doors of the ferry that would transport them over the Irish Sea to Dublin were now open.

  Rather than take the first vacant spot she saw, Annja carried on to the end of the first row and around onto the second before she reversed into a spot there.

  It gave Garin the chance to park close enough to maintain eye contact and put her near the terminal building.

  She left the engine running.

  She couldn’t see anyone in the surrounding cars. She couldn’t obviously see Awena on either the roof or observation deck of the terminal building, either. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. She had to assume Awena Llewellyn could see her and knew she’d parked.

  So why wasn’t she calling?

  Perhaps the delay was because she’d moved beyond her eyeline? It wouldn’t be easy to find a vantage point that allowed full three-sixty coverage of the lot and the surrounding network of roads and buildings. The place was a labyrinth of industrialization. There were buildings with tall chimneys and buildings sprouting communication masts and others that had huge steel roller doors and transit crates stacked up outside. There were a thousand places she could be hiding; none of them would allow her to see everything.

  Annja shut off the engine and picked up her cell phone. Once she was outside of the car she leaned against the canary-yellow bodywork waiting for the woman to call.

  The phone rang again.

  “Stay where
you are. I’m coming to you,” Awena said, and again Annja was left holding a dead line.

  She leaned against the car, alert for any movement, looking around to see where the woman was coming from.

  Garin had parked two bays over, and was facing her.

  She tried not to look at him as she swept her gaze around the lot.

  Even so, Awena had almost reached her before Annja realized it, clutching what could only be her sword. The blade was wrapped in a piece of sacking.

  “Where is it?” Awena asked when she was close enough.

  “Where’s Roux?”

  “Show me the mantle.”

  “We could do this all day. I’m not showing you the mantle until you prove to me that Roux’s unharmed.”

  “You’ll just have to trust me.”

  “Uh-uh, not going to happen. Where is he?”

  “Fine.” Awena reached into her pocket and pulled out a ticket. “He’s on the ferry, fast asleep in the trunk of my car. You’re going to have to be quick if you’re going to get to him before the ship sails. This ticket is for you once I have the mantle. I told you, I’ve got no intention of hurting him.”

  Annja snatched the ticket from her hand.

  She didn’t hesitate; she ran between the parked cars, straight to where Garin was clambering out of his car. It wasn’t the smartest move tactically—she thought about disarming the woman, taking her down and making sure she couldn’t use the sword—but the cargo bay doors would be closing any minute and they needed to get to Roux.

  “He’s on the ferry,” she told him, thrusting the ticket into his hand. “Get him. I’ll deal with her.”

  Garin didn’t waste any time. With a squeal of tires on asphalt he reversed out of his space and cut across the lot, angling for the front of the snake of cars.

  “You double-crossing bitch!” Awena screamed as she ran toward Annja, lips curled back in a feral snarl. “Where is it? Where is my mantle?”