by Alex Archer
This was about ending things—one thread that had been dangling for centuries, another for considerably less time but promised the sweet succor of vengeance. He ached for satisfaction.
Cauchon took a deep breath, the nib of the pen still a hairsbreadth from the paper, then added a name into the space where the Maid of Orleans’s name would once have been.
His hand trembled.
He steeled himself.
This was not the time for doubt or hesitation.
He wrote the name that belonged there.
Annja Creed.
23
“What have you done this time, Garin?” Roux said. There was no mock-exasperation in his voice. There was only cold fear. He rubbed at the white bristles of hair along his jawline. “I thought this Cauchon had worked out our connection, and convinced myself that he was using you to get to me. I was wrong. This proves that. I don’t know how, but he knows about what you are, Annja. He knows who you are.”
Annja sat on the edge of the bed, trying to take it all in. “But how…?”
She looked at the old man, but he couldn’t look her in the eye.
Did he know something else that he wasn’t telling her? Was some secret from his past about to come back to haunt him, to haunt both of them?
Could someone really have stumbled across the truth about what she had become?
“Do you think there are others?” she asked.
“Others? I don’t follow.”
“Like you and Garin. Like me?”
His expression didn’t change. He shook his head slowly in denial, but Annja was sure that the thought had flashed across his mind. Had he ever considered the possibility before?
Why would they be the only ones like this in the world?
If it was possible for people like Garin and Roux to defy time, held here for some higher purpose, then why couldn’t there be others?
“We have to find him and stop this,” Roux said. “He’s still here, I’m sure of that.” He was thinking on his feet. “He will have been watching you. He must have been, to make that call. We can only assume he won’t leave until he’s finished whatever it is he’s planning to do. So we have to make sure that we stop him.”
“Easier said than done. Where do we start?”
“We have one obvious link to him—the two men who tried to kidnap you,” he said finally. “If he doesn’t come to us, we go to him. Through them.”
“You must have forgotten about the whole police custody thing. There’s no way that the gendarmerie is just going to let them walk away because we want them to.”
“Who said anything about walking away? We’re going to walk in there.”
“You mean spring them?” Annja asked, not quite sure she was following the old man’s thought processes. Every now and then he acted like the law just didn’t apply to him. It took her a moment to switch gears sometimes and remember that. “I’m not sure I want to know.” The one thing she was absolutely sure of was that no matter what she said, Roux would go ahead and do whatever he wanted.
It was something they had in common.
“So, we just show up at the police station and ask to speak to a couple of gunmen they’re holding in custody?”
“I can do anything I set my mind to, young lady,” he said, flashing her a dangerous grin. “All we need are the right credentials, and they can always be arranged for a price.”
“Credentials?”
“In this case, a business card, a good suit and a dose of confidence that will border on arrogance, as if I’m used to people prostrating themselves at my feet and saying yes to my every whim. Our boys will no doubt be sitting there hoping that Cauchon has hired a top-notch lawyer for them rather than throw them to the wolves. I shall be their advocate.”
Annja shook her head. “You’ve been spending far too much time with Garin.” She laughed before realizing just what she was saying. It was enough to kill the conversation stone dead. She checked her watch. Philippe, her on-site cameraman, would be waiting for her. As much as she wanted to get swept away with the chase, the adventure that came with keeping company with Garin and Roux, she still had a job to do, no matter who might be watching.
As long as she stayed in public places, no one was going to try anything.
And if she wandered off the beaten track, she was more than ready to protect herself.
In fact, she was kind of hoping that someone would try something.
Annja left Roux making calls, barely getting a raised hand in acknowledgment as she walked away. She needed to pick up some things from her room before she hit the road. There was still plenty of daylight left. She called Philippe as she hurried along the corridor, and was fumbling in her pocket for her room key by the time he took the call.
“Where are you?”
“I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes,” she said, avoiding answering the question. He wouldn’t appreciate the fact she was back in the hotel while he was working. She’d worked out that much about him already. “Have you managed to get the shots you need?”
“Pretty much,” he said. “But I should warn you, my throat is starting to long for an ice-cold beer, so if you want to get this bit finished before I give in to the siren song, you better hurry.” He was grinning as he talked, pretending to be indignant, and hamming up the French reputation.
“You better tell me where you are, then.”
“I’m outside the cathedral, but I’ll be finished what I want to do here in ten minutes, fifteen tops.”
“I’ll be there,” she said.
She hung up, slipped the phone back into her pocket and unlocked the room. It had an old-fashioned charm. She liked that the floors weren’t quite even, that the walls weren’t quite straight, the corners not quite square. The building might not be as ancient as the city walls, but it was old and it belonged there. It had the kind of gravitas you couldn’t manufacture with new builds.
A breeze fluttered the curtains as she closed the door.
An instant too late, she realized there was someone in the room.
She tried to turn, reaching into the otherwhere for the sword as she moved, but the crushing weight of a body slammed her against the wall before she could close her hand around it. She felt the searing stab of pain as rough plaster gouged into her cheek. An involuntary cry escaped her lips as she was pinned, unable to move, a huge muscular arm pressing into her nape, a hip into the small of her back.
She smelled a cheap cologne that was doing a poor job of masking stale sweat.
She tried to speak, but that only increased the pressure on her body, until she felt a scratch on her arm.
Annja threw everything she had into trying to push the man away, but he was incredibly strong. A brute. She realized just how vulnerable she could be without her sword.
As darkness began to swirl around her, all she could think of was Roux.
24
It turned out to be easier than Roux had hoped.
It hadn’t taken long to pick out a decent suit that hung well enough that it could be mistaken for a made-to-|measure garment if a person wasn’t sophisticated enough to know better. It still cost more than the average policeman’s monthly salary and looked like it did. That was what mattered. The clothes maketh the man. In this case, one of wealth and taste—a successful man who meant business. The manager of the store had been only too happy to come to his hotel room with a selection once he had been given his measurements over the phone, and in less than two hours Roux was ready to play his hand.
What had taken a while was getting the names of the two men being held in custody. But he’d worked his magic, contacting an old flirtation at Interpol who called in a couple of favors to access the information for him in return for a promised dinner next time he was in town. Of course, there was always a risk that the local law enforcement officers would get huffy because some distant agency was muscling in on their turf, but huffy or not, they gave up the names. Garin would have been able to do it,
and probably faster, but right now Roux wasn’t inclined to offer him the time of day, let alone ask for his help.
He strode up the steps of the police station, pausing on the threshold to adjust his suit, before approaching the desk sergeant.
“I’m here to see my clients,” Roux stated, putting his gilt-edged business card on the desk in front of the uniformed man. “Marcel Dugarry and Étienne Rameaux.”
The desk sergeant looked him up and down slowly, taking in the sharp suit and the crisp white shirt as well as the ridiculously expensive diamond studded cuff links that completed the ensemble, then returned his attention to the card again.
“You got here quickly,” he said.
“As I am sure you appreciate, my clients get the best treatment money can buy.”
The officer snorted and made a note in his ledger. “One minute,” he said, picking up the telephone on the desk beside him.
He talked quickly to a colleague somewhere else in the station, and a moment later a sallow-eyed man emerged through a combination pass-locked door.
“Mr. Reyes?” the young plainclothes officer said.
Roux inclined his head.
“Follow me, please,” he said. He seemed polite enough, but give him enough time down here swimming amid the detritus of humanity, and all of his smoothness would rub off and leave a jagged disdain for officers of the court who represented the men they had in custody. It was inevitable. The legal eagles were the enemy of the honest cop, twisting words and truths, looking for any technicalities they could wrangle out of a situation to get guilty men off. He didn’t say another word as he led Roux down the institutionally grim corridor, stopping at the fourth door.
He opened it and stepped aside to allow Roux to enter.
“There will be someone outside at all times,” he said. “Just knock when you’re ready to come out.”
“I know the procedure,” Roux said. He waited until the door had closed before taking a seat on the other side of a steel table across from the man who was sitting there. He had no idea which of the two thugs he was dealing with, but judging a book by its cover, he didn’t think he was dealing with the brains of the operation.
“Who the hell are you?” the man asked.
“I am your salvation,” Roux replied.
“Huh?”
“I’ve been asked to get you out of here,” Roux said, which wasn’t entirely a lie. Annja had probably said something like that during the conversation, even if not explicitly using the words spring them as a request but rather as a question.
“Yeah?” His eyes had brightened, though now it was a case of the lights being on but no sign of anyone at home. He shuffled in his chair, pulling himself upright.
“I need to make sure that you’ve got your story straight.”
The man nodded. “Sure. Yeah. Of course. Are you going to spring Étienne, too? Or just me?”
“What do you think? Would I be sent to get you out of here and leave him to take the rap?”
“Right, yeah, of course. Leave no man behind.”
“Indeed. I need to get you both out of here if I’m going to make this all go away.”
“You think you can do that?”
“I know I can,” Roux said.
“Right, so what do you want me to say? Anything you need saying, just give me the script.”
“Before we start, I need you to tell me what you’ve told the police so far.”
He’d found one of the easiest ways to gain a man’s trust was to get him to repeat whatever story he had trotted out—truth or lies, it didn’t really matter. It was the sharing that did. It built a bridge between them, made them feel complicit. Roux was confident he would be able to tell truth from fiction, particularly when he had spoken with the second man. There was bound to be some common ground in their stories that would come together as a reasonable recollection of the sequence of events.
If Annja was right about how far away the police were when she left them standing by their car, they hadn’t had time to concoct an elaborate story. And going back to that book-cover judgment, this guy didn’t seem as if he was all that creative.
Roux sat back and listened as the man rambled on without making eye contact.
Every now and then he looked up at Roux for a reassurance that he hadn’t told them anything he shouldn’t have.
“So who is the woman?” Roux asked.
“Her name is Creed. Annja Creed. She’s supposed to be some kind of television personality. I’ve never seen her on anything, though, so she can’t be all that famous.”
Roux wasn’t surprised. Dugarry looked like the kind of man who preferred sport, action movies and porn, though not necessarily in that order.
“And you say that she attacked you?”
“Yeah, the crazy woman pulled a kind of sword out of nowhere like she was a magician or something.”
“And you pulled a gun on her in self-defense? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Self-defense, that’s it, man, right there, that’s it.” Dugarry nodded just a little too rapidly, a smile starting to spread across his face to reveal a missing tooth.
“And that’s what you’ve told the police?”
More nods.
“So how did you know her name?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if she attacked you, and you were acting in self-defense, how did you find out what her name was?”
The man’s face went blank again. He was clearly so used to telling lies that the truth wasn’t always easy to find when he went looking for it.
“Did you tell the police that you knew her name?”
He paused again, perhaps trying to play the whole of the conversation back inside his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said at last.
“So Cauchon told you what to do?” he said, providing the answers, but making it sound like a question rather than a statement. The nod came easily to the man.
It had been a long shot.
Dugarry could have denied having anything to do with Cauchon. He might even have known him by a different name, but Roux had gotten lucky.
The thug glanced toward the door, then leaned in to make sure that no one could overhear what he was saying. “I didn’t think he would send anyone to get us out of here,” he confided.
“How many times have you worked for him?”
“A few. Usually just collecting things, carrying packages, you know?”
“Did you ever look at what was inside?”
The man shook his head rapidly. “Never,” he said. “We were paid enough not to.”
“What about this time?”
“We were just supposed to pick her up and take her to Cauchon.”
“Whether she wanted to go or not?”
“Whatever force was needed, that was what he said. Just get her there alive.”
“Where were you supposed to take her?”
“We were to call him when we had her, and he’d tell us where we needed to go.”
“And the police have the phone?”
Another nod. Roux admitted that he’d been fortunate to get access to Dugarry without any trouble, but the odds of him getting a look at the phone were pretty slim. Thinking on his feet, he gambled. “That’s a shame. Cauchon uses a variety of cell phones as I’m sure you can appreciate. I could have warned him to destroy the one used for this job if I knew the number.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Dugarry said, and rattled off a string of digits. The thug smiled. “I’m good with numbers.”
25
Pain tore through Annja’s shoulders as she tried to move.
Her wrists were bound together behind her back and her ankles were tied together, too. The ground was cold and hard beneath her. In the near-darkness she had no means of knowing where she was.
She tried to move, but all she did was make the pain worse.
“There’s no point in struggling.”
It was a woman’s voice.
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Annja tried to twist her head to get a look at her.
All she could make out was a dull light in the corner of her eye and a shape behind it. Just a shape. It was impossible to get a good look at her captor.
“What do you want?” she asked, feeling the numb heat of pain on one side of her face from where she’d been slammed against the wall. There was no way it had been the woman who had taken her out, which meant someone else was hiding in the darkness. “If it’s money you’re after…”
The woman laughed. “Money? How little you understand… This has nothing to do with money,” she said.
“What, then?”
“That’s not for me to say. I am simply doing my job. I was told to keep you here until the time is right.”
“Right for what?”
The woman didn’t answer. Annja heard the click of heels on the hard stone floor. She put the woman from her mind. Right now, she would be better served spending her time trying to work out where she was, rather than worrying about why she was there.
The floor was cold and damp against her face. There was a familiar smell. It took her a while to identify the chill mustiness. Her eyes became gradually more accustomed to the meager light. In it, she saw the evidence that confirmed her suspicions.
“A crypt,” Annja murmured, without realizing she’d spoken the thought aloud.
“Most perceptive,” the woman said.
The light began to move. It was an oil-filled lantern. The woman placed it on top of a large sarcophagus close to where Annja lay.
Annja tried to move her head again. She managed to get a better view of the blonde standing in front of her. Early thirties, maybe, but the light wasn’t flattering. She was well toned but not muscular, which confirmed that she wasn’t the unwashed mountain of muscle that had caught up with her in the hotel room.
She pushed against the pain, and by sheer force of will managed to get into a sitting position, propped up against the wall; only it wasn’t a wall, it was a stone sarcophagus. The carvings dug into her spine. Annja tried to move her shoulders, working the muscles against the discomfort. It didn’t help. If anything, she only succeeded in making it hurt worse.
