by Alex Archer
“I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” he said. “Why don’t you order from room service? I’m starving.” He closed the door behind him without waiting for a response, leaving Roux alone in the room.
35
Annja felt the bruises even before she was completely awake.
Her body bounced up and down on the unforgiving metal floor as the vehicle rocked and rolled on its suspension.
The ties binding her wrists had been supported by another set around her ankles and there was a gag across her mouth. She could taste the wad of cloth that had been stuffed in behind the gag to make sure she couldn’t be heard. Swimming back toward consciousness, it felt like she was drowning on the material, choking and gagging as she tried to suck down precious air. It took her a moment to master the panic and focus on breathing in slowly, calmly, through her nose.
She had no idea of where she was or what their destination might be.
The rear doors had small windows at the top. They’d been whitewashed, but still let in a faint glow of light that kept the darkness at bay. She couldn’t see anything through them, though. The most she could glean was that it was daylight outside—not that she knew if it was the same day, the next day or any day of any week. Gravity pulled her toward the doors as the vehicle jounced and shuddered up a rough track, climbing.
It was already cold in the pickup, but there was no mistaking the fact that the temperature was dropping as they traveled.
In her head she tried to visualize a map of the region in her mind, thinking about the hills and twisting roads. It gave her something to concentrate on as she tried to fight her way out of the drug-fog that still lingered inside her head.
Whatever she had been injected with wasn’t doing her any good. She felt slow, lethargic and like she didn’t really have control of her limbs. Having that stuff pumped into her veins twice within a matter of hours was not good at all.
There was an empty pit in her stomach where the hunger gnawed away.
She tried to ignore all of it, all of those different sensory inputs and distractions, as the map came into focus.
How far could the woman have taken her in an hour or two, assuming that was how long she’d been out?
Could she have reached any mountains?
Of course she could.
In that time they could have made it into the Pyrenees.
They could have been crossing into Spain or Andorra.
So why take her into the mountains?
What could be gained from that?
Apart from finding a nice secluded spot well off the beaten track to dump a body where it wouldn’t be discovered for months?
Annja didn’t like it, but it made a grim kind of sense.
But if the woman had wanted to kill her, she could have done it back at the church, put her corpse inside one of those old sarcophagi, and it would have taken years, if ever, before someone stumbled on it. So no, it was something else.
Every time she tried to move to ease the slowly mounting pain in the muscles around her shoulders, Annja felt the plastic dig deeper into the raw wounds, and that just made the pain worse. There was no point in trying to fight against the restraints. They weren’t going to break. If she’d been awake when they’d cuffed her, maybe. There was a way to brace your wrists against each other so when you pulled down hard and sharp the ties broke, but not from behind your back. So now she was just going to have to hope that the kidnappers gave her the opportunity to make a run for it.
The truck braked suddenly. She heard the tires spit gravel, spraying against the underside of the vehicle, the clattering chips of stone against the metal sounding like a hailstorm inside. Up front, the driver killed the engine and the world fell silent. She heard the cab door open and slam shut and the crunch of feet on deep snow moving around the side of the truck.
She closed her eyes and slumped, giving her best imitation of someone still doped up.
A key slipped into the lock and turned.
The back doors swung open together, letting in a sudden wash of light.
Annja squeezed her eyes shut against the invasive sun; even so it seeped through her eyelids, stinging.
“Time to move, sleepyhead,” the woman said, leaning into the back of the truck.
Annja had no plans to make this easy for her.
She lay motionless, waiting for the other woman to make her move.
The woman reached in and took hold of Annja’s ankle.
Annja moaned, like someone trying to claw her way back to consciousness, not resisting. She kept herself as limp as possible, expecting the woman to try to drag her out.
Instead—and so much better than she’d dared hope—she felt the tension suddenly go as the ties binding her ankles were cut.
The woman muttered to herself all the time, but Annja couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“If you think I’m going to carry you inside, you can think again,” she said finally, so Annja had to assume she was talking to her.
The chilly air filled the back of the truck quickly, bringing the temperature down fast. She was beyond cold, even in the thick fleece she was wearing. Without it, the cold would have been unbearable. She let out a groan, faking the slow return to consciousness, gambling that the woman wouldn’t stick her with another syringe. She didn’t. She reached toward Annja and yanked the gag away from her mouth and pulled out the wadding. Obviously they were somewhere remote enough she didn’t care about noise anymore.
“What the hell did you do to me?” Annja moaned, struggling to raise her head.
“Ah, so you are still with us. Pity.” The woman ignored the question. “It’ll take you a few minutes to come around, quite a while longer to clear your head completely.”
“What did you hit me with?”
“The same stuff they use to tranquilize elephants,” she said, holding another syringe where Annja could see it. “You should think yourself lucky my brother wants you alive. It would have been so easy to get the dose wrong.”
“Why are you doing this?” Annja asked, just to keep her talking.
“You’ll know soon enough,” she said, but there was something in her voice, a quality to it, a vagueness, that made Annja doubt that she knew herself. If her brother was keeping her in the dark, did that mean he didn’t trust her? Was that an angle she could work? If she was reading the woman right, she’d have been just as happy to kill Annja as deliver her alive, so she was going to need all the angles she could work to get out of this situation.
But at the end of the day she knew that all she had to do was to keep calm and wait for when her hands were free, and if that didn’t come, reach into the otherwhere with both hands tied and draw down on her abductors. No matter how dangerous they thought they were, she was infinitely more dangerous to them.
Annja levered herself into a sitting position, using her feet now that they were free. Changing positions relieved some of the excruciating pain.
The woman took a step away from the vehicle, revealing the sweeping mountain vista that lay behind her.
High snowcapped peaks seemed to crowd around them, reflecting the last of the day’s dying light.
Annja scanned the landscape, trying to pick out any signs of humanity.
There was nothing but nature, still wild and unconquered, as far as the eye could see.
“Okay, princess, move it,” the woman said, motioning for Annja to climb out. She still clutched the syringe in her right hand, brandishing it like a knife. Annja had no intention of taking a third shot.
Her chance would come.
She slid to the edge and set her feet down slowly until they settled on crisp snow that crunched under her weight.
As she stood upright, her legs buckled, struggling after being cooped up for so long. The woman caught her and hauled her up to her feet.
She dragged Annja a couple of steps.
Annja in turn dragged her feet.
“Any chance you could do something with my wrist
s?” she asked, pushing her luck.
“I know what you can do. Believe me, there’s no way in hell I’m going to let you pull that sword of yours, even if I had a gun in my hand.” So the grunts had reported back what had happened when they’d ambushed her. So much for the element of surprise.
She pushed Annja forward, making her walk around the side of the truck.
Annja crunched through the snow, feeling the ice just beneath the surface.
There were tracks in the snow, meaning the truck wasn’t the first vehicle to make the climb up the mountainside. They ended at an SUV that was parked beside a farmhouse, its gray slate roof covered with several inches of snow. The SUV’s tracks had only just begun to be filled by the latest snowfall.
With the sun dropped, the temperature was falling fast. She wished she’d put on her ski jacket instead of just the fleece. The wind swirled snow up and down in the air, driving it against the wall of the farmhouse in a steep drift.
The building had been cut into the mountainside, a feat of engineering in itself.
It was hard to imagine why anyone would go to such an effort to build a home here given the inhospitable terrain.
There were lights on inside, but that didn’t make the place feel any more welcoming than the ice and snow of the mountainside.
“Keep moving,” the woman said, pushing her in the back. “I’d hate to think that I’d brought you out here only for you to die of hypothermia.”
Through one of the bay windows Annja saw the flickering red glow of an open fire. A man sat beside it, talking on the telephone.
There was something familiar about him, even if his face was distorted in the firelight of the bubbled glass.
Annja paused midstep, trying to remember where she’d seen him before, knowing that she had, and hoping that remembering would be the key to unlock his motivations for dragging her out here as his prisoner. Another shove in the back got her moving again.
The man looked up from his telephone call.
In that instant, as they locked eyes, she realized where she’d seen him.
When she had met him before she’d made the mistake of thinking he was insignificant, someone who had just happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now she knew different.
Now she knew one piece of the puzzle.
36
Garin didn’t need twenty minutes.
He returned with a new laptop and a couple of bags brimming with additional purchases.
It took longer to install the software and get the machine up and running.
“I need a shower,” he said, heading toward the bathroom, treating the hotel room as if it was his own.
“What about that?” Roux nodded toward the laptop.
“It will take a while for all this stuff to load,” Garin assured him, disappearing into the small bathroom. Thirty seconds later the spray of the shower was running.
Roux felt as if he had reaped the whirlwind and its name was Garin Braden.
He glanced at the screen, with no idea of what was happening. Again all he could do was wait.
After another minute he could hear Garin singing to himself.
His cell phone rang. It was a blocked number. He snatched it up, knowing it couldn’t be Annja. That only left one alternative.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Roux, so good to speak to you again.”
“Cauchon,” Roux said. “You’ve had your fun. How about you tell me what this is all about? Man-to-man. There is no need to involve anyone else. Let’s keep this between us. Whatever you want, we can work this out.”
“I really don’t think we can.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Honestly? I want you to suffer. Are you suffering? It sounds as though you are. I hadn’t expected it to be this easy, but then every man has his pressure points, and if you know where to apply pressure he’s always going to break.”
“What have you done with Annja?”
“Ah, the delightful Miss Creed. She’s safe. For now.”
“Where?”
“Don’t take me for a fool, old man. She’s safe and that’s all you need to know.”
“Just let her go. I’ll give you whatever it is you want.”
Garin emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in nothing more than a towel. Roux gestured to the phone, and mouthed, It’s him.
Garin eased himself into the high-backed leather chair in front of the laptop, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he punched instructions into the command line.
“What could you possibly offer me?” Cauchon mused, enjoying himself. “Perhaps something for my collection?”
“Like the papers you had Garin steal from my house?”
“Very much like that, yes.”
“Name it, and it’s yours.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you want.”
“A reliable source tells me there’s a piece of armor…” Cauchon’s voice trailed off again, and even without him uttering another word Roux knew what he was talking about. There was more than one piece of armor in his collection, but there was only one piece that was related to Joan of Arc.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He tried the lie, but Garin was better at that than he was. He knew his voice wasn’t convincing. His inflections changed subtly, as if his soul refused to let him get away with the falsehood, which was ironic given the thousands of lies he’d told in his lifetime.
He looked across at Garin, who was still frantically hammering the keys of the laptop.
Cauchon laughed, a sound that seemed mean, bitter, cynical. There was a degree of cruelty in his voice that the man made no effort to mask. It was obvious he was enjoying having Roux dangling on a hook, the old man a worm ready to be lowered into the water.
“Did you really just try to lie to me? With the girl’s life on the line? Is there no level you won’t fall to? Don’t do it again, old man. We both know what we are talking about. And before you get any bright ideas to try to palm off a fake on me, I will recognize the original. Anything less, the woman dies. And that’s just the beginning. I have so many ways of hurting you, not least of which is exposing your secrets.”
“It will take me a few days,” Roux said, knowing he needed hours, not days, and all he was doing was stalling for time. Cauchon would know that, too, but if it bought him a couple of days it was worth it.
“Really? To return to your home, secure the item and return here with my prize? A couple of days?”
“As you’ve pointed out, I’m an old man,” Roux said. It sounded like a reasonable excuse, but the truth was the armor wasn’t in his vault. It was hidden somewhere far safer.
“Fine. Two days,” Cauchon said. “I will call you at your hotel. I will only dial the number once. If you don’t answer, you know what happens.”
The call ended.
Garin frowned. “Not enough time to narrow it down. I took a chance, tried a shortcut, assuming that he was in the vicinity of Carcassonne, and hoped that it would cut down the search time and give us a chance to pinpoint his location. No dice.”
“So it was a waste of time?”
“I didn’t say that. I managed to get a rough fix on him, maybe within a twenty-mile radius, but that was as much as I could manage.”
“Where?” Roux asked.
Garin swung the laptop around so he could see the map of Southern France that filled the screen. He jabbed a finger at a circle that covered much of the border between France and Spain.
“The Pyrenees?” he said.
“I started off with the wrong assumption. It cost us. I’m sorry. I didn’t think he’d have moved. Not now that we are here. I thought he’d want to be on top of us, having a laugh at our expense.”
“Is there nothing else you can do to narrow it down?”
“I’ve got a lock on the number he used to dial in, but given h
is MO, he’ll have ditched that SIM card already. One card, one call.”
“So, our best hope still lies in him using the number I got from his thug Dugarry. And if Cauchon knows the man’s been picked up by the police he could have destroyed that connection, too.”
“The alternative is to give him what he wants,” Garin said, putting it out there.
Roux didn’t like it; he said nothing.
Garin didn’t know about the piece of armor.
He had kept it secret all these years, one of the few he had kept from him, and wasn’t sure that he was ready to share it. Deep down, he just didn’t trust his companion.
“Come on, Roux. Be straight with me. He wanted something from you, I heard that much. Are you going to tell me what?”
“No,” Roux said.
There was no point in trying to pretend that he didn’t know what Garin was talking about. Better to simply refuse to answer.
“You don’t think that telling me what he’s after will help?”
“No. He’s a collector. He wants something else to add to his hoard.”
“And you’re not going to tell me what?”
“Not yet,” Roux said. “Think of it as a need-to-know basis. I’ll tell you when I think you need to know.”
The younger man shrugged but didn’t try to argue. “However you want to play it. This is your show. I’m just along for the ride. We get Annja back safe. That’s all that matters, right?”
Roux nodded. For now, at least, he had Garin where he wanted him. He just hoped that he’d be able to keep him there for the duration.
“So what now?”
“You stay here,” Roux said. “If you manage to get a fix on him, call me.”
“Are you heading back to your house?”
“Not yet. There’s something I need to do first. I’ll need to take your car after I’ve picked up a few things.”
Garin reached inside the pocket of the jacket that he had dropped on the bed and threw the bunch of keys to him. Roux caught them in one hand and tested their weight. No matter how much he tried to think about alternatives, he knew that he had to do this. He had kept that piece of metal hidden from the eyes of the world for centuries, but maybe this was the reason for that. If he could trade it for Annja’s life, then surely it was a small price to pay, no matter the potential long-term consequences.
