Rogue Angel 54: Day of Atonement

by Alex Archer

  What he didn’t like was the fact that the ancient piece of metal was closer to Cauchon than he was just then.

  “You might want to put some clothes on,” he said to Garin, pocketing the keys.

  “I’m hoping to surprise the maid.”

  “I’m sure you will.” Roux shook his head and left the younger man to it.

  37

  “You?” Annja said when she was finally led into the room where the man was finishing his telephone conversation.

  There was a passing resemblance between him and the woman who had brought her to this remote place—obviously brother and sister, even if he was fifteen, maybe twenty, years older.

  “Expecting someone taller?” the man asked in English, laughing bleakly as she was pushed farther into the room.

  He moved a control on the arm of his wheelchair to turn it so that he faced her.

  Through the window she hadn’t seen the chair, and thought he was merely sitting to make the call. But as she stepped through the door and saw the wheelchair, she recognized him as the man who’d saved her from the falling masonry with his warning cry. She’d assumed that he’d been there by coincidence, caught up in her near-disaster by chance, but he’d been there to watch.

  His sister had been with him, pushing the wheelchair, which meant they had a third man in their team, someone to set the masonry in motion—assuming his sister hadn’t set some sort of remote charge in the stone to blow it free of the wall.

  “Indeed, me.”

  “I know you. You were there. At the church.”

  The man’s face twisted into a cruel smile. “Indeed I was. And believe me, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. From where I was sitting, it looked as though you had a lucky escape. You might even say someone must have been watching over you.”

  “So, was it just meant to shake me up, or do you want me dead? Rock falls, ambushes on the country roads. Not exactly subtle.”

  “But effective. You are here now, after all. But to answer your first question, was it meant to shake you up? Not really. Do I want you dead? Again, not really. It’s more what you represent, what makes you more than just Annja Creed, television personality. That aspect, I cannot deny, yes, indeed, I do want to see that destroyed. But before that, I want to humble an arrogant old man. You might know him. He calls himself Roux. We have unfinished business.”

  “The old man shouldn’t give you any trouble,” the blonde woman said.

  “Never underestimate old men, Monique, particularly one as old as Roux. You live that long, you learn a trick or two about surviving, isn’t that right, Miss Creed?”

  “He’s clever, if that’s what you mean,” Annja said, deliberately ignoring the gibe about Roux’s age. She made a show of trying to free herself from the restraints again, giving them something else to think about. It earned her a cuff across the back of the head from Monique.

  “I’m going to ask you to do me a favor, Miss Creed. Please don’t take me for a fool. It’s one thing I really cannot abide. We both know who Roux is, or perhaps I should say what he is. The same, I suspect, goes for his partner in crime, Garin Braden, though I have not confirmed the link as yet.”

  “Garin?” She hadn’t meant to say his name aloud. Fatigue and the lingering drug-fugue still fogged her brain.

  “Are you going to pretend that you don’t know him, either? How precious. Perhaps you would like to see a few photographs to jog your memory. I’m sure we’ve got a few shots of the two of you together if that would help? You do make quite a handsome couple. I assume you are lovers. There is something very intimate about the way you interact. Would he cry for you? Put roses on your grave?”

  Annja said nothing.

  Anger built inside her. There was no release for it. She stared at the man in the chair, knowing that even if her hands were free, even if she had the comforting familiarity of the sword in them, she couldn’t strike him down. His sister, on the other hand, yes, she could hurt her. They had a date with pain.

  “What do you want with me?” Annja asked, barely masking the frustration in her voice.

  “Patience. All good things come to she who waits.”

  “Humor me.”

  He inclined his head slightly to the right, as if weighing the notion, then straightened in the chair. “Why should I? Why should I make your time here any more tolerable than it needs to be? I will be honest with you, Miss Creed. I have no reason to take your life. For all I care you can walk away from here once I have cast out the demon that possesses you. That is all I care about. Alas, I have to admit that I cannot guarantee your survival. But you are young. You are strong. You might indeed live to see the ritual completed.”

  She couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly. Demon? Possession? She was dealing with a madman. That changed everything. “Demon? What are you talking about?”

  “Am I talking to the creature inside your skin? Or is it still you? Demons wear many faces, many of them comely. They survive because of their beauty. They lure in the innocent and take refuge in their skin. We both know there is an entity hiding itself within you, and that it hides itself well, but we’ve seen the evidence with our own eyes, how when under threat you can conjure weapons out of thin air, how you are impervious to bullets. None of that is natural, Miss Creed, we both know that. But soon I will have the last item I need to be able to rid you of this thing, you have my word. The ritual will not be painless. I wish that it could be, but to liberate the flesh of its demon host is no easy thing. It will feel as though your soul is being flensed.”

  “You’re insane,” Annja said, unable to bite her tongue.

  “No, Miss Creed, I am very, very sane. I have dedicated most of my adult life to the pursuit of this justice, and it will be mine. It ends here. And your friend Roux will help me by bringing the final item here to trade for your life. Alas, he does not understand that it is actually your mortal soul he is trading for, not the flesh.”

  Annja had no idea what the man was rambling on about; she focused on one thing he’d said: Roux was on his way.

  She would bide her time.

  There was no need to do anything to jeopardize her safety; as long as the madman didn’t have his final gris-gris he couldn’t carry out his ritual. And he wouldn’t hurt her if he truly believed she was possessed of some all-powerful demon for fear of waking it.

  She had time.

  Under normal circumstances Roux’s arrival would have meant Garin wasn’t far behind, but after what had gone down at the chateau with Garin stealing from the old man, that meant these weren’t normal circumstances. She had to assume they’d be on their own. If he turned up, passing for whatever version of white knight Garin Braden could muster, then that’d be a bonus.

  “What do you want me to do with her?” Monique asked her brother.

  “The basement, I think. Then turn the heat on down there so she won’t freeze to death. Make sure she has food and drink, too. We aren’t barbarians.”

  “How am I supposed to eat when I’ve got my hands tied behind my back?” Annja asked, doing her best to make it sound like a question, not a challenge. She didn’t care about food. It was all about getting her hands free.

  He looked at her, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Let me guess—we free your hands, your demon conjures that sword again and you attempt to cut us down where we stand? Is that the plan?”

  Annja shrugged.

  “Why not?” he said. “Once you’re down there you can play with your sword to your heart’s content. Your hands have been tied for hours. It’ll be a miracle if you can manage to lift a teacup. I don’t think we need to worry about your sword for a while.”

  “Are you sure?” Monique asked. “We don’t know what the bitch is capable of.”

  “Unless you want to nursemaid her for the next two days, I don’t see that we have any choice.”

  “We could just sedate her again,” Monique said.

  “That’s always an option,” he agreed. �
��I’ll leave it to you. Just try not to break her.”

  Monique turned to Annja. “It looks like it’s just the two of us for a while.” Before Annja could say anything Monique propelled her toward the door with a vicious shove.

  As far as Annja was concerned, Roux couldn’t get there soon enough.

  38

  Roux set the GPS on Garin’s rented 4x4 even though he could have found his way without it.

  It had been a long time since he had last made the journey—and from Roux’s perspective a long time meant centuries, not months or years. The last time it had been on horseback.

  There had been times—plenty of them—when he’d been glad that he had hidden the piece of history somewhere that Garin would never find it. As much as their relationship was one of love and hate, the one thing fundamentally lacking was trust between the two, and that had been damaged for centuries with Garin doing everything in his power to stop the old man from tracking down the scattered shards of Joan’s blade. Go up against someone often enough and that feeling of distrust would never go away. Now, Roux contented himself with trusting Garin Braden about as far as he could throw him.

  It had been years since he had last read Guillaume Manchon’s ledger. The court scribe had been right there at the end, or for Garin and Roux, the beginning. There was enough in there to betray the both of them, but more, he feared, there was a clue that might lead the right reader to the one thing that Garin had so desperately craved: the chance to make sure the sword of Saint Joan was never whole again. Garin Braden would always do what was best for Garin Braden. It wasn’t about them now, though. It was about Annja’s life and what those documents—so filled with ancient superstition and religious dogma—might mean for her.

  He could not allow the sword to be shattered again.

  The light was dying as the weak winter sun sank low in the sky despite the fact it was only late afternoon. He had no thoughts of stopping for a break, not even for a second.

  It would be fully dark before the jagged outline of the Pyrenees rose in the distance. All he could do was concentrate on the road ahead and hope that the time would pass as quickly as the distance. He tried to keep to a steady speed, but the narrow roads weren’t plowed with the same regularity as the city streets he’d left behind. More than once he found himself closing in on a truck a little too quickly, risking a slide as he touched the brakes, or had to pull out into the path of another vehicle in an aggressive passing maneuver only to be greeted by the blaring horns and flashing lights of the oncoming traffic.

  As he drove, the words of Bernard Gui played themselves over and over in his mind.

  He had read them often enough over the years, understanding the notes he had made and believing them without an ounce of doubt.

  There were plenty of others who followed after him who colored their writings with their beliefs, with the edicts of the church and the declarations that the world wanted to hear, not the independent thinking that challenged the world around them. Gui had been different. He had written only the truth as he saw it. And that was why Guillaume Manchon’s papers were of such importance. Coupled with Gui’s writings they spoke of secrets never to be told.

  Like it or not, he was in a race, the finish line: getting to the people who still carried the knowledge before Cauchon did.

  Roux had trusted them in the past and had no reason to suspect that they would let him down now, but if his enemy was prepared to go to the extremes of murder to get what he wanted, then they were at risk. He didn’t like putting innocent people at risk. It went against every vow he’d ever made and still held dear.

  The journey might have taken only three hours on a good clear day, but when the latest snowfall began to transform into a proper storm he knew it was going to take a lot longer than that on these roads.

  Trucks that had been racing down the road slowed alarmingly as the conditions deteriorated rapidly. Big wheels lost their grip, sliding in the compacted surface as the road began to climb. Roux slowed, but not as much as the others, fishtailing on the ice to save a few precious seconds with each corner.

  The traffic began to thin over the course of the next twenty minutes, the driving conditions growing harsher until he could barely see a couple of feet beyond the hood for a mass of snow falling faster than the wipers could sluice it away.

  He hadn’t risked the fastest route, deliberately. He wasn’t a risk taker in general, and the fastest route involved running hard around high peaks where there were no barriers on the side of the treacherous roads to stop him from plunging hundreds of feet down into any of the many snow-filled ravines. This way involved fewer deathly drops and border controls. The border police, such as they were in this region, were primarily interested in the heavily loaded trucks passing though in a steady stream, some bringing contraband over the border.

  The main difference between him and them, though, was that he wasn’t heading into Spain. He was aiming for the tiny principality of Andorra in the knowledge that it would have changed beyond all recognition in the intervening years since his last visit.

  The country had a population of less than a hundred thousand, but attracted more than ten million tourists every year because, while time hadn’t exactly stood still, life had moved at a very different pace to the rest of Europe and the skiing was good. As was always the case, many of the locals had embraced the opportunities tourism presented while others resented the presence of so many visitors. But then, plenty of people clung to the past as if they were afraid that it would be taken away from them and lost forever.

  He crested the final hill and began the descent into Andorra, passing the yellow sign that marked the city limits for the parish of Canillo.

  Even through the churning snow Roux could see so many changes, most notably the arrival of electricity, and streetlights that lit the place like Bastille Day.

  Eventually the car crawled into the parish proper.

  He pulled over to the side of the road, realizing just how tightly he’d been gripping the wheel. A car like that was built for rough travel, winding coastal roads, cross-country trips and inclement weather. Even so, the goat tracks he’d taken it down were pushing it to the extreme and his white knuckles were living proof of that.

  Roux flexed his fingers to relieve the cramp, glad that his joints didn’t feel quite as ancient as they really were.

  He opened the door and clambered out of the 4x4. His boots crunched as he stepped onto the fresh snow.

  The boots, along with the coat that he grabbed from the passenger seat, would help deal with the elements at least, but he was going to need more than that if he was going to come out of the next twenty-four hours alive.

  It was only a short walk to the meeting place, but as the snow began to thicken it made walking difficult, the wind driving it into his face, into his mouth. He walked with his head down, knowing that the last thing he wanted to do was to be stranded in this place, and every hour the snow fell the greater the likelihood of that happening became.

  He forced himself to walk faster, leaning into the wind.

  After a couple of minutes he couldn’t feel the cold on his face; he’d lost all feeling in his extremities. He didn’t slow down. For almost fifteen minutes he trudged down the hillside, stopping every now and then to try to see if he could make anything out ahead of him beyond the vague glow of lights, but all he could see was white.

  He turned back the way he had come to check on the car, but after a couple of hundred yards it disappeared from view, as did everything else.

  He felt so incredibly isolated, like the last man alive in a savage frontier.

  The wind picked up as he descended, making walking wet and uncomfortable and chilling him to the bone just as the snow getting into his lungs made it difficult to breathe. It didn’t just sting his lungs; it felt as if Mother Nature had reached down his throat with her icy fingers and ripped them out with each breath.

  He lifted his head, scanning the horizon, then cont
inued down.

  Up ahead, he saw the dark shape of a man.

  For a moment he was sure that he was looking at a ghost.

  39

  “The car has stopped,” Cauchon said, looking up from his laptop.

  “The benefits of modern technology,” Monique said. They had watched the blip of the GPS signal as it had moved across the map, moving closer and closer toward them.

  “Indeed, but alas, we still don’t know which one is in the car,” Cauchon cautioned. “Braden somehow avoided arrest, despite our best efforts, though I must admit I enjoyed the fact that he switched the stolen Ferrari for a rental car. It’s just unfortunate for him that our man at the airport was able to switch the tracker before he took delivery of the new vehicle. But then, anything he can think of, we’ve already considered it, haven’t we, my dear?”

  “We’ve had years to,” she agreed. “They are working on instinct.”

  “And we’ve gathered enough evidence to know just how dangerous their instincts are,” Cauchon agreed.

  “Like taking candy from a particularly old and ugly baby,” Monique said.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Monique. Yes, Mr. Braden might have succumbed to your more obvious charms, but I wouldn’t expect him to fall a second time.”

  “Perhaps not, but let’s not give the old man too much respect, either. That’s just as dangerous a mistake to make.”

  Cauchon raised an eyebrow.

  He hadn’t shared quite everything about Roux’s lineage and longevity with his sister, and now wasn’t the right time to start. She’d only think it was fairy tales, anyway. It would be better in the long run if she continued to believe this was all about money.

  Money and revenge.