Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  With the pressure lifted from her chest, Annja was able to breathe again but she didn’t waste time enjoying the relief; she didn’t have the luxury.

  The silent man found his courage and rushed Annja, but stopped dead in his tracks as she rose into a crouch, sword in hand.

  “You had your chance,” Annja said. “Really, how difficult can it be to do what you’re told? I hate it when people don’t listen to me.”

  “You talk too much, woman,” the man said, breaking his silence. “It will be the death of you.”

  “Touché.”

  She swung, her only intention to ruin his balance. There was limited space to fight in the room, the low ceiling and proximity of the bathroom and bed making it difficult to maneuver with any kind of grace. She lanced out with the blade, pushing him back, and again, until he was half in the doorway, half out, caught between running and fighting, and that indecision was his undoing.

  Annja pulled the sword back, two hands wrapped around the hilt, inviting him to attack. He obliged, stepping in close and throwing a fist as Annja rocked on her heels and then countered with a two-handed drive, hilt first. His momentum carried him into the trap she’d set, and even as he tried to pull out of the blow, the pommel of Joan’s sword struck him on the side of the head.

  He fell awkwardly, his head cracking off the side of the narrow dresser beneath the TV mount. He didn’t move.

  “Annja? Annja? Are you okay? What the hell is going on?” Johan stood in the doorway. She knelt to check that the quiet attacker was still alive. She felt a weak, fluttering pulse in the vein at his neck. Weak was better than nonexistent.

  She looked up at the cameraman. The sword was gone, back to the otherwhere. She had no idea if he’d seen it, or witnessed its return.

  “Is he dead?” Johan asked.

  “Not yet.”

  Johan looked over at the big man who was still bent over. “Remind me not to get on the wrong side of you.” The big man started to move again. Annja turned, looking back over her shoulder to see him coming up behind her far quicker than he should have been able to, all things considered.

  He grabbed her around the neck, driving his knee into the base of her spine as he did. All it would take to kill her was one sharp twist of the head and her neck would snap like a dry twig. His grip tightened. She felt his fingers crushing her windpipe. Soon she was choking, spots of light sunbursting across her vision. She couldn’t call out. She reached up, hands clawing at her attacker’s hands, trying to pry them away from her throat, but his grip was vicelike.

  Applying pressure under her chin, he forced Annja to rise. Then he used his extra height to keep her rising until she was barely on her toes, so close to kicking empty air as he pushed her toward the open French doors.

  Annja knew exactly what he intended to do, and he was so incredibly strong, lifting her like a rag doll and carrying her closer to the long drop.

  Johan appeared to be frozen in fear.

  “Johan!” Annja cried, arching her back as she tried to butt the big man in the center of the face, but he anticipated the backlash and drove his free fist into the base of her spine brutally.

  The blow took the wind and the fight out of her.

  Annja felt the tears of pain sting her cheeks.

  And embraced the pain.

  Pain was good.

  Pain meant she was alive.

  Pain meant she still had a chance.

  Her hand closed around the sword. She felt it solidifying in her grasp, but let it slip through her fingers. She didn’t need it. Not yet. She jackknifed her body again, ramming her head straight back and up, her skull cracking off the side of his Neanderthal brow. It hurt her more than it hurt him, but she didn’t care.

  “Get the gun!”

  She had no idea if the cameraman could even fire a gun. It didn’t matter if Johan even moved—it was all about casting doubt in the big man’s mind. Giving him a second enemy to think about meant two points of attack.

  Annja could feel the cool breeze on the side of her face.

  They were already on the threshold; two more steps and it would be too late to do anything but learn how to fly.

  It was a long way down, but by no means far enough for evolution to conjure up wings before she hit the concrete parking lot below.

  One step.

  Annja felt the iron railing dig into her side as the big man twisted her around. She scrambled, kicking out with her feet uselessly, unable to stop him as he heaved her up toward the drop—and then her legs were on the other side of the railing and there was nothing between her and the parking lot.

  She tossed her head frantically left and right, trying not to look down, but there was nothing she could use to break her fall, not even slow her descent.

  The big man released his hold on her.

  Not suddenly—he didn’t fling her away from him, he didn’t pull back his hand and leave her to the mercies of gravity—he just relaxed his grip so Annja started to slide away from him as though he could no longer hold on to her.

  She twisted in a tight half turn as her arms were freed, grabbing for the railing as the grip of his meaty hand slipped. Flailing, Annja snagged ahold of something—his legs? The balcony railing?—and hung there for a heartbeat, but even as she did, it started teetering.

  Annja used her body weight to bring him over the top of the railing. She let go, willing her momentum to carry her the precious inches to safety as he tumbled silently past her.

  Annja’s fingers caught the rough concrete, but with nothing to hold on to started to slip.

  And then she felt a hand close around her wrist and saw a pale-faced Johan straining as he leaned over the railing.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  She wasn’t about to argue with him; any relief she felt at her sudden salvation was tempered by the sound of the big man hitting the concrete. She didn’t look down. She didn’t need to. He wasn’t going to be getting up again.

  “I’ve got you,” Johan reassured her. “Careful, careful, okay...” Annja hooked her foot over the edge, and reached up to grab the guardrail and scramble back to safety.

  Annja just stood there, feeling the solidity of the floor beneath her feet. She felt a twinge in her shoulder where she’d strained it hanging on for dear life.

  Johan held the gun in his hand. He didn’t know what else to do with it, she figured. She hadn’t heard a shot, she realized, but security would be coming soon, anyway.

  Gunshots and a body in the parking lot below: there were going to be a lot of people swarming over her room in a second.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to hit him with this,” Annja said, taking the weapon from the cameraman. She weighed it in her hand. Was it heavier now that it had taken a life? Weighed down by the big man’s soul?

  “I killed him...” Johan said. He couldn’t stop shaking. She wanted to calm him, but they had other problems. “We should call the police.”

  He was right, of course. That was exactly what they should do, but she wasn’t big on doing what she was supposed to. It wasn’t a rebellious streak so much as it was survival instinct.

  “No. I need to call some friends first. They’ll know what to do,” she said, meaning Roux, meaning Garin. “But we need to take care of sleeping beauty.”

  The dig would be suspended, that was pretty much a foregone conclusion with Lars Mortensen’s death and now the attack on her here, and the dead man down there, if the two could be obviously linked. She’d need to check in with Doug Morrell, too. No doubt he’d consider the whole thing ratings gold. She had questions of her own: Who were these guys, who did they work for and why had they come for her?

  The why she could guess—they thought she knew something, or thought she had something. So either they thought Lars had told her something, or hidden his discovery with her. That was all it could be.

  Annja stepped back inside the room, intending to drag the unconscious man into the here and now. She wanted to pry a few answer
s from him before the cops turned up.

  It was a good plan save for one tiny thing: he was gone.

  12

  Annja looked around the empty room.

  “We can’t just do nothing,” Johan objected.

  “We can and we will. Close the French windows before someone looks up and works out which window he went out of.” As she gave the instructions she set about closing the door, Do Not Disturb sign still in place.

  “Someone must have seen you...seen him fall.”

  “Maybe, but we don’t make it easy for them.”

  “It’s not that there are many rooms he could have fallen from,” Johan persisted. There was a rising sense of panic in his voice. If she didn’t bring him down, and bring him down fast, he was going to go into shock as the adrenaline fell away.

  “Okay, you’re right, so we’ll go to your room. It’s on the other side of the corridor, looking out of the front, right? Come on. I want to take another look at the footage.” He nodded, but she had no way of knowing if he actually understood a word she was saying. “I’ve seen one of those guys somewhere. I know I have. At the rally, maybe. He’s got a memorable face. You up for going through it with me?”

  Annja stepped past him and went to look down from a window to the parking lot below to gauge the amount of activity, shock and panic playing out down there. The double-glazing in the room was good, so she couldn’t hear any sounds of a commotion—no shouts, no screams. Nothing at all, she realized, pressing her face to the glass. She peered down, expecting to see a body spread-eagled against the asphalt. There was a pool of blood—a dark stain—but no body.

  “He’s gone,” she stated at the stain on the tarmac, able to make out the vaguely human-shaped imprint smeared by wheel tracks where the corpse had been moved to a waiting car. He’d used one of those luggage trolleys to move the body, and left it abandoned by the parked cars. As if to confirm her suspicions, an engine started up and a car pulled out of a parking space and peeled away.

  “He’s survived? How?”

  “No. He’s dead. Our friend’s cleaned up the mess.” That was the only way to read the scene. The silent man had moved the body. It helped them in that it meant fewer questions to answer—no body meant no crime for the police to investigate, or at least no crime here, linked to her.

  “Let’s get out of here, shall we?”

  “I don’t understand what’s going on.... What did they want?” And before she could answer that question, he was already asking another. “Annja, what if they come back?”

  “Later. Right now let’s concentrate on getting the camera set up in your room,” she said, hoping that by giving him some sort of direction it’d distract him long enough to calm down, but she wasn’t overly hopeful.

  She dragged the camera case out from under the bed, glad the silent man hadn’t taken it during his escape. Of course, that thought had immediate repercussions: maybe they hadn’t taken it because they didn’t care if they’d been caught on film or not.

  She and Johan went across the corridor to his room. Annja could hear confusion downstairs, people demanding to know what was going on, had they heard gunshots? She locked the door. His room was the mirror image of hers, but where hers barely looked lived-in his looked as though a bomb had gone off in it with clothes and food cartons making a mess of every available surface. He shrugged and began to hook the camera up to his laptop.

  The technology had changed so drastically over the past few years that digital video footage had a core hyperrealism to it that surpassed even film in many cases. A couple of cables in place, and Johan began the process of transferring a copy of the recording onto his hard drive. This was his domain. He found tranquility in the process. Annja heard the shift in his breathing while he worked. He executed the command triggers with confidence and told her, “I’m just going to upload the footage to my cloud account, then they can download it back in the office,” he explained. “All things considered, it’s better to be on the safe side. I was doing a shoot in Ethiopia a few years back, and didn’t send any kind of backup. As I went to leave the country, customs seized my camera, all of my backup footage. When I finally got it from them, the entire thing had been hit with a gauss gun. Completely wiped. Once bitten...”

  Annja nodded. He’d just helped a man die, recorded a bombing where several innocent people lost their lives and was still trying to process the knowledge that one of his subjects had burned up in a crash this morning. There was an element of “death comes to us all” about it, but in this case it felt like death was in a hurry to visit, so backing up his footage elsewhere was like ensuring his immortality of a sort.

  Peas in a pod, Annja thought, remembering some of her own idiosyncrasies when it came to things like flying: she’d never board a plane with every single piece of work completed, purely because it felt like tempting fate. She liked to leave something dangling, even if it was only a rough cut that needed tidying up before it was screened. The unfinished work was her insurance policy against the plane plummeting out of the sky.

  “Right, it’s up there, so where do you want to start?”

  “At the rally. The last few minutes leading up to the explosion. I’ve watched it a couple of times. There’s something not quite right, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Okay.” He started to advance the image in static jumps using the time sequence along the bottom of the screen until he found the right spot.

  “Let’s see if those two thugs are in there, shall we?”

  She and Johan watched in silence as the events unfolded all over again. Annja scanned the faces in the crowd, and then amid the dust and debris, but there was no sign of either of the two men. She’d been sure she’d seen one of them there, even suspected they might have been part of Thorssen’s security detail in their neat black suits, but they weren’t anywhere in the sea of faces that flocked out of the theater in panic.

  “There he is,” said Johan, breaking the silence.

  “Where?” said Annja. “I don’t see him.”

  He paused the scene and used the touch pad to scroll back until he’d found what he was looking for, then started it again.

  Annja watched as Karl Thorssen was brought out of the building by a couple of his security men. He was leaning on them heavily as they pushed others to one side, forcing a path through the injured without a second thought for their safety.

  The lens shifted focus as people jostled Johan—he’d clearly struggled to hold the camera steady during the mass exodus—but every now and then it settled on a face clearly. Annja looked hard at each and every one as it came into focus, but she wasn’t seeing whatever it was Johan had seen. She couldn’t see either of the men in the seething mass of frightened humanity. She stared at the dirt and tear-streaked faces, she stared at the pained and frightened expressions, but none of them looked familiar.

  “There,” Johan said again, freezing the image this time. He jabbed at the laptop’s screen. “That’s the guy you knocked out.”

  Annja stared at the screen. The image was slightly blurred, the movement of so many people barely confined within it, but she knew he was right.

  He was in profile.

  She hadn’t recognized him because she’d been looking in all of the wrong places. She’d been absolutely focused on the people fighting to get out of the theater. He wasn’t among them. He was outside, though, as people went up to her would-be assassin for help.

  He wasn’t one of Thorssen’s security detail.

  He was a paramedic.

  Or at least he was dressed as one.

  13

  Thorssen refused to leave his prize in the office overnight; he needed to take it home with him. It wasn’t because he didn’t trust the security—his office was one of the most secure locations in southern Sweden. He just couldn’t bear to be parted from his treasure.

  He had substituted the black garbage sack with a more delicate red silk wrap, and laid both pieces of the broken sword in a
fine oak case with sumptuous red silk lining. In the past few hours he had opened the box more than a dozen times to gaze at the sword.

  He craved the feel of the metal beneath his fingers. He wanted nothing more than to touch the rust-encrusted surface and pick away at it until it was gone and all that remained was that impossibly gleaming metal of Nægling. He hadn’t been able to leave the broken sword for more than a few minutes since it had come into his possession. He found himself returning to the safe to make sure it was there, to check that it was real and not some fabrication of his febrile mind.

  It wasn’t.

  It was very much real, every corroded crust of it, every gleaming exposed inch of it. Real. Nægling.

  Thorssen knew it was real. More than real: genuine.

  And that made him restless.

  He couldn’t just sit in his office pretending it was business as usual.

  He couldn’t concentrate on anything but the sword, so he packed it away and carried it down to his Tesla Model S parked in the complex across the street. The streets were his. He drove with his foot to the floor, executing each twist and turn out of the city with g-force-defying acceleration until he hit the winding country roads that led up to his home in the hills.

  The house was an overblown gingerbread cottage—as though Hansel and Gretel had stolen it from a giant, not a wicked witch—with sprawling grounds, its own lake, ringed by a forest of towering evergreens and an array of modern conveniences that included his own helipad. The protective gates, almost half a mile from the main house, were solid wood, carved with the incredibly elaborate craftsmanship that harkened all the way back to the Viking longhouses with snakes’ heads, torcs and, in the very center, the carved image of a warrior, sword in hand, enfolded in a dying dragon’s wings.

  Music blared on the radio—a mindless pop song telling him to smile if there was anything he wanted. Thorssen caught himself smiling in the rearview mirror, not because he wanted something, but because he had it.