Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  Thorssen ran his fingers along the metal, closing his eyes as he felt its length, trying to feel out the break without success. He opened them again and even in the concentrated light it took a moment to find the faint line that revealed where the two halves had been pushed close together before he fell asleep. The two broken edges were still a perfect fit despite everything the metal had been put through.

  He wondered how easy it would be to reforge the two halves and make the thing whole again. Replacing the grip and bindings for the hilt shouldn’t prove too difficult, but the blade itself, much harder, surely? It was a complex job requiring specialist skills. Skills that had almost died out in the modern era. Would it be possible to find someone capable of the task? It wasn’t his field. The archaeologist would probably have known someone who could have fixed it, but there was no use crying over spilled milk. He would find someone. Money had a way of finding men with unusual talents. Men like Tostig and the Serb. Men like him.

  Thorssen imagined stepping out onto the hustings, raising the aged weapon in triumph to the rapturous cheers of his supporters. Just how good would that feel? How powerful would he feel standing there, Nægling in his hand? What an amazing gift it would be to the people—to his people—to be able to put the ancient sword on display to the world.

  That would show the world just how important he was, how powerful he was.

  He imagined himself strong enough to slay dragons.

  He picked up Nægling’s hilt once more, pretending it was whole.

  He cut through the air, twisted his wrist, dropped his hip and cut through the air again, savoring the feel of the sword in his hand.

  His connection to it was primal.

  Powerful.

  It took him a moment to realize that the two parts were still held fast together, and that it wasn’t just an illusion.

  He laughed, turning the sword in his hand this way and that, and could not stop laughing.

  He tested the blade, cutting the air again. The joint held firm; somehow the two halves had reforged themselves while he slept.

  They belonged together and never wanted to be parted.

  He knew that now, felt the truth of it in his hand.

  Thorssen scrutinized the edge of the blade. It was straight as a die, with no imperfections. There was no sign of the joint. It was a weapon for a warrior.

  It was a sword fit for a king.

  17

  Annja woke the next morning with the sour taste of wine in her mouth.

  Her head was pounding, but not because of alcohol; she’d only had two glasses of wine. She hadn’t been good company after that and had made her excuses to head back to the room. Micke took it like a gent; in other circumstances she might have offered him that cup of coffee, but all she wanted to do was crash.

  She rolled over.

  Her mind was running slow.

  The light from the window came in from the wrong side of the room. No. She’d not slept in her own bed. She’d used Johan’s room. Johan had insisted on leaving his key with her, and after the briefest of good-nights with Micke, she’d stood in between the two doors playing a game of eenie-meanie before deciding that should her would-be killer try again, he’d come looking in her room, obviously. The last thing she’d done before getting into bed was to push Johan’s giant camera case up against the door. The noise of it moving should have been enough to wake her if her attacker found her.

  The alarm clock on the nightstand showed that it was a little after seven-thirty. Annja got up, showered quickly and dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing the night before. She gathered up the rest of her things and went back to her own room.

  Her door was ajar.

  Annja eased the door open slowly while standing to one side.

  She could hear movement inside.

  She tensed, readying the sword in the otherwhere, in case she had to fight for her life, only to scare the heck out of a startled maid.

  “Oh, miss...the manager is coming.”

  And then Annja realized that all of her possessions were tipped out of her case, and the contents of the wardrobe had been emptied and dumped on the floor and bed. The room was in complete chaos.

  Annja didn’t say anything.

  “I hope you don’t mind. I was walking past. I saw that your door was open and it was like this. I called out, but there was no answer so I came in. I think you’ve been robbed.”

  “It’s fine, don’t worry. I appreciate it.” She shook her head, looking at the mess. Her bag was still hooked over the back of the chair. She checked it. Her credit cards were still in her wallet. Meaning, this was no opportunist’s crime. The thief had been thorough, but for all that thoroughness he’d almost certainly left empty-handed. She suspected she had what he was looking for: Johan’s camera.

  “It doesn’t even seem as if anything has been taken,” she said, but before she could thank the girl and send her away, the manager appeared.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I am so sorry. I just...this has never happened here before. I can’t believe this. I’ll call the police straightaway. Please, Marcy, would you be so kind as to show Ms. Creed to suite seven?”

  “There really is no need,” Annja said.

  “You can’t possibly stay here now. Please. Let me at least give you an upgrade. Anything you’ve lost, we’ll bear the cost. Just give me a list.”

  “It’s okay. I have an idea of who’s behind this.”

  It was clearly music to their ears.

  If Annja knew who was responsible and didn’t want to involve the police that was her decision, one that meant no bad publicity for the hotel. The manager’s face lit up at the idea of being able to sweep the whole thing under the carpet.

  “If you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “The suite?”

  “To be honest, I kinda like my room, and I’m not good with heights,” she joked.

  “If you are sure,” the manager repeated.

  “I really am.”

  In the silence that followed their leaving, Annja took another moment to look around the room, reassuring herself that nothing had been taken. It wasn’t about theft; it was a warning. They could reach her at any time.

  Well, good for you, Annja thought. Bring it on.

  Annja Creed wasn’t some passive victim. They could come for her, they could try and scare her, they could try and silence her, but what they needed to know, to really understand, was that she could just as easily come for them.

  And, closing the door on the chaos, that was exactly what she intended to do.

  18

  A woman was waiting for her in the hotel’s reception area.

  Annja had no idea of how Mrs. Mortensen had found out where she was staying. It was a little unnerving. And why did she want to see her? It wasn’t as though she knew her son particularly well. They had talked for perhaps twenty minutes, but she was probably one of the last people to speak to him, she realized, if not the last.

  The woman’s eyes were red and raw with grief.

  It was obvious she wasn’t sleeping.

  “Miss Creed?” the woman said, coming across the marbled foyer to meet her. “Una Mortensen. Can I have a few minutes? I promise not to take up too much of your time. I just hoped to talk to you about Lars.”

  “No, of course, let’s grab a seat,” Annja said, indicating the lounge opposite the reception desk. There was a continental breakfast desk set up, filled with a variety of cornflakes, yogurts and crisp breads along with glass beakers of coffee strong enough and black enough to stand the sugar spoon up in. Annja poured two and joined Una Mortensen.

  “My son said that he was going to see you?” Una said.

  “That’s right, Mrs. Mortensen,” Annja started, but the woman interrupted her.

  “Una, please,” she said. “I’ve to listen to the police call me that all day, like it was some sort of token of respect when there was none. They think that he was drinking, that what happened
to him was his own fault.”

  “Because of the ground breaking?”

  “It’s traditional, isn’t it? It’s not a real party. I’m not saying Lars didn’t drink, because he enjoyed a bottle of beer as much as the next man, but he’s not a drunk, and he’d never drink and drive, especially after his father died. He was hit by a drunk driver when Lars was fifteen. He wouldn’t do it. Everything in moderation, that was my Lasse.”

  “He sounded fine to me when he called,” Annja told her.

  The woman’s face lit up at this simple statement.

  “He did call you, then? That morning? He said he was going to. He said he needed to see you.”

  “He said that he had something he wanted to show me.”

  “Well, then, he clearly trusted you. He didn’t trust everyone. He said there were people at the dig he was sure were working for Thorssen. He was worried that someone would try to take it from him.”

  “Take what?”

  “He didn’t tell you what he found?” The woman sank back into her chair.

  Annja shook her head. “He didn’t want to tell me over the phone. He said that he would rather show me what he was so excited about.”

  “But they haven’t found it, have they?” Una asked.

  “I don’t know. If he had it with him the chances are it was destroyed in the fire.”

  Una Mortensen looked defeated. It was as though the whole world had suddenly caved in around her and buried her last hope along with it. Annja couldn’t believe that she hadn’t at least considered the possibility that the artifact had been destroyed, but if she didn’t believe that his death was an accident why should she believe his treasure had perished in the blaze along with him?

  “Do you know what he had found?” Annja asked. If the archaeologist had confided in anyone it would have been his mother, especially if the find was so important. He would have needed to tell someone.

  Una shook her head, quashing that notion just as quickly as Annja had quashed hers. “He told me it was the most important thing he’d ever found. He said it would make him famous.”

  So he had found something, and without any significant signs of excavation after breaking through the shell into the tomb under the hill. Not the remains of the hero; he would never have attempted to remove those bones for fear of damaging them irreparably. No, it had to be something easily portable, something light, just waiting for him to reach inside. Something that would have barely left a trace behind after he’d taken it.

  “He didn’t give you any clue?”

  Una shook her head and sat in silence.

  And then her face lit up as a thought crossed her mind.

  “He was always so careful. He wouldn’t have just taken something. He wasn’t a thief. There are procedures, aren’t there? Things to establish a chain of continuity for a find. He would have taken a photograph of it before he risked the extraction, wouldn’t he? He’s done that ever since he started. He’s got a picture of every fragment of every piece of pottery he’s taken out of the ground, so wouldn’t he have done that with something really important?”

  “There’s got to be a chance—it’s hard to break a habit like that, even when you’re excited about something,” Annja agreed. Archaeologists were creatures of habit; their procedures were so ingrained they’d never break them, given what was at stake.

  “He had some kind of fancy phone that took really good pictures,” Una Mortensen said, suddenly filled with excitement.”

  The phone that his murderer called her on, she realized. They were still two steps behind, chasing shadows.

  “Gone,” she said, not wanting to say the rest of the sentence.

  “The phone might be, but that doesn’t mean the picture is. He always copied them to his computer so he could show me when he came home. It was worse than looking at his holiday photographs.” She smiled softly at the memory, just a little bit more lost than she had been a second before.

  His laptop.

  Annja remembered that it had been sitting on the table in his caravan, half-buried by newspaper articles and journals and just about everything else he’d been able to amass to clutter such a small space. So if he had taken a photograph, if he had transferred it to his laptop before he left to meet her, that’s where it was. If the laptop was still there. Those were a lot of ifs.

  Her mind raced through all of the possibilities.

  Was that what the burglary this morning had been about? Someone looking for that photograph? If Mortensen was a creature of habit, someone who’d been watching him for a while would know his methodology, and know that there had to be a photograph of the find out there. It made a grim kind of sense.

  “It was in his caravan yesterday,” Annja said.

  “His caravan?”

  “He’s got a caravan on-site.”

  “That sounds like Lasse. Once he gets his teeth into something he won’t leave it alone. Not even for a minute. I remember him going to Pompeii and the only time he left the camp they had set up was when he was heading to the airport to come home.”

  “Which doesn’t make sense, does it? I mean, why did he want to meet me in town, not out at the site? It would have been easier to get me to come out to the dig. I could have seen the find in situ.”

  “He was frightened,” Una confessed. “I told you. He was frightened someone was going to take it from him.”

  Annja thought about the implications of what Una was saying. The only someone had to be Karl Thorssen, didn’t it? Lars had told her he’d done a deal with the devil and as a result Thorssen had the right to see everything as it came out of the ground. So he’d tried to get the find out of there before word of his discovery got back to Thorssen. It was all starting to make sense.

  “I have to go to the police station this morning. They want to explain everything to me face-to-face. I want to see his body but they won’t let me. I guess that’s what they want to go over, that he was too badly burned in the fire. They want me to identify his medallion.”

  “I saw the fire,” Annja admitted, and waited for the news to sink in.

  “You saw him?”

  “The police...the firemen...they were all doing everything they could to put the fire out.”

  “But no one tried to get him out of his car,” Una said flatly. It wasn’t an accusation.

  “It was too late by then. I didn’t even spot that it was his car, but believe me, no one could have gotten close enough to help him. It was already too late by the time they got there.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Una Mortensen was unable to meet Annja’s eyes. The woman seemed to age fifty years in as many seconds as her resolve broke and the tears started to fall. Her body heaved and shuddered as the sobs raked through her. Annja let her grieve. It was a private thing.

  “Are you here on your own?” Annja asked when the woman’s sobs finally subsided. She couldn’t abandon her. Not if she needed someone. She was barely able to make any coherent sound. Una nodded.

  “Would you like me to come with you?”

  “Would you?” The words hitched in her throat.

  “There’s nothing that can’t wait. We could go out to the site afterward, if you like. So you can see what Lars was doing, where he was staying.”

  “We could check to see if he took a photograph,” she suggested hopefully.

  “We could indeed.”

  “You don’t think this was an accident, do you?” Una asked the question Annja had so fervently hoped she wouldn’t.

  She couldn’t bring herself to lie.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  19

  The Creed woman was sitting in the hotel lounge drinking coffee with an old lady Tostig did not recognize. According to Thorssen, Creed was some kind of television personality, which increased the risk of her being known. In the world of cell phones and instant media it was a problem. He had to be aware, careful not to be caught in any celebrity snapshot souvenirs.
r />   It would have been better to deal with her yesterday but there was no undoing the past.

  Getting into her room again after he had disposed of the Serb had been child’s play. She hadn’t been in there. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. That had pushed him close to the edge.

  He knew he was on the verge of doing something stupid when he snarled, stormed out of her room and raised his foot to kick down the door of the room opposite. As the rage threatened to consume him, he saw himself kicking down every door on this floor and the next and the next until he found her. He couldn’t do that.

  She would be on her guard. That was going to make things more difficult.

  His first problem was getting her alone—or at least luring her away from somewhere quite as public as this.

  Tostig was patient. He could bide his time. Watch. Study her. Get to know her when she thought no one was watching. That was when you learned the truth about a target. The car was uncomfortably warm as the heat of the day started rising, but air-conditioning drained the battery while the engine wasn’t running. It was a compromise, invisibility for discomfort. He had only managed a few hours’ sleep the night before. He only needed a few hours. Like many in his line of work, he’d learned to adapt, to snatch rest whenever it was offered because there was no way of knowing how long it could be until he could next sleep. He didn’t take artificial stimulants. A man survived on his wits, on his skill and, if necessary, his fear. He did not survive on amphetamines.

  Besides, the thought of his brain being interfered with, of his thoughts racing any faster than they already did, was an entirely different kind of fear for the assassin. Chemicals altered the balance of the mind. There was no telling what demons they would liberate.

  He needed distance.

  Objectivity.

  Making something personal increased the chance of making a mistake.

  That meant keeping low profile for now.

  His cell phone signaled he had a call. He checked the display. All it said was The Client.

  “What?”

  “Where is she? Right now?” Thorssen asked, his voice bright and excited.