Celtic Fire (Rogue Angel)

by Alex Archer

  Her memory of the sword’s history was sketchy at best—ancient Britain wasn’t her specialty—and like it or not certain sword legends all started to blend together eventually. But as she had read the ancient text much of it came back to her, along with new snippets of information that she didn’t think she’d seen anywhere else.

  She’d been right in remembering the blade of the sword would supposedly transform into flame, and that Rhydderch Hael, the original wielder’s name, translated essentially to generous. Generous because, unlike many great warriors, he’d always been willing to offer his sword to others, but they all returned it to him as soon as they became fully aware of its properties.

  Annja never understood why they’d be so keen to give up the sword, rather than marvel at what the weapon was capable of, but Gerald’s book offered an aspect to the legend she hadn’t considered before. Dyrnwyn’s blade would only blaze if it was held by someone worthy. Gerald assumed that worthy meant highborn, but there were other interpretations. Perhaps the fear of looking not worthy, or holding dead steel instead of a burning magical sword, was enough to scare them from keeping the weapon....

  Annja had seen the evidence with her own eyes that fire had been involved in the curate’s death, but how could a grave robber ever be deemed a worthy man? That didn’t make any sense...unless he was some sort of highborn man? But that only made sense if the legend was to be believed in full. Not that it helped. Given the sheer passage of time half the people in the country probably had some kind of noble blood running through their veins if they dug far enough back into their family line. But it felt important. She couldn’t say why, it just did. And she’d learned a long time ago to trust her gut when it came to this stuff. That one line told them something about the man who had taken the sword.

  She was still thinking about it when someone knocked on her door.

  It was Garin.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “Of course I do, but you’re awake so it doesn’t matter.”

  It was hard to argue with his logic.

  He grinned as he bustled past her into the room and set his laptop down on the bed. “This is our eureka moment.”

  “Is it, now? So what am I looking at?”

  “The answer. Sit.”

  She did.

  Garin reached over her shoulder, tapping a key to start a video playing. “Footage from a CCTV camera near the cathedral.”

  “On the night of the murder?”

  “No, a couple of days before.” He jabbed a finger at the screen and a man came into shot. “And this handsome fellow is the vagrant that the police are looking for.”

  She looked at the slightly wild-eyed face and shaggy beard that was seriously distorted by the low-quality image of the recording. “How did you get hold of this?” she asked.

  “I stole it, obviously,” Garin replied. “But let’s not get hung up on that.” He fast-forwarded the footage. The view switched to show the man moving from one gravestone to the next, examining each in turn.

  “I think that proves it was no accidental mugging. He’s definitely looking for something.”

  Garin nodded. “Now look at this.” He moved the curser and called up another window. “This is the night before the body was found.”

  The quality of the picture was worse, offering a gray and grainy image of a narrow country road lined with thick hedges and brown stone walls.

  “Where’s this?”

  “A couple of miles down the road we came along from Haverfordwest, facing this way.”

  “And what am I watching for?”

  “You’ll know it when you see it,” Garin replied, and sure enough in the distance she saw the burn of headlights approaching. He touched the keyboard again, slowing down the progress of the car, making it appear as if it was creeping toward the camera, not speeding.

  The black-and-white image grew frame by jerky frame as the car came closer to the camera until Garin paused it with the front seat and driver in the middle of the frame.

  “It’s the same man,” Annja said.

  “It certainly is. And let me answer the question I know you’re about to ask—never.”

  “What was the question?”

  “When was the last time you saw a tramp driving a car?”

  Chapter 14

  Breakfast was a quiet affair.

  Annja had been cooped up in her room so long it smelled of her. Sleep hadn’t been refreshing, either. It was another bout of tossing and turning and not really sleeping at all, not in any deep and meaningful way. That was what she hated the most about jet lag. It wasn’t just that your world turned upside down, it was how it crept into everything, weighing you down, slowing you down. And when you wanted nothing more than to sleep you couldn’t. So she went downstairs.

  Roux was already sitting at a table by the window, looking out onto a narrow street at the front of the building. He had a copy of a broadsheet open on the table in front of him, but he ignored the paper. Garin joined them after she’d ordered a strong black coffee and told the woman who ran the guesthouse she was good with a bowl of muesli and yogurt; maybe she’d have a full English breakfast later.

  As was so often the case, Garin’s expression said, You are in the presence of genius, but instead of blurting it all out he bided his time, waiting for them to ask why he looked so pleased with himself. Annja knew his game, and Roux had known Garin since he was a boy, which meant pretty much forever. So they made him wait until they’d got their food just because they knew it would infuriate him.

  “Come on, then, spill,” Annja said finally.

  “I wake up every morning wondering what you would do without me,” Garin said, keeping a straight face. Annja didn’t rise to the bait. “There are only five copies of the book in existence, not ten as Roux thought, though there may have been ten once so I’m not saying the old man is wrong...but five is the magic number. There’s no record of it ever having been translated, either. So let’s do the math. Roux has one copy, another is owned by Jacques LaCroix....”

  Annja recognized the name. LaCroix was a Howard Hughes–style billionaire recluse content on seeing out his days beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. He was a man who liked to own things purely for the pleasure he derived from knowing someone else could not.

  “Not LaCroix,” Roux said. “He is only interested in a book as an object, not for what is written on the pages.”

  “Even when they might lead him to other objects?” Annja asked.

  “Even then. It’s a game with him. He’s a collector, yes, but he’s not interested in the effort of finding something outside of an auctioneer’s catalog.”

  “Maybe he let someone have access to his copy?” Garin suggested.

  Roux made a moue. “No. It’s not like him. His collection is locked in an airless vault. No one ever gets to see them, not even LaCroix.”

  “Okay, number three is in the British Museum,” Garin said. “According to their records the book hasn’t been examined for more than six months, and even then it was only to check on its condition, so that’s a dead end.”

  “And then there were two,” Annja said, aware that she was stating the obvious.

  “They are both in private hands,” Garin said, the smug grin on his face still firmly fixed in place. “One is owned by a minor member of the British royal family, Prince Something or Other. The other is owned by one Owen Llewellyn.”

  “A Welshman?”

  “What gave it away?” he joked, tucking into his fried eggs with gusto.

  “What do we know about this man?” Roux asked.

  “Not much. His family made their money in coal and steel and have their home somewhere north of Cardiff. There’s not a lot about him on the Net. Widowed, two grown-up children—twins, Awena and Geraint—but
honestly, there’s something a bit off about him. He reckons he’s descended from the last of the true princes of Wales.”

  There was no complicated history of the Welsh being subsumed by the English; that was a tale that didn’t need telling.

  “I think you should pay him a visit, Annja,” Roux said. Before she could comment he said, “A single man is more likely to talk to a beautiful young woman, especially one who happens to work for a television company. Flatter him. Men like that.”

  “And me?” Garin asked.

  “Do what you do best. Stick your nose where it doesn’t belong. Maybe Llewellyn is the man we are looking for, but maybe he isn’t.”

  “I can do that.” Garin nodded. He told the old man about the footage he had shown Annja the night before. “I couldn’t get anything off the plate, though, typically it was covered in mud. Still, I’ve sent a copy of the file to one of my people, and who knows what they’ll be able to do. But to be honest, without so much as the color, working out who’s behind the wheel isn’t going to be easy.”

  “I’ve got faith in you,” Roux said.

  “Is it worth checking other CCTV cameras in the vicinity? Maybe the car was caught in better light?”

  “Already on it,” Garin answered. It was unusual for him to be content doing what amounted to menial work, but stick a challenge in front of him and he’d make sure he aced it. It was just part of his übercompetitive charm. And maybe he’d finally worked out there was more than one way to be the hero.

  “I’m assuming you mean you’ve delegated? Because as dearly as I’d love to be able to do this alone, two minds are better than one,” Roux said.

  “You need my help, just say it.”

  “All right.” Roux let out a low sigh. “I need your help. Does that make you happy?”

  “In ways you can’t even imagine, old man,” Garin teased. “So what do you need?”

  “There are other treasures.”

  “So we’re going hunting? Excellent. Will you be calling out hot and cold as we go?”

  Roux ignored him. “I believe one of them is in Caerleon. Isn’t that where you were, Annja?”

  She nodded.

  “What am I looking for?” she asked, feeling a tingle down her spine as if she knew what he was about to say.

  “A quern,” he said. “Nothing much to look at and easy to hide in plain sight.”

  “A grindstone?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer.

  “It would appear so, to the uninitiated, but no, it is more than that. It is the Whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd, a treasure in its own right. We need to reach it before the grave robber does.”

  It hadn’t seemed important before, hardly worth mentioning, but now it clearly meant a lot. “It’s too late. It’s already been stolen,” Annja told them.

  Chapter 15

  The day had turned gray.

  The sky was overcast, weighted down with heavy clouds.

  They suited her mood.

  Annja anticipated an absolute deluge of biblical proportions. The sky couldn’t possibly hold all of that brooding anger in check; it had to rain. From somewhere in the distance she heard the low rumble of thunder. Give it a couple of minutes and the first fat spots of rain would hit the windscreen.

  Ahead of her, a lorry made slow progress up the hill. It caused a snake of traffic to build up behind it.

  Outrunning the oncoming storm was impossible. Even with three lanes of traffic it would have been unlikely. As it was, Annja was still in the excruciatingly slow tailback of cars when the first drop fell. She’d moved less than a hundred meters.

  She’d left Roux and Garin behind in St. Davids; neither had been particularly forthcoming about where they were heading next. Roux mentioned another treasure that needed to be secured, assuming it hadn’t already been discovered. He’d been reluctant to talk about what this treasure was and she’d decided against pressing him. Push too hard and the older man would simply clam up.

  Their last conversation before parting had been prickly. “There’s no guarantee it’s the same stone,” Roux had said, and she’d wanted to shake him and say, How naive can you be, of course it is.

  Instead, she’d said, “Too much of a coincidence for it not to be. And can you think of another reason why someone would break into a museum and steal a grindstone? No, I didn’t think so. It only makes sense if the thief knows something we don’t, like, say, it’s not a grindstone at all. It’s actually an ancient treasure, priceless, powerful, like, oh, I don’t know, the Whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd. And if we accept that, it means we have to accept that the grave robber’s looking for all of them. This isn’t random.”

  “Fine, it isn’t random. That just makes it worse. Now stop wasting time arguing with me and go, girl. Do what you’re told, this once. Please.”

  She’d driven away in a mood as black as the sky.

  Annja couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that the theft of the whetstone and the murder of the curate must have happened no more than a couple of hours apart, despite the distance between the two sites. Could the same person really have committed both crimes? Was there even enough time to drive between the two places? It had taken her, what, the best part of two and a half hours to get from Caerleon to St. Davids. Though admittedly she hadn’t floored it all the way because she didn’t know the roads. Someone who did could probably have shaved ten minutes, maybe fifteen, off the journey. But could they pull off a robbery like that, evade the law, drive for nigh on two and a half hours and then kill a man?

  Why would they even attempt it?

  Surely there couldn’t be so much urgency to the hunt that it necessitated carrying out both crimes back-to-back like that?

  Unless, she thought, maybe it was some kind of challenge, like a grail quest: gather the treasures before the full moon rises or something. A dare? But kids wouldn’t do something like that, would they? Again, unless it got out of hand. Annja had seen enough to know that just about anything was possible.

  The road widened up ahead. Cars began to slip past the huge truck, wipers fighting back the downpour. It felt good to be moving again, even though she could barely see beyond the hood. Rain hammered off the roof, drowning out the radio. She didn’t mind; it was some eighties band she’d never heard of and the crazy synth just made her nervous. A flash of lightning filled the sky. She counted out one, two, three, in her head before the rumble of thunder filled the air. Annja thought about pulling over onto the hard shoulder and sitting out the storm, but figured she’d be safe enough if she kept moving. The weather seemed to change so easily in this small country, and so unpredictably. Hopefully Garin and Roux hadn’t attempted to take off yet—or if they had, that they were a long way from the eye of the storm. Garin was a good pilot, but as another spear of lightning split the sky she was reminded of just how powerful and primal Mother Nature was. And as good as Garin was, she was capable of much worse. Of course, knowing Garin Braden he’d probably bribed air traffic control to secure a runway slot right as the heavens opened, merely for the hell of it.

  As she approached Carmarthen she saw the welcoming bright yellow lights of a supermarket sign and decided to stop. She pulled into the parking lot, finding a space as close to the entrance as she could.

  She felt her body relax as she set the hand brake and killed the engine.

  In an instant the windshield was a sheet of water that diffused the yellow light from the sign. The drumming on the roof was deafening now the engine had been silenced. It completely drowned out the sound of her cell phone ringing. If it hadn’t been for the feel of it vibrating against her thigh she’d have missed the call. It was Garin.

  “Didn’t make our window. We’re grounded for at least the next thirty minutes.”

  “Thirty minutes? Are you out of your mind, pretty boy? Not even you can
fly in this weather.”

  “No choice. If we leave it any longer, there’s no telling how long we’ll be stuck in this godforsaken green isle. The runway’s pretty much mud as it is. If we’re not away soon we’ll have to wait for it to drain and the old man’s worried we’re already going to be too late...so he’s basically said now or never. Who am I to say no?”

  Even though he couldn’t see her, Annja shook her head. “You’re mad. The pair of you. You don’t need to take stupid risks. Think about it—if you can’t move, neither can anyone else.”

  “You make it sound as if you care, Annja. I’m touched.”

  “Don’t be. I don’t have the time to arrange two funerals, that’s all.” It didn’t come out quite as she’d intended, but he got the message.

  “I’ve got people for that, too,” Garin said. She couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “Do you have guys to scrape you off the tarmac, too?”

  “You know I do. No job too big or too small.”

  Annja was convinced that Garin’s belief in his own abilities would get him killed one day—which was ironic considering he’d been knocking around the planet for quite a lot longer than most people, death wish or no death wish.

  Lightning flashed again and the call was over.

  She tried to ring him back, but her network was down.

  Great, she thought, pocketing the phone.

  The electrical storm was clearly interfering with the cell tower. There was no telling what it would do to the Gulfstream’s systems. Nothing good, obviously.

  There was no sign of the storm abating.

  She didn’t relish the prospect of getting soaked to the bone in the ten seconds it would take to run from the car to the store, but didn’t have much choice. The drumming rain alone was enough to drive her mad.

  She gave it a couple of minutes in the vain hope that it would ease off a little. It didn’t, so she gritted her teeth and clambered out of the car. The rain soaked through to her skin before she’d finished locking up. It was warm, but give it a couple of seconds and it’d chill down, leaving her cold. She sprinted, her feet splashing in puddles of water, splattering her legs and soaking her jeans.