by Alex Archer
Annja ducked inside the sliding doors, and was glad to see a small café near the checkout. She paid handsomely for a bad cup of coffee and a sugary doughnut. She wasn’t alone. The storm meant a dozen or more shoppers had decided they were thirsty enough not to want to venture outside.
Her gaze switched between the rain-streaked windows and the cell phone, which lay on the tabletop beside her coffee, the “no network” message making her feel increasingly nervous about Roux and Garin flying into the storm.
By the time she’d finished her coffee she’d tried to contact him by phone and text repeatedly, but without any joy.
Sitting still wasn’t helping her.
There was no sign of the storm easing.
She was ten miles from the next rest stop up by the motorway. Ten miles in torrential rain. It was doable, provided the roads didn’t flood. Looking down the slope to the river, it seemed as though the churning water was in the process of breaking its banks. That didn’t bode well. One thing this country really seemed to do well was weather. No half measures.
She pocketed her cell and ran back out to the car.
Two minutes later she was on the open road once more.
Spray from other cars was less of a problem as she headed out of Carmarthen. The steep gradient of the hill and the exaggerated camber of the road meant that the rain ran away quickly, and most of her fellow brave hearts drove cautiously. A truck thundered by on the other side of the road as the hill leveled out, sending a torrent of water up against the hire car. The impact was almost as fierce as it would have been if she’d been hit by another vehicle. Annja wrestled with the wheel, cursing the idiot in his eighteen-wheeler. She gripped the wheel much tighter than she needed to, thinking about Garin and Roux up in the air. “Idiots, the pair of them.”
Ten miles felt like fifty.
She was more than a little relieved when the signs up ahead finally showed she’d be joining the start of the motorway and promised a rest stop. She pulled off the road and into the forecourt. As she made the turn she caught a glimpse of a bearded face through the rain-streaked window. The beard was every bit as wild as it had been in the CCTV footage.
She was looking at the man who had killed Roux’s friend.
Chapter 16
He saw the woman stare at him.
It wasn’t a glance. It didn’t end with usual disgust at his appearance and her turning away. It wasn’t a casual look.
The rain obscured his view of her, so likewise it must have impeded her view of him, but she’d been staring. Why? Why would she stare at him? She didn’t know him. She couldn’t know anything about his quest. She had no reason to be so fixated on him. He tried to think...had he left any clues behind? Anything that would lead someone to him here? No.
He’d been careful, thorough; he’d covered his tracks, especially after St. Davids. He’d never meant...no, he couldn’t bring himself to think about it. The more he did, the more it ate away at him. He’d shed tears over the holy man. It shouldn’t have had to happen. Not like that. He tried to think...he’d left the cathedral...he’d wanted to run straight home. He was that desperate to show Awena what he’d found, but he couldn’t risk it, not if someone had seen him, not if the police were already following him. He couldn’t risk possibly leading them to his house, so he’d fled into the night, and taken refuge in a small hotel in Haverfordwest.
The do not disturb sign had hung on the doorknob all night, and most of the morning. He preferred solitude when he entered the details of the day in his notebook. Transcribing the events in the cemetery grounds in a way that didn’t make him look like a killer was a challenge. Then he’d slept the sleep of the damned for the rest of the day.
He practically jumped into his car, not sure where he was going, just away from here, back out onto the open road and away from this woman. He slammed his foot down on the gas as soon as he rejoined the motorway, weaving into the traffic, carried along with the tide of it like a dirty piece of flotsam.
He hated the woman’s look of...recognition.
It was as if she knew him.
His first thought was that she must. He’d been so careful to stay out of sight of cameras in and around St. Davids, and it wasn’t Cardiff. It wasn’t swarming with eyes in the sky looking for crimes from every conceivable angle. It was a tiny little village where the post office robbery had been the crime of the century right up until yesterday.
Even so, he couldn’t shake the feeling she’d been focused on him.
And that meant someone must have gotten hold of his picture somehow.
So soon?
No, it had to be a case of mistaken identity. She’d seen his wild man of Borneo getup somewhere else, on someone else. It didn’t have to be the worst-case scenario.
He adjusted the rearview mirror and caught sight of himself. He barely recognized the man looking back at him there, unkempt and tainted with madness around his red-rimmed eyes. Surely that would have been enough to make a woman stare at him?
But no risks. He needed to put as much distance between himself and her. Just in case.
On the horizon the sky was brighter. The wind was still fierce, but appeared to be shifting, driving the storm north. There was markedly less water on the road, too, and less spray screwing with his visibility. That meant he could keep his foot down and was soon in touching distance of eighty—over the limit, but not enough to trigger the speed cameras—and passing the cars on the inside lane still crawling along.
It was like he’d developed a nervous tick in the past half an hour; he kept glancing in the mirror to see what was behind him.
It was strange—he was more nervous now, after the woman had stared at him, than he had when he’d carried the frail and featherlight body of the old cleric through the graveyard to hide it beneath the wooden footbridge. He hadn’t been afraid of discovery then, despite the stakes being so much higher, but now he was. His palms were clammy against the steering wheel.
Every driver he passed seemed to glance across at him. He concentrated, eyes forward, rigid in his seat.
A car behind flashed its headlights at him once, twice, three times, before sounding its horn.
He panicked, only to realize that his speed had dropped and it was no more than an impatient driver wanting him to move back into the middle lane so he could pass. Chewing on his lower lip, still rigidly facing forward and urging the car to fly, he pulled across into the middle of the three-lane highway. He couldn’t calm himself down. He could feel his heart in his throat, the beat resonating through his bones. He was pushing himself too hard. He wasn’t concentrating on the driving; rather he relied on muscle memory to do the work for him. He was a danger to himself and others but could not stop again until he reached safety.
But where was safe?
Home?
The sword lay on the backseat wrapped in his old coat but it seemed to be singing to him. He could feel it. That was when he thought he was losing his mind. How could a sword demand to be held? Even if it had lain hidden for so many years? There was no such thing as a sentient blade. That wasn’t the magic of this weapon. Still, there was no denying the fact that it felt like the ancient weapon was alive and insisting it be held.
What if the other treasures would behave similarly?
His mind raced with the possibilities. They all came together with the same question—how would the treasures react to one another? Would they be amplified? Neutralized? He needed to find another, but he’d spent his entire adult life looking for them and only found this one....
He pulled down hard on the wheel, to the angry blare of horns, until he was on the shoulder. He switched off the engine and turned on the hazard warning lights while he grabbed his journal and wrote down what he was thinking. He couldn’t risk losing his train of thought. It took no more than a couple of minutes, then he
resumed driving, hoping he wouldn’t run into an unfortunate traveler who’d had a blowout or had broken down.
He did not see the car that was in the lane beside him, not properly. He cursed it for matching his speed and stopping him from merging with the traffic.
Owen Llewellyn looked across, intending to give the driver a piece of his mind, and saw the woman from the rest stop staring straight at him.
She knew.
He floored the accelerator again, forcing his car into the lane even though the gap between her car and the car in front was too close, and narrowing as she gassed the engine to match him again.
So he did the only thing he could think of.
He swung the wheel hard left, making it up onto the embankment beyond the hard shoulder, tires churning up mud, gravel and water as they ripped into the ground. The car slewed viciously, fishtailing as he fought to control it, while no other cars on the road seemed to know what was happening around them. Gritting his teeth, he wrestled with the wheel as it struggled to get away from him. He barely kept control as he pressed the car for more power, more speed, his eyes on a slip of road twenty meters away across a churned field. It was insanity, but he couldn’t do anything else but power on now he’d committed to it. Somehow he slid and skidded and churned up mud before he bumped back onto asphalt as horns blared and headlights flashed. He dismissed them all, accelerating again once all four wheels were firmly set on the hard ground.
He glanced sideways, across at the motorway; the woman was still matching him for speed, obviously hoping his evasive maneuver was going to be neutralized by the fact the two roads ran parallel, one obviously a newer replacement of the other, but he knew something she didn’t. Even though he couldn’t outrun her on the narrower old road, she couldn’t follow him where he was going because her next exit was more than a mile beyond where he was turning.
By the time she was off the highway he’d be parked up in the drive at home.
He accelerated. He knew these old roads like the back of his hand. He’d lived here most of his life, despite his travels.
He was free of her.
Chapter 17
Garin cursed the weather.
The storm had rolled in much more quickly than he’d anticipated. The rain came down in a solid sheet, turning the entire runway into a swimming pool. The surrounding grass was a marshland. Two of the light aircraft parked there looked as though they were sinking into the ground and wouldn’t be moving without being towed.
“You’re not getting out today,” the man said as they approached the office. “You might as well settle in for the long haul—the storm has. We’re just not equipped to deal with this kind of weather, sorry.” His yellow sou’wester was slick with water that ran freely over its shiny surface.
“It’s an emergency,” Garin shouted to make sure that his words weren’t carried away in the wind. He leaned into the driving gale force, fighting for each step.
“Doesn’t really help, I’m afraid,” the man called back, then pointed up at the sky.
“It’s medical,” Garin said.
He glanced at Roux, who looked as if he was having trouble standing up.
“An ambulance will have a better chance of getting through.”
“Too long! We need to be airborne. The local hospital isn’t equipped to deal with the problem. We need to get to Liverpool.” It was the first city that sprang into his head and at least lay in the general direction they wanted to head.
The man didn’t press him further. There was no point. Shouting against the storm was just a waste of energy. He waited for them to get closer.
“Chances are you’ll miss the worst of it if you head straight north,” he said, still shouting even though they were only a couple of feet apart, “but listen...I can’t give you permission to take off. I’d be crucified if something happened to you. Sorry, mate, it’s not happening.”
“I’m not asking for your permission,” Garin replied. “To be blunt, all I want is for you to step aside. Don’t try and stop me. Write up whatever you need to write up in your logs. I’m going up. End of story.”
The man glanced at their Gulfstream plane parked on the concrete apron.
He shrugged. “It’s going to take me ten minutes to get back into the control room.” The man didn’t wait for a response.
Instead, he turned his back on Garin and Roux and headed toward the building.
“And there was me about to offer him a decent bribe.” Garin shook his head as though to say, Some people.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Roux spat.
If they were gone before the guy made it up into the tower, then he’d have no choice but to record their departure. Once it was logged, it became real. Until then, well, it was as if they were never here.
They battled their way across to the aircraft, and Garin opened a hatch on the underside to trigger the door and the stairs descended. They boarded quickly, shucking off their soaking coats. “Buckle up, old man, it’s going to be a bumpy ride,” Garin said, disappearing into the cockpit while Roux went to take up one of the plush leather seats in the cabin. It was nothing like a commercial liner; the Gulfstream was the height of luxury and probably cost more than a third-world country’s GDP.
Even though he only had a grace period of a couple of minutes, Garin didn’t rush the safety check. Contrary to what Annja might think, he really didn’t have a death wish. Quite the opposite actually. He was keen to live forever and suck the marrow out of life and all that. Fly into the eye of a storm, no problem—that was man and machine versus the elements and he’d back this man and this machine every time, but only when the deck was stacked in his favor. He wasn’t about to go up in a death trap. Diagnostics run, he fired up the radio and asked, “Anybody there?” but didn’t raise so much as a burst of static. The man obviously hadn’t reached the control tower yet.
He turned on the internal comms. “Strapped in back there?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he flicked a series of switches and the engines roared into life, the sheer power of them drowning out the wind and rain.
The plane turned slowly, edging ever closer to the start of the runway.
Garin pulled back on the throttle, keeping the brake in place so the engines built up power—more and more of it, until he could feel the body of the Gulfstream shivering. He released the brake, quickly gathering speed despite the layer of water on the runway. The plane juddered against the resistance. In response Garin just gave it more power. His eyes flicked backward and forward between the dials and the end of the runway in the distance. “Not enough speed, not enough speed,” he kept saying to himself as the end of the runway came closer and closer, but kept pushing until it was too late to stop safely in the conditions and just willed the wheels to lift off the ground. They did, only to bounce back down again. “Come on, up you go. I don’t want Annja yelling at me for killing the old man,” he grumbled, and this time the plane started to rise as he pulled back on the steering column, lifting the nose in time to avoid a row of hedges that marked the perimeter of the small airfield.
Garin let out a sigh of relief, not realizing that he had been holding his breath the entire time. His knuckles were white from where he’d been gripping the wheel. He relaxed his grip as they started to climb. Through the window there was nothing but gray cloud and rain. He checked the instruments, making minor adjustments to bank them around toward the north. There were no hazards at this height; any commercial flights would be well above the storm or avoiding it all together.
As they leveled up, Roux opened the cabin door and took the copilot’s seat beside him.
“In-flight entertainment not up to scratch?” Garin asked.
“I’m not the best passenger,” Roux said. “I’d rather be up front.”
“Meaning you wanted to keep an eye on me?”
“Something like that.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not about to get you killed. I like the plane far too much to crash it.”
And almost as soon as he said it, the Gulfstream hit a pocket of turbulence that dropped it a hundred feet in a stomach lurching fall. Immediately, it was caught by an updraft and leveled out smoothly, buffeted and bounced from beneath as the wind tried to tip the wings.
“You sure about that?”
“Positive.”
“Good,” Roux said. “Don’t make me regret trusting you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Lightning flashed, a sheet of cool blue rippling out through the clouds, too close for comfort. The cabin filled with the sound of thunder.
Garin gripped the controls again, tighter this time, as the vibrations tried to wrench them out of his hands. It took every ounce of strength he had to level off again.
Roux didn’t look happy.
He had his eyes closed; his skin had the texture of greaseproof paper and his fingers gouged into the armrests of the copilot’s seat.
“You okay, big guy?” he asked.
Roux nodded. That was as far as communication went.
Garin didn’t see him open his eyes again until the turbulence was over and the plane had lurched out of the storm.
Beyond them lay sunshine and blue sky.
The Gulfstream had an onboard satellite phone system that rerouted to Garin’s cell, meaning his phone was theoretically never out of range. He tried to call Annja, but it went straight to voice mail. No doubt the weather was playing havoc with her reception out in the woolly wilds of Wales.
He would call again before they landed, but for the time being at least he could relax.
“So,” he said finally. “Are you going to tell me what we are looking for?” He checked the instrumentation again, making sure the bearings were right for the small airport in Caernarfon that was their destination. He’d booked a hire car that was going to be waiting for them when they touched down.
