by Alex Archer
“Already taken care of.”
“Your check bounced at the bank. My guess? You should start seeing the overdrafts immediately. I know you are two months behind on rent for that little fencing salon around the corner. Pity. The children will be deprived of your witty yet charming teaching manner,” Lambert said.
Ascher grunted against the increasing force straining his muscles.
“As for that cottage you call a mansion out of town, I’ve made it my business to know your electricity will be shut off two days from now.” He bent close to Ascher’s face. “Allow me to ease your financial strain.”
“There is no amount you can offer for the sword.”
Ascher twisted. Two meaty hands held firmly. It was quite embarrassing how easily he’d been wrangled. As long as his aggressor held his arms back at such a painful angle, he could not escape.
“That sword is something I have searched for for years,” Ascher hissed. The gloved hand waggled its fingers before him. A disturbing threat. “I could not possibly put a monetary value to it—”
Suddenly pierced from behind, Ascher’s body clenched, his chest lifting and his body arching upward as his shoulders were wrenched further backward. He was impaled. Stuck like a pig. The pain was incredible, so much so that much as he wanted to scream, he could not put out a single breath.
A blade had entered his left kidney. The thug behind him shoved it to the hilt.
Lambert stood right before him now. An intelligent and greedy gaze followed Ascher’s gasps of pain. “Of course, it would be difficult to fix a price to so intriguing a find as the sword.”
Wincing, Ascher groaned low in his throat. He felt tears roll down his face. It was impossible to make a defensive move or push away his attacker. Barely able to stand, he battled against his fading consciousness by drawing in deep breaths through his nose.
“I wager you’ll hand over the sword for a kidney.” A snap of the rubber glove released a haze of cornstarch powder.
“I need only one!” Ascher defiantly managed to declare.
“Sure, a man can survive with one, but you won’t have that one forever.”
The other thug, who had been standing to the side, stepped forward. Ascher cried out as he took a punch to the right kidney. But, held carefully, his torso did not take the blow with another cringe. It seemed they wanted to ensure the knife remained firmly placed.
“Should you refuse to cooperate,” Lambert continued, “I shall return for the other. But know, I can give you a replacement in exchange for your cooperation.”
Feeling blackness toy with his consciousness, Ascher heard something crackle like plastic.
“Open his mouth.”
His mouth was wrenched open from the right by the one who had punched him.
Lambert stabbed something into his mouth and rubbed it inside Ascher’s cheek. “DNA evidence. I’ll take it back to the lab and immediately begin to grow your new kidney. Therapeutic cloning. Quite the marvel. Think of it as your new life insurance policy.”
The thug clapped Ascher’s jaw shut, and Ascher briefly saw Lambert deposit a white swab into the glass vial.
“What do you say, Vallois? Do we have a deal?”
“I…” He was losing it. Pain shot up and down his spine and spidered through his entire nervous system. He had never known such agony. He couldn’t think, let alone move.
“If you refuse, I’ll have Manny tug the knife from your back. Within twenty minutes, you’ll bleed out internally. You will be dead, Mr. Vallois.”
Death sounded much better than this torture, Ascher thought.
“But, keep the knife in place and accept the escort to casualty that I am willing to provide, and you’ll have a pleasant hospital stay, and be back in the field in, oh, ten days? Of course, the left kidney is a loss.” The plastic rattled before Ascher’s closed eyes. “What do you say?”
The man behind him tapped the blade shoved deep inside his body. Ascher yowled as the vibrations sent out new waves of shocking anguish.
“In or out?” Lambert asked. “The blade, that is.”
Feeling his body release the tense cringe and fall forward, Ascher chased the darkness. Passing out would stop the pain. And so would his compliance.
“In,” he muttered, and then the world stopped.
2
Court of Loius XIV
Seventeenth century
“History shall revere Charles de Castelmore d’Artagnan.”
Queen Anne nodded to Charles, who stood in full regalia—musket and bandolier spread across his black coat trimmed in gold. A red plume dusted the air above his right brow, and his boots were polished to a shine to rival the mirrors in Versailles.
To the queen’s right, a liveried foot guard stepped up, proffering a red velvet pillow with a sword laid upon it.
Containing his excitement, Charles drew in a breath and maintained a solemn expression.
The queen took the sword by the gold hilt and held it before her, seeming to look it over, but moreover, displaying it to all who had congregated in the king’s private chapel to celebrate one of Louis XIV’s musketeers. She handled the weapon with skill, though d’Artagnan doubted she’d had occasion to use the weapon.
“For bravery and valor,” Queen Anne recited in a regal yet quiet voice, which was her manner. “For honor among all men. And for all that you have done for your king and queen. You serve our country well, musketeer.”
She presented the sword to Charles, blade extended horizontally to the right. The hilt sparkled. A bit of damascening curled up near the ricasso of the blade. It was a rapier, and quite ornate. No simple sword for this simple man.
Head still bowed, Charles held open his hands to receive the gift. It wasn’t coin—which he could much use over another sword, especially one so decorative. But the gold on the hilt should fetch a year’s meals, and perhaps even outfit the ranks with the grenades Grosjean had demonstrated at Lille a fortnight earlier. They exploded on contact with the ground. What Charles wouldn’t do to put his hands to those marvelous weapons.
The rapier landed on his palms. It was well weighted; he could determine that merely by holding it. It was likely fashioned by Hugues de Roche, the king’s sword maker, and a most sought after craftsman.
This honor meant the world to Charles. To be publicly awarded this gift made him stand a full boot heel taller, and he felt his shoulders should never again slouch.
Perhaps he’d keep this prize to hand. Though a gold hilt was never practical in active combat. The enemy would see it as plunder, instantly transforming Charles to a keen target among the ranks.
Charlotte would insist he keep it. Yes, perhaps his sons should have this. It was rare he got a chance to visit the boys. It had been over a year since he’d last seen them.
Now the queen bent slightly and leaned forward, which startled Charles. And it wasn’t because her heavily gilded dress creaked and the pearls roped about her neck and across her bosom clacked. The queen had reduced their proximity to close confidence. She had never done such around so many.
“There is more to the eye than what glitters without,” she whispered.
Straightening, she then stepped back and placed her hand in that of her son King Louis XIV.
Remaining bowed before his majesties, Charles knew the king would send him off with a few words. But even as Louis spoke, he could not concentrate, for the wonders Queen Anne had stirred with her cryptic statement.
Present day
CHALON-SUR-SAÔNE WAS a thriving city nestled on the shore of a river that saw barges and tourist cruise boats heading northwest to Paris. The Saône was one of Europe’s largest commercial waterways.
After her flight from England, Annja Creed had rented a car in Paris. She’d come from Stonehenge, after filming a segment for Chasing History’s Monsters. Since the builder’s settlement had been discovered not far from the stone monument, the archaeological world had been astir. Annja hadn’t been able to resist the assignm
ent, but it was not finished, nor did she believe it could ever be truly completed. Stonehenge would offer marvels and mysteries for centuries to come.
Upon arriving in Chalon, a quaint half-timber-and-brick restaurant lured her to park. Now she sat before a table on the restaurant patio beneath a maple dropping its leaves. Pea soup and a side order of potatoes and sausage made her forget that fast food ever existed. She was in pure, fattening, butter-laden heaven. She’d work it off later with a few hours of practice lunges.
The restaurant was on the ground floor of an eighteenth-century building, just across from the river. Since Annja was half an hour early, she had taken advantage of the opportunity to eat. Her first rule of thumb when on the road was to eat when the opportunity presented itself.
Finishing her cup of coffee, she dug out some bills and coins and left them on the café table in payment.
Last night she’d received a hasty instant message from Ascher Vallois—a man whom, until today, she had only referred to as AnjouIII while communicating with him. He’d asked her to meet him as quickly as possible. Ascher knew from a previous online conversation that she had been wrapping things up at Stonehenge. His message had been littered with exclamation points.
Ascher’s excitement had injected Annja with renewed exhilaration over a side project she’d been working on for years. It was one of her favorite geeky obsessions. And Ascher believed he had found it.
She made him promise not to look at the find until she arrived.
The find was the infamous sword alluded to in notes found in the nineteenth-century research journal of adventure writer Alexandre Dumas. The sword was gifted to Charles de Batz-Castelmore d’Artagnan by Queen Anne, the Austrian import, while her son Louis XIV reigned over France in the seventeenth century. Research notes written in the margins of Dumas’s notebooks—but not necessarily in his handwriting—had postulated that the sword had been a gift for a job well done serving as lieutenant of the king’s First Company of Musketeers.
“D’Artagnan’s sword,” Annja murmured, a smile irresistible. “Finally.”
Standing outside the white picket fence that corralled the café’s customers, she looked across the street and stretched her gaze beyond the parking lot before the river.
“If Ascher is right, this day will so rock.”
Though her specialty was the medieval and renaissance time periods, Annja had started following the life of the real-life musketeer—upon whom Dumas based his infamous hero—after reading a tattered copy of The Three Musketeers during her first year at college. If her fellow archaeologists discovered she spent her rare free time poring over copies of Dumas’s journals for the sword, they’d laugh.
And a laughing archaeologist was a rare thing.
Annja considered what she knew about the real musketeer. When Charles Castelmore, one of eight children born to minor nobility, signed on to the musketeers—some thirty years after Dumas had chosen to place him into his fictional version of history—the adventurous young Gascon used his mother’s maiden name of d’Artagnan. At the time, it carried more cachet than the Castelmore surname. His mother had been a Montesquieu, and the d’Artagnan name hailed from ancient nobility. His grandfather had been well-known to Henri IV, a valuable alliance to the Castelmore family.
Castelmore lived an illustrious career serving the king’s First Company of Musketeers. Dumas had included many of the man’s actual adventures in his stories, including the capture and imprisonment of Nicolas Fouquet, the notorious superintendent of finances who had been arrested for embezzling royal funds.
Not many people were aware that the swashbuckling hero from one of their favorite classic reads had been a real person; even fewer were aware of the sword. An allusion to the sword’s existence was marked by a notation in Dumas’s notes. Most literary researchers put it off as an abandoned plot line.
Annja, on the other hand, had found that notation and had run with it.
There were too many correlating facts for her to ignore. But she’d turned up nothing but a few enthusiastic historians and the occasional document signed by d’Artagnan for her sleuthing efforts. Once she realized that the real man had signed his name “d’Artaignan” she had also uncovered a few more items of interest, such as a copy of his marriage certificate—signed by Louis XIV—as well as the document of divorce.
She had explored the few sites d’Artagnan was known to have occupied or lived at, and had even been involved on a dig in Lille where d’Artagnan had served as governor of the city for a few miserable months. That dig had turned up nothing more than a few Spanish coins circa the sixteenth century and a dented copper pot.
She’d thought of Gens, the region close to Lupiac in southwest France, where he was born, but that had turned up little more than the usual facts about the musketeer’s military accomplishments. Though there was a nice museum dedicated to the musketeer in Lupiac.
Of course, Charles Castelmore’s last residence was not Lille, but in Paris on the rue du Bac. The site where his apartment once stood bore a small plaque commemorating the musketeer, but the building had long been torn down and replaced with a more modern design.
Annja had known Ascher Vallois for over a year, having met him online at alt. archaeology. esoterica, her frequent hangout when stuck in an airplane flying over any number of oceans. Ascher began instant messaging her after she’d filled in some information for him on Henri III, his favorite historical figure.
An unabashed flirt—yes, even though only in e-mail—the man had managed to wheedle some of Annja’s personal information from her, such as favorite color, favorite country to visit, and favorite geeky obsession—d’Artagnan.
That information had started an amusing and often informative cyber friendship. Ascher had been on the sword’s trail for years himself. Thanks to some extra research efforts the past two months, Ascher now believed the sword could be found in Chalon, the final resting place of Charlotte-Anne de Chanlecy—d’Artagnan’s ex-wife.
It was a solid theory, one that had caused Annja no amount of chagrin to realize someone had beaten her to the punch.
But though he’d called the moment something had been unearthed at the dig site—it appeared to be the end of a wooden sword box—she knew it could be any number of things.
If the sword had been found, then this detour before heading home to Brooklyn could prove most exciting.
Annja knew exactly what she was getting herself into by meeting Ascher Vallois. She’d already done a background check on him. Her good friend Bart McGilly, NYPD homicide detective, usually ran names through the law-enforcement system for her, but for overseas contacts Annja was left to her own devices.
It had been easy enough to find information on Ascher. He had his own Web site, which focused on fencing and parkour. While Ascher styled himself a part-time archaeologist who enjoyed extreme sports and who also taught at a children’s fencing school in Sens, Annja had decided he was really a glorified treasure hunter.
To be called a treasure hunter by a fellow archaeologist was a real insult. Duel worthy. Ascher had laughed her off when she teased him. Or rather, he LOLed her.
At least he wasn’t a pothunter. Their sort were unauthorized amateurs who scavenged marked-off sites, digging up fragments and then selling them on the black market.
Annja favored the social aspects of archaeology. She loved learning about the people behind the treasures. A treasure hunter was all about the find, the bling, the prestige over nabbing a valuable artifact and then selling it.
Not that she didn’t get excited over a find, but she was very rational and followed the law when it came time to turn treasures over to the proper authorities.
She had made Ascher swear that, if he located d’Artagnan’s sword, selling it was not his intention. He had promised it would go to the Lupiac museum.
“Chalon,” she murmured, smiling to herself. “I should have thought of Chalon.”
Exhaling, Annja then drew in a deep breath. Th
e river, about a hundred yards off, sweetened the air with a marshy tang. She strode across the street, heading for her rental car to wait for Ascher.
Since inheriting Joan of Arc’s sword, Annja’s life had been completely turned on its head. It wasn’t a bad thing, but neither always good. Her job description had become more than a simple archaeologist turning up finds at a dig. She was so much more than a field reporter on a cable television program.
Around every corner she turned, it seemed she encountered danger. She had escaped from bullet fire, swum away from harpoons, battled demons and had come close to death too many times since she’d discovered Joan’s sword—her sword.
Almost daily, the world proved to Annja it was far more wicked than she could have ever fathomed. When Joan’s sword came to her from the otherwhere and fitted itself ready in her hand, it was because it was needed to stop evil or counter adversity.
And of late, Annja had been wielding it a lot.
Today felt like a vacation. An escape from the day job. For once the world did not sit heavily upon her shoulders. This trip to Chalon was a free moment away from Annja Creed, sword-wielding defender of innocence. It was a chance to breathe and to indulge herself.
“I need this,” she said aloud.
Leaning inside her car, she deposited her backpack on the front passenger’s seat, then closed the door and went around to sit on the hood. From here she could see the two steeples of Saint-Pierre, the city’s largest cathedral. She loved touring European cathedrals. And there were so many of them to see, she felt sure to never run out in her lifetime.
The parking lot bordered the shore of the river Saône. The scent of fresh water and grass overwhelmed even the leaky-oil smell coming from the rental car. Blond brickwork danced along the verdant shore, and the paved walkway was shaded by huge chestnut trees.
A white swan called out as Annja scanned the pedestrians, mostly tourists carrying shopping bags and maps. A newly remodeled strip of shops and cafés lined the street behind her. This part of the city catered to tourists, and offered hourly boat tours along the river.
