by Alex Archer
It wasn’t a fast, hard morsel, like she’d given him below-ground to get him to move. This one took its time, and thoroughly impressed her. For a man half-dead, he certainly could curl a girl’s toes.
“Thank you, Annja. I am sorry to have gotten you into this mess,” he said.
“Nothing I’m not accustomed to. In fact, I might have been let down had this adventure been anything less.”
And then she returned the kiss, because some adventures were not to be denied.
ANNJA LEFT ASCHER at the casualty ward in the Hôtel-Dieu on the main island, and in the capable hands of a lovely blond nurse whose giggles had made the indomitable Gascon blush.
Night had arrived, and she had never been happier to revel in the gray illumination a big city gave off. No more pitch-black tunnels for her. At least, not for as long as she could prevent it.
Tossing the pommel of d’Artagnan’s sword up and down in her palm, she stood at the corner of a street paralleling the Seine, pondering her next move.
She knew exactly where to find Jacques Lambert. And if he was smart, BHDC would be entirely cleared out of incriminating evidence by now. But the man wasn’t that smart, and she suspected he felt as if he’d gotten away with murder.
Because he did it daily.
“Not on my watch.”
25
Seventeenth century
The news of her husband’s death shook her more than she expected it to. They had dissolved the marriage years ago. And in truth, while the vows had been honored, she had never felt married to the man who had flitted in and out of her life as if a nuisance insect. Though he had attracted with his musketeer’s tunic and a bold honor that gleamed from him as if gold. A man of impeccable standards—military standards.
Yes, he had been a tender lover, and there was no denying he loved his children. But his very soul had been promised to the king long before she had entered his life.
He had never been completely hers.
Charlotte-Anne should have known when she’d decided to marry a soldier that she could never be first in his life. Only after military, the king, the queen, his troops—and then even the enemy troops—did she manage to toe a place in the line of his affections.
And now he was gone. A man who had given her two fine sons, and a few precious moments of joy.
The journey from Chalon to Paris required she rent a coach and endure half a day on the road. In the carriage, ill sprung and without glass windows, she suffered the interminable five-hour journey only by force of will. She had to return to the place where they once shared their lives. For one last breath of the air. And to claim a small piece of the musketeer who left her alone to raise their children, without thought to support said family.
Not that she wasn’t well enough off. Charlotte-Anne de Chanlecy, dame de Saint-Croix, had certainly married below her station. A family stipend would see her through her end days, but it would not provide for her sons’ futures.
Would there be anything left from their father’s military life to provide them a start? She doubted it.
Her poor boys. They had not seen their father for seven years. And now they would never see him. Yet, they both desired to serve the military. Already the eldest sought to join the guards. Charlotte wished them a better life, but she knew their father’s desire for adventure ran in their veins as molten lava creeps across the scorched earth.
That same inner fire had attracted Charlotte to Charles.
An inventory had been made of Charles de Castelmore’s home on the quai Malaquais. Charlotte had been given a list by the auditor and told all items would go to pay off debtors. When she inquired if there was a small trinket she could keep, she was told to speak to one of the king’s guards. A small cache of d’Artagnan’s personal items was being held with the prefect of police until the king signed off on the musketeer’s death certificate.
That very same evening, Charlotte was granted an audience with the king. She dressed in her finest, and even allowed herself to feel a flutter of anticipation. In all the years she had been married to the king’s favorite, somehow she had never been invited to court. Her husband, most uncomfortable around courts and fanfare, hadn’t bothered to see that invitation secured.
Now she would be granted what she had been owed. But she felt no such desire to return to the glamour of Louis’s court after the audience. His Highness had gifted her with the trinket she’d requested, stating cryptically, “This is the second time we have given this to a Castelmore. Make it stick.”
Now, clutching the gold-hilt rapier at her side, Charlotte swayed as the coach took her away from the royal palace toward an inn at the edge of Paris where she would stay the night before returning to Chalon.
She had not begged, but a real tear had come to her eye when she’d bowed before Louis and Queen Anne and requested a piece of her husband’s possessions for memory. It was the queen who had instructed Colbert to retrieve the rapier for Charlotte, stating quite firmly that it should be given to his sons, for it was well-known that Charlotte had renounced all common property upon her divorce with Charles.
Thanking the royals profusely, Charlotte then left the palace, with every intention of gifting the rapier to her sons. It was a mere sword. Decorative. Dangerous to consider brandishing at the vanguard. Why Charles had not sold it stymied her. And yet, a gift from the king and queen he would surely revere.
The gold hilt might bring a pretty price, but his boys would decide that, if they so chose.
A private family estate sat in the thick woods north of the Augustine convent in Chalon. There Charlotte retired, hoping to never look upon another handsome soldier with seduction on his lips, a promise in his eyes and adventure in his heart.
Over the years, the rapier was tucked away into a cove in the wall near the hearth for safekeeping. Upon Charlotte’s death, the cove remained untouched and forgotten. Her youngest son had been forced to sell his mother’s estate to provide for his own family.
D’Artagnan’s eldest son died without progeny, while his youngest produced two sons. Both boys died without children, being the last descendants of Charles de Castelmore d’Artagnan.
Present day
ANNJA COULDN’T LET things stand as they did. Not without the treasure. Not without knowing if there was a treasure.
If treasure did exist, it didn’t belong to BHDC, nor was it meant to subsidize cloning research. Lambert had gone too far. She would make the modern-day Frankenstein answer for the lives of the babies he had created and who had then quickly perished in the name of his twisted science.
Standing before the nondescript redbrick facade of BHDC, Annja summoned courage.
Yes, she had to summon it. Just because she possessed a sword that would help her to defeat the bad guys didn’t mean she wasn’t reluctant, if at times wisely fearful of the situations she got involved in.
Biopiracy was far out of her realm of understanding. Jacques Lambert may not be a man who threatened to destroy the world, but with his selfish experiments he crippled the future of the world, one small human life at a time.
“Oh, hell, what is that?”
Up on the third floor, a window glowed strangely against the night sky. Almost as if it reflected the setting sun, golden and fiery—She knew what it was. Fire.
“He’s destroying the evidence.”
All her life Annja had had dreams about fire. She’d never been caught in a burning building or had any incidents involving fire. There was no explanation for the dreams.
“More like nightmares,” she muttered.
Yet now the pace of her heartbeat brought her to that moment of struggling lucidity that followed after waking from such a nightmare. It wasn’t an explanation so much as a knowing.
Your history. Her history. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake as a martyr. The two of you are connected.
With the sword, had she inherited the nightmares?
Breathing deeply from her stomach, Annja then let it all gus
h out. Focus. She wouldn’t allow what wasn’t real to bring her down, to cloud her thoughts. She needed to act. And fast.
Nothing would stop her from learning the truth and seeing justice done. “I can do this.”
She marched up to the building where ten-foot-high brushed-steel doors guarded the entrance. No signs or plaques identified the place. It was locked—no surprise.
“Wonder who is inside? Just Lambert? A crew of pistol-wielding thugs?”
Hopefully, no pregnant mothers. If they implanted fertilized eggs into women here, then they very likely brought them back for the birth. There must be a clinic or hospital section in the building. Innocent women could be trapped inside.
Shaking the door, Annja guessed the solid steel would require forceful encouragement. Glancing over her shoulder to check her periphery—the street was quiet, the café down the road dark and the windows covered with bright words advertising the specials.
She summoned the sword.
The blade wouldn’t serve to break the narrow glass windows set into the steel, but a firm stroke of the hilt straight down onto the biometric scanner cracked off the cover and exposed wires that short-circuited in tiny pops.
Smashing the pommel repeatedly into the exposed box, Annja was rewarded when the door clicked. It didn’t open smoothly, yet she was able to ram her shoulder against the steel and push the door inside.
Releasing the sword from this world, Annja stepped quickly through the reception area and down the hallway that displayed ancient swords, rapiers and knives. A Gothic mace taunted beneath a halogen beam. Caltrops—medieval throwing stars used to take down horses—flaunted deadly iron points. None were encased in glass.
She didn’t need any of them.
Arriving at the door to Lambert’s office, Annja lifted a leg and kicked near the biometric lock. Still wearing the rubber boots, she felt the impact keenly. She hadn’t expected it to fall inward, thinking surely the lock and steel mechanism would hold firmly—but one good kick did bring the whole thing down.
Inside, Jacques Lambert leaned against a desk, his ankles crossed casually and his palms to the black marble edge of the desk behind him.
“I’ve been expecting you, Annja Creed.”
“Really.” She stepped across the threshold and, while keeping her distance, maintained a peripheral view of the doorway. “Where’s your fiddle, Nero?”
“You saw? There’s no smoke, is there? It’s contained. Third floor only. You’ve forced me to take measures.”
“Imagine that, you having to take measures.”
“Didn’t take you long to find your way out from the dark labyrinths that snake beneath our city. Pity about the treasure hunter.”
“He’s still alive. Not for lack of your attempts. Your goon was ordered to kill, wasn’t he?”
“Of course. I don’t do anything halfway, Annja—you should know that by now. But your death was not ordered. You hold great value to me.”
“Charmed, I’m sure.”
There were no lights on in the room, save the small halogens highlighting the swords on the wall. As it was, they provided enough light to show the maniacal glimmer in Lambert’s eyes.
Annja had encountered many a power-crazed villain, most very intelligent and reasonable of mind. A villain could never get far without skill and intelligence. But the truly frightening opponents were those who got sucked in by one small twisted desire, and ran with it.
“Speaking of my goons. Did you leave the body behind to rot?”
Annja wasn’t sure how to report the death, or to what authorities. Aboveground police or the cata-cops? She wasn’t keen on allowing innocent cataphiles to stumble upon a rotting corpse. “Taken care of.” Or would be soon enough, she hoped.
She glanced around Lambert’s arm. “Is that the box?”
He reached behind his back and slid a small white box into view. It had been too dark in the tunnels to know more than that it was a box and light colored, possibly metal. But now she saw it was wood, painted white. A beam of light fell across the decorative flourishes carved along the edges and the base. It was ornate, but it struck Annja that the design was not fitting of the period. Something created in the seventeenth century would have been even more elaborate, flourished with the baroque. The style appeared flowing yet spare, perhaps art nouveau, though she knew little about the art style of the time period.
“I was hoping you could explain this to me,” Jacques said. “It appears perhaps Dumas put the joke on all of us.”
She stepped forward, wary of her periphery, and also not about to forget that the building was on fire. Contained? How did one contain a fire to one floor? Perhaps that’s where the goons were. Destroying BHDC’s files.
The more time she wasted, the more incriminating files Lambert was able to destroy.
“It’s not indicative of the baroque time period,” she said. “I would expect gilding, some miniatures painted on the sides. Of course, time might have erased any detail work. May I?”
Lambert nodded eagerly and she picked it up.
It was light. The wood must be walnut, or perhaps mahogany; she couldn’t be sure with the white paint. The cover was latched on two opposite sides. Interesting. It wasn’t a lock and key, but rather a sliding latch mechanism, and it wasn’t gold or silver, but bronze. Again, a surprise.
Wouldn’t a gift from a queen, rumored to be worth an untold sum, at the very least, be offered in an elaborate setting?
There were words engraved around the rim of the box cover. Annja traced a finger along the raised carvings as she read, “Tous Pour Un, Un Pour Tous?”
Lambert met her wondering stare with a shrug of shoulder and splay of his hands. “Ironic, isn’t it? That Dumas was able to dupe so many. I had always wondered if he had based The Count of Monte Cristo upon his own treasure findings. This proves it.”
“If Dumas found the treasure, then why did he die in debt?” Annja asked.
“Extravagant spending, a childlike lack of understanding for the value of money and goods,” Lambert said.
Details Annja knew anyone could know about the writer by reading a simple biography.
She opened the lid. There was nothing inside, save a soft red velvet lining. If it was from d’Artagnan’s time it had aged very well. But the condition of the fabric led Annja to believe it was much newer.
“There was nothing inside?” she asked.
Lambert shook his head. “I would tell you if there had been. Honest.”
He probably would have. If only to flaunt his find, she knew.
“This could not be the treasure,” she said. “It could not have been placed in the tunnels during Queen Anne’s time.”
“Perceptive, but dull as a horse,” Lambert said snidely. “There never was a treasure. It is a hoax designed by Alexandre Dumas, for—I don’t know!”
“It couldn’t be.” She replaced the cover and smiled at the saying that Dumas had made famous: All For One, One For All. The musketeers’ call to adventure, their claim to protect the king and each other. “The map was in d’Artagnan’s sword. Dumas couldn’t possibly have found the sword and planted it outside Chalon to be later dug up by—”
“Treasure hunters?”
He implied she’d stepped from her profession to the dark side. She wasn’t about to join ranks with this pirate.
“No, the sword and the map are real. Dumas must have found the treasure during his research—perhaps he found the copy of the map in Fouquet’s papers? Or even Mansart’s?”
“Possible.”
“And when he found the treasure, he then decided to leave behind this box for future treasure hunters.” She tilted it and inspected the bottom, which was lined with a disintegrating slash of green velvet. “It looks a trinket box. Maybe something created to go along with the release of The Three Musketeers. ‘All for one—’”
“None for all,” Lambert spit and slapped the side of the box so it went flying out of her hands.
Annja wasn’t quick enough. She lunged, but felt the wood as it skimmed the tips of her fingers. It hit the marble floor with a dull crash, but did not shatter as she expected; only the lid cracked in two and clattered across the floor.
“What a waste of time!” Lambert railed. “And at so great an expense.”
“What expense? You plunder. It costs you nothing more than time spent stalking your marks until they lead you to the treasure!” Annja shouted.
“It cost me the entire third floor. Because of you. You know too much.”
“Most of it was freely given by you when you spilled the beans to me the other day.”
“I—! For a pretty young celebrity, you have an obstinate manner about you.”
“I’ve nothing of the sort. You wanted to spill, and you did.”
“I am doing this for Toby!”
Annja crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her head. “Is this the part where the villain details his evil plan before the hero tries to take him out?”
“A villain?” Lambert scoffed. “In the eyes of a simple woman who has no more knowledge of the workings of the genetic code than a monkey. Do you understand the value to mankind to successfully construct a human clone?”
“No, actually I don’t. And I don’t need to know that it’ll replace lost loved ones, or populate factories with mindless drones. All I know is that your research is playing God and destroying human lives in the quest for a nonessential science.”
“Nonessential? It is our future. It is our means to immortality!”
“It is morally wrong.”
“Morality is an invention of the personality,” he hissed grandly. “It is something we creatures require to uphold judgment against others. We crave that accusatory judgment, the ability to place ourselves above another, to lift our souls. I am of the light, I judge none and I serve all.”
Annja coughed, and glanced aside.
“One man’s morality is another man’s sin,” Lambert said. “Science is always the scapegoat! What you cannot understand, you seek to destroy. And yet, throughout the ages, science has never ceased to open our eyes. We feared the plague, and then science created a microscope so we could study germs and learn and understand that fear. We are but atoms and light, Annja Creed.” He pounded his chest fiercely. “These are but borrowed bodies—the soul is the great equalizer.”
