The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2)

by Anna Richland

  Stig had told her. She’d failed, not him. She’d been too cynical to trust the evidence of her own eyes or to believe what he’d tried to share.

  They flew another twenty minutes with the door open and the cold gnawing her to the bone. She guessed they were flying almost due north, maybe a little bit west, because for a while there had been a hint of orange at the edge of the sea to her left. Now that line of orange was gone. No stars above through the clouds, no lights below on the water, total dark.

  Her watch said another twenty minutes had passed when she saw the speck of light on the horizon. The pit of her stomach told her that was their destination, and it wasn’t land. It wasn’t anywhere that she could signal out a window or run away, because on all sides the unending black of the sea merged into the black of the sky.

  The light multiplied into a cluster of small lights, but she couldn’t tell whether they were heading for a ship or an island. Then, as if a switch had flipped, the few lights became many. A giant white letter H in a circle showed below the open door. Not H for help. H for helipad. There was enough illumination to show her the steel trusses of two cranes and the stacked squat tower of prefabricated building modules crouching at one end of the tablelike structure, looking so unbalanced that she wondered if the entire setup would flip into the water.

  The helicopter settled over its target, an offshore oil platform. No one would find her. No one, not even Stig, would be able to rescue her. The metal walls and floor shuddered as wind buffeted the hovering coffin, but finally they landed.

  Leif pulled her out by her bound wrists. She stumbled to the concrete deck, wanting to avoid falling into him but unable to center her feet under her body with her hands immobilized and stretched in front of her body.

  He yanked on her arms, then released to let the forward momentum carry her straight into his chest as if he’d intended it. His hands caught her, one grabbing her breast and the other on her shoulder.

  She reacted instinctively the way Manny had drilled into her since he was a tough thirteen-year-old, taller than his big sister and trying to be the man of their two-person family. She thunked the hard part of her head into his chest, and then slammed her knee upward as fast as she could. One-two, buckle my shoe.

  Her brother’s tricks worked for an instant. Leif grunted and let go.

  She pivoted to run, but then her head jerked back so hard her feet almost skidded out on the wet concrete. She chuffed a painful breath out her open mouth, only pride keeping her from squealing once for each hair she knew she was losing.

  “You’re a fast bitch. Are you this quick in bed, hmm?” His voice was so close to her ear she thought she might be ill, but she swallowed the acid. No weakness, and throwing up would show weakness. “Stig will want you returned in one piece, won’t he?”

  Leif rotated her by using his grip on her hair. As soon as she made it out of here, she was cutting it. Too damn many men had used her hair to control her. She was done with it.

  “Sir?” The pilot had a clipboard in a plastic cover in his hand. The white floodlights and streaming rain made all three of them look like stills from a black-and-white movie. What part was he, the extra? His mouth was partially open as if he wanted to ask a question but wasn’t sure. His gaze went from her hands to Leif’s grip in her hair.

  She put all the pleading she could muster into her half-open mouth and big eyes.

  The pilot must know one less passenger arrived here than departed Antwerp, that one of the men had fallen out in a struggle and that she’d been kidnapped. “Sir, may I ask—”

  “I don’t pay you to ask questions.” Her captor snarled, and in the distraction his hand loosened and she stumbled back, temporarily out of his reach. A few more steps, maybe she could turn and run. Over the side might be better than staying.

  Who was she kidding? Her hands were tied. She’d last thirty seconds in the storm waves.

  “I don’t know why I pay you.” Then her captor had his gun in his hand.

  “No! Don’t!” she cried.

  He ignored her. “You ask more questions than people on my payroll should.”

  One boom, then the pilot’s clipboard fell to the gray concrete deck. He tried to look at his chest and lift his arms at the same time, but his torso jerked and twitched and he couldn’t seem to connect the motions. He stumbled backward until the side of the helicopter stopped him. Rain had soaked his dark-colored windbreaker, so the only change she could see on his chest was a small tear in his jacket. But his face slackened in a way that told her his body and his mind were pulling apart before he slid to the ground wordlessly.

  Leif turned to her. His grip was like a set of pincers, painful and sharp, and his weapon dangled low at his side in his other hand. “Are you happy that I shot him?”

  She stared uncomprehendingly. The rain streamed off the tip of the pilot’s nose, into his open mouth and out again.

  “Your pitiful begging cost me a good pilot. He wanted to help you twice. I can’t have employees who don’t do what they’re told.”

  Her fault.

  Not my fault, she screamed inside her head. Leif’s fault.

  In a sick haze, she stumbled where Leif prodded her, toward the building assembled out of pieces on the far side of the platform. Three flights of exposed open metal stairs, saturated and slippery, loomed.

  At the top, a flimsy door didn’t look like it would hold back the sea elements, but at least when they passed into the hall, her face could tell that it was a little warmer here. The rest of her was too cold and wet to know the difference.

  She trembled. Cold. Fear. Hypothermia.

  Her captor opened the last door on the right, flipped a wall switch, and she knew the true ordeal was about to begin.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Despite the chill, the blue and yellow decorations in the English beach house reminded the man called Thomas Locke of a place Jane had once rented along the Florida coast. He savored the memory while he cleaned his Heckler and Koch P7M8. On that Florida trip he’d been halfway through the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant and had intended to read eight hours a day, but Jane had insisted he join her and Emmie to walk the beach. She’d herded him miles looking for shells and wave-smoothed glass, debris they could have bought in ten minutes, but she’d preferred to beachcomb.

  The tacky shell picture frame perched on the fake mantel opposite his seat stabbed Locke with the memory of why Jane had insisted on collecting all those shells and flotsam. She and her daughter had surprised him at Christmas with a family picture in a homemade frame. The glue had been visible enough around the shells that Em, still in braces, had protested, “It was supposed to dry clear.” He’d said he couldn’t see what she meant, because it was clear. Another memory burned into his heart as surely as the awkward little craft project had burned to ash last summer.

  He left his semi-automatic in pieces on the table and crossed to the mantel. Glue didn’t show on this frame. Probably made in a factory in Asia.

  This mission was for Jane and Em. His last, maybe.

  The little band of three men and a dog had connected with the immortal soldier and his doctor wife, Wulf and Theresa, at the airport in Hull this morning, then driven to the coast at Grimsby. Neither Wulf nor Theresa recognized him, a testament to his world-class blandness. Wulf had arranged a fishing trawler to run them out to the oil platform, departure in six hours fifteen minutes. Theresa and Porkchop were staying on shore.

  He’d never actually been a hero, the type who ran toward gunfire or sirens instead of away. His inclinations, his training, his livelihood had always focused on staying undetected. Hiding who and what he was, as surely as he’d hidden his pay in Luxembourg banks.

  Tonight was different. Tonight was for Jane.

  “Thomas?”

  He turned at the name he’d used for the last
two months.

  Stig must have called him more than once. “You were wool-gathering.”

  “Pardon me. I was recalling another beach house.”

  Stig’s look requested details, even while his hands busied themselves reassembling his own semi-automatic.

  “Thailand. Fishing trip.” And running CIA money to informants ratting out arms dealers.

  Wulf stopped cleaning his weapon’s bolt action to look from Thomas to Luc. “Tonight won’t be so warm and pleasant. Both of you should stay here.”

  “No, thank you.” Relief battled annoyance at the soldier’s implied criticism. While he wasn’t former Special Forces, neither had he spent his life selling cars in a suburban mall. “I’m still in.”

  “I vouch for them both,” Stig said. “And for Porkchop, if he wants to join our pleasure cruise. He’s a cantankerous little git and as good in a tight spot as they come.”

  Wulf stared at Stig. “They’re with you, not me. I’m not responsible for their safety.”

  Stig nodded, and Luc launched into a descriptive refusal of the offer to stay behind.

  It had been a long time since Thomas could remember feeling as if he had a colleague. A person who vouched for him or trusted him.

  Wulf’s phone rang before Luc could finish his umbrage. “Coming to the door,” Wulf told the caller as he crossed to check through the side window. All of them knew better than to look out a peephole.

  Only when the former soldier was on station did his wife get out of the car, plastic takeout bags for their last lunch swinging as she splashed through puddles. Her husband opened and closed the door. She had been in the open between the car and house no more than five seconds. They were a careful team.

  More careful than Jane had ever learned to be, but then, Theresa had been in the army too and suffered her own losses, the type that made a person either extremely reckless or extremely cautious.

  “I bought this instead of Indian,” she said as she tracked water across the wood floor.

  Over the last six months he’d accepted that even if he hadn’t stuck his neck out, his world would still have exploded. He’d still be without Jane, but he’d have no self-respect to help shoulder his grief. When Unferth had given him termination orders for Theresa, he’d spoken up. That counted, and it let him sleep. A little.

  Seeing Wulf and Theresa together reminded him he’d been right, and honorable, but it didn’t lessen his pain.

  “I’ve heard the national food of Britain is chicken curry or chicken tikka.” Theresa squeezed four bags onto the table between boxes of ammunition, then shed her rain parka. “But this place was closer, and driving on the left in the rain freaks me out.”

  As he processed the printed Green Papaya logo on the bags, the familiar aroma reached him, starting an ache so painful that he wrapped his arms around his waist and backed away. He and Jane had loved Thai, until the day his boss had said, We can debate my decision over Thai food. I hear it’s your favorite. That day had sealed his family’s fate.

  Luc asked about the rice, and Stig dealt clamshell containers across the table like vingt-et-un, as happy as those who were about to die could muster.

  Red curry and skewers of peanut chicken had been Jane’s way of celebrating when he was home from a trip.

  “Thomas? Are you eating?” Theresa held a paper plate in her hand, spoon poised over a container of jasmine rice.

  He nodded and reached for the plate of rice. The steam hit his nose, curled inside his body with the sweetly subtle call of his wife’s skin. He missed her. He missed her very much. And the men on the oil rig had killed her.

  “Thomas?” Theresa hadn’t started to eat. Her dark hair and eyes, the combination like Jane’s, blurred into Christina’s features too. They were alike, those three women. Falling for men who were too at home with danger, and not at home with them.

  “My name isn’t Thomas.” The bubble inside his ribs grew. He wasn’t a religious man, merely one who believed in seeing the signs life placed in front of you, and the Thai food was a big one.

  The crew around the table fell silent.

  “My parents named me John Alan Draycott. If tonight ends as it likely will, I’d prefer to depart as I arrived. As John Draycott.”

  They all processed his announcement in the pause, but Theresa spoke first. “Is there someone I should...”

  “No, not anymore.” Last year Jane’s body had been identified in the burned shell of their Fairfax home, a victim of a failed gas line. Those were happening more frequently, the news announcers concluded, due to lack of infrastructure spending. Even suburbs ringing the seat of national politics weren’t immune. Thus a murder morphed into a footnote in an endless budgetary debate. His stepdaughter must be gone too, because she hadn’t responded to the personal ads that contained the family safe words. Perhaps the Agency would want to know, but only to reroute his pension into a clandestine account. They were always looking for a way to move legitimate personnel appropriations into black ops funds. “Please take care of Porkchop.”

  “Of course.”

  “Draycott.” Stig reached his hand across the table. “Nice to know you, John.”

  * * *

  Artifact hunters are curious people, aware that the worst weather exposes the best finds. The most avid are as enthusiastic as storm-chasers or war correspondents. They weigh the comfort of a couch against the thrill of the search, and reach for their squall gear.

  Twenty-five miles southwest of Copenhagen, Denmark, the town of Gammel Lejre sits quietly in the heart of old Viking lands. Farmers plow curving rows around ancient stone monuments. Golfers play past barrows of unknown warriors. Archaeologists with poetic natures search cremation mounds for links to Beowulf, for these fields and hills supposedly held the Hall of Heorot and the throne of Hrothgar, King of the Spear-Danes.

  Thirty years ago, seekers uncovered the postholes of a 160-foot-long great hall on a hilltop. Those who hoped Heorot had been found were disappointed when carbon-dating revealed the hall to be from AD 880. Heorot remained lost. Digging deeper, they uncovered the remains of another hall, equally great and two hundred years older, but not old enough to have supported the roof under which Beowulf ate, drank and fought.

  Infected by the passion that drives both discovery and obsession, the devoted persevered for twenty more years until they found the remains of a third great structure occupying another hilltop. Half the length of a soccer field, but more importantly, built in the middle of the sixth century, the evidence confirmed their faith. If there was a Heorot, if King Hrothgar was real, the hilltop at Lejre was the place.

  To the west of the royal hills of Lejre lies an inhospitable landscape of rocks and rubble left by melting prehistoric glaciers. Boggy marshes dotted with trees and scrub link the small lakes and tarns, making the land simultaneously too wet and too boulder-strewn for farming or village life. Although ancient people avoided these bogs, modern man does not generally believe in evil, or at least in evil landscapes, so the rocks have been removed and the fens drained. The marsh has shrunk; it has not disappeared. Drier, it became a destination for hunters who use beeping metal detectors.

  In February, farmers hunkered in their snow-locked homes had a sight straight from ancient lore when flames lit the nearby Lejre historic museum complex like a coastal signal of centuries past. After dousing the massive fire, searchers found two bodies, assault weapons that didn’t belong with the historic collection and a blood-covered snowmobile.

  March brought storms to churn the mud and throw winter-killed tree limbs into the bog. Wind raked the water’s surface, pushed the sulfurous water into inland waves where no tide normally existed and hurled the depths onto the land. The wind plunged across the bog like horse-hooves of apocalyptic riders, churning, churning, to the dark bog floor.

  The most devoted treasure s
eekers set out before storms finish, hoping to find another Tollund Man or Lindow Man, perfectly preserved by the anaerobic mud for a thousand years, or perhaps a hoard of rings and goblets. They all know of a farmer somewhere who turned up something, and now it’s in this museum or that one. They all hunger to be next.

  The man in the yellow all-weather coat, overalls and thigh boots was devoted. Rain that kept others indoors never dissuaded him, because he loved the anticipation of a find revealed by forces of nature.

  He’d been right to venture out this afternoon as soon as the rain slackened, because he had the prize of a lifetime in front of him. An armored, headless torso lay half in and half out of the mud. The body was perfectly preserved, with a suit of unusually fine chainmail and two complete gauntlets on his hands. This would be the first major find of the twenty-first century, perhaps called Lejre Man, and his name would go in the books as the discoverer.

  Then he saw a head with bits of intact flesh on the mostly exposed skull tangled in tree roots only meters away. It must belong to the same body, pushed out of a bog burial and ripped apart by the storm.

  His hands trembled as he picked vegetation from the skull and fit it to the torso, his mind already racing to condense his biography for the news. Lejre Man’s armor was remarkable, and even his teeth were complete under the mud-crust. This find would bring him fame, perhaps a museum job if he handled the publicity correctly.

  He stepped away to snap a photo and sent it to his girlfriend.

  Not quite the placement he wanted, so he bent to adjust one of the bog man’s mummified hands and looked at his tiny mobile screen.

  He didn’t see the other hand move.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Christina didn’t know how long she’d been absent from her body before her consciousness checked back after its visit to a better place. She’d tipped over her chair, struggling to lift her bound arms over the back. Now her right arm was numb pinned underneath her weight. Her clammy jeans stuck uncomfortably and the twist ties binding her to the chair legs dug into her skin above her socks. All of this was unpleasant, but her survival instinct sent one mantra to the blue screen that was the rest of her mind.