Mystic Warrior

by Alex Archer

  A dozen feet farther on, the tunnel widened enough that she could stand. After she did, she added her miniflashlight’s beam to the light put out by her lamp.

  The lights skated across the remnants of a small room. Stone walls encrusted with tree roots that stabbed through the crumbling mortar stood on three sides. A dark doorway lay in shadows under a snarled gob of roots that partially covered the opening.

  In spite of her excitement to see what lay beyond the door, Annja played her miniflashlight’s beam across the floor. A thick layer of damp earth mostly covered the stone floor, but patches of the cut rock showed through in places. The soil erosion hadn’t always flowed down the hill.

  Several small animal tracks stood revealed in the earth, showing where the martens and other larger mammals had walked.

  The tracks disappeared into the doorway, definitely indicating more space lay beyond.

  “Well, that’s a bit of good news.” After coming to a stop beside Annja, Roux aimed his flashlight at the tracks in the mud. “Nothing human has been this way in a long time.” He pointed his beam at the doorway and drew one of his pistols, flicking off the safety.

  “Why do you have the gun?” Racz stood behind them.

  “In case whatever made those tracks is still with us.” His voice echoed slightly in the room.

  Racz didn’t say anything, but his flashlight shifted as he gripped the handle more tightly.

  “Shall we?” Roux asked Annja.

  Taking out her own pistol, Annja crossed the room to the doorway. As she entered the passageway, the light from her headlamp and miniflashlight chased the darkness back, revealing huge sections of hammock webs that hung from the ceiling. Large spiders moved jerkily through the strands.

  Rather than disturb the spiders, Annja squatted and duckwalked under them. The spiders continued moving only inches above her head. She had to ignore the crawling, itching feeling in her hair, telling herself that it was just her imagination. Then Roux swiped a hand across her hair and a large spider slapped against the wall and dropped to the floor before scurrying under rock debris that crunched underfoot.

  Mouth dry, hair still itchy, Annja kept moving forward.

  Eleven steps farther on, she came to a three-way intersection. She shone her flashlight over the other two tunnels. She went to the right, a habit she’d learned when exploring unknown places. In case she got lost, she had a way of figuring out how to get back to her starting point. She took a piece of yellow chalk from her backpack and marked the wall, tagging it with the direction indicated by the compass she carried.

  The new passageway curved slightly, making it hard to see what was coming ahead. Twenty-seven steps later, the flashlight lit up the bottom of a stone staircase that led up fifteen feet to a doorway partially filled with fallen rocks.

  Staying close to the wall, Annja picked her way over the rocks that covered the steps. She paused at the doorway and cast her light over the large room ahead.

  Rocks filled three-quarters of the room, blocking off all exits that surely existed except one to Annja’s left. The remains of several campsites at the bottom of the rocks left her feeling dismayed. Charred wood sat in clumps, surrounded by crushed beer cans and cigarette butts. Soft-drink bottles lay on their sides.

  “We’re not the first ones to come this far,” Roux said. “It looks like some of the local young people found a way in at some point.”

  Annja made no comment and pressed on, crossing the floor to the doorway and going through. The next room was larger and held more campsites, and it was empty of fallen rocks, though the ceiling bulged conspicuously above them. Cracks showed through the mortar, and pieces of the ceiling seemed on the verge of crashing into the room.

  “You aren’t disappointed that this place isn’t pristine, are you?” Roux asked.

  “A little,” Annja replied.

  “It’s nothing to be concerned about. Many of the greatest finds in history were discovered in places explorers thought they knew.”

  “I know. Archaeologists are still finding tombs in Egypt.” She moved into the next passageway and followed it, realizing they were going deeper into the broken remains of the castle. The soft scrape of their footsteps and the occasional crunch of a rock underfoot echoed, letting her know considerable empty space existed before her.

  A wide door opened to a huge room on her right. She aimed the flashlight inside and saw more campsites across the floor. Piles of rubble had been scooted out of the way to make room for transient visitors.

  The walls on either side of the room contained ragged cracks. Rocks had broken loose and lay spilled inside the room nearly six feet from the original wall.

  But on the other side of the room, the wall was solid. Covered by grime and spiderwebs, chipped by debris, the wall featured a ten-foot-by-twenty-foot section of dark stone that had been chipped out of what looked like black marble. Dust coated it in a gray patina, giving it a faded and worn appearance.

  Beneath the dust and debris, a woman stood more to the right of the section.

  Drawn by the woman’s beauty, wanting to see more of what lay beneath the dust, Annja crossed the room. She stopped and wiped dust from the woman’s face. The figure, like the rest of the scene, had been carved of stone, rendering the image in bas-relief, and fitted so precisely together that it was difficult to see the seams. Most of the small lines disappeared even more once the dust was removed.

  “It’s the Virgin Mary.” Roux stood beside Annja, playing his light over the sections her dusting revealed.

  “I know.” Annja holstered her pistol, slid her backpack off and positioned her miniflashlight on a rock so the beam shone onto the wall. She worked with both hands and used her jacket to knock dust from the stone, steadily revealing what lay beneath.

  Within a few minutes, with Roux working beside her, the image was revealed. It was, as Annja had thought, the Virgin Mary. The nimbus around her head gave her away immediately. She stood in front of a mounted knight on a battlefield. Plate armor covered the warrior from his shoulders to his knees, leaving his head bare. The armor and the broadsword placed the time at around the ninth or tenth century. The knight’s head was bare, turned so that he was calling to the troops who stood ready behind him.

  “Do you recognize the knight?” Roux asked. The confidence in his voice betrayed the fact that he believed he knew who it was.

  “Childeric III,” Annja said. The profile was the same as the one that had been struck on coins during the king’s reign. “This castle was built under Childeric I’s rule, over two hundred years before Childeric III became king.”

  “Childeric I was a lothario,” Roux said. “After he’d seduced the wives of many of his nobles, he was exiled from the country for eight years. It wasn’t until he helped defeat the Goths that he was once again recognized as king of the Franks.”

  “Why did Childeric III have this wall built?” Annja studied the scene, taking in the wide swath of warriors. “Designing this, even if it was done here, took a long time. Probably years.”

  “The castle would have stayed in the family.” Roux reached out to touch a spot where a piece of the stone mural had either fallen out over time or been knocked out.

  Other bare places stood out as well, revealing the stone wall behind the mural. Tool marks scarred several of those places, showing where someone had dug into the mural, either to see what lay behind it or to take souvenirs. The campers who had littered the area might have claimed some of those stones as keepsakes for bragging rights to prove they’d been to the castle ruins.

  “Childeric III didn’t do this on a whim.” Annja stepped back from the wall, taking it all in again. “He had a reason. And the stone is Tournai marble. The same as the statue Janos Brankovic made.”

  “You think the choices are connected?”

  “They have
to be.” Annja considered the string of information that had brought them here. “The manuscript Julio Gris left mentioned the treasure, and it was a message hidden within a message.”

  “As was Brankovic’s Virgin Mary. Also a message in a message.”

  Annja touched the cool surface of the stone.

  “The Virgin Mary was carved here first. Then it was turned into a statue by Brankovic.” Annja paused. “No, that’s not true. The monks saw the Virgin Mary in Dózsa’s ear as he lay dying.” Excitement coursed through her. “What if they didn’t see the Virgin Mary?”

  “Then the Catholic Church would have a problem on its hands. They verified the story was true.” The light reflected from the mural lifted Roux’s sardonic smile from the shadows. “But if we follow your logic, perhaps they were two monks whose faith wasn’t just in God.”

  “They were listening to the ravings of a dying man who was holding on to a secret.” Annja searched the mural and ran her hands across it more slowly. “Maybe they were caught trying to get information out of Dózsa.”

  “And they covered that up with the story of the Virgin Mary. Half truth, half lie.”

  “It could be that Dózsa told them some story about the Virgin Mary that put the suggestion in their minds so that they saw her in his ear.”

  “God does work in mysterious ways.”

  Annja combed through the stories that she had heard while at Denisa Cierny’s home. “There was something Racz said. Something about the Key of Shadows.”

  “He said the statue was the key.”

  “Or maybe there’s more than one key.”

  Distant voices reached Annja’s ears, and from the hollow way they carried, she knew they hadn’t come from outside the castle. She turned to face Roux. “Did you hear that?”

  Roux nodded. “We’re not the only ones in here.” He drew his pistol and picked up his light as he glanced back. “Where is Racz?”

  Annja pointed her flashlight behind them. Istvan Racz was nowhere to be seen.

  37

  Clad in bulletproof armor and carrying a machine pistol, Garin Braden moved silently through the forest. He peered through the surrounding foliage and looked for the people who satellite telemetry indicated were ahead of him. He knew they were somewhere in the forest because his team had found their vehicles—and the men who guarded them—a quarter mile back. They’d parked that far away so the engine sounds wouldn’t carry to Annja and Roux.

  “Look sharp,” Inge whispered in his ear. “You’re only forty meters or so from the unfriendlies. Don’t want to give away the element of surprise, now, do you?”

  “Not hardly.” Garin put his back to a tree and peered at the jumble of rock ahead of him. He let the machine pistol dangle from its shoulder strap and took a pair of microbinoculars from his chest pack. He pulled them to his eyes and scanned the fallen castle.

  Three men in combat gear and camouflage uniforms stood near a pile of broken rock about seventy yards from the main body of the castle’s remains.

  “I count three guards,” Garin said.

  “Roger that,” Sabre Race replied. “Confirm three guards.”

  “Inge?” Garin prompted.

  “Same,” she answered coolly. “Confirm three guards. Outside. They won’t be guarding an empty tunnel.”

  “Do you know if they are de Cerceau’s men?” Garin couldn’t think of anyone else who would be there.

  “I’ve matched one of them to the men you crossed paths with in Kosice.”

  “If they’re not part of de Cerceau’s crowd, the other two should pick their friends better.” Garin put his binoculars away. “Snipers.”

  “Ready, sir,” a male voice and a female voice replied.

  Turning to peer around the tree, Garin pulled the machine pistol into his hands. “Take them down.”

  A second later, two of the men dropped bonelessly as suppressed rounds punched through their faces. After seeing what had happened to his mates, the third man tried to run and tried to search for where the attack was coming from at the same time. A bullet caught him in midstride, whipped him around and punched his body to the ground.

  Garin led the move forward, flanked by Sabre on his right. When he closed on the dead men, he spotted the tunnel behind one of the bodies. Reaching down, he fisted the uniform and yanked the corpse clear of the opening.

  He dropped to his hands and knees beside the opening, took up the machine pistol and peeked around the edge. Darkness filled the tunnel after only a few feet inside, but thirty or forty yards distant, a light gleamed.

  Garin rolled away from the tunnel mouth and looked at the man photographing the three dead men on the ground. The man stepped back and tapped on the camera quickly, then put it away.

  Holding his position, Garin opened the comm. “We’re sending pictures.”

  “I’ve got them,” Inge replied.

  “Are they all de Cerceau’s people?”

  “Affirmative. Two of them have outstanding warrants in Bern.”

  “How did de Cerceau beat us here? We followed Roux’s jet as quickly as we could.”

  “De Cerceau had to have known where Roux and Creed were going before we did. That’s the only explanation I have. No one could have gotten you here faster than I did.”

  That answer didn’t sit well with Garin. He believed Inge’s assessment of her abilities. Even with the police attempting to stonewall him in Kosice, he and his people had gotten free in short order.

  Sabre knelt beside him. Concern chiseled the young man’s face. “Those are de Cerceau’s men?”

  Garin nodded.

  “How did they get here so quickly?”

  “They’re working with someone inside,” Garin said.

  Sabre grimaced. “My brother’s doing, no doubt.”

  Memory of the two brothers as boys touched Garin’s mind fleetingly. Istvan had been the older brother, supposedly the one who would take up the family legacy of looking for the Merovingian treasure, but the stories had captured Sabre’s dreams. Of the two, Sabre had always been closer to the grandfather.

  “Okay, get your men ready,” Garin said. “We’re going in, and they’re going to know immediately that we’re there.”

  * * *

  WEARING NIGHT-VISION GOGGLES, de Cerceau stepped through the darkness carefully and followed the chalk marks on the wall to the stone stairwell built into the wall. He paused at the foot of the steps when he spotted the soft glow of artificial light through the doorway at the top.

  A shadow blotted out the brightness for a moment as it passed through, then started down the steps. The person walked carefully in the darkness, feeling for each step and keeping one hand on the wall.

  De Cerceau lifted his rifle, keeping his sights on the man. So far there had been no unexpected encounters. Following Annja Creed and her companions had been easy.

  Now there was the excitement of this tumbled-down wreck to sort out.

  “Stop where you are,” de Cerceau ordered in a low voice.

  The shadow stopped moving immediately and raised its arms. “It’s me,” a man’s voice replied. “I brought you here.”

  “You’re SEEKER4318?”

  “I am.”

  “Prove it.”

  The man quickly recited the Swiss bank account de Cerceau used to funnel the man’s payments through. Slowly, the man lowered his arms, gaining confidence from his declaration. “You work for me.”

  De Cerceau let that pass. Officially, he was still working for the man, but as soon as the treasure proved itself real, all bets were off. He lowered the rifle and signaled to his men to do the same.

  “Where is Creed?”

  “Deeper inside the castle. Only a short distance away. You have to be quiet. They’re armed.”
>
  The fact that the old man and the woman were armed didn’t worry de Cerceau. They were only two people, and he’d brought a lot of men with him. The mercenaries stood behind him in the tunnel.

  “Is the treasure there?”

  “I believe so. We haven’t found it yet, but it has to be here.”

  “Take us there,” de Cerceau said. “It won’t matter if they’re armed.”

  “I want Annja Creed alive,” the man said. “I’ll need her to find the treasure.”

  De Cerceau agreed. Arguing now would only make problems. Killing them all later wouldn’t be difficult. And he planned on doing that anyway to tie up loose ends.

  “I want a weapon. They wouldn’t give me one.”

  De Cerceau nodded at the man closest to his employer. The mercenary handed over one of his pistols.

  The man took the gun and made a show of checking the action and making sure a round was chambered. Then he turned and walked back up the steps. “Follow me.”

  Three steps behind, de Cerceau trailed him up the stairs.

  * * *

  HOLDING HER PISTOL in one hand and her miniflashlight in the other, Annja eased forward and stopped when she heard a foot scuff on the other side of the entrance she faced. Hiding was no use. The light had already announced her presence.

  “Don’t shoot,” Istvan Racz said. “It’s me.”

  “Come through the door slowly,” Roux ordered. He kept his pistol centered on the door.

  A moment later, Racz stepped out of the darkness into the beams of light. He held his hands up above his head and shut his eyes against the brightness.

  “Where did you go?” Roux demanded.

  “I had to relieve myself.”

  Roux grumbled and lowered his weapon. “The next time, tell someone before you wander off.”

  “Sure.” Racz gave a little embarrassed shrug and lowered his hands. Then, more quickly than Annja expected, the man’s hands reappeared holding a pistol.

  Annja barely had time to recognize the threat before Racz fired three shots from less than ten feet away. All three bullets struck Roux with meaty slaps.