Rogue Angel 54: Day of Atonement (18 page)

But at the end of the day she knew that all she had to do was to keep calm and wait for when her hands were free, and if that didn’t come, reach into the otherwhere with both hands tied and draw down on her abductors. No matter how dangerous they thought they were, she was infinitely more dangerous to them.

Annja levered herself into a sitting position, using her feet now that they were free. Changing positions relieved some of the excruciating pain.

The woman took a step away from the vehicle, revealing the sweeping mountain vista that lay behind her.

High snowcapped peaks seemed to crowd around them, reflecting the last of the day’s dying light.

Annja scanned the landscape, trying to pick out any signs of humanity.

There was nothing but nature, still wild and unconquered, as far as the eye could see.

“Okay, princess, move it,” the woman said, motioning for Annja to climb out. She still clutched the syringe in her right hand, brandishing it like a knife. Annja had no intention of taking a third shot.

Her chance would come.

She slid to the edge and set her feet down slowly until they settled on crisp snow that crunched under her weight.

As she stood upright, her legs buckled, struggling after being cooped up for so long. The woman caught her and hauled her up to her feet.

She dragged Annja a couple of steps.

Annja in turn dragged her feet.

“Any chance you could do something with my wrists?” she asked, pushing her luck.

“I know what you can do. Believe me, there’s no way in hell I’m going to let you pull that sword of yours, even if I had a gun in my hand.” So the grunts had reported back what had happened when they’d ambushed her. So much for the element of surprise.

She pushed Annja forward, making her walk around the side of the truck.

Annja crunched through the snow, feeling the ice just beneath the surface.

There were tracks in the snow, meaning the truck wasn’t the first vehicle to make the climb up the mountainside. They ended at an SUV that was parked beside a farmhouse, its gray slate roof covered with several inches of snow. The SUV’s tracks had only just begun to be filled by the latest snowfall.

With the sun dropped, the temperature was falling fast. She wished she’d put on her ski jacket instead of just the fleece. The wind swirled snow up and down in the air, driving it against the wall of the farmhouse in a steep drift.

The building had been cut into the mountainside, a feat of engineering in itself.

It was hard to imagine why anyone would go to such an effort to build a home here given the inhospitable terrain.

There were lights on inside, but that didn’t make the place feel any more welcoming than the ice and snow of the mountainside.

“Keep moving,” the woman said, pushing her in the back. “I’d hate to think that I’d brought you out here only for you to die of hypothermia.”

Through one of the bay windows Annja saw the flickering red glow of an open fire. A man sat beside it, talking on the telephone.

There was something familiar about him, even if his face was distorted in the firelight of the bubbled glass.

Annja paused midstep, trying to remember where she’d seen him before, knowing that she had, and hoping that remembering would be the key to unlock his motivations for dragging her out here as his prisoner. Another shove in the back got her moving again.

The man looked up from his telephone call.

In that instant, as they locked eyes, she realized where she’d seen him.

When she had met him before she’d made the mistake of thinking he was insignificant, someone who had just happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now she knew different.

Now she knew one piece of the puzzle.

Garin didn’t need twenty minutes.

He returned with a new laptop and a couple of bags brimming with additional purchases.

It took longer to install the software and get the machine up and running.

“I need a shower,” he said, heading toward the bathroom, treating the hotel room as if it was his own.

“What about that?” Roux nodded toward the laptop.

“It will take a while for all this stuff to load,” Garin assured him, disappearing into the small bathroom. Thirty seconds later the spray of the shower was running.

Roux felt as if he had reaped the whirlwind and its name was Garin Braden.

He glanced at the screen, with no idea of what was happening. Again all he could do was wait.

After another minute he could hear Garin singing to himself.

His cell phone rang. It was a blocked number. He snatched it up, knowing it couldn’t be Annja. That only left one alternative.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Roux, so good to speak to you again.”

“Cauchon,” Roux said. “You’ve had your fun. How about you tell me what this is all about? Man-to-man. There is no need to involve anyone else. Let’s keep this between us. Whatever you want, we can work this out.”

“I really don’t think we can.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Honestly? I want you to suffer. Are you suffering? It sounds as though you are. I hadn’t expected it to be this easy, but then every man has his pressure points, and if you know where to apply pressure he’s always going to break.”

“What have you done with Annja?”

“Ah, the delightful Miss Creed. She’s safe. For now.”

“Where?”

“Don’t take me for a fool, old man. She’s safe and that’s all you need to know.”

“Just let her go. I’ll give you whatever it is you want.”

Garin emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in nothing more than a towel. Roux gestured to the phone, and mouthed,
It’s him
.

Garin eased himself into the high-backed leather chair in front of the laptop, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he punched instructions into the command line.

“What could you possibly offer me?” Cauchon mused, enjoying himself. “Perhaps something for my collection?”

“Like the papers you had Garin steal from my house?”

“Very much like that, yes.”

“Name it, and it’s yours.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you want.”

“A reliable source tells me there’s a piece of armor…” Cauchon’s voice trailed off again, and even without him
uttering another word Roux knew what he was talking about. There was more than one piece of armor in his collection, but there was only one piece that was related to Joan of Arc.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He tried the lie, but Garin was better at that than he was. He knew his voice wasn’t convincing. His inflections changed subtly, as if his soul refused to let him get away with the falsehood, which was ironic given the thousands of lies he’d told in his lifetime.

He looked across at Garin, who was still frantically hammering the keys of the laptop.

Cauchon laughed, a sound that seemed mean, bitter, cynical. There was a degree of cruelty in his voice that the man made no effort to mask. It was obvious he was enjoying having Roux dangling on a hook, the old man a worm ready to be lowered into the water.

“Did you really just try to lie to me? With the girl’s life on the line? Is there no level you won’t fall to? Don’t do it again, old man. We both know what we are talking about. And before you get any bright ideas to try to palm off a fake on me, I will recognize the original. Anything less, the woman dies. And that’s just the beginning. I have so many ways of hurting you, not least of which is exposing your secrets.”

“It will take me a few days,” Roux said, knowing he needed hours, not days, and all he was doing was stalling for time. Cauchon would know that, too, but if it bought him a couple of days it was worth it.

“Really? To return to your home, secure the item and return here with my prize? A couple of days?”

“As you’ve pointed out, I’m an old man,” Roux said. It sounded like a reasonable excuse, but the truth was
the armor wasn’t in his vault. It was hidden somewhere far safer.

“Fine. Two days,” Cauchon said. “I will call you at your hotel. I will only dial the number once. If you don’t answer, you know what happens.”

The call ended.

Garin frowned. “Not enough time to narrow it down. I took a chance, tried a shortcut, assuming that he was in the vicinity of Carcassonne, and hoped that it would cut down the search time and give us a chance to pinpoint his location. No dice.”

“So it was a waste of time?”

“I didn’t say that. I managed to get a rough fix on him, maybe within a twenty-mile radius, but that was as much as I could manage.”

“Where?” Roux asked.

Garin swung the laptop around so he could see the map of Southern France that filled the screen. He jabbed a finger at a circle that covered much of the border between France and Spain.

“The Pyrenees?” he said.

“I started off with the wrong assumption. It cost us. I’m sorry. I didn’t think he’d have moved. Not now that we are here. I thought he’d want to be on top of us, having a laugh at our expense.”

“Is there nothing else you can do to narrow it down?”

“I’ve got a lock on the number he used to dial in, but given his MO, he’ll have ditched that SIM card already. One card, one call.”

“So, our best hope still lies in him using the number I got from his thug Dugarry. And if Cauchon knows the man’s been picked up by the police he could have destroyed that connection, too.”

“The alternative is to give him what he wants,” Garin said, putting it out there.

Roux didn’t like it; he said nothing.

Garin didn’t know about the piece of armor.

He had kept it secret all these years, one of the few he had kept from him, and wasn’t sure that he was ready to share it. Deep down, he just didn’t
trust
his companion.

“Come on, Roux. Be straight with me. He wanted something from you, I heard that much. Are you going to tell me what?”

“No,” Roux said.

There was no point in trying to pretend that he didn’t know what Garin was talking about. Better to simply refuse to answer.

“You don’t think that telling me what he’s after will help?”

“No. He’s a collector. He wants something else to add to his hoard.”

“And you’re not going to tell me what?”

“Not yet,” Roux said. “Think of it as a need-to-know basis. I’ll tell you when I think you need to know.”

The younger man shrugged but didn’t try to argue. “However you want to play it. This is your show. I’m just along for the ride. We get Annja back safe. That’s all that matters, right?”

Roux nodded. For now, at least, he had Garin where he wanted him. He just hoped that he’d be able to keep him there for the duration.

“So what now?”

“You stay here,” Roux said. “If you manage to get a fix on him, call me.”

“Are you heading back to your house?”

“Not yet. There’s something I need to do first. I’ll need to take your car after I’ve picked up a few things.”

Garin reached inside the pocket of the jacket that he had dropped on the bed and threw the bunch of keys to him. Roux caught them in one hand and tested their weight. No matter how much he tried to think about alternatives, he knew that he had to do this. He had kept that piece of metal hidden from the eyes of the world for centuries, but maybe this was the reason for that. If he could trade it for Annja’s life, then surely it was a small price to pay, no matter the potential long-term consequences.

What he didn’t like was the fact that the ancient piece of metal was closer to Cauchon than he was just then.

“You might want to put some clothes on,” he said to Garin, pocketing the keys.

“I’m hoping to surprise the maid.”

“I’m sure you will.” Roux shook his head and left the younger man to it.

“You?” Annja said when she was finally led into the room where the man was finishing his telephone conversation.

There was a passing resemblance between him and the woman who had brought her to this remote place—obviously brother and sister, even if he was fifteen, maybe twenty, years older.

“Expecting someone taller?” the man asked in English, laughing bleakly as she was pushed farther into the room.

He moved a control on the arm of his wheelchair to turn it so that he faced her.

Through the window she hadn’t seen the chair, and thought he was merely sitting to make the call. But as she stepped through the door and saw the wheelchair, she recognized him as the man who’d saved her from the falling masonry with his warning cry. She’d assumed that he’d been there by coincidence, caught up in her near-disaster by chance, but he’d been there to watch.

His sister had been with him, pushing the wheelchair, which meant they had a third man in their team, someone to set the masonry in motion—assuming his sister
hadn’t set some sort of remote charge in the stone to blow it free of the wall.

“Indeed, me.”

“I know you. You were there. At the church.”

The man’s face twisted into a cruel smile. “Indeed I was. And believe me, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. From where I was sitting, it looked as though you had a lucky escape. You might even say someone must have been watching over you.”

“So, was it just meant to shake me up, or do you want me dead? Rock falls, ambushes on the country roads. Not exactly subtle.”

“But effective. You are here now, after all. But to answer your first question, was it meant to shake you up? Not really. Do I want you dead? Again, not really. It’s more what you represent, what makes you more than just Annja Creed, television personality. That aspect, I cannot deny, yes, indeed, I do want to see that destroyed. But before that, I want to humble an arrogant old man. You might know him. He calls himself Roux. We have unfinished business.”

“The old man shouldn’t give you any trouble,” the blonde woman said.

“Never underestimate old men, Monique, particularly one as old as Roux. You live that long, you learn a trick or two about surviving, isn’t that right, Miss Creed?”

“He’s clever, if that’s what you mean,” Annja said, deliberately ignoring the gibe about Roux’s age. She made a show of trying to free herself from the restraints again, giving them something else to think about. It earned her a cuff across the back of the head from Monique.