Rogue Angel 54: Day of Atonement (8 page)

He was out cold.

“Stay right there,” the driver said. He looked ruefully at his unconscious comrade, obviously glad he wasn’t in his shoes. He had his own gun aimed squarely at the center of Annja’s mass, but wasn’t in a hurry to fire. He’d
just seen what she was capable of. Why would he think his bullets had a better chance of finding their mark than the mountain’s?

Annja held her sword in front of her, balanced lightly in her grasp, moving forward onto her toes. He was close enough she could hurl the blade at him, cleaving his head from his shoulders before he could get down behind the safety of the car. But killing him wouldn’t give her any answers. And it wasn’t her style.

“There was no need for that,” he said, doing his best to sound reasonable. “We just want to talk to you.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “People always come up to me wanting to have a nice little chat with a gun in their hands.”

“Look, I’m sorry. It wasn’t meant to go down like this. If you’d just come with us, we could have done everything nice and calmly.”

“And why on earth would I want to go with you? I think you better start talking fast.”

“
Why
? Because we were asking nicely.”

She shook her head. “You didn’t ask at all. Your brute tried to strong-arm me. I’d hate to see what you call nasty. So, what do you want to talk to me about? I’m sure you’ve noticed that you have my undivided attention right now.”

“Not me. I was only asked to pick you up.”

“I’m already fed up with the way you answer questions. Who asked you to pick me up?”

“It doesn’t matter who.” He shrugged. “Not to me. I’m just doing my job.”

“Ah, the good old staple. ‘I’m just following orders,’ is that it? I think I’ve heard that before somewhere.”

“Look, there’s no need to get hostile about this. I don’t want
anyone
else to get hurt, especially me, okay? So why
don’t you just drop that
thing
and get into the car. We can just do what we’ve got to do and everyone can be happy.”

“Happy? You seriously think I’m about to get into a car with you? What kind of happy pills have you been popping? Give me some answers and I’ll
consider
following you in my car,” she said, with no intention of following him. But if he believed her, maybe she’d get a few details.

The man on the ground started to groan. He didn’t sound happy with life. She probably had a minute or two at most before she’d have to put him down again or things might get a little feisty. At least his gun was out of easy reach.

She started to walk toward the driver, inclining her head in invitation for the man to talk.

The only words that came out of his mouth were, “Drop the sword,” and they were followed by the sound of his thumb fumbling with the safety on his gun.

“Seriously? You’re thinking of trying that? I’m disappointed.”

She took another step, but it was a mistake.

The man squeezed the trigger and the gun ripped out a roar that shattered the silence.

The world moved in slow motion for an instant.

A bird rose from the field behind him, giving out a cry of warning that had barely left its beak when the bullet hit her sword. Sparks flew as it rang off the metal, ricocheting into the car and sinking into the bodywork. There was another sound, a deep pop that made her think it had hit the engine block, which was a pain, but it hadn’t hit her.

The man shook his head, not believing his eyes. She realized that he hadn’t trusted the mountain to get a shot on target but, knowing his own should have buried itself in her heart, didn’t know what to do next. She liked beating people’s expectations.

“What can I say? I guess I got lucky. Want to try again?” Annja asked, taking another step closer.

The man had nowhere to go without leaving the safety of the car.

He was nervous and that made him dangerous. Annja wasn’t about to drop her guard, even for an instant, no matter how quick her reactions. It didn’t take a lot to squeeze a trigger, and the fact he was willing to take her life made him as dangerous as any killer she’d faced. She knew the second and third shots were coming. She could see it in his eyes. Dropping to one knee, Annja blocked a shot on the cross brace of the sword and another on the tip, sending it back the way it had come. The bullet shattered the glass of the window inches from where the driver stood, completely undermining any notion of safety he harbored.

“Next time I won’t miss,” Annja said, “so how about telling me who you are working for?”

There was no hiding his fear now.

He was far more afraid than she was.

“Or maybe you want to wait here for the police to arrive. I’m assuming they will, even somewhere this remote. When people hear gunshots, they call the police.”

She completely ignored the fact that he was the one holding the gun.

She was in control here. They both knew it.

She watched the black eye of the muzzle waver as the gun trembled in his hand. Even if he tried to fire again, there was no way he’d hit her. As if on cue, she heard the sound of the siren in the distance.

“I assume you don’t want to spend the rest of the day trying to explain to the police what’s happened here, so if you won’t tell me who you are working for, I think we’re done.”

The man nodded and placed the gun on the roof of the car, holding up his hands, palms out, where she could see them.

He stepped away from the car without taking his eyes off her.

She gave one last glance at the man still lying on the ground. Given more time she might have had more success with them, but such was life.

“Can I make a suggestion?” The man said nothing. “If I were you, I’d quit,” she said. “You’re really not cut out for this line of work. Two grown men beaten up by a girl.” She shook her head and smiled.

She kept walking toward the Mercedes, making the man back up a couple of steps, before she sliced the tip of the sword into the black rubber of both front tires one after the other, deflating them with a hiss that had ended before she climbed back into her rental car.

Now she was relying on a little bit of luck when she turned the ignition, hoping the bullet hadn’t done anything terminal when it had embedded itself under the hood.

The engine coughed, and died.

She tried it again.

It rumbled a second longer before it died.

Third time was the charm.

She checked on the driver in the side mirror. He wasn’t going anywhere.

That was something at least.

But it didn’t answer the one question she really wanted answered: Who had sent them after her?

The house was silent.

It was huge, with only Henshaw who lived on-site, but he had his quarters away from the guest rooms and the master suites. The main problem was alarms and security, but more often than not the old man didn’t activate the internal sensors, at least for parts of the house. Though Garin was almost positive there were silent alarms in place around core areas of the house, including Roux’s study.

Garin had retreated to his room, certain that many famous people had once visited here. Roux moved in many circles. Garin couldn’t help but wonder who had lain on this bed before him, listening to the sounds of winter in the distance. It was close enough to Paris that the likes of Louis-Auguste, dauphin of France, and his young bride, Marie Antoinette, had very likely summered with the old man before the dark days of the revolution.

He didn’t sleep.

He listened to the building, lying on the bed fully dressed. He heard the occasional groan and sigh of the
old building moaning to itself, and old ghosts whispering away along its splendid corridors. Finally, he pushed himself off the bed. It was time—if not safe—to make his play.

Roux was a light sleeper, a habit he’d picked up from years of metaphorically dozing with one eye open, but Garin was light on his feet, and barring something stupid, like sending a priceless Ming dynasty vase tumbling, he wouldn’t wake the old man.

Floorboards creaked with almost every step he took, no matter where he placed his feet. He carried his shoes in one hand, his laptop case in the other.

Each time he made even the slightest sound he paused, waiting in case there was any sign of an echoing call from somewhere else within the house, even though he knew that it was the erratic nature of a disturbance that was more likely to rouse a sleeper than the steady sound of footsteps on old boards. A red light pulsed slowly and regularly at the far end of the passage—the alarm’s motion sensor. With no siren blaring, it seemed safe to assume it wasn’t set. He crept onward, keeping his breathing slow, steady, aiming for a Zen-like state of calm that put him at one with the hallway. But he was excited. He couldn’t help himself. There was a thrill that went with this kind of thing, snooping around in the old man’s secrets. That was just the way he was. Garin carried on down the hallway, keeping his footsteps to the edge of the treads as he reached the stairs, and descended.

It was all he could do not to give a slight sigh of relief when he reached the bottom without an alarm betraying his nocturnal perambulations. Now all he had to do was to enter the vault, get Manchon’s papers and get back to bed before Roux roused himself.

Easy.

He placed his shoes carefully on a chair in the hallway and made his way back into the study, pausing to listen at the door before he eased it slowly open.

The last embers of the fire had burned down to an amber glow that still clung to the crumbling coals. Moonlight shone in through the French windows, casting abstract shadows over the room.

Garin placed his bag on the desk, easing it open, and retrieved the laptop. He opened the lid. The machine had been in sleep mode rather than turned off, so there was no chime of the operating system starting up. He quickly dimmed the screen so the glare didn’t show through the window, giving him away to any security the old man had prowling the grounds. The heavy oak would be enough to muffle almost any sound he made in the room, but that didn’t stop him from taking exaggerated care as he prepared himself. He didn’t have an excuse for being in the study. If Roux walked in, the best he could manage was that he couldn’t sleep so he’d come down to do some work. It was unlikely the old man would fall for it.

Best not to get caught then, he thought, examining the spot on the back wall that would reveal the vault.

He fished a cable out of his bag and slid one end of it into the microcoupling on the laptop, before placing the sensitive electromagnetic reader on the other end onto the wall itself.

Once he had done that, he ran the hack from the terminal and sat back waiting for the machine to do its thing.

Digits cycled through the boxes on the screen, at first faster than the eye could possibly see, each change indicating the sending and receiving of an electrical pulse between the computer and the safe as it raced through the dizzying permutations eight digits offered, searching out
the slightest difference that would indicate it had found the correct number in the sequence.

By the time the third number had been locked onto the screen, Garin was absolutely certain he knew the combination. The old man was predictable. A smile played across his lips.

05301431.

A date that was seared across both of their lives.

The date of Saint Joan’s execution.

He tapped the eight digits into the keypad.

The wall opened with an electronic click as the lock disengaged.

The way he figured it he had less than an hour to similarly open the vault and then get back to his room before he was caught. It wasn’t as if the old man would have been thoughtful enough to have Guillaume Manchon’s papers neatly stacked in a pile and put to one side conveniently for him to find. That would have been too easy.

But Garin was a resourceful thief.

It was one of his better qualities.

Garin had disappeared by the time that morning came.

Roux thought at first he’d simply gone for a run in the grounds, but then he saw his erstwhile squire’s car was missing from the drive.

It shouldn’t have surprised him. Garin Braden had been disappointing him one way or another for centuries. He should have guessed there was another reason for his late-night visit than simply concern for Annja. There was nothing he’d said to Roux that couldn’t have been said over the telephone, which meant he had another purpose for coming.

He almost missed it, because nothing in the study had been moved, but when he went through the security tapes, he got to watch firsthand as Garin robbed him.

Most of the documents and treasures he kept inside the vault were more of a sentimental or academic nature than having any intrinsic value.

He followed the usual procedure, then entered the vault.

The room, given the kinds of things it had been designed to protect, was airtight.

At first glance it was next to impossible to see what, exactly, had been taken.

The jewels he had acquired from King Louis XIV were still in the black velvet pouch that had kept them safe since the day he’d stolen them, and the gun he’d liberated from the German SS officer who’d thought that he possessed the power to do anything he liked likewise was nestled in its place. There were so many incredible items in the vault, each with a history that defied simple categorization on a museum’s shelves. So many seemingly innocuous treasures that were little more than trifles to the human eye possessed such significance to the eye of time. And, as far as he could tell, they were all still where they had been left.

It would take ages to check each one on his inventory.

But why would Garin steal a memento?

He wouldn’t.

That wasn’t his style.

There were other antiquities in the vault, arguably more precious, even if they looked less glamorous. There were a stack of notebooks and papers, ledgers, journals, diaries, everything that he had ever accumulated that could possibly be used to pick a path between who Roux was now and who he had been. They were tied up in ribbons, each color signified a century and decade within it—hardly the most elaborate filing system, but it sufficed. One of the ribbons, the purple of the fifteenth century, was loose.