Rogue Angel 55: Beneath Still Waters (15 page)

Garin said they might just do that and then the the
three of them were escorted out by a pair of Stuggart’s thugs.

Annja could feel the club owner’s stare even after the door had closed behind them.

“All right, so now what?” Paul asked.

The three of them were seated at an outdoor table in front of a quaint little Parisian café in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. They’d gone straight there from Stuggart’s underground club, needing a change of scenery to help them forget about the place as quickly as possible.

“We keep trying,” Annja answered while looking over the menu. It had been hours since she’d eaten and even the distaste she felt for Stuggart and his cronies couldn’t quite dampen her appetite.

Besides, fueling up now, she knew, was simply smart tactics. Who knew what lay ahead of them?

“That’s all well and good, but it seems like we’re at a dead end. Where do we go from here?” Paul asked.

Annja wasn’t sure. Her initial wave of excitement at seeing how the separate alphabets were combined into one had swiftly passed when Stuggart revealed that the knowledge didn’t really help them. The translated “text” wasn’t text at all but gibberish.

She supposed she could consult some of her friends
in academia, experts in ancient languages and the like, to see if they might have any suggestions, but that would take time, and time wasn’t a commodity they had a lot of. Even sitting there and eating felt like a betrayal. Here she was, enjoying a late dinner beneath the lights of the Eiffel Tower, and somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic her friend was spending another evening in captivity. She wanted to be doing something, wanted to feel as though they were making headway, but she didn’t know where to turn.

Paul was right. Now what?

She didn’t know.

The server came with their meals and they dug in. As hungry as she was, Annja finished before the other two, so while she waited she decided to once again tackle the puzzle in front of them.

She dug out the scrap of paper Garin had given to Stuggart and stared at what the man had written there. There were four groups of symbols that Stuggart had broken down into their component parts, one from each of the two ancient alphabets. He had written the corresponding English letters beneath them and when viewed that way they certainly didn’t say anything recognizable.

But then an idea hit her.

What if there was more than one code? What if you had to solve the first layer in order to get the key to solving the second?

She stared at the collection of symbols, both the first set and the translated English letters beneath, looking for some connection between them. She
didn’t see anything off the top of her head, but she didn’t have either the Norse runic alphabet or the Enochian alphabet in front of her for reference.

That, she could fix.

“Paul, give me your phone,” she said, as she pulled her own out of her pocket.

A quick internet search brought up a picture of the runes of the Old Norse alphabet on her phone. A similar search brought up an image of the letters in the Enochian alphabet on Paul’s. She began checking letters against symbols, looking for a pattern.

“You’ve got something, haven’t you?” Garin asked.

Annja nodded, but didn’t look away from the information in front of her. It was there, she knew it was, she could feel it in her bones. Right there in front of her, waiting to be…

“I’ve got it!” she shouted, and then ducked in embarrassment when she realized everyone nearby was now staring in her direction thanks to her outburst.

Bemused, Garin leaned closer. “What, exactly, is it that you have?”

“I’ve cracked the code.”

“You’re kidding,” Paul said.

But she wasn’t. She had, indeed, solved it.

“It’s not one code, but two, nestled inside each other.” She moved the piece of paper and the cell phones so the other two could see them.

“The first code is the combination of the Nordic runes and the Enochian letters, just as Stuggart showed us. But, again as he pointed out, that doesn’t
get us anything but gibberish. The words those letters form don’t make any sense.

“The reason that they don’t make any sense is that they are not the message itself, but simply the key to deciphering the message. The Enochian letters and their position in the alphabet tell us which Caesar cipher to use for each letter combination.

“Decoding each paired combination, we get the third and final layer, which is the actual message.”

“So what does it say?” Paul asked.

Annja picked up her pen and wrote it out for them.

“One twenty leagues east of the Phoenix, ninety-four leagues southwest of Christmas.”

They all stared at it for a few minutes.

Finally, Garin broke the silence. “Isn’t this the part where you excitedly tell us you know exactly what that’s referring to?”

I wish
, Annja thought. But she’d gotten this far…

She began walking through it aloud, trying to work it out in the process.

“All right, let’s think about this. A league is a unit of measuring distance, right?”

Paul nodded. “Roughly three miles,” he said.

“But it is used more in relation to boating than anything else, which makes it nautical miles instead. That means a distance of three and a half miles instead of three.”

Garin quickly did the math. “So the place we’re looking for is 420 miles east of Phoenix and 329 miles southwest of Christmas.”

“Southwest of Christmas? What on earth does that mean? Could it be another code?” Paul asked.

Annja didn’t know. “We need an internet café, someplace we can do some research on something other than our cell phones.”

“I know a place a couple of blocks from here,” Garin said. He put a stack of euros on the table to cover the cost of their meal and then rose. She and Paul followed suit.

Turning, Annja saw him first.

He was about as big as the men who had been guarding the entrance to the club, but this man moved with the litheness of a panther on the prowl, light on his feet and totally confident in his ability to bring down whatever game he was hunting. With him were two other men of similar ilk, one walking on either side as if they were a presidential entourage. They walked with their bodies angled slightly toward Annja and her companions, their right hands down and half hidden behind their legs.

Annja had no doubt that they were carrying weapons in their hands.

“Down!” she shouted, even as the man in the lead caught sight of her and brought his arm up in their direction.

Garin didn’t hesitate, throwing himself to the ground at Annja’s command. Paul was a little slower off the mark, but Annja took care of that by tackling him in the seconds before the newcomers opened fire.

Gunshots filled the night air, the three men using their pistols to fire indiscriminately in the direction
of Annja and her companions. Several other late-night diners were struck in the process, collapsing wounded into their seats or onto the ground beneath their tables. People were screaming and trying to get away as the gunmen fired on anything and anyone that moved.

It was utter chaos.

Annja rolled off Paul and pointed toward an overturned table nearby. “Get behind that and stay low!” she told him. Having done what she could for him, she decided it was time for her to move as well. She had a better chance at staying alive if she could keep them guessing where she was. Annja was closer to the street than anything else so she rolled in that direction, stopping behind a parked car and putting a few thousand pounds of plastic and steel between her and the approaching gunmen.

She glanced about quickly, trying to assess the situation.

Like Paul, Garin was crouched behind a table a few feet away, an automatic pistol now in his hands. She’d expected him to be armed—he usually was—so she was pleased to see that she’d been right. Between the two of them they at least had a fighting chance.

To her surprise, when she looked back at Paul she found that he, too, was armed. He’d produced a snub-nosed pistol from somewhere on his person when she wasn’t looking and was preparing to fire back at their attackers as well. Evidently the guards at the club were even more sloppy than she had imagined.

Bullets slammed into the car in front of her, but Annja ignored them. She was safe enough for the time
being; she still had a few seconds before the attackers would be upon them.

Reaching into the otherwhere, Annja drew forth her sword. She could practically hear it sing with anticipation as it emerged, fully formed, into her grasp. The sword had seen her through many a tight spot and she had no doubt that it would do the same here.

No way was she letting a bunch of two-bit Nazi thugs take her out. Not here and not now.

She turned and began to duckwalk to the rear of the car, knowing the gunmen would be moving forward while firing, trying to keep Annja and her companions pinned down so that they could be finished off with ease. If she could move in behind them while Garin and Paul kept them occupied, she would be in a position to launch a surprise attack from the rear.

There was a pause in the gunfire as the attackers stopped to reload. Annja peeked up over the edge of the car’s window just in time to see one of the thugs take a bullet to the throat and fall backward in a spray of blood.

One down, two to go
.

The shot had to have come from Garin because the two remaining gunmen suddenly concentrated their fire on the table he was hiding behind. Bits of wood went flying each time a bullet struck its target, which was often. Annja hoped he was all right as she moved around the rear of the vehicle and peeked out the other side.

She could see the injured man in the street, but that was all. The other two had advanced far enough that
they were either in line with the car or had passed beyond.

Now was her chance.

Annja rose to a crouch and rushed forward along the opposite side of the car, moving back toward where she’d started, but on the opposite side of the car.

As she drew closer to the hood, she was able to see around the front of the car. One of the gunmen stood a few feet away, firing repeatedly at either Garin or Paul. Perhaps both.

The sound of his shots would cover her footsteps, Annja knew, and there didn’t seem to be any return fire coming this way for her to worry about. She took advantage of the moment and rushed ahead, rising from behind the front end of the vehicle at the last second, her sword already in hand and in motion as she struck out at the attacker.

The gunman caught sight of her and tried to turn, shouting out a warning as he did so, but he’d been startled by her sudden appearance and was slow to respond. He hadn’t even completed half the turn, was still trying to bring his gun to bear on her, when the sword tore into him like a razor, cleaving him in two.

Annja let the momentum of the strike carry her around full circle, completing her turn so that she was facing the second man, who had been standing a few feet in front of the first.

Unfortunately for her, he’d heard his buddy’s cry of surprise and had turned in response to it. Now he was staring directly at her, gun in hand.

Five feet separated them.

Five feet that might as well have been five miles, for there was no way she was going to be able to cross that distance before he could pull the trigger.

Annja braced herself for what was to come.

A shot rang out.

Annja jumped, releasing the sword, amazed that she wasn’t dead. She glanced down at herself—didn’t see any red stain blossoming across her shirt, didn’t feel any pain—then looked back up at the gunman.

She was just in time to watch him crumple to the ground, a bullet having pierced his back and found his heart with unerring accuracy.

The man was dead before he even hit the pavement.

Annja found herself staring across the distance at Paul, who stood with his arm outstretched, the gun in his hand still pointed in her general direction and his expression unreadable.

For just an instant Annja felt a cold chill wash over her at the sight of him standing there, the muzzle of his gun looming large in her view as she stared down its barrel. Then he lowered his arm and rushed forward to wrap her in his arms.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” she told him, having recovered
from her momentary shock at finding herself still alive. “Put your gun away. We’re fine now. Where’s Garin?”

“He’s over…” Paul began, doing as he was told. Then he caught sight of the remains of the man she’d killed with her sword. The rest of what he’d been about to say apparently vanished from his thoughts. “What on earth happened to him?”

Annja ignored the question. If he hadn’t seen her with the sword, she certainly wasn’t going to tell him about it, not now at least.

Maybe after all this craziness passes
, she thought, and then caught her breath as she realized she was honestly contemplating sharing her most closely guarded secret with someone other than Garin and Roux.

I’m not ready for that kind of commitment, am I?

She shook the thought away; now was definitely not the time to wonder about such things.

She could see Garin moving among the tables, checking on the bodies that were lying unmoving among the ravaged tables and chairs. The gunmen hadn’t cared who they killed provided they also hit their targets and the evidence was all around them. It made Annja’s heart ache for their loss.

The police were no doubt on their way; a gun battle didn’t rage in the middle of Paris without someone calling the cops. In fact, she thought she could hear sirens approaching in the distance.

They had a few moments, no more.

Knowing Garin would do what he could for the
wounded, Annja bent and searched the man that Paul had shot, the leader of the attack. She rolled him over and looked at his face, but he wasn’t anyone she recognized. She checked his pockets, both his coat and his pants, looking for a wallet or something that could identify him. She came up empty.

The sirens were definitely getting closer and Annja knew they had to go. She didn’t like leaving the scene of a tragedy like this, but if they were detained, even for just a few days, that could spell doom for Doug. They had to get away and out of the country as soon as possible; it was the only way they were going to remain free long enough to help her friend.