by Alex Archer
****
Doug Morrell called in the afternoon. Bored and wanting to hear a friendly voice, Annja took the call.
"Hello, Doug."
"Ah, my favorite fugitive."
In spite of the situation, Annja grinned. Maybe being on the run wasn't exactly conducive to continued good health, but there was a part of her that enjoyed it. Was that part always there? Or did it come with the sword? she wondered.
"Did it take you long to think that up?" Annja asked.
"Actually, it wasn't me. It was my boss. He called me and asked me if I knew my favorite fugitive was on the run again."
"I take it you're in trouble." Annja felt bad, but only marginally so. Doug was a nice guy and she enjoyed their friendship. However, he'd chosen the volatile field he was in. In media, yesterday's heroes were today's tragedies.
"Nope. We're getting a lot of free advertising as a result. For some reason CNN and Fox News have picked up the story of your evasion of local law enforcement."
Annja was perturbed. Being a nationally recognized fugitive was going to make her attempt to purchase a plane ticket back to New York difficult.
"My boss thinks it would be better if you turned yourself in. Eventually," Doug said.
"Eventually?"
Doug sighed. "Right now my boss is happy with all the free advertising Chasing History's Monsters is getting."
"Then why are you calling?" Annja asked.
"Just, you know, checking on you. Trying to make sure you were okay."
Annja detected a note of dishonesty in Doug's words. Suspicion honed her paranoia to a sharp edge. "You called because you cared?"
"Well, yeah. Where are you?"
"On the highway headed to Sacramento."
"Okay." Doug was quiet just long enough to make his next question sound awkward. "Can you see a mile marker?"
"A mile marker?"
"Yeah. You know. One of those sticks that tell you how far you are from somewhere?"
Annja counted to ten. "Are you planning to tell the sheriff's office where I am?"
"No!" Doug's answer was immediate and too vehement to be believable. "I wouldn't do something like that, Annja!"
"When I get back to New York, we're going to talk about this." Annja shut the phone, wondering if the show had a way of tracking her phone.
****
Annja glanced over her shoulder when she heard a diesel engine bearing down on her position.
A bright blue fully-dressed eighteen-wheeler roared along the highway.
Annja sprinted toward the road, hanging on to the backpack's strap with one hand. She threw her other hand out with her fingers curled and her thumb extended. She barely resisted the impulse to yell at the driver to stop.
Air brakes whistled and thudded. The eighteen-wheeler put on its emergency flashers and pulled over to the side of the road.
Jogging, the backpack thudding against her spine, Annja caught up with the truck just as the passenger door popped open and swung wide. She hauled herself up the first couple of rungs.
"You all right, missy?" A grizzled truck driver sat behind the wheel. He wore a baseball cap, a cowboy shirt with snaps, and had a full beard that was a mix of black and gray.
"I'm fine. Can I catch a lift?"
The driver looked back in his rearview mirrors. "Where'd you lose your car?"
"A dirt side road a few miles back."
Nodding, the driver waved her into the truck. "Come on ahead."
Annja climbed up into the seat and stowed her backpack between her feet. "Thanks."
"You know that hitchhikin' ain't exactly the safest thing a young woman can do in this day an' age."
"Yeah. I didn't exactly plan for it today." The strong odor of dog tickled Annja's nose. She held back a sneeze.
The driver grinned. "I reckon not. Where you goin'?"
"As far as Sacramento if you're going that way."
Both hands on the wheel as he eased back onto the highway, the driver nodded again. "I am. You thirsty? Hungry?" He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "I got a refrigerator in the back with water and soda. Got a couple ham sandwiches in there, too."
"You don't mind?" Breakfast and the rolls she'd had afterward were long gone.
"Not at all. Help yourself. While you're back there, I'll take a sandwich, too, if you don't mind."
Annja turned and found herself face-to-face with an English bulldog. The dog's heavy jowls quivered as he barked and snapped. She froze.
The driver glanced in the mirror. "Almost, you be quiet now. She's a guest."
Almost whined a little, then retreated to the far side of the bed in the back of the cab. It was almost as big as an efficiency apartment and stocked with the refrigerator, a television set and stereo components, and a closet area.
The driver smiled. "You can't mind Almost. He's just protectin' the truck. Me an' him been together a lot of years."
"I just wasn't expecting him there." Annja swung the refrigerator open, then took out two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and two bottles of water.
Turning around in the passenger seat, she handed one of the sandwiches and a bottle of water to the driver. She opened her own sandwich and bit in. She was rewarded with unexpected flavor. "The bread is great."
Grinning, the driver nodded. "My wife bakes it fresh. Makes it easier for me to pass by these greasy spoons I see on the road." He looked in the driver's side mirror with interest. "I sure hope you left your car a ways back there."
Glancing out the side mirror, Annja spotted a sheriff's cruiser closing in fast. For a moment she thought she was caught, that Doug had turned her in and she was going to spend the next few hours or days being interviewed. It wasn't a pleasing proposition.
Abruptly, the cruiser pulled into the other lane and sped by the truck.
The driver shrugged. "I guess you hid your car pretty good."
Annja took another bite of her sandwich. "You know that picking up fleeing fugitives isn't the safest thing a truck driver can do these days," she said.
"Yes, ma'am. But I gotta keep up my outlaw ways. We'll get you to Sacramento all right, but after that you're going to be on your own."
****
About twenty minutes from Sacramento, Annja got another call. She didn't recognize the number, but she recognized the exchange. Paris, France.
Roux. Annja felt an unexplained surge of excitement at talking to the old man. More than a month had passed since their last communication. She was never quite sure where she stood with him because sometimes he acted like he didn't care if she lived or died, but the sword linked him to her. And to Garin Braden.
The sword made them family, of sorts, and she didn't know if she liked the idea or should feel frightened by it. But maybe it made sense that her feelings were in both camps. That was what she had gathered most people's families were like.
She answered her phone.
Chapter 16
"Annja." Roux's voice was boisterous. "You are well, I trust."
Instantly wary, Annja decided to buy herself some time to get the lay of the land. "I am. How are you?"
"Mystified, actually."
"Why?"
"I've been perusing your archaeological postings."
"I didn't know you did that," Annja said, surprised.
Roux's voice was dry and didn't offer any clues as to why he'd called. "Sometimes. When I get bored."
That hurt, just a bit, and she felt certain he'd intended the comment to. A warning shot to keep my distance? She didn't know. She turned cool, masking her feelings the way she'd learned to do in the orphanage.
"I thought you were off playing poker."
"I am back," Roux said.
"What posting are you referring to?"
"The new one of course."
Annja smiled a little at that. Even though he'd lived for centuries, Roux wasn't all-knowing. Annja posted nearly every day on various Web sites, constantly asking for help in pinning down facts or offering it.
"Oh, you mean about the Grecian urn." Annja couldn't help twisting the knife just a little. Roux had pompous and arrogant down to a science. "I found out it was a fake after all. It had been cast at least a hundred years later than the museum thought. But it was interesting. Did you know that Grecian urns have been around since the twelfth century B.C.? And that it wasn't until the eighth century B.C. that Greek potters began painting the figures black to contrast them against the red clay material they made the urns from?"
Roux sighed irritably. "I did."
"Did you ever throw a Grecian urn on a potter's wheel?"
Roux made a disgusted noise that sounded like a lion coughing. "I didn't call to talk about Grecian urns. I called to talk about the Scythian belt plaque."
That stopped Annja dead in her tracks. There was no way he could know for a fact that the belt plaque was Scythian. She couldn't tell that, and she'd handled the piece, not referenced it from a Web posting. "I haven't ascertained that it's Scythian," she said.
"It is."
"You can't tell that from a photograph." Despite her enthusiasm at bedeviling Roux, Annja was starting to feel irritated herself. Roux had a familiarity with things, but he wasn't trained as an archaeologist as she was.
Still, he knew an awful lot about history from hands-on experience. From the conversations she'd had with Roux, Annja believed he'd traveled most of the known world.
"I can identify that artifact from the photograph." Roux sounded adamant.
"Why?"
"Because I've seen it before."
"How old is it?"
"Two thousand years, more or less."
Annja wondered how much Roux was letting slip.
"I saw it in Shanghai. Four hundred, five hundred years ago. I can't remember exactly. I could look it up."
"Look it up where?"
"I'm writing my memoirs."
Annja was stunned. Memoirs? From a man she knew to be at least five hundred years old? "I didn't know you were – "
"Of course I am." Roux's voice was brusque. "I was trained to document my travels, observations, and ruminations."
By whom? Annja's mind danced around the possibilities.
"Sometimes I forget things, or I need to remember them better. I use the memoir to remind myself."
"Would it be possible for me to – "
"No. Not in your lifetime. Only when I reach the end of mine. The world isn't ready for the things that I know."
A woman's soft, entreating voice spoke somewhere in the distance, calling out Roux's name. He growled an impatient noise at the interruption. "Where is the belt plaque?"
"Why do you want to know?" Annja liked having the upper hand. She often didn't in her dealings with Roux.
Roux sighed. "You lost it, didn't you?"
So much for that, Annja thought. "Not exactly." There was the possibility that her computer expert friend could track Huangfu Cao. Or that she could find the man's trail herself.
"Of course you did. If you still had the belt plaque and wanted to pique me, as you witlessly tried to do just now, your response would have been that of course you had it. Possession would have given you total control during this discussion."
Annja let out a tired breath. I'm really going to have to step up my subterfuge game to play against him, she told herself. "Okay. I lost it."
"How did you manage that?"
"Guys with guns. Guys with helicopters. More guys with guns. It gets repetitive."
Roux gave a displeased grumble. "There are some things, girl, that are not meant to be lost."
Frustration chafed at Annja. It often did when she had to answer to Roux. Since she'd left the orphanage, since she'd graduated college, she hadn't had to answer to anyone the way she felt compelled to when working with – or was that for – Roux.
"It was in a grave for a hundred and thirty years before I found it last night. I'd say that was pretty lost."
"Misplaced. Now, with the belt plaque in the hands of someone else, it's lost. Do you intend to try to get it back?"
Annja recalled the cold way Huangfu Cao had executed the three young men at the gravesite. Crossing his path again was going to be risky. Even more so when it was on his home turf. She hoped there was a way around that.
"No," she said.
The irritation in Roux's voice grew stronger. "Why not?"
"The men who took it were very determined to kill me."
"Upon occasion, I'd find that understandable, but not acceptable. Do you know who took it?"
"I'm working on that."
"Do you mean to say that you not only lost that belt plaque, but you don't know who took it, either?"
"He lied to me about his name. Actually, there was a lot he lied to me about."
"And you bought into his lies?"
"Everybody, it seems, lies to me." Annja leaned back in the seat. The driver, Joe, listened to her every word. They'd been sharing a pleasant conversation, trading stories, up until Roux called.
"I seem to recall a few you've told me," she said.
"I'm better at it than most."
Annja bit her tongue.
"What are you going to do when you find this man and the people he works for?" Roux asked.
"I don't know." The answer was honest. Annja lacked the funds to travel whenever and wherever she wished. Chasing History's Monsters didn't pay that well, and with China involved, visas would have to be arranged.
"It sounds to me that you've rather botched this," Roux stated.
"Thanks for the post-game summary." Annja knew she sounded angry but didn't care. "I didn't know you had a vested interest in this."
"I don't."
"Now that is a lie."
Roux cursed and Annja knew she should have been offended, but she actually felt like laughing. "And the game's not over," she said.
Roux was silent for a moment. "What do you mean?"
"I've got digital images of the inscription on the back of the belt plaque. I intend to find out what's written there." Annja hung up but held on to the phone.
Joe glanced over at her. "Talkin' to your dad?"
Annja thought about that, realizing that the whole story couldn't be told and the relationship she had to Roux was all but impossible to explain. "He's my grandfather."
"Sounds like a tough old bird."
"He is."
"But it sounds like he cares about you."
Annja didn't know where Joe had gotten that idea. The phone rang again. Checking to make sure it was a Paris exchange again, she answered.
"You hung up."
"You were being rude."
Roux took a deep breath and let it out. "We should meet."
"Why?"
"Because there is something that I – " Roux paused. "Because there is something that I want to find that is connected with that belt plaque."
"Something of yours?"
"I don't want to go into it."
Annja hung up again. A sign beside the highway announced that they were entering Sacramento's city limits. She knew she didn't have much time.
Joe made a lane change, then turned to her. "Where do you want me to take you?"
That was the question. If she went anyplace public there was a chance she'd be recognized and the police would be called.
"Give me a minute."
Joe smiled. "Waitin' on your grandpa to call back?"
Annja smiled back. "He will." She was starting to doubt herself, though, when the phone finally rang. "Yes."
"That is getting really annoying," Roux said.
"I'm tired of not knowing what I'm dealing with here." Annja stared at the tall buildings in the state's capital. At the moment they were far away, but they were closing in fast. "So far that lack of knowledge got three people killed last night."
Roux's voice was more contrite. "I wasn't aware of that."
"You didn't ask."
"No. I should have. But we need to talk about this. I need to see that inscription.
"
"Why?" Annja asked.
"Can we talk about this somewhere else? This isn't something that should be gone into over the phone. Not with Homeland Security possibly listening in."
Annja didn't know if the paranoia over Homeland Security was warranted, but she needed help. Roux's desire to talk later and elsewhere provided her with leverage.
"In Brooklyn. At my loft."
Roux agreed without hesitation. "I'm in Paris. I'll book the first flight out."
"I may not be able to make it."
"Why?" Sharp suspicion edged Roux's words.
"I'm in California at the moment. I'm also wanted by the police."
"Don't tell me you killed someone." Roux sounded exasperated.
"I think so, but that's not why I'm wanted by the police."
"Then why?"
"I'm a person of interest."
"A suspect?"
"They're not calling it that."
Roux cursed again, but it was gentler and not directed at her. "You want to leave California without being apprehended."
"Unless you want to talk to me in jail where I'm being held as a material witness to crimes I can't explain."
"Where are you?" he asked.
Annja hesitated just a moment, thinking about Doug and how he might have been about to turn her in to the police. You don't have a choice at this point, she thought. "In Sacramento."
"Find a public place to be for the next few hours. A mall or something like that. I'll have someone meet you who can get you back to Brooklyn."
"Okay."
"I'll meet you there. If something comes up, let me know."
Annja said she would, and she felt grateful but knew she wasn't going to mention it and he wasn't going to expect her to. That was just how things worked between them, and she thought it was because both of them were used to being solitary people. Garin Braden wasn't like that. He was more social. But so were predators that preyed on their own kind.
"He's gonna help you?"
Annja glanced over at Joe. "Yes. He has a friend who's going to get me out of Sacramento."
Joe grinned. "Sounds like you know a lot of outlaws."
Annja laughed. "I guess maybe I do."
"He must care an awful lot about you to do something like that."