by Alex Archer
“Well, are you going to tell me what’s in the box?” Garin asked when they were both inside.
“You still don’t need to know,” Roux said, staring straight ahead as the wipers struggled to keep pace with the snowflakes settling on the windshield.
“Are you sure about that?” Garin asked.
“For now, yes.”
44
The towels smoldered rather than burned.
That was good. Better than burning herself alive. It didn’t take long for Annja to get the smoke to rise, as if she was sending good old-fashioned smoke signals to the ceiling detector. It didn’t need flames to go off. She offered another steady encouraging breath to try to muster flame from the smoldering cloth, feeling the heat starting to grow. She caught a lungful of acrid smoke and had to turn away for a moment, choking as it burned her lungs. She covered her mouth with her hand before she turned back in time to see a single tongue of flame reach a few inches into the air, surrounded by a belch of smoke.
It was a start.
She got to her feet and took a couple of steps back, still coughing.
The room filled quickly with thick tendrils of smoke, but then the near-silence was replaced not by the sound of an alarm or the spray of sprinklers bursting into life, but by the incessant hum of an extractor fan venting the smoke out of the small room.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Annja rumbled. Some cheap piece of household gadgetry wasn’t going to stop her getting out of there.
She wafted the flames, willing the fire to really take hold as the room started to fill with smoke despite the extractor’s best efforts. And then the smoke alarm sounded, bursting into shrill life.
Annja covered her ears just as the sprinklers came on.
She moved toward the bathroom door, realizing the one major flaw with her brilliant plan—she wasn’t going to survive too long out in the blizzard if she was dripping wet. Hyperthermia would take her out in a matter of hours. It was too late for second thoughts with constant water raining down on her head.
She needed to be quick about it. The door could open at any moment.
She grabbed the sword and slid the weapon back into the otherwhere.
Her thoughts were focused on escape, not killing. Primary objective: get outside. Secondary objective: find someplace to hide out until she was ready, or Roux arrived, whichever came first. As she gave up her grip on the sword, she heard the sound of a key in the lock.
Annja shouldn’t have been surprised to see Monique standing in the doorway, hypodermic syringe in her right hand. She’d assumed the car meant the woman had gone, but of course it must have been customized for Cauchon.
It changed things, but only slightly. It just meant it would be harder not to kill the woman because she wouldn’t back down.
Annja snatched up the remnants of the comforter from the bed, some of its stuffing spilling out as she started to sprint up the ramp. Annja intended to use it as a shield, much like a gladiator might have used a net. That needle wasn’t going in her arm again.
She didn’t give Monique the chance to back out of the room; instead, she was on her in a second, knowing this was her one and only chance to escape—hopefully bloodlessly. She wasn’t about to waste it. Monique hadn’t been prepared for the ferocity of the attack. Too late, she tried to backtrack up the ramp and simultaneously block Annja’s path. Caught between the two maneuvers, the woman was trapped in an instant of indecision that cost her.
Badly.
The shredded comforter was too bulky to allow Monique to jab the needle through it and into Annja’s skin. There was nowhere for it to go as Annja’s momentum knocked the woman off her feet.
Annja didn’t give Monique any time to fight back; she landed on her hard, driving her knee into the woman’s gut in a solid blow she couldn’t fend off. Annja drove her elbow into the woman’s face, feeling the crunch of bone and blood as she rolled away. She was up on her feet in a heartbeat and running, not looking back. She had to keep moving. Annja guessed only Monique and Cauchon lived in the farmhouse. Others, however, could be there. But for now she focused on the fact that the wheelchair-bound Cauchon was gone.
She knew that in her place Garin would have acted differently. Leave no enemy behind was a mantra he seemed to live by. It would have made sense to go back and finish the woman, or even just stick her with her own damned needle and take her out of the fight for a few hours, but that wasn’t Annja’s style.
She pulled the door closed behind her, turning the key that was still in the lock.
Sometimes old-fashioned mechanics were every bit as effective as fancy drugs and cruel violence.
The fire alarm was still shrieking in the basement, and the sprinklers would have the fire under control in a few moments. Monique wasn’t going to drown down there, even if the fire department couldn’t make it up the mountain tonight. The same almost certainly went for any calls for the police. With the storm of the century building, the emergency services would be more concerned about accidents and keeping the roads open than a little petty crime in some remote farmhouse.
Annja was on her own.
She didn’t even contemplate Roux’s white knight act.
One look outside the window killed that particular fairy tale stone dead.
She scoured the place for keys. She could hear the woman in the basement pounding against the door, venting her frustration. All of the factors that had made it difficult for Annja to break through that ancient door still held for Monique. She was going nowhere. But without keys, neither was Annja.
There was a box beside the door, but there were no car keys on the bunch that hung inside it; that would have been too easy.
She headed straight for the front door, hit by the incredible cold against her soaked skin as she stepped out. The truck was still parked by the house, but fresh tracks alongside it showed where the other vehicle—Cauchon’s car—had set off down the mountainside. The back of the truck was still open. She closed it.
The keys were in the ignition.
It was a trusting neighborhood, but then again it was very isolated.
She didn’t waste any time clearing the windshield, despite the thick layer of snow that had built up there. She simply pushed aside a huge armful and relied on the wipers to do the rest.
Even so, the wipers labored under the strain, but not the engine. That fired first time. Annja threw the truck into gear. The wheels turned slowly through the snow, crunching over the fresh fall as she pulled away gently. She picked a path carefully, not wanting to risk getting caught in a deep drift. She checked the side mirrors, but the reflection was filled with snow. She’d just have to drive blind and trust that no one was crazy enough to follow her down the mountain road.
The tracks from Cauchon’s car were still clear ahead of her, giving Annja something to follow. She still needed to control her speed, easing the brake whenever she needed to, but mainly trying to slow by inertia rather than risk sliding on the sheet of ice buried below the snow. She did her best to keep to the center of the road.
To her right, the mountainside fell away steeply, though a person would not have been able to tell without actually focusing on the landscape to notice where one started and the other began, which made a mockery of perspective. The drop, she guessed, was both steep and long. On a clear day no doubt she’d have been able to see for miles. Tonight, Annja was focusing purely on the few feet in front of the truck’s hood and no farther.
She drove on into the blizzard, visibility down to mere inches, and even then all she saw was a blanket of snow.
* * *
THE ENGINE COMPLAINED as she shifted through the gears, using the engine to try to slow the vehicle as the descent began in earnest. It had little effect. She could feel the truck’s weight and gravity’s helping hand as the vehicle picked up speed as the gradient increased, caught up in its spell.
She saw the bend too late and had to fight with the wheel to try to get it around while the truck sought
to take flight.
The wheels caught in the snow. The truck slid sideways, hitting a bank of snow and beginning to tip, as if trying to stand on two wheels. Annja leaned against the door, as if her weight alone could bring it back onto four wheels.
It was a pointless move.
Her action didn’t affect anything apart from make it more difficult for her to steer into the slide. The truck continued to slide in the opposite direction. The back end slewing toward the precipice as one wheel caught on the edge, tantalizingly churning snow and the dirt beneath it for a heart-stopping second until the tread caught and pulled the truck back onto the road. Annja fought every instinct to yank the wheel hard, willing the huge vehicle to stay under her tenuous control, but the momentum was too strong to fight.
She wasn’t an idiot. It was only going to be a matter of time before she hit a turn the truck couldn’t handle and it went over the edge.
She had to make sure that she got out of it before that happened.
Annja clutched the wheel, knuckles white, willing the wheels to get some real traction on the road beneath her. The snow swirled and churned and spun, turning the air absolutely white, blinding, as she released the seat belt.
The next bend could be her last chance.
With one hand she gripped the wheel, with the other she groped for the door handle, throwing it open. As ice cold air flooded the cab, she launched herself out of the truck. She had no means to prepare for her landing. She could have hit an outcrop or a dry stone wall just as easily as she could have slammed into a tree or any other part of the landscape that wasn’t a snowdrift to cushion her fall.
Suddenly, she was in the air and then she hit the road, hard, rolling away. The truck hit a rock, the back end lifting off the ground before it tipped back onto two wheels again, and slewed, twisting well beyond the balancing point, wheels spinning freely in midair.
Annja was on her hands and knees, looking up in time to see the truck slide over the edge in slow motion, and then it was gone.
She heard rather than saw it roll, each horrible impact echoing through the mountain range, before the explosion tore through the eerie stillness and sent a tongue of flame into the sky.
The sound of the falling truck almost masked the oncoming vehicle that was climbing back up the track.
She pressed herself low in the snow, trying to take cover, sure that it wasn’t the cavalry riding up the hill to rescue the damsel in distress.
She was right.
In the dull glow of the dashboard as the vehicle crawled past, Annja caught a glimpse of the gaunt reflection of Cauchon, hunched over the wheel seemingly oblivious to the accident that had taken place only minutes before.
He was not alone.
She counted three other men in the vehicle with him.
He couldn’t have not seen it. There was no way he could have missed the shaft of flame. He just didn’t care. That said something about his psychopathy right there.
Who were the men who were with him?
She didn’t have time to waste thinking about that.
Not with the extreme cold, the lack of protection from it and the wet clothes already beginning to freeze to her skin.
She needed to move, to keep up her body heat. But even then there was a limit to what she could withstand before the elements won. Being lost, alone in the heights of who only knew where, she didn’t exactly have the luxury of making any mistakes. The problem was, there was nothing, no sign of civilization, no promise of warmth or salvation, as far as the eye could see. Although that didn’t mean much, given the storm, as she could barely see beyond her outstretched hand.
Think, Annja urged herself. Use your brain. You are not helpless. You’re not a victim. Don’t act like one.
She could run, but where?
She could stand on the roadside and trust that Roux was coming, even if he knew he was heading into a trap, but when would he arrive?
She could go in search of a phone, get a message to Garin. That was an option, too.
Whichever one she decided on, she needed to start walking if she was going to get off the mountain before the cold killed her. That much she knew. She could already feel death creeping into her bones.
45
Even driving through conditions as bad as this gave Cauchon a sense of freedom.
The car offered him a level of control he never would have imagined possible even a few years ago, and almost allowed him to forget about his lifeless legs. It was miraculous to think that while he couldn’t use them to hold his own weight he could still drive. Maybe one day in the future they’d perfect some sort of stem cell surgery that could rebuild his legs, like those of a bionic man. Until then he’d settle for little miracles like this and focus on revenge, which was far more effective for pushing him on than hope ever had been.
Truthfully, he didn’t care if he ever walked again; that had been a hard realization to come to, but once he’d made his peace with it, it made living in the chair so much easier.
Monique had insisted that he be the one to make the trip down the mountainside to pick up the men who were going to keep the house secure. It made sense. Should Roux arrive at the farmhouse when he was alone, he wouldn’t have been able to fight him off. This close to the endgame, Cauchon was taking no chances. He knew just how dangerous Roux and his friend Garin were, hence bringing in extra muscle. His original plan had been for the two men he’d hired to bring Annja Creed in from Carcassonne to serve as guards, but he hadn’t been able to make contact in the past twenty-four hours. He had to assume that they had been arrested by the police. They couldn’t reveal who he was, but it meant that he needed to burn that number, too. He couldn’t risk that they’d somehow lead back to him.
It was all about planning for the worst now. The extra muscle shouldn’t be necessary, but better to have it, and have the grunts sitting around wondering why they were there, than not have them and need them.
The price was having to pick them up from the village during a major storm.
Cauchon didn’t care about the snow or the storm or anything that fell outside of the sphere of his single-minded purpose. His entire universe funneled down to one thing: Roux. Nothing else mattered.
Even with satellite navigation, the muscle would never have found the farmhouse in this weather.
Monique was more than capable of handling Annja Creed; he was absolutely sure of that. There was nothing his sister couldn’t do if she put her mind to it, and nothing another shot of tranquilizers couldn’t handle if worse came to worst.
Even so, it frustrated him that he had to rely on his sister so much. She, conversely, relished it. Monique would rather have kept Annja sedated for the entire time they held her. There was sense to that, of course. A passive hostage wasn’t likely to cause trouble. But he couldn’t help thinking that Monique was more interested in tormenting the woman than keeping her pliable. Annja Creed was the innocent in all this, only the vessel that something else had taken possession of.
The tracker on Roux’s 4x4 had remained stationary for a long time before Cauchon left the farmhouse, leading him to believe that Roux was in place, retrieving the armor. Not that he was naive enough to think that he could trust the old man to keep his word. He would be scheming hard, planning a scheme to renege on his promise. That was his nature. Even if he was in place, the weather almost certainly meant he wouldn’t be able to move out even if he could retrieve the armor before morning. That didn’t matter to Cauchon. He knew where the man was. That was the important thing.
Once he was below the line of the heaviest snow, he joined a wider road where a snowplow had cleared away enough of the fresh fall to allow two cars to pass side by side in comfort. He pulled over.
It was time to make the call.
He’d been looking forward to this for a while. He wanted to enjoy it, not be worried about concentrating on the road and icy conditions.
“Do you have it?” he asked when the other man answered.
/> “Not yet.”
Cauchon thought about calling him a liar, just to rattle Roux, strip him of a little more arrogance. Cauchon could have told the old man precisely where he was. That would have really thrown the old man, but he thought better of showing his hand. Right now he had an advantage, as slight as it was, and he did not want to relinquish it too easily.
“When, then?”
“First light,” Roux said.
That sounded reasonable enough. Almost like it could be the truth.
And it wouldn’t hurt if Roux was forced to spend an uncomfortable night in the car instead of some plush hotel.
The connection wasn’t good. The line kept cracking and dropping out as the poor weather interfered with the signal.
Cauchon looked at his watch. How long should he give the man to retrieve the armor? Less than he’d initially offered obviously, to keep the man on his toes, keep him thinking that he was on shifting sands.
“You’ve got until 6:00 p.m. tomorrow to get to Pau. The conditions should be good enough for you to be able to take that plane of yours, but if they deteriorate any further you’ll just have to put your foot down and pray that 4x4 of yours doesn’t get you killed.”
“But…” Roux started to interrupt him.
Cauchon silenced him. He was not going to let him get a word in. “I will call you with instructions.” He ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket. It was imperative that he stayed in charge of the situation. He was so close to getting what he wanted.
It was going to be on his terms from now on.
He put the car back into gear and set off.
Roux was going to pay the price for what he had done.
46
“Pau,” Roux said as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. “He’ll give us directions once we get there.”
“So the mountain goes to Muhammad,” Garin said.
“Or the spider draws us into its web.”
“The difference being we’ve got an advantage. We pretty much know where the spider is. It doesn’t know we know. Now it’s just about playing his game. Part of me wants to head straight to the airport at Pau. He’s probably planning on sending that woman out to meet you. I wouldn’t mind meeting her again. We’ve got some unfinished business.”