Day of Atonement

by Alex Archer

  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.

  14

  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.

  The old man rubbed at his jawline, feeling the rough stubble where his beard was already thickening, and took down the bundle. Surely Garin knew he would have allowed him to examine any of these papers, and that the only secrets they represented were the ones that down the years had protected them from witch hunts and claims of heresy?

  He should have burned them all, of course, but he could never bring himself to do it.

  Roux had few secrets from the man. How could he have? They’d shared so much of this life together, the only two men in the world who could confide in each other as the world aged around them, leaving them untouched. And yet he had chosen to take them? To break in here in the middle of the night and disappear before dawn, trying to cover his tracks?

  It couldn’t be good.

  He knew Garin better than he knew himself; there was only ever one motive for him to do something like this, to betray the pair of them so completely: money.

  He had a buyer, almost certainly, but for what?

  And just how much damage could the papers do out in the world once they were sold?

  Without knowing exactly what was missing, it was difficult to tell, but most of the material in here was primary source research. Handwritten notes of scribes and eyewitnesses to incredible moments of history—like the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake in Rouen.

  He felt foolish. Garin was a scorpion. It was in his nature to sting, no matter how much love there was between them. He took what he wanted without giving a second thought to anyone else. If it meant so much to Garin to risk their often-strained relationship, then there was nothing he could have done to stop him short of handing the papers over himself, with his blessing. And that would have taken the fun out of it for Garin. That was just who he was. No, what hurt was that he had used Annja and his concern for her as a cover for his crime.

  As always it was only ever about what Garin wanted.

  And what Garin wanted, Garin took.

  He took the opened bundle of papers and cradled them carefully in his hands, intending to check them off against the inventory, but once in the study the first thing he did was call Annja.

  The call went straight to voice mail.

  That only made him all the more nervous.

  He needed to know she was safe, primarily, but he wanted to know if she’d seen anything, marked anyone taking an unnatural interest in her beyond the usual autograph hunters. That meant that he was looking for one single piece of information: Had the anonymous caller made contact?

  He’d only kept the call from Annja because it had felt like the right thing to do the previous night. Now, in the cold light of day, he was starting to doubt his own judgment.

  “It’s Roux,” he said. “Please call me when you get this. I’m on my way to join you. I’ll be there in a few hours.”

  Using the intercom on the main phone, he summoned Henshaw. The man appeared in a matter of seconds, as though materializing from thin air. “Henshaw, is there a way we can redirect calls from the line in the study to my cell phone while I am on the road?”

  “Yes,” was the man’s reply, taking the phone from the cradle and punching in a code.

  It took him all of three seconds.

  “It is done, sir.”

  “Excellent. Please prepare an overnight bag. I shall be leaving the chateau soon. Call ahead to make sure my plane is ready, would you?”

  “Yes, sir.” The faithful servant nodded.

  “That will be all.”

  “Very well, sir. Safe travels.”

  “We can but hope, but they rarely ever are,” Roux said.

  15

  The sun had barely kissed the horizon when Garin reached his plane. It was a short return hop. Let Roux go chasing after Annja and meddle in her life. Besides, she was a big girl. And he had another, more pressing engagement with a buyer who was about to pay an awful lot of money for the papers he’d liberated from Roux’s vault. An obscene amount of money, really, given what they actually were, which only made the deal sweeter.

  Before he ran through safety procedures, he made a call to the interested party, assuring him that he had come into possession of the merchandise, and that he was ready to make the trade. The price had just gone up, however, by another mil, for expenses incurred, which was a fat lie, but the kind of fat lie a person could get away with when he held all the cards. Unsurprisingly, given the hour, no one was there to take the call.

  “I’ve got what you were looking for, but now that I have, we need to revisit the price,” was all he had said before he hung up.

  He checked his watch. The buyer would call back soon enough; Garin knew the man was desperate. And when the buyer did contact him, Garin would be back in the comfort of his own home, reveling in the fact the score card read Garin +1, the rest o
f the universe 0. With luck, it would be months before the old man even realized something was missing. It wasn’t as if he had the need to go into the vault every day.

  But then, his absence would set the old man to thinking.

  Nothing good ever came from the old man thinking.

  But maybe he should have been doing more of that himself?

  He knew absolutely nothing about his client.

  Not quite true. He knew a single string of numbers—the account code for the wire transfer that had deposited the funds to secure his fee. That was enough of an act of faith for Garin to trust the mysterious buyer to hold up his end of the bargain.

  It would have been enough in normal circumstances, but Roux had got him thinking now, second-guessing himself. These papers were almost as old as he was, and recorded an event he’d witnessed firsthand.

  So why these papers?

  Why ask him to find them?

  Why go after one of the missing copies instead of stealing one of the known ones?

  Unless his buyer knew Garin had easy access to them—knew about Roux.

  No.

  Unlikely.

  Sometimes a spade was just a spade.

  He made another call.

  “I’ve got another number for you,” he said when his hacker answered the phone. No preamble. No pleasantries.

  “Shoot,” the hacker said.

  Garin reeled off the digits.

  No need to discuss rates. This particular kind of transaction was about as commonplace as walking into a supermarket and picking up a loaf of bread or a liter of milk.

  “How quickly do you need it? There’s been a lot of traffic on the net, and I may have to bump some stuff to get in if you need it in a hurry.”

  “Definition of a hurry—I’m going to be in the air for the next hour, and if you can have something for me by the time I land there’ll be a bonus in it for you.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Garin knew he’d come up with the goods; the hacker had never let him down before, and no reason to think he was about to start now.

  He took off in the plane, rising to altitude smoothly. There was a simple joy in flight. It put him up with the angels. Sometimes it was incredible to think how the world had changed even over a few short decades that something as wondrous as flight could become so utterly normal.

  But the joy of the flight was second to the thought of the money waiting at the other end.

  Sometimes Garin Braden was a simple soul.

  Even if he already had more money than most people could spend in three or four lifetimes, even if he was richer than Croesus, that didn’t mean he had enough.

  He could never have enough.

  That was a lesson he’d learned a long time ago.

  There were people in this world simple enough to believe that being able to pay the bills was enough, or being able to go out for a meal any time they wanted to was more than enough. There were others who believed that enough meant being able to change their car whenever they felt the urge, but Garin wasn’t one of them. Garin wanted to be able to buy anything that took his fancy, whether he needed it or not. Even the plane he flew now was bought on a whim.

  And still he didn’t have enough.

  It was all about staying on top.

  His buyer was determined to possess Manchon’s papers, as it opened the way to something else he was determined to get. And if he wasn’t determined enough to pay the extra premium, then maybe Garin would hang on to the papers and see if he could unlock the mystery himself.

  16

  Annja was frustrated.

  She didn’t like being in the dark.

  Those two thugs had been working for someone. They might not come after her again, but that didn’t mean that their boss wouldn’t send others to make up for their failure.

  Which—and she wasn’t about to admit it aloud—was exactly what she was hoping for. That way maybe she’d find out who the organ grinder was, even if she had to take care of a few more monkeys.

  The sirens faded, then fell silent behind her.

  She sped away, ignoring her cell phone when it started to ring.

  Whoever it was could wait.

  She had no doubt that the two men wouldn’t be going anywhere before the police arrived, meaning it wouldn’t be long before they were gracing an interview room somewhere in the vicinity, answering some uncomfortable questions. What were they going to say? A crazy woman pulled a sword out of nowhere and used it to deflect bullets meant to kill her? The police would laugh in their faces, and then they’d be drug tested before they were shipped off to the psychiatric unit, white jackets on standby.

  None of what had just happened would make the front page of the tabloids.

  She realized that she was traveling well over the speed limit, knuckles white from gripping the wheel too tightly, and eased the pressure on the accelerator, watching the needle drift and slowly count down the numbers. It was only when she was closing in on thirty that she relaxed her grip on the wheel.

  Annja fished out her phone and glanced briefly at the screen. Roux was listed as the missed call. She pulled over as best she could, then pressed redial with her thumb to return the call.

  He answered before the first cycle of the ring tone had finished.

  “You called?” That was an event in itself. She could go for weeks, sometimes even months, without hearing from him. Now he’d called twice in as many days.

  “Are you still in Carcassonne?”

  “For a couple of days at least. Why? Is something going on?”

  She listened to the moment of silence stretch on just a little too long.

  “Roux?”

  “I’m coming to see you.”

  “Why? Is something wrong?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not. It could just be in my head. But it’ll set my mind at ease to be there. I’m going to ask you a question now, girl, and I want an honest answer. Has anything else peculiar happened to you since we last spoke?”

  “You mean apart from a couple of guys pulling a gun on me?”

  “What? When?” There was a genuine alarm in his voice.

  She kept it matter-of-fact. “About five minutes ago. It didn’t go well for them, and now they’re talking to the gendarmerie. I’m long gone. It’s all good.”

  “Go to your hotel room and wait there until I arrive. Something’s happening here, and I don’t like it. I really don’t like it.”

  “I’ve got work to do.”

  “Your life could be in danger.”

  “It has been ever since you first walked into it, my friend. I’m still here.”

  “Please,” he said.

  It wasn’t often he used the word please.

  His usual method for showing just how much he cared was blind indifference.

  She didn’t like the new Roux.

  “Okay, what aren’t you telling me?” Another pause. “And remember, you’re a terrible liar. No matter how good you think you are at it, I always know when you’re trying to hide something, so spit it out.”

  “You know how I feel about coincidences,” he said, which was no answer at all.

  “There are none.”

  “Right. That masonry falling wasn’t an accident. Ancient masonry doesn’t just happen to work itself free after hundreds of years the very moment you are standing beneath it. It just doesn’t happen. And now two men held you up at gunpoint?”

  “I think, technically, it was more a case of me holding them up by the end of it,” she corrected him.

  “I don’t care. Stop making light of it. They are connected.”

  “And you know this because…?” Because he was still holding something back from her. She knew it.

  “I had a phone call. No more than a few minutes after the rock nearly killed you. Someone called to taunt me.”

  “Who?”

  “He called himself Cauchon. The name should mean something. I know it should. But for the life of me, I can’t
work out why. The only thing I know for sure is that the call originated in Carcassonne.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Positive.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because Garin doesn’t make mistakes with this stuff.”

  “Please don’t tell me he’s about to descend on me, too.”

  “No, he’s not. The call was made from a burner phone in Carcassonne.”

  “Not my goons,” she said. “They weren’t running the show.”

  “No. I don’t think this is about you. I think it’s about me.”

  He hung up, promising Annja he would be with her in a couple of hours, and she agreed to sit tight.

  But if this was all about Roux, then coming to Carcassonne put the old man in the line of fire.

  Was this what Cauchon wanted?

  Almost certainly, Annja thought. If he actually had a vendetta against the old man, he was using her as bait to lure Roux here.

  She’d lied to the old man, though; she had no intention of hiding in her hotel room.

  She had an appointment with the curator of the museum.

  17

  “Thank you so much for seeing me,” Annja said as she held out her hand in greeting.

  The curator made a show of looking at his watch, as if to reinforce just how important his time was, and just how close she’d cut it. She’d met plenty of men like him before—officious jerks basically—but she plastered on a smile as she hurried toward him.

  His suit, neatly cut and definitely not off the rack, looked sharp, and his starched white shirt and fancy tie no doubt bespoke of some significance or loyalty to an ancient house or cause no one but he remembered. His hair thinned prematurely, showing a pink scalp around a prominent widow’s peak.

  He looked like a man who was aging before his time.

  “Miss Creed,” he said, taking her hand. His hand was like a dead fish in hers. This was going to be more difficult than she’d hoped.