by Alex Archer
She wasn’t Saint Joan, she wasn’t strong enough to meet death head-on, fire to skin. Joan was stronger, prepared for her fate. Joan had something inside her, a resolve. Annja could only wish she possessed the same inner strength, and that it might manifest itself as she strained against her bonds, willing the ties to break or the blood pouring down over her wrists to be enough to finally allow her to pull free.
It was a struggle just to breathe now as the smoke thickened and the pain in her head became incessant.
She heard another creak followed by a huge crash as the central joist supporting the timber roof started to buckle. But Annja was bound firmly in place and no amount of fighting it could tear her free. Less than a minute had past since she’d come to her senses, but it felt like forever. If you were going to die, she thought bitterly, that’s how you want your last minute to go.
She could hear Johan coughing, but couldn’t see him for the thick pall of smoke and the cloud of dust that had risen up as part of the roof came down. More air rushed in, feeding the flames.
It would all be over soon.
She knew one thing, one truth: she wasn’t ready to die.
Not yet.
Not like this.
There was another tremendous crack followed by a low rumble she felt deep in the stones that vibrated up through the crucifix. Light speared into the heart of the church, piercing the black smoke with an otherworldly whiteness that seemed to cast the flames aside.
From within the whiteness Annja heard a voice calling her name.
Her time had come.
29
Tostig had the church key in his pocket.
He knew he ought to leave it on the hook beside the door, with it not being there it invited the question Where was it? He could drop it at the scene, but that wouldn’t have been much different. As long as it wasn’t on the hook there would always be the question of how it got to where they found it. Taking it was a mistake. Worse. As long as he had it with him there was physical evidence connecting him to the church, and that in turn connected him to the fire. But that didn’t stop him.
He needed to find the right place to dispose of the key once and for all. And he had an idea where that was.
It was hard to explain why, but this time it was different. He’d told himself it was personal, but it was more than that. It went beyond such a mundane explanation. The assassin needed to stay, needed to see the place burn. He needed to know Creed and her photographer were inside, no matter what the risk. He needed to know she was gone.
So he stood in the doorway, watching the fire start to take hold of the broken pews and the battered old hymnbooks. He felt an immense wave of satisfaction as he laid the match to the gasoline trail, setting fire to the symbol of those hours of oppression that amounted to his childhood.
Tonight he was drawing a line under so many things; not only was he paying off his debt to the Serb, he was cleansing a hated part of his world.
And it felt good.
Almost euphoric. He smiled.
At last he was forced to close the door and turn the key, locking Creed and the cameraman inside. Now the devil could have his fill.
The fire intensified, passing the point of no return. The old church was beyond saving. The fire in the sky must have drawn the attention of people across the lake. They would have called the emergency services to report it. Fire engines would be on their way already. And that meant he had to cut out now, before they were on the narrow road down from the freeway, or he’d run the risk of meeting them.
So he drove, not toward the freeway, but in search of a vantage point. Somewhere he could watch these two deaths play out without being seen. That was a part of his trade he had never indulged in, the voyeuristic aspect of it all. He’d never felt the need to watch what happened in the last few moments of a job, preferring to trust his methodical planning. He was good at this.
But not this time. This time he wanted to see her burn.
By the time the assassin found somewhere suitable, the black smoke was rising in a thick plume and the air was full of the sound of sirens.
He was beginning to appreciate the efficacy of fire. It consumed everything, destroying every last trace of evidence with its voracious appetite for destruction.
He took the cell phone from his pocket and made the call.
“It’s done,” he said, unable to take his eyes from the conflagration.
“Are you sure?” Thorssen replied.
Tostig had never known his employer to doubt him. Not once in their long arrangement. Yet he was questioning him now. Had his pet politician finally lost faith? Was his trust in him so fragile after everything they had been through together? It wasn’t as though he had ever failed the man, even when he lost his apprentice. He had taken care of things before and after.
“It is done,” he repeated coldly.
“I hope you are right, old friend. I would hate for failure to come between us.”
Old friend. Karl Thorssen had never called him his friend before. That one word was enough to put Tostig on edge. The dynamic between them was shifting. There was something different about Thorssen’s voice; he had always been matter-of-fact in their dealings in the past, not one for pleasantries, no lingering on the line. Their relationship had never gone beyond the negotiating table. It was strictly business. A series of transactions to their mutual benefit. The assassin followed his instructions and was rewarded handsomely for his efforts.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up in warning, prickling against his shirt collar, which was soaked with sweat growing cold.
Now he was certain the dynamic of their relationship was shifting: there was a threat where there had never been one before.
“I have never failed you,” Tostig said. “It may be some time before their bodies are discovered, but that is all for the good.”
“Bodies? I only asked you to deal with the woman. Who else?”
“Her cameraman. He was there in the hotel room. He was a loose end that needed tying up.”
Thorssen was silent for a moment.
Tostig waited for him to respond, all the time watching the fire in the distance. There was no way the fire department would be able to bring it under control. The gasoline had ensured the flames got into the very fabric of the old structure. The church was gone. The fishermen would need to find somewhere else to confess their sins and bury their dead.
“I have another job for you,” he said at last.
“Another one?”
“There is a woman making a nuisance of herself. I have agreed to meet her, to listen to her suspicions and offer some platitudes. But I think it is time to call upon your special talents. Dissuade her, Tostig. Convince her there is a wonderful life out there very much worth living and that it would be such a shame if she didn’t get to enjoy it to the fullest.”
“Of course. Who is she?”
“Una Mortensen, the archaeologist’s mother. It seems she has taken her son’s laptop from the dig at Skalunda.”
Tostig liked control, reason, logic; this situation was rapidly losing all three thanks to his client.
So what if the old woman had some of her son’s possessions; if Mortensen had anything incriminating, surely he would have had it with him, presumably to keep it safe, when they’d stopped him on the road.
“You think there’s something on the computer we should be worried about?”
“I’m just being cautious. You ought to be. For some reason she seems to think that I know something about his death. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Tostig?”
It was the first time Thorssen had ever used his name when speaking to him on a cell; that was one of the golden rules, no identification. It concerned the assassin that his employer no longer seemed to care.
He was going to have to make his own escape before the chance slipped away.
“No.”
“Stay close by,” Thorssen said, as though reading his mind.
It was time to leave.
Not just the scene of his latest crime.
It was time to leave Sweden. To leave his life as Tostig. He’d always known the day would come. He had a box—his insurance policy—beneath the floorboards in his downtown apartment. That box contained everything he required to start a new life. It had money, paperwork, plastic. It had an entirely new person with his face just waiting to be born.
To all intents and purposes, as he hung up the phone, Tostig died. He watched as the last link to his youth went up in smoke.
And like the phoenix from the ashes he would rise again from the flames, reborn.
30
The nurse asked too many questions.
She wanted to know how he’d cut his hand. She wanted him to go to the hospital to get it looked at properly. She pretended concern about tendon damage. Thorssen did not appreciate her clucking over him. And when she reached for the phone to call an ambulance he had no choice but to stop her. He asked her not to. He made her promise discretion, but he could not trust her, that much was obvious.
She became another loose end.
It fell to him to ensure she could not be picked at and unraveled.
The look on her face when she had peeled back the blood-soaked dressing spoke volumes. She had never seen anything like it before. She was out of her depth. Something had changed beneath his skin, the red swelling expanding and causing the wound to open farther, splitting his palm.
“There may be something stuck in there. We won’t know what it is without having an X-ray. This is serious, Mr. Thorssen. We can’t just stitch it up. It won’t help.”
“Just clean it up. I’ll be fine.”
He was used to giving people orders. They did what he wanted, when he wanted. He was used to the power that came with money and politics. He knew what it was like to be feared; people were afraid of him because they relied on him for their livelihood, but this was different. He snarled at the woman like a beast. She wanted to cower before him. He could taste her fear. She didn’t want to be in the room with him.
“You need to go to the hospital,” she insisted, reaching for her phone. She turned her back slightly, and as she punched in the three digits on her keypad to summon the ambulance, he pulled the sword smoothly from the piece of sacking he’d stolen from the sword smith’s workshop.
Back turned, she didn’t see the lethal arc of silver as it swung for her, and fell before her call could be connected. Not that an ambulance could save her. Nægling dug deep into her neck, severing arteries and slicing into bone. Her weight as she fell forward pulled the blade downward, forcing Thorssen to yank it free from her with far more force than it had taken to embed it.
Without the blade inside to hold the blood at bay it pulsed out to cover his face and chest and the walls and rug around and beneath her.
He didn’t regret this, though he hadn’t wanted it to happen inside his own home. This was his sanctuary. But she had left him with no choice. No choice at all.
At least it had happened in his den. Any evidence would remain hidden from the eyes of his mother. Neither she nor the cleaner dared venture inside the room without being invited. The nurse’s body couldn’t remain there indefinitely, of course. Nature would have its pestilent way with her, but he would have time to clean away the mess undisturbed.
His hands were still red with her blood when his cell phone rang.
He should have left it alone, but it was an anchor to reality. The election was two days—three days? Four days? He couldn’t remember; even that simple important fact was slipping away from him. It could be important. He needed to act normally, but it had been a long time since he’d felt anything approaching normal.
He gathered his wits and was sure he had control over his voice before he answered, then he listened to the voice on the other end as Tostig relayed the news that he had dealt with the problem posed by Annja Creed and her cameraman. He felt nothing. They were like the nurse whose body lay at his feet, a necessity, a cost of war. He was becoming something more than himself.
Once, he would have trusted the assassin with his life, but no more. Problems caused doubts, which caused more problems. There could be no trust when the man had proven himself a possible liability.
If you want someone killed, do it yourself, Thorssen thought, twisting the old truism.
He had almost asked the man to dispose of the nurse’s body, but the assassin had never been out to the house before. Doing so now went beyond the limits of their relationship. It exposed Thorssen to more risks. Risks he was averse to taking. He was quite capable of getting in the nurse’s car and driving her body far away from here. It didn’t take a genius to dispose of a corpse.
He would be done before his mother returned.
Thorssen had almost forgotten he still had the sword in his right hand.
Nægling was becoming part of him now.
So much so he felt strange when it was not in his grip.
Bereft.
Stranger than that was the craving he felt, the thirst and hunger that pulled at him and demanded to be satisfied.
A single thought dominated his mind: he must move the woman’s car. Away from here. As far away from his home as possible.
His hand throbbed with dull agony. He was almost blind to it now. If only the nurse had stitched the wound as he’d asked. But no. She had to meddle. To fuss. Like his mother.
He looked down at his hand. The dressing was almost dry; the cut had clotted but not closed. The red swelling in the center had hardened to form a new layer of skin. He flexed his hand, stretching and closing his fingers, startled to find the skin split a little more, to reveal that the new skin extended beyond the cut.
The metamorphosis wasn’t only affecting his mind.
He was changing.
Thorssen felt the urge to tug and tease at the edge of split skin and rip it away just as he had with the crusted coating that had shielded Nægling all those years it was underground. Look what had happened to the sword when it had been revealed, the transformation. He could only begin to imagine what he might find growing inside him, the extent of the transformation it was working on him.
But that could wait.
Practicalities had to come first.
He rolled the nurse into the rug she had fallen on and retrieved her car keys from her handbag. It would be easier to dispose of the carpet than to clean it.
The rug was easier to lift than he’d anticipated. He hoisted the carpet onto his shoulder, and felt the back of his shirt stretch and pull. He manhandled the corpse into a comfortable position to carry out of the house.
He opened the trunk of the small car she’d arrived in and bundled her inside, careful to keep the rug wrapped around all of her.
This wasn’t his first time disposing of a corpse. He’d buried the sword smith in the patch of ground at the back of the man’s house. Even so, the mundaneness of it was distasteful to his new emerging self. He was a warrior. They had fallen. It was not his place to bury the dead.
He looked at himself in the rearview mirror, at eyes he didn’t recognize, a question forming in his mind: If I can deal with death like this, if I can get my hands dirty, why do I need the assassin?
31
“How’s that for an entrance?” Garin Braden looked up at Annja, devilish grin fixed firmly in place as he pulled aside a stack of burning hymnbooks from the pile beneath her feet. He aimed the fire extinguisher at the broken wood, dampening it down long enough for him to climb up to where she hung. “Admit it, it really was a bit impressive. Church on fire, smoke everywhere, me striding to the rescue impervious to the flames. Are you beginning to understand why the ladies love me yet?”
For all his talk, Garin worked quickly and efficiently, cutting through the ropes and catching her as she fell. Annja felt the c
irculation return to her arms, which, given the state of her wrists and the blood coagulating around them, wasn’t the best timing.
“Maybe if you didn’t look like a drowned rat,” she said.
“Hey, I took a dip in that ice cold lake to save your skin, woman. The least you can do is be grateful.”
“I am. Just this once. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“No, ma’am.”
He helped her out of the bindings that still held one arm tight to the cross. The fire showed no sign of abating. Annja reached out into the otherwhere for the sword, feeling the reassuring solidity of it in her grasp, and then there it was in her hand as though it had always belonged there.
She moved along the aisle toward the door, the flames rippling overhead, the walls bowing under the weight of the roof as she picked a path through the detritus from the collapse. Johan was unconscious in the chair. Annja dropped quickly to her knees, fumbling with the ties binding him, but the smoke stung her eyes and she couldn’t see straight. Beside her Garin started coughing. Steam rose from his body where the lake water was evaporating, its protective layer being scorched away.
There was no time. Annja used the sword to slice clean through the ties. Even half blind, her precision with the sword was unerring. Johan’s hands came free and he slumped forward, only held in place by the ties binding his ankles to the chair legs. Hot embers stung her skin. She ignored the pain, focusing on freeing the cameraman’s legs and getting him out of there. Garin was at her side, helping her.