Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  Together they carried the unconscious cameraman out of the church, half supporting, half carrying each other down the aisle.

  “Somehow I always imagined we’d be doing the whole aisle thing in the other direction,” Garin said, hacking up his lungs as another bout of coughing hit.

  “In your dreams.”

  “Frequently.”

  Fresh air—beautiful, wonderful, fresh air—hit them as they staggered out of the church. The doors hung open on broken hinges where Garin had forced them. Annja saw what looked like a portable battering ram lying on the floor beside the doors. She didn’t ask. They carried Johan back to a low-slung black sports car not intended for three, and eased him onto the back shelf that pretended to be a seat. The effort brought him around.

  “My camera...” Johan murmured.

  “Camera?”

  “In there,” the cameraman managed. “Important...” he whispered, and then broke off coughing.

  Garin looked at Annja. “You don’t expect me to go back in there, do you?”

  “No. I don’t expect you to do anything. Wait here.” And before he could argue Annja set off at a run across the grass to the blazing shell of the church. The entire structure was ablaze, flames reaching twice its height again into the sky and threatening to spill over into the wooden bell tower in its search for material to consume. The trees were too close, she saw, realizing that if the fire reached even one of those low-hanging branches the danger was that the entire forest would burn, which would be nothing short of an ecological disaster.

  She tried to enter, but the heat beat her back.

  The camera couldn’t survive the heat, surely? The recording would be ruined.

  Steeling herself, Annja went back into the fire, covering her face.

  Everywhere was aflame, every surface rippled with it. The heat was beyond anything she’d experienced in her life. She felt her hair beginning to shrivel into her scalp and the skin across her face and hands tighten painfully. She couldn’t see the camera and had no idea how long she could stand the smoke and flames. The door to the vestry hung open. She’d seen the camera in there, hadn’t she?

  Annja started to run. Above her, a series of sharp cracks announced another imminent collapse. It felt as if the entire weight of the roof was about to come down on top of her. Annja threw herself through the vestry door. Seconds later the crucifix fell, tearing away from the wall with a scream of tortured metal. She couldn’t think about it. All she could do was focus on the camera case. It had to be in here. She’d seen it in here.

  But she couldn’t see it now.

  She wanted to scream.

  It had to be in here.

  And she had to get out of there.

  She was about to give up when she saw it on the floor, partially covered. She grabbed it and turned to run back through the wall of fire and out through the main door as if the devil himself was on her heels. The entire roof fell in behind her seconds after she burst out of the church.

  She dropped to her knees.

  “You’re insane—you do know that, don’t you?” Garin said, leading her to his car. “I risked my neck to get you out and what did you do? Run right back in!”

  She held up the fire-scorched camera case as if it were the Holy Grail.

  “Not worth it. Never worth it. Never, Annja.”

  “Every time you get out alive it is,” she said, earning a grim frown from Garin.

  There was no sign of her car.

  Picking up on it, Garin said, “I suspect you’re going to have a long and quite awkward conversation with your rental company.”

  Annja swore under her breath, but the car was the least of her worries.

  For a start, she’d hired it in the name of the production company, so Doug Morrell would be getting the bill, not her, assuming they couldn’t just use the on-board GPS to locate it. Then again, if the assassin was as thorough as he seemed to be it was probably at the bottom of the lake by now. She’d have to ring Doug and warn him that there might be a particularly substantial bill winging its way to New York. That was a going to be a fun conversation.

  She got into Garin’s car. Seconds later they were peeling away from the ruined Saint Peter’s on the Lake and racing toward the city.

  “How did you know where to find us?”

  “Elementary, my dear Annja,” Garin said. “I’m connected. I have people. Unlike you, they love me. In this particular instance it was the rather lovely young receptionist at your hotel who was only too happy to trade what she knew in return for the promise of a box seat for the folk opera tomorrow evening.”

  “Charmer.”

  “And lucky for you, I am, wouldn’t you say?” She didn’t argue the point. Given the fire in the sky behind them it was difficult to.

  “But why are you here?”

  “Because you said you needed my help. Okay, not in so many words, but it was obvious. I dropped everything and came running. It’s what I do. Haven’t we established that yet?” The sarcasm in his voice could not have been more obvious if he had tried.

  “Right. You traveled all this distance because of the laptop?”

  “Well, let’s just say I wasn’t having a lot of luck with the ponies, and the little minxes I’d invited along for a ride were of the pretty, but vacuous, variety.”

  “Just how you like them.”

  “Oh, you wound me.”

  “So, you think you can crack the laptop?”

  “Without doubt. I paid handsomely for a little device from someone.”

  “Someone?”

  “One of my contacts.”

  “That’s a bit vague.”

  “Listen, I can’t keep all of their names straight. Do you have any idea how many contacts I have? Aaron? Erin?”

  “Sounds like you can’t even keep their gender straight.”

  “Exactly, I’m people blind. Everyone is equal.”

  “Especially when you want something.”

  “My contact is confident his box of tricks will do the business with that computer.”

  “And he knows what he’s talking about?”

  “Oh, yes, he does this sort of thing for a living.”

  “What? You hired a thief?”

  “What do you take me for, Annja? Again, I’m wounded,” Garin said, flashing her a dangerous grin. “Ignorance is bliss, trust me.”

  As they approached the outskirts of Gothenburg Garin suggested that they lay low, given the fact they’d just stumbled out of a burning building, soot and scorch marks included. It was the kind of detail that stuck in a person’s mind and they didn’t want to be remembered.

  “I’ll go in, have a quick chat with the delightful Lovisa. Use my not inconsiderable charms and convince her that I’m sneaking a famous American celebrity into the building and we need to avoid those damned paparazzi.” He grinned. “The best lies always have a grain of truth. There’ll be another way in. Trust me.”

  Lovisa? He’d been in the country for three hours and was already on first-name terms with the receptionist, had a date lined up for when her shift ended and had thrown himself into a burning building to help them?

  Some people were life-size. Some people, like Garin Braden, were larger than life. She watched as he strode through the lobby’s entrance as if he owned the place. He probably did; he had his fingers in that many pies. He’d make a joke about not being able to keep his contacts straight, but as he himself had just said, in every good joke there was an element of truth. Garin Braden owned far more of the world than he’d ever admit. He liked it that way, but then five hundred years gave you time to build up a decent portfolio.

  “How are you doing?” Annja asked Johan, leaning over into the backseat. He was breathing easier, but he looked terrible. Drained, deathly pale, the only color in his face from the dirt and grime.

  “Been better,” he said, and then paused. “We should be dead. He saved our lives.”

  “I know. But don’t let Garin hear you say that—
it’ll only go to his head.” It would have been easy to reassure Johan, admit they’d had a lucky escape, but escape meant being free of the threat, and they weren’t free at all. The big man—Thorssen’s goon—had tried to kill them twice. He was still out there. She didn’t even want to think about a third time lucky.

  “We should go to the police. We need to. We need to be protected from this madman.... They need to put him away.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” she said, even though she knew he was right. “We don’t even know who we’re dealing with.”

  “Of course we do—it’s Karl Thorssen. He’s behind it all. Everything from sabotaging his own rally—all of those innocent people dead simply because they believed in his hate speech—to Mortensen, the fireworks guy and very nearly us. There’s nothing to be gained by trying to kid ourselves here. We’ve picked up a very powerful enemy—”

  “Exactly,” Annja agreed, cutting him off. “He’s connected. He has friends in law enforcement. He has friends in criminal justice, in customs, immigration, you name it, right across the entire bureaucratic spectrum—and he’s connected to so many others through the simplest facilitator of crime ever, money. He owns people, Johan. We can’t trust anyone here. We have no idea if they’re in Karl Thorssen’s pocket. And no, I’m not just being paranoid. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. We’re in trouble here. We need ammunition. We need something we can take out to the world and finish Thorssen once and for all. Let’s just offer a silent prayer to whatever devil or deity looks after people like us that what we need is on Lars’s laptop.”

  So much for reassuring him, she thought.

  Garin knocked on the window. Annja rolled it down.

  “Worked a charm. Drive around to the service entrance. There’s an underground parking bay that has a separate stair they use for laundry, food deliveries to the cold storage, et cetera,” he explained. “We can get you in that way. The stairs run the entire height of the building, so we just need this—” he paused, waggling a staff security pass “—to get through the lock and we’re good to go.”

  “You’re a star,” Annja said.

  “That I am.”

  They circled the block, turning onto an incredibly small alleyway, and took the ramp down into the underground parking facility. Garin worked his magic with the lock and they climbed the stairs to Annja’s floor.

  Johan didn’t say one word.

  She was worried about him.

  This wasn’t the kind of thing a hot shower and a change of clothes would fix, either.

  Garin saw them to their rooms, made his excuses and left them to it for a while. Annja had half expected him to at least offer to scrub her back, but he hadn’t made even the slightest innuendo. For that, she was truly thankful.

  Annja riffled through her stuff for a clean shirt and jeans.

  Then she recalled that Garin had checked himself into the penthouse suite, and it seemed young Lovisa had offered a special turndown service.

  Annja was glad to have some time to herself.

  It wasn’t just about freshening up, though she ran the shower hot enough to scour the skin from her body. She needed to decompress. She felt like a diver coming up too quickly and suffering from the bends. Her emotions were bottled up inside her, especially how she felt about Roux not being in touch. It was unlike the old man. He’d normally be the first to fuss over her, and no game of poker was that good he’d risk losing her. There had to be a reason Roux hadn’t answered her texts. She didn’t want to think she was jumping at shadows, but she’d said it herself, Thorssen was connected....

  Just call damn you, old man.

  She stayed under the spray a long time, head down, the steaming water red at the bottom of the shower from the bloody skin around her wrists. Afterward, she treated and bandaged her wounds, and then dressed quickly. She didn’t want to be in her bra and panties when Garin reappeared, and knowing Garin that was exactly what he was aiming for.

  The faintest tap on the door caused her to think that Thorssen’s man had returned to finish what he’d started, but then she heard Garin say, “Only me.”

  She opened the door, but before she could say anything, he continued.

  “Get your stuff together. You’re not staying down here. Not tonight, at least. There’s several rooms in the suite—one has your name on it, one’s got Johan’s. I’m not letting you out of my sight, and don’t bother arguing about it. I’ll only be forced to call Roux and get him to sort you out.” He grinned. “We have one tactical advantage here—right now your would-be killer thinks he succeeded. We need him to keep thinking that for as long as possible. Besides, the suite costs an arm and a leg. No way I’m getting value for money out of it by myself, so raid the minibar, indulge on room service, rack up a small fortune on the pay-per-view.

  Johan answered first, appearing behind Garin. “Count me out, folks. This is totally beyond my pay grade. I’m out. I’m heading home.”

  “I can pay you a lot more,” Garin said seriously.

  “No, thanks. I’m heading home,” he said.

  “We need you here,” Annja said.

  “Sorry. I can’t take any more of this. Micke didn’t say anything about people trying to burn me alive when he asked me to come and shoot some footage. If I wanted that kind of excitement in my life I’d have signed up for something other than a Swedish election.”

  “I need your camera,” Annja stated, and thought maybe she shouldn’t have because it would only serve to make him feel like she’d been using him all along. Still, she wasn’t lying. She did need his camera if she was going to get at Thorssen.

  “Fine. Bring it back with you if you can avoid getting killed. Otherwise, I’ll bill the production company for a replacement.”

  “Doug’s going to love me...bills for cars and cameras.”

  “You said why you didn’t want the police involved, and I listened. You made me realize I can’t stay here. I’ve got responsibilities, Annja. A wife. A two-year-old daughter at home.” It was the first time Johan had mentioned his personal life in all the time they’d been together, and she couldn’t blame him for backing out. In his place, with the same people waiting for her, she’d have done the same thing. “Every time I close my eyes I see that guy stuffing the rag into my mouth, threatening to kill me.... I can’t live like that. I’m walking away.”

  “Running, you mean,” Garin added needlessly, but then he hadn’t been the one who’d been tied to a chair while the building was torched around him.

  “As fast as I can,” Johan agreed, no anger in his voice.

  He left them, heading down the corridor without so much as a backward glance.

  Annja wanted to go after him, but she knew there was nothing she could say to persuade him to change his mind. This put him out of harm’s way. It was a good thing, she told herself. But she didn’t believe it. He was going to be out there alone. She couldn’t protect him.

  “Then there were two. Get your things. Room service will be delivering in fifteen minutes and I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. Unfortunately, they eat horse in this country so I have no idea what I actually ordered.”

  She threw her clothes and toiletries into her bag.

  Garin reached on top of the wardrobe and positioned a small and unobtrusive black box where it could not be seen unless someone was looking for it.

  “Camera?” Annja asked.

  “Just in case. You never know who might come calling. Especially if they think it’s fair game to steal from the dead. I’ve already arranged with Lovisa for the maids to leave the room alone for a couple of days.”

  “Uh, what about your hot date? Shouldn’t you be wining and dining the lovely Lovisa?”

  Garin grinned. “Rain check.”

  “I bet you’re popular.”

  “Remember, Annja. You can get away with almost anything if you say it with flowers.”

  32

  The suite was larger than she had expected; a small princip
ality could have lived within its four walls.

  Annja stared out of the window—a huge single sheet of glass that stretched the length of the living area. The view offered an unrivaled panorama of the city and the countryside for miles beyond.

  “He’s still out there.”

  “That he is,” Garin agreed. “But not necessarily hunting you. That’s the important thing here. He thinks he’s done his job. He could be out of the country by now. It’s what I’d do in his place with everything neat and tidy.”

  “That makes me feel even worse,” Annja said, staring out the window in the direction of the distant lake. “If he’s gone, there’s no chance we can stop him. He’s just out there.”

  “Point. But you still haven’t told me why this guy wants to burn you alive.” Before she could answer him there was a polite knock on the door and an announcement that room service had arrived.

  Garin showed in two members of staff, moving with calm precision to lay out the table and arrange the meal as if it were silver service. They didn’t say a word. It was weirdly quiet, until they were gone.

  “I wasn’t sure what to order,” Garin said, waving a casual hand toward the huge meal that had been spread out. “So I rather ordered the lot.”

  It really was a veritable feast—a proper Swedish smorgasbord with a little of everything from pickled herring to spare ribs, butterfly sandwiches, beetroot dip, avocado sauces, various fish dishes, something Garin described as Jansson’s Temptation and a whole host of finger food.

  “You could have asked.”

  “You’d have only said steak, and where’s the fun in that?” He laughed and threw himself into a chair, rubbing his hands. “So, you were about to tell me why you’ve got an assassin on your trail, again.”

  Annja told him about what had happened in the hotel, about the man that Johan had pushed over the balcony and the fact that someone had ransacked her room the following morning, about the dead archaeologist and everything else in between.

  “So your crime is being a nosy do-gooder?”

  “Isn’t it always? And speaking of... The laptop?”