Blood Cursed (Rogue Angel)

by Alex Archer

  The skinny guy, whose magazine had jammed and he couldn’t get it placed, was down on his knees, pleading for them to spare him. Garin backed him into a corner.

  Annja’s blade swept before Skinny, the tip of it cutting into a framed needlepoint pronouncing Home Sweet Home hanging on the wall and blockading him with the deadly weapon at his neck.

  “Where’s Bracks?” Garin growled. “He was here.”

  “He wasn’t! He got out before we got here. Told us to go ahead without him. The pickup is—” His eyes went wide, darting back and forth between Garin and Annja.

  “Pickup?” Annja prompted. She kept an eye on the room behind Garin, where the others lay moaning.

  Garin followed Skinny’s gaze along the wall and to the floor where a white plastic cooler sat. “What’s in there?”

  Skinny shrugged. “Not supposed to look. It’s sealed. To open it will break the seal and damage the contents.” He patted his shirt pocket. “I was doing as I was told. I don’t know Mr. Bracks other than for this job, I swear. I never meet the bosses.”

  Wise business practice, as far as Garin was concerned. Since the punk had just double-crossed one of them. Him.

  “When and where is the pickup?” he asked.

  “Outside, across the sunflower field. Soon. Don’t kill me.”

  “Did I kill any of your colleagues?” Garin asked angrily.

  “Uh, I think you took out Schweps. And the woman is scaring me. Where’d she get that sword?”

  “You don’t like a girl with a sword?” Garin said. “Come on. Who doesn’t like a girl with a sword?”

  Annja pulled the blade out of the embroidered wall hanging and with a sweep of her hand sent it off into the otherwhere. That continued to baffle Garin. When she needed the sword she could call it to hand. And when she didn’t? It just disappeared when she released it. That was more incredible than his longevity. He didn’t like not knowing the answers to things. He wanted to know what made the sword tick, and if, when it had been joined together from scattered pieces years ago and Annja had claimed it, it had somehow altered the length of his life. Until that point, ever since Joan of Arc’s death by fire, he’d felt...immortal.

  He could still take a bullet and survive, but did he have a shelf life now? He and Roux were both tied to that sword, for good or for ill, because they had been there when the soldier had broken it into pieces while Joan burned at the stake. That sense of immortality wasn’t a gift Garin was willing to give up. Neither was he willing to let Annja hold some kind of power over him simply because she held the sword, now whole again.

  The only way he’d ever understand would be to get his hands on the sword—and break it again. Restoring it to the form it had been in when he’d felt certain he’d live forever.

  They heard the sudden juddering pulse of a helicopter above the cottage.

  Annja lunged for the plastic cooler.

  “Don’t open it!” Garin shouted. He had no clue what was in there, but what he’d seen the other night gave him a clue. Sealed? That meant the contents had an expiration date or were volatile.

  Searching Skinny, he pulled a small piece of paper out of the man’s front pocket. A business card with an address. “Grab the cooler, Annja. Let’s get out of here.”

  He shot Skinny in the ankle, putting him down in a dead faint. Stepping over the fallen, Garin followed Annja outside and toward the sunflower field.

  * * *

  “WHERE ARE WE going?” Annja asked as they ran out the back door. Twilight dropped a gray cloak over everything but she could still see well enough.

  Garin took the cooler from her, which was fine. It weighed about twenty pounds―not overly heavy, but she liked to keep her arms free in case anyone followed them.

  She twisted a look back toward the house. Everyone inside was out cold. She appreciated when Garin used restraint.

  “To see where this all leads,” he replied. “I’m hoping it’s to Bracks.”

  They entered the sunflower field, the heavy yellow heads hitting them in the faces. Moving into the lead, Annja took out her sword and used it as a machete. She heard Garin’s approving growl from behind. They passed through half an acre before arriving at an open dirt field.

  About five hundred yards beyond them, a helicopter landed on the rough-plowed dirt. There were no business logos or identifying marks on the drab olive green exterior, not even a registration number. Private, and from the rust lacing around the rivets at the metal seams it didn’t look as if it could carry anyone more than a dozen miles.

  Garin waved to the pilot as if he knew him. The pilot returned the wave and made a circling signal with his forefinger. Not much time. Hurry it up.

  Ever curious, and not about to let Garin leave with whatever was in the cooler, Annja said, “Let’s do this.”

  “This is not an us adventure, Annja.”

  She saw his fist plow toward her and blocked it with her forearm.

  “I’m going,” she protested, and twisted at the waist, bringing up her foot to kick his thigh.

  The man returned an uppercut and skimmed her jaw. Before she could straighten and prepare for the next blow, the man’s iron fist found her gut. She doubled, expelling her breath in a painful clench of abdomen muscles.

  “Sorry, Annja, stick to skeletons. This is my battle. The spoils are mine.”

  Lifting her by the hair, Garin then punched her in the jaw, knocking her out. She didn’t feel the ground catch her body as she collapsed.

  * * *

  TREKKING ACROSS THE field, Garin knew Annja would be okay to leave behind. Even if the men in the cottage rallied and went looking for them, they’d have to deal with a warrior armed with a sword who was pissed off at being cut out of the deal by him. He chuckled to think of the fight those idiots had waiting for them.

  He hadn’t a clue who the pilot was, or what was going on, but sometimes the best way to get anywhere was to blend in and act like you’re a professional. That ingenuity had gotten him into and out of more than a few perilous situations.

  Garin climbed into the helicopter and buckled in. The pilot, wearing eye goggles and a headset, turned and gave him the thumbs-up. “We’ll land in Berlin in forty-five minutes. Buckle in!”

  “Roger that.” Berlin. Taking him back home?

  “Wasn’t there another?” the pilot asked. “I only have orders to pick up one, but I thought I saw—”

  “Staying behind,” Garin summoned quickly. “Let’s head out!”

  Apparently the pilot didn’t know the identity of the passenger he was to pick up. Good for Garin. Between his feet sat the white cooler.

  For the first time, dread trickled down Garin’s neck, and that was a rare and ugly feeling. If all suspicions were correct, he didn’t want to look in the cooler.

  They lifted off the ground, and soared into the gray sky, high above the pinpoint lights from the small town of Chrastava below.

  Should have left Annja the keys to the SUV, he thought. Oh, well. She was an industrious woman. She’d find a ride back to town somehow.

  * * *

  THE FLIGHT BACK to London was quiet, the plane dark and the few other passengers all reading quietly on their electronic devices or snoring. Weston Bracks closed his eyes but didn’t find sleep.

  He expected Braden to pursue him, to come back at him with something bigger and better than the shipping heist. He had almost snagged a nice load of artifacts with that one. Braden’s security had been lax, easy enough to slip in a spy. Though he’d have to write him off as a loss. Surely, Braden had tortured the man to find out who was behind the theft.

  The almost-theft, that is. Damned Syrian authorities had charged in at the last moment and overtaken the ship. Thankfully, Bracks’s men had been well trained. They’d shot the captain and, wearing SEAL wet gear, had deployed into the ocean. They’d rendezvoused with a pickup five leagues north.

  A loss, but so long as Braden hadn’t gotten the goods Bracks was going to tally that
one in the win column.

  But what an interesting surprise to take care of business with the immensely fascinating Annja Creed and to have Braden walk in on that. And it seemed Braden and Creed knew each other.

  How to figure that one? Was she working for him? Yet he’d thought the job in Chrastava had been completely unrelated to anything Braden was doing. One of their employees must be moonlighting with the other. And Bracks pinpointed Canov. He was the only one in the Czech Republic he’d dealt with lately. Could he also be on Braden’s payroll? Possible, always possible.

  The fun had only just begun in Chrastava. He couldn’t pull out now. And to sit back and see how Creed and Braden worked together would prove fascinating. Was she someone Bracks could ultimately use against Braden?

  “We shall see.”

  * * *

  PICKING A FEW stray sunflower seeds out of her hair, Annja trudged back to the SUV by way of the red-brick cottage. The place was empty, the car they had originally followed gone. She peered in the windows, but didn’t see any bodies, which gave her some solace.

  She rubbed her jaw where Garin’s fist had landed solidly. That was going to leave a bruise. The bastard. She had no clue where the helicopter had been headed, so she now stood at a dead end. And she’d tried Garin’s cell number. Of course, he wasn’t answering.

  As she neared the SUV, she felt thankful the tires hadn’t been slashed, or the car trashed. But though the doors were unlocked, the keys were not inside. They were probably in Garin’s pocket eight thousand feet above the ground right now. They had driven a good ten miles out of Liberec. She didn’t look forward to the walk back.

  Climbing through to the backseat, she folded down one side to get into the trunk. Shuffling around in the trunk, she lifted the floor mat and found an emergency kit. Inside she found a flat-head screwdriver, exactly what she needed.

  Sliding onto the driver’s seat, and pressing a foot to either side of the steering wheel on the dashboard for torque, she forced the ignition lock out and inserted the screwdriver in the slot beneath. The engine revved.

  “Nice. Thanks, Bart.”

  Her good friend and confidant, NYPD detective Bart McGilly, had once explained how to start a car without a key. Just in case she ever needed the skill. She did love his willingness to corrupt her with all his secret police knowledge. She looked at the damage she’d done to the ignition. Good thing this vehicle was registered under Garin’s name and not hers.

  The SUV had half a tank of gas. The day wouldn’t end entirely on a bad note, after all.

  * * *

  WHEN GARIN TOOK in the landing strip below he realized they would touch down at an actual airport, or something very close. It was small, and there were only a handful of buildings nearby, but it was marked with landing lights, designating it a landing strip.

  When the helicopter landed, he unstrapped himself and opened the door. As he stepped out from the cabin and cleared the blades, he sighted a white limo driving down the landing strip. The night had grown long and the moon sat low behind high trees to the west. Had to be close to a town or city, but he couldn’t see any smoke or air pollution that would clue him to a direction. He’d been unable to get service on his cell phone in the helicopter to track by GPS, so he pulled out the phone now.

  His instincts told him, Get out now. Yet he walked forward, his long, sure strides moving him toward the limo with its tinted windows. Behind him, the helicopter hadn’t lifted off. Waiting for a return ride home? It would probably need to refuel.

  Fingers crossed that whoever was in the limo didn’t know who he was expecting to pick up, Garin heaved out a breath.

  A man got out of the limo, slim and dark, nondescript. He waved him toward him impatiently. “Hurry, the plane is ready to taxi!”

  A plane?

  “A dropoff point,” Garin muttered.

  This had just been the first stop. That little mail plane sitting outside the airport had to be his next ride. The plane didn’t look like it could carry a pilot and a passenger, let alone mail.

  He slid into the backseat of the limo. The car wheeled around and less than a minute later had delivered them. An elaborate escort, considering he could have walked down the runway to the plane. If anyone were going to overdo the power play, leave it to Bracks.

  Garin tucked himself into the back of the plane. Alone with the cooler. He wasn’t going to look inside. He should look. What was keeping him from looking? If he was going to be informed, and fight Bracks with as much power as he had, he needed to look. Especially since the cooler might be forcibly taken from him at any point, given that he had no idea who was controlling this journey he was blindly taking.

  Sliding a hand over the rough plastic cover, he determined with a lift of the handle that the lid wasn’t vacuum sealed. He wouldn’t be able to see anything in the darkness of the plane. Relieved, he was able to put off opening the thing. He could at least wait until he had more privacy. If that was meant to be.

  * * *

  THE PILOT HAD told him he’d have to sit in the back because the passenger seat was filled with packages spilling out of a box. Garin assumed this wasn’t an official mail plane, and probably everything inside was illegal.

  The back wasn’t officially the back, either. It was right behind the pilot’s and passenger’s seats, and was three-quarters stuffed with mailbags and plastic shipping containers. There was no seat. Garin sat wedged into a space on the floor where a seat might normally have been positioned, and was thankful a seat belt was available. The whine of the engine did not bode well for this trip. Neither did the odor of gas.

  He’d been in smaller aircraft and had flown in an open cockpit biplane fighter in World War I. He could handle a puddle jumper like this for a few hours.

  His right elbow resting on the cooler because a mailbag was suspended from a bright orange netting overhead, he eyed the pilot from behind. The guy hadn’t given him more than a nod of his head and directions to buckle up in the back. He was clearly just the transport pilot. Nothing more, nothing less.

  Their destination was Gatwick, it turned out, thirty miles outside London. The flight would take a little less than three hours, so he hunkered down to catch a few winks while he could. He would probably sleep through any turbulence. He could sleep through an invasion, as he’d proved a few centuries earlier.

  Funny thing about him and Roux. They’d walked through the ages together, reluctant companions who kept their distance. The other had once been his master, teaching him the ways of the soldier and martial arts skills. He’d at times been a father figure, a stern and demanding father, and at other times had been a brother soldier in arms. But they both knew they were in it—life—for themselves.

  Tough love, that. Though Garin would never actually admit to loving the old man. A strong measure of like, for sure. And frequent annoyance, always. He supposed Roux was lounging poolside right now, a bevy of bikini-clad women purring around him. The man had taught him the value of luxury and women, and Garin would never begrudge him that.

  Garin’s last thoughts before he fell sound asleep were so what if he wasn’t a morally upstanding man? He wasn’t preaching his nefarious ways to influential children or young athletes, so what the hell? He was fine with the life he led. And it wasn’t as though he had a family who looked up to him to show them the way. Any family he’d once had was centuries gone and forgotten.

  At the tail end of a rainstorm, Garin awoke to see that they were soaring over the English Channel. Carefully, he tilted back the plastic cooler handle. It wasn’t locked, and the cooler was cheap, so by sliding back the handle, that released the grip on the cover.

  Sealed? Not in any particular manner that would keep him, anyone, from opening it.

  It popped open and a faint meaty odor trickled into his nostrils. Inside the cooler, ice packets lay on top but he saw the dark murky crimson color beneath and immediately knew it was blood bags. Like those he’d seen hanging in the warehouse?


  What the hell was going on?

  He didn’t want to risk digging inside the cooler, but a long tag, written on with black marker, stuck out along the inner wall of the cooler. He leaned in to read the words, which he believed were Slavic. Játra. He wasn’t sure if he was translating it correctly. His grasp on languages covered many, but not all, and the Romanian dialects were tricky.

  Did it translate to liver?

  Garin closed the lid and rapped his thumb on the cheap plastic, but his thoughts soared far away, back to the Czech Republic. Blood and a liver. They had come from a dirty concrete warehouse in the middle of nowhere.

  Were they transporting human organs? For transplant? Impossible. Official medical connections needed to be made. Even black market organs had to be transported in a more secure manner. The organ couldn’t stay viable in a simple plastic cooler. Neither could the blood. Not for any amount of time.

  Who would accept an unviable organ, and for what purpose?

  And since when had Bracks involved himself in the trade of human flesh and blood? He’d always been an arms and art kind of man.

  This was disturbing, but the only way to truly know your adversary was to step into their shoes. Bracks did tend to slip into anything and everything. Seemed like the man gave new ventures a go, and if they were successful, he stuck with them. If not, on to the next project.

  Garin tapped the cooler. Surely by exposing it to air he had decreased the viability rate, or whatever you call it, for the objects inside.

  No, this wasn’t right. If indeed it was a human liver inside, it couldn’t be intended for transplant. No black market dealer would send an organ this way and expect repeat business.

  So whoever was receiving the contents had a different use in mind.

  He searched the archaic knowledge that floated in his memory for something, anything, that would clue him in to what was going on.

  Of all the times he could have used Annja Creed’s esoteric knowledge, that time was now. Yet she would flip to know exactly what was in the cooler. And then she’d adamantly suggest they contact the authorities.