by Alex Archer
Annja hurled herself to the ground, hitting it hard with her right shoulder, rolling out of the dive and rising in front of them. The maneuver had taken her out of the line of sight with the Alfa, minimizing the risk that a stray bullet would puncture the shell and hit Garin while he was unable to defend himself.
“Do you really want to die out here, boys?” she called, hoping to strike a chord of fear inside them. It came down to who they feared the most—her with the otherworldly blade in her hand, the devil they didn’t know, or their leader, the devil they most definitely did.
She was answered by a spray of bullets.
“You’re slow learners, aren’t you?”
More gunfire.
She moved fast, scrambling across the gravel. Bullets tore up the ground around her feet. Shots plunged into a tree beside her, splintering the bark.
Too close for comfort.
She moved between the trees, using them to conceal her as she ran along the side of the parking lot. Muzzle flare and the bark of gunfire filled the night. She didn’t slow down. Bullets ripped chunks out of the trees on either side of her. Annja took one on the length of the blade, sending the bullet high and wide in a shower of sparks.
She burst out of cover, running head-on at the gunmen. Three guns became two as one of the Steyrs fell silent. The brother lost his nerve and dropped his gun, realizing that the bullets weren’t up to the task.
He turned and ran.
Annja closed the gap between her and the remaining men, her blade still slicing through the night in a deathly arc of silver. One bullet ricocheted against its length, spinning away in the direction of the shooter. It took the brother in the shoulder. His cry of pain had barely left his lips when the man beside him fell to his knees, blood leaking from a gaping wound in the middle of his chest. He pitched forward, his breathing almost nonexistent. He wasn’t going to be long for this world, and he knew it.
Another hail of bullets almost caught her unaware. The last gunman was a stubborn one.
“Okay, sunshine, you had your chance,” Annja said, dropping to her knees as a bullet took the dying man in the back of the head and put him out of his misery. She heard another staccato burst of gunfire. Then a grunt and the sound of stumbling feet followed by collapse.
In that moment, the gunman with the bullet in his shoulder turned and ran.
And he moved like a jackrabbit, bolting for the anonymity of the dark.
She had to move quickly, while she could still make out the fleeing gunman’s position. He wasn’t getting away from here. She needed the Brotherhood to think these men were dead.
Another shot came in her direction, wide of its intended target.
Muzzle flash gave her something to aim for, and the briefest glimpse of the man behind the trigger. He was firing blindly.
She started after him. She was faster. Fitter. He stumbled, sensing her behind him, fired wildly again, high over Annja’s right shoulder. She was no more than a couple yards from him when he realized how close she was. The brother was caught half-turned, and he went down in an ungainly tangle of legs. He landed on his back, the Steyr pointing up at her face, so close he could not possibly miss.
In that second, Annja Creed felt regret for the things she hadn’t done far more than for the things she had as she thrust the sword into his chest. His death was accompanied by the unmistakable sound of the Steyr clicking on an empty chamber.
Annja sank to her knees, breathing heavily, her heart racing.
She couldn’t have known that the gun was empty, and the man beside her, whose life was draining into the parking lot’s gravel, couldn’t have known, either. Annja stood up and began to make her way back toward Garin and the car when she heard the crack of another gunshot.
“Garin!”
She ran, cursing herself for leaving him alone and not suspecting there would be a fourth gunman. The sword was light in her hand. It gave her strength. Power from that ancient connection to the maid flowed through her veins, filling her body and soul. She was ready to cleave the gunman’s head from his shoulders and end this here, praying every step of the way that Garin was still alive.
She reached the car. Garin stood above one of the masked brothers. He leaned on the car to support himself. The brother was dead, a bullet hole in the middle of his silver mask.
“He came back for more,” Garin said simply.
She stepped in close, taking his weight. He was rank, reeking of stale sweat.
“Did he say anything?”
“Only that El Zogoybi will kill us for this.”
“El Zogoybi?”
“Their leader,” Garin said. “Damn, it’s good to see you, Annja. About time you saved me for once.”
She laughed at that, relief flooding through her system. She could feel herself shaking as the adrenaline abandoned her.
“I heard them say his name a few times, like he was some sort of divine master, one of these holier-than-holy nutjobs. I never saw him. At least I don’t think I did. It was hard to tell who was who behind those creepy masks.”
Annja bent down and pulled the masks off the dead men, but she’d never seen any of them before. She’d hoped one of them might have seemed familiar, a face she’d seen tailing her and reporting back about her movements over the past day. But they were strangers. Each of the dead men had the tattoo of flames on the backs of their hands.
“The Brotherhood of the Burning,” Annja said as she got back to her feet.
“I’m not with you?”
“Let’s get in the car,” she said. “We can talk while I drive. Sticking around here’s not good for our health. I’ll tell you what’s been going on while you’ve been out of action.”
“Sure, where’s Roux?”
“Taking care of business,” Annja said. “We’ll catch up with him and work out where we go from here. But first, let’s get you patched up.”
“I’m good. I just need to sleep. I could kill for a hot bath.”
He clambered into the back and was asleep within minutes of his battered body sinking down onto the leather seats. She drove in the direction of the airport.
It was a lonely road.
22
As Roux left the tiny chapel, his phone lit up with notifications of missed calls and voice mails.
The dead-zone effect.
The vast majority of the messages were increasingly frantic calls from Oscar demanding that he call him back. He’d found something, but he wasn’t going to just leave it on Roux’s answering service—which meant it was something important. Roux walked through the streets, hurrying away from the chapel. The surviving brothers would come after him soon enough; his best hope was to lose himself among the tourists. Safety in numbers.
Not that he’d recognize the men when they came, unless he could spot the distinctive tattoo on their hands. So, from that moment on, everyone was a prospective threat. Thinking that way made staying alive easier. Trust no one. The man beside him in the crowd could have been one of them. The man leaning against the wall smoking a thin licorice-paper cigarette and seemingly admiring the female tourists could have been one of them. Or neither of them. Or both.
Roux looked left and right, knowing his own furtiveness marked him out as suspicious, but there was nothing he could do about it.
He needed to get away from there.
The clock was ticking, but Garin was still alive, and he wasn’t here anymore. That made Roux’s role in this less urgent. That could change at the drop of a hat, but for now he had to move about unseen. It didn’t help that his face was all over the national news, wanted in connection with the bombing of the courthouse in Seville. They’d released his name, too. Of course, it wasn’t his real name, though it did mean that that identity was dead to him now, which was inconvenient.
But Oscar sounded desperate for him to call back. That much was obvious, but it didn’t change the fact that it was going to have to wait. Annja was on her way to secure Garin’s release and Roux was a rat in a maze with a bunch of trigger-happy men on his tail. Nothing the hacker had turned up would alter the outcome of the meet or the chase.
At the moment, it was all about priorities. He’d get out of there, find somewhere safe and then make contact. It came down to trust. He trusted Annja. He trusted Oscar. They would do what they had to. If the kid’s info was that vital to the outcome, he’d reach out to Annja—he wasn’t dumb. Besides, given the number of missed calls, he’d probably try Roux again before he was halfway out of the complex.
He moved quickly, following the last of the visitors. Only a handful of staff remained, cleaning up before they closed the site for the day.
His phone rang again.
He took it out of his pocket, turning the corner and moving quickly down a narrow set of steps, taking them two and three at a time as he answered.
It was Oscar.
Roux slipped into a narrow passageway between buildings and emerged into a courtyard.
“What is it?” he rasped, still moving.
“Finally. I thought you were dead.”
“Not yet. So something’s got you wound up?”
“You’ve been in that dead zone, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re one crazy SOB, you know that, old man? Do you have any idea how much trouble you might have been walking into?”
Roux drew in a sharp breath. “I do now, put it that way. You were desperate to talk—I assume that wasn’t because you wanted to berate me on my lack of caution?”
The hacker grunted. “Now I know you’re safe, it’s not so urgent.”
“Tell me, anyway. Let me be the judge.”
“I’ve been monitoring the dead zone, like you asked. I might have missed it if I hadn’t been looking for it.”
“For what?”
“It’s not always dead. I mean, it bursts into life, only for a few seconds at a time, never at set intervals, never for the same length of time, but never longer than a minute. I set up a lurker in case they came on again.”
“A lurker? In English, please?”
“It’s a Trojan that just hangs around, waiting for the system to go online, then it embeds itself.”
“Let’s pretend that means something to me.”
“The code gathers information and creates images of the entire drive when the system is online. Even if the network is shut down and restarted, the Trojan will pick up again where it left off. It’s much easier than trying to hack into the network in the bursts when it’s online. It also means I get to dig around properly without fear of setting off any security. Score one for the good guys. I haven’t managed to get everything yet, but I’ve found something very interesting. Actually, it’s more than just interesting—it’s weird.”
“I’m not paying you by the word. Spit it out,” Roux said.
“How’s this—while I was waiting to download stuff, I decided to take a look at the CCTV footage from the kidnapping at Garin Braden’s offices. Some of it was missing.”
“What do you mean? The kidnap footage?”
“No. That’s all there. Every second of it. It’s the twenty minutes or so immediately before the kidnappers crashed through the window. It’s been erased.”
“Okay, strange, I’ll give you that. How does it help? What are you thinking?” Roux couldn’t see how footage from before the kidnapping was going to reveal a great deal, but he humored the man. “Maybe he was in there with a client? Some of the people he deals with are very private. Maybe they didn’t want any record of their meeting.”
“I thought of that. Big-business, late-night clandestine meetings, all very cloak-and-dagger. Not worth losing sleep over. Until I found it.”
“Mystery solved, then?”
“Very much not. The footage wasn’t on the company servers. I found it stored on the system in the Alhambra. It was in the first burst of data that came through from my lurker. The Trojan is designed to send me the most recent files first. And there it was.”
“I’m not getting it. Why would the Brotherhood have footage from Garin’s office that wasn’t on his own system?” Roux was thinking on his feet. “Okay...maybe they were on there? One of them wasn’t wearing his mask? So they wanted to wipe out anything linking them to the kidnapping? But then why keep a copy of their own?”
“Weird, isn’t it? I know you like weird, so I figured I’d let you know.”
“I appreciate it,” Roux said, his mind racing. This was important. Somehow. “Send it to me.”
“Will do. Watch it. Tell me if you see what I see. I had to watch it a few times before I worked out what it was that someone was trying to hide, but I figured it out. I’m a smart guy, and I didn’t see it straightaway. But you...well, you just might. I don’t want to color your reaction, though, so I’m saying nothing. Take a look, then tell me what you see.”
Roux hung up and waited for the video clip to arrive. He could hear people in the distance, but no one was approaching, so he stayed where he was, in the deepest of the courtyard’s shadows.
The phone vibrated and he opened the video file.
Looking at the image, Roux realized that he had never been inside the office in Madrid. But he’d been in a dozen like it across the world. Garin was predictable in his taste. The room was well-appointed, the furniture comfortable and functional, but very definitely fashionable. It was a classic case of style at considerable cost, the kind of comfort that could only be achieved when money was no object. It was ostentatiously chic.
There were a couple of men in the room with him, behaving as if they were at home. That marked them as bodyguards. They were relaxed. A little too relaxed, but that was unsurprising, given the seeming impregnability of the office. It was essentially a fortress hundreds of feet above the city. Any threat of danger there was minimal.
Garin said something to one of the guards and got to his feet. There was no sound on the footage and Roux couldn’t read his lips. The man stood, as well, and slid the sofa he’d been sitting on forward a couple of feet.
Garin stepped behind it and removed a picture from the wall.
Roux had seen the style before. He was reasonably sure it was a Mark Rothko, and knowing Garin, it was an original, meaning it was valuable. Like everything else in the room.
Garin studied the painting for a moment, holding it out to the light.
He spoke again, then left the room, taking the picture with him.
The two remaining men continued to chat, clearly relaxing even more now that their employer was out of the room.
Garin returned a few minutes later, still carrying the canvas.
He replaced it on the wall.
The sofa was pushed back into position and drinks were poured for everyone.
Garin checked his watch a couple of times while they drank.
Then the clip ended. Roux wasn’t quite sure what he’d just seen.
Thoughts ran through his minds like cogs and wheels in a gradually accelerating machine. He weighed everything in the clip. There was something important in that short piece of security footage. Something fundamental to everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours.
It made him uneasy.
The uneasiness quickly changed to anger as things started to fall into place.
It took a moment to piece it all together, but when he did, that changed his perception of everything he’d just witnessed and everything that had happened since.
He’d caught the look on Garin’s face as he sat there sharing a drink with those two men. Two men who would soon be dead. He had checked his watch because he knew what was coming
.
He had known to the minute when the kidnappers would shatter the huge bulletproof window and come rappelling in. There was no surprise. He had known he’d be the only one of the three leaving the room alive. That was what the drink was about. It was a toast. A send-off. It was the Rothko original that gave it away, though. He hadn’t just taken it out and then returned to rehang it. Garin had known what was coming. He knew there would be gunfire. He’d known it would get messy. He had switched the picture, replacing it with a print of the same image so no one studying the security footage would notice anything amiss. That was Garin’s weakness. He loved beautiful things. Roux stared at the small screen, feeling sick. Betrayed. He should have known. He was well aware how venal his friend was. He’d always known how duplicitous the little snake could be—after all, he’d spent centuries avoiding Garin’s elaborate attempts at murder. Even so, the sight of him taking his seat and waiting for the kidnappers to arrive sent a shiver down the old man’s spine one bone at a time.
Garin wasn’t the victim here.
Roux needed to warn Annja before she walked into the cross fire.
23
The hotel was almost full.
Annja had passed it on the way from the airport. It was business-class, not a tourist trap, which meant an added layer of anonymity, plus decent food. She was starving. She headed straight for the hotel rather than waste time looking for something else. They needed to freshen up, regroup, think. They needed to get that mask back.
Garin stood beside her, the only colors in his face the red-brown of the cuts and grazes and the blue-black of the bruises that bore testament to the beating he’d taken. He wasn’t his usual talkative self. He didn’t try to flirt with the woman behind the reception desk. There was no dazzling smile. That, more than anything else, convinced Annja that he was in worse shape than he was letting on.