Rogue Angel 52: Death Mask

by Alex Archer

  Roux ran his hands across the various pieces of expensive tech, trying to find something that might be functioning as a signal jammer, but truthfully, he didn’t have a clue what he was looking for. A box was a box—be it hard drive, router or jammer—and they all looked the same to him. Assuming the dead zone originated in this room, the best thing he could do was take out the lot of it rather than worry about trying to pinpoint a specific piece of equipment, and the best way to do that was pull the plug. That or torch the stuff, which would be ironic, given the Brotherhood of the Burning motif. But smoke and flames would almost certainly bring attention to his presence.

  Roux checked the screens again. Garin was almost at the gate. Two minutes away at best. The obvious hunter’s move was to lie in wait, then spring an ambush on the duplicitous SOB. He had the guard’s Steyr, which would cause some serious damage. He didn’t need anything else to make Garin’s life a living hell. And yes, the old man decided, that was exactly what he was going to do. Garin was going to pay for every little betrayal he’d countenanced over the years. Roux was done being his fool.

  Anger dulled the senses.

  He’d been so engrossed in elaborate thoughts of revenge on Garin that he hadn’t heard the chapel door opening. Now footsteps echoed in the vestibule.

  He checked the screen again. The car was still passing through the gate. This newcomer couldn’t be Garin. Maybe one of the men he’d taken down had decided to play Lazarus.

  “Javier?” a voice called.

  Roux held his breath. He eased the machine pistol from his shoulder silently.

  Javier was lying under the stairs. He wouldn’t be answering the call any time soon.

  “Javier,” the voice called again, closer now.

  The edge of the curtain moved.

  Roux felt like the Wizard of Oz waiting to be exposed as a fraud.

  He waited until he had the confirmation he needed—a hand with a flame tattoo parting the curtain—before pulling the trigger. Roux unleashed a short burst, the bullets shredding the curtain and ripping into the man behind it. The brother went down, still clutching the ruined fabric as he fell. The brass rings broke away from the rail under his weight.

  There would be no hiding now.

  Which, to be perfectly honest, suited Roux just fine.

  He was ready for Garin to walk through the chapel door.

  And he’d made up his mind. He wasn’t going to let the bastard charm his way out of this one.

  Roux checked the screen again. The car was gone. Almost two minutes had elapsed. He should be here any second. Roux smiled. It was all coming together.

  There were no headlights on any of the screens.

  Roux toggled through a few different views, using a little joystick on the console to pan the camera angles wider, but there was no sign of Garin. There should have been. He should have been pulling up outside the chapel by now. Roux ran through the feeds again, but there was absolutely no sign of Garin’s car in any of them.

  A vaguely familiar sound filtered through from outside. It took him a second to place it because it was so unexpected. It grew louder gradually, until the old windows seemed to vibrate in time with it.

  When he realized what it was, he cursed himself for being so slow and headed outside.

  28

  Annja heard the noise before she saw the light in the sky.

  She needed to get to a position where she could see the chopper touch down. There was no obvious landing site that she remembered. That meant she had to find higher ground. The rooftops. Plenty of buildings were fronted by scaffolding, so she ran to the nearest, eyes on the sky, trying to follow the helicopter. She climbed quickly, hand over hand, and leaped from the platform to the rooftop proper.

  She kicked herself. Of course Garin had more than one reason for wanting to return to the Alhambra. It wasn’t just about deciphering the mask, and it wasn’t even about tying up loose ends. Garin was more than capable of walking away from carnage with a grin on his face. She’d seen it before. He had no problem avoiding responsibility for his actions. The one option she hadn’t considered was that he already knew what was on the mask and the ancient fortress was only a rendezvous point.

  She raced across the flat roof, then launched herself into the air, catapulting across the gap between buildings, and came down in a front roll, rising again, still running, with the moon picking out her silhouette.

  The helicopter was already descending.

  She raced across the rooftops, leaping nimbly onto a perimeter wall that skirted a dry soil bed between houses, then scaling another high point, never once looking down.

  She heard footsteps.

  Two sets.

  These weren’t the heavy boots of the first man, either.

  Garin and his accomplice? It had to be.

  The helicopter made its descent and she ran toward it, covering the distance quickly. She was fast. But she had no idea if she was going to be fast enough. She could hear Garin running through the streets below. He made no pretense at stealth. She needed to stop him from boarding. It wasn’t exactly the confrontation she wanted, but she couldn’t afford to let him get on that helicopter.

  Once he was in the air, there’d be no catching him, even if she knew where he was going.

  The helicopter touched down in a courtyard. She stood on the tiled roof, watching helplessly as two shapes emerged from the shadows, oblivious to her presence.

  There was no mistaking Garin.

  She called his name.

  Both men stopped for a moment, their faces illuminated by the glare of one of the security lights.

  “Wait,” she said, running hard, arms and legs pumping furiously as the tiles cracked beneath her feet.

  Garin looked so much more alive than he had less than an hour ago.

  His bruises had already begun to fade in the strange, harsh light. He was a fast healer, but not that fast.

  But it was the other man she stared at, and the other man who stared back at her. There was a moment of recognition. Panic. Then he tugged at Garin’s sleeve to urge him toward the chopper.

  She’d seen him before.

  Back when this nightmare day began.

  She hadn’t expected to ever see him again.

  But there was no mistaking the easy style of Francesco Maffrici, the curator of the Monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Ávila.

  Here.

  Now.

  With Garin.

  They had been tracking her the whole time. They’d known every single move she’d taken from that very first step. How many more of the people she’d met in the past twenty-four hours were up to their necks in this conspiracy? Had they been feeding her what she needed to get here drip by drip, manipulating her into thinking she was solving some ancient riddle?

  Her phone rang. She couldn’t take her eyes off the pair of them. And she couldn’t reach them. Garin broke into a sprint, breaking the spell. He gave a cry, drawing a guard from one of the alleyways. The brother had a Steyr machine pistol in his hand, but he wasn’t as quick on the draw as she was. Annja threw herself forward in a combat roll and rose with the sword already in her hand, drawn from the otherwhere in time to stop the first bullet, sending a shower of sparks flying in the dark night as metal struck metal. The brother kept his finger on the trigger until the hail of bullets stopped coming, ripping up the tiles beneath her feet. By the time the gun dry-fired it was too late for him to save himself. Annja spun on her heel and hurled the otherworldly blade, sending it scything through the air in a vicious arc.

  The brother fell, his last breath caught on his lips.

  His head hit the ground a moment later and rolled away across the cobbles as the sword reappeared in her hand.

  Annja saw Garin duck into the waiting helicopter, Maffrici
a second behind him. She was too far away to stop them. She could have hurled the sword at the rotors as the helicopter started to rise...but she didn’t want to kill him. He was gone.

  Unless she could catch up with the helicopter as it rose, somehow snag one of the runners before it was out of reach...

  She bolted across the roof that ringed the courtyard, trying to get as close as she could before launching herself through the air, stretching with all of her will for the runner.

  She caught it with one hand, clinging on for dear life as the helicopter surged upward.

  She could see the horror on Garin’s face as the downdraft from the rotors pummeled her.

  She swung her second arm up, kicking her legs desperately. Her fingers slipped on the slick metal of the runner. There was no way she could hold on without getting her second hand around the stanchion, which meant relinquishing her grip on the blade. It didn’t help. As she reached up, Maffrici leaned out of the cockpit and stamped down on her hand. Then she was falling, battered toward the ground by the fierce windstorm.

  It was a long way down.

  She hit the cobbles hard in what would have been a backbreaking fall for anyone else. The impact drove every ounce of breath from her body. She thought her spine was going to shatter. The pain was blinding. It sent a sunburst of agony through every nerve and fiber. The sword flickered in her grip as she clenched her hands, gritting her teeth, but she couldn’t hold on to it. She stared up at the belly of the helicopter.

  Garin was gone and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

  She tried to sit up, but the pain was unbearable, so she gave up and lay on her back, unmoving, watching the helicopter as it banked and flew away in the direction of the mountains.

  Her phone rang again.

  She didn’t want to move.

  It didn’t stop ringing.

  “There’s a helicopter coming in to land.”

  “Too late,” she said into the phone. “The only thing coming in to land is me...and not gracefully.” She didn’t elaborate.

  Roux cursed, a stream of French that would have turned the air a vivid shade of sacre bleu if they’d lived in a cartoon world.

  “I know where they’re going. At least I think I do. But we’re on the back foot now. Garin’s with a guy called Francesco Maffrici.”

  “You know him?”

  “The curator from the Torquemada tomb in Ávila.”

  “Strange bedfellows. Did it look like Garin was going willingly? Or did Maffrici have him at gunpoint?” Meaning, was Garin complicit. She tried to remember exactly what she’d witnessed. Could she have misinterpreted some aspect of the scene? Maffrici had been behind Garin, not leading the way. Could the curator have been running the situation? She hadn’t seen a gun, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one. She realized what Roux was asking. He wanted her to say definitively that Garin Braden had betrayed them, or give them an out so they could still believe he wasn’t the devious, conniving, unfaithful, backstabbing, two-faced liar he was. And the truth was, she didn’t know. Maybe he had been at Maffrici’s mercy.

  “I can’t say for sure. And to be honest, I don’t want to think about it right now. I hurt all over. Get to the gate. Follow the road maybe three hundred yards. You’ll find a red Alfa Romeo parked by the side of the road. The keys are in the ignition.”

  “Right. And once I get there, where am I going? I can’t read your mind, girl.”

  She was still on her back. She wasn’t entirely sure she could sit up. She should have been dead. Any normal person would have been. But since she’d first laid hands on Joan of Arc’s sacred sword, she’d been anything but normal. “Turn the car around, and head away from the Alhambra. Drive half a mile, and you should see a dirt road on the right. It’ll take you up into the mountains. You’re aiming for a V in the skyline. A pass. That’s where he’s heading. The car won’t get all the way to the top. I’ll see you there.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Me? I guess I’m going to haul my battered ass up there the old-fashioned way.”

  She watched as the helicopter disappeared into the distance, its searchlights spearing ahead, pointing toward the Pass of the Moor’s Sigh.

  She needed to run.

  Which was going to be difficult, because she could barely stand.

  29

  The car was exactly where Annja had promised it would be.

  Roux slid behind the wheel and turned the ignition.

  On another day, in another place, in a better frame of mind, he’d have loved to take the Alfa out onto a long straight road and unleash the full power of the horses under the hood, maybe hit the coast road from Saint-Tropez to Monte Carlo and onward into Italy, top down, wind in his hair, enjoying the view and looking like a walking, talking midlife crisis. Today, though, he had to find a way around the side of a mountain in the dark. At least he didn’t have to do it on foot. Leave that kind of stupid exertion for the young.

  He followed Annja’s directions, keeping an eye out for the side road she’d mentioned, almost missing it because it wasn’t lit or signposted. It looked too narrow and too steep to be a real road, but there was nothing else for miles around, so this had to be what she meant. Four-wheel drive would have been better, being a sheep or goat, perfect. But he trusted Annja.

  As the road wound up the hillside, he caught sight of the helicopter’s searchlights far off to his right. They were moving faster and more directly than he could, but they gave him something to follow. It seemed as if Annja’s hunch was right. So she’d solved some other part of the mystery. It would have been good to have been able to spend a few minutes with her before setting off on this wild-goose chase, but time was a luxury they didn’t have right now. Still, he wished they were together. Being separate had made sense when they needed to be in different parts of the country, but now, this close, maybe two was better than one. Attack the problem head-on, face Garin down, find out if he’d played them...

  It wasn’t an “if,” though, was it? As much as Roux wanted to believe it was, he’d seen the evidence with his own eyes. Garin was not purely a victim in all this. And Roux knew full well Annja would be too soft on him, that she’d swallow whatever sob story he put in front of her. She’d do that because she always wanted to see the good in people. Roux was old enough to know that sometimes there just wasn’t any.

  Roux’s phone rang. He grabbed it, steering one-handed.

  “Roux?”

  “Kinda busy right now.”

  “I’m sending you some stuff,” Oscar said. “You’ll want to read it as soon as you can.”

  “Want to summarize for me?”

  “No, it’s best you read it.”

  He hung up. Roux tossed the phone aside, but not before he’d taken a bend a little faster than intended, tires crunching on the hard dirt of the shoulder. He felt the car pull to the right and adjusted. He reached for the phone and checked the screen, one eye still on the road as he eased up on the gas.

  He looked up as the headlights picked out eyes staring at him from the scrub along the roadside.

  The Steyr machine pistol he’d appropriated from the brother slid off the passenger seat, hitting the side of the foot well hard and coming to rest with the muzzle pointing up at his face. Roux ignored it. He wasn’t about to allow himself to be distracted—not by the gun or the local fauna or anything else around him. He had a job to do. People were counting on him. And right now that meant concentrating on the god-awful road he was trying to navigate and keeping track of the helicopter in the distance.

  Anything else was just getting in the way, including the hacker’s information.

  He climbed higher and higher, the road becoming even more unnerving as he rose, with not so much as a guardrail to stop him from overshooting a turn and doin
g a Thelma and Louise off the side of the mountain.

  A glance back the way he’d come revealed a handful of lights in the distance. They had to be the spotlights of the Alhambra. And looking forward, beyond the hills, the sky was starting to lighten. It was just the slightest tinge of red, but dawn couldn’t be that far away, and it wouldn’t be long before the fortress was teeming with visitors. And that would mean someone would discover the bodies in the chapel. How long until that happened? When it did, it would change everything.

  They said that the only thing worse than bad publicity was no publicity, but with the Seville courthouse and now the Alhambra murders, Roux had become a one-man crime spree. They’d be locking him up and throwing away the key if they caught him here. He needed to get this out of the way quickly and be back on his plane before the police pulled their act together.

  There would be rain before the day was over, but he’d be back in the château in France long before the first fat drops fell. He promised himself that much.

  But first, before he could think about any of that, he had to take care of Garin.

  The helicopter started to descend, dropping out of sight over the far side of the mountain.

  The road began to meander off in the opposite direction, with no sign of doubling back on itself. Annja had warned him he wouldn’t be able to make it all the way to the top in the Alfa. It was time to start walking. Long before he reached the V carved between the peaks, it would be daylight. Garin had a decent head start, whatever he was intending to do here. That didn’t mean he couldn’t stop him, though. Roux recovered the machine pistol and clambered out of the car. He left the keys in the ignition, just as Annja had, although he’d already decided he wouldn’t be driving back to town. Instead of calling Oscar back straightaway, he put in a call to make sure they would have a ride when this was all over, then he slung the Steyr over his shoulder and allowed his mind to wander back to when all this had begun—a time when Garin had still been his apprentice and little more than a boy.