The Dragon’s Mark

by Alex Archer

  Sleep came quickly.

  THE LATCH ON THE French doors that led to the balcony in the sitting room snapped open with a soft click about an hour later. The door opened silently from the outside. A shadow detached itself from the others that hugged the exterior wall and slid inside the room without making any more noise than the door had.

  The intruder stood to one side once inside the room, waiting for eyes to adapt to the level of light and listening for any sound or sense of movement.

  There was none.

  The guest slept on in the bedroom next door.

  The intruder crossed the sitting room with a few quick, sure steps, almost as if passing from shadow to shadow. At the bedroom door the intruder paused, listening again.

  The door to the bedroom swung open and a shadow slipped inside the room as swiftly and quietly as it had entered the suite itself.

  On the bed, the sleeping form of Annja Creed could be seen in the dim light coming in through the window’s half-drawn curtains.

  The intruder carefully walked around the bed until Annja’s face was in sight and stared down at it for several long moments.

  Why you?

  What makes you so special?

  Annja did not reply.

  As the intruder looked on, Annja mumbled something in her sleep and flailed about with one arm.

  The Dragon watched for a long time, a wraith standing in the darkness beside the bed, eyes alert and ready.

  It would be so easy to end it here, the Dragon thought silently. A sudden thrust and it would all be over but the dying. The Dragon could then search the suite in a leisurely manner; no doubt the sword was here somewhere.

  But the sensei’s instructions had been clear. The sword must be given voluntarily or it was useless to him. Disappointing the sensei was not something the Dragon wanted to do, ever.

  It would seem that the easy solution was off the table for now. The Dragon would have to wait to claim its next victim.

  The intruder bent close.

  “Until next time, Annja Creed.”

  A SWORD CAME WHISTLING in toward her unprotected throat and Annja knew that this was it. She was about to die…

  She awoke, bolting upright in bed, her heart hammering like a thousand kettledrums all at once, a thunderous booming sound. Her eyes were already searching the interior of the room for her opponent, her hand tight on the hilt of her sword as she called it into existence from the otherwhere.

  But there was no one there.

  The room was empty.

  Realization came roaring in.

  A dream, just a dream, she told herself.

  She pushed back the sheets and got out of bed. With the tip of her sword she checked to see if anyone was hidden behind the curtains, then turned to look out the window, expecting at any moment for a face to press itself up against the glass, horror-movie style, and announce that it was coming for her. But the glass remained empty, the space around her silent.

  Satisfied that no one was in the room with her, Annja turned, intending to investigate the rest of the hotel suite, only to come up short when she saw the door leading from the bedroom to the living area was open.

  Her mind whirled as she tried to remember—had she left it open or closed it behind her?

  She was certain that she had closed it before going to bed.

  Or, at least, ninety-five percent certain that she had.

  She moved toward it with panther-light steps and carefully eased past, taking in the sitting room just beyond.

  It, too, was empty.

  The hotel room door was securely shut and locked, as were the French doors leading to the balcony outside.

  Despite what her gut was telling her, it appeared that no one had been in the room.

  Still, just to be safe, she took another few minutes to search the entire suite, including the closets, the bathroom and even under her bed.

  Then and only then, satisfied that she was indeed alone, did she release the sword back into the otherwhere and return to bed.

  This time she made certain to shut the bedroom door firmly.

  Her last thought, as she drifted off to sleep, was that someone was watching.

  7

  When she checked her e-mail late the next morning, she discovered a very succinct note from Bart in reply to her.

  Call me, was all it said.

  A glance at the clock told her that it was early back in the States but she picked up the phone and dialed his number.

  A sleepy male voice answered. “McGille.”

  “Hi, Bart. It’s Annja.”

  “Hey! How’s Europe?”

  “Not too bad.” They chatted for a few moments about what they’d been up to recently and then Bart turned the conversation to the reason she had called.

  “So what’s this about a robbery?”

  Annja gave him the fake story she’d concocted about how her friend’s apartment had been vandalized by a thief who’d left behind the origami figure as “payment” for what he’d stolen.

  “Sounds like a job for the Paris police. Why send the pictures to me?”

  “My friend is subletting the place from the current tenant without the owner’s permission. If she goes to the police, the owner finds out and that will be that.”

  Annja knew that was all she had to say. As a veteran New Yorker, Bart would understand the need to keep the sublet a secret; real-estate prices were so outrageous that subletting rent-controlled apartments had become a thriving black market in the Big Apple and Bart would no doubt believe the same about Paris. For all Annja knew, the situation in Paris might even be the same.

  “Say no more,” he said good-naturedly.

  On the other end of the line Annja breathed a sigh of relief. “So what did you find out?”

  “To tell you the truth,” Bart replied, “not much. I made a few phone calls, had some folks check some records for me, and what they came up with were all negatives. No similar crimes in your area. No record of origami figures being involved in any crime, regardless of the type, in more than seven years. Basically they found nothing to tie this burglary to any other, in France or elsewhere. Maybe your cat burglar just has a sense of humor.”

  Annja digested that for a moment, knowing that she was partially hampering Bart’s ability to get her information by not telling him the entire story. Still, it couldn’t be helped.

  Something Bart said jumped out at her. “What do you mean you didn’t find any link to crimes committed in the past seven years? Were there some before that with the same M.O.?” she asked.

  Bart laughed. “That’s where you nearly gave me a heart attack. Ever hear of the Dragon?”

  Annja frowned. “Wasn’t there a Bruce Lee movie with that name?”

  “No, that was Enter the Dragon. Great movie, too. But that’s not the Dragon I’m thinking of. This one is an international assassin who likes to leave little folded origami figures at the scenes of his kills.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly that at first Annja didn’t think she’d heard him correctly.

  “Did you just say ‘assassin’?”

  “Yeah, an international hit man, if you can believe that. Responsible for more than eighteen deaths in half a dozen countries, including France. Real son of a you know what.”

  Annja felt her stomach do a slow roll as she remembered Garin’s words from last night. Probably could have ambushed any one of us before we even knew they were there.

  Bart wasn’t finished, though. “And talk about someone who loves their job, this guy managed to get up close and personal to each and every one of his victims. They say he took it as a personal challenge. He’d get in, do the deed and vanish before anyone even knew he’d been there. The police had nothing on him for years, except for those stupid little paper dragons he would leave behind with the bodies in his wake.”

  Bart laughed. “You sure there wasn’t a dead body lying next to that origami, Annja?

  Anger flared. “Jeez, Bart, that�
�s not funny!”

  “What? Okay, come on, Annja, lighten up a little. Do you think I’d still be yammering away on this end of the phone if I thought you and your friend were being targeted by some crazed international assassin?”

  That was the problem. He thought they were still talking about some harmless burglary.

  She couldn’t tell him the truth now; he’d be worried sick. “No, I guess you wouldn’t,” she said instead, laughing it off, while inside she was burning to know more.

  Luckily Bart was a talker. “And talk about old-fashioned. Guy manages to pull off eighteen major hits and not once does he use a gun? Come on! What is he, stupid?”

  A shiver ran up Annja’s spine. Hesitantly she asked, “If he didn’t use a gun, what did he use?”

  “A big-ass sword apparently. One of those curved Japanese blades, like the one Sean Connery carried in Highlander.”

  Annja hadn’t seen the movie, but there was no mistaking what Bart was talking about. “A katana?” she asked, dreading the answer but needing to know, anyway.

  “Yep, that’s it. A katana. Can you imagine getting close enough to a major political figure to try and take him out with a freakin’ sword? When everybody else has guns? What a maniac!”

  This was getting worse by the minute.

  “Did they ever catch him?”

  “Of course they did. Why do you think I’m not worried about you, given the kind of trouble you get yourself into?”

  She had to admit he was right; ever since taking possession of the sword, she had a knack for getting herself into the biggest messes possible.

  Like now.

  “So what happened to him?”

  Bart snorted. “Got blown up when he tried to take out the British prime minister at a summit in Madrid back in 2003. There wasn’t enough left of him to fill a Baggie.”

  Just when she started to feel better about the situation Bart had go and ruin things again.

  “So they never found a body?”

  “What did I just say? There wasn’t anything left of him to bury, Annja. But trust me, you and your friend can rest easy. Whoever it was that broke into your friend’s flat was probably just trying to be funny.”

  “Some sense of humor,” she said, and laughed along with him while inside she was getting more and more nervous by the minute.

  She made small talk for a couple of moments more, thanked Bart for what he had dug up and then got off the phone as quickly and as gracefully as she could without raising his suspicions.

  As soon as she had, she headed for her laptop.

  A quick search online turned up a decent number of feature stories and news reports from the eighties through the nineties that talked about the mysterious Dragon. All of them told the same basic story Bart had—assassin for hire, no one knew his background or what he looked like, or even if the Dragon was a man or a woman, only that he always killed with his weapon of choice, a katana, and would leave a piece of rice paper folded into the shape of a dragon at the scene of every killing. The press had given him the moniker “the Dragon” when word of the origami figures leaked out, and to this day it was the only name they had for him. The Dragon’s identity vanished in the same explosion that had claimed his physical body.

  She sat back, staring off into space, as she pondered the similarities. An international assassin who killed with a Japanese katana and left origami figures in his wake, and an unknown intruder who broke into a rich man’s home, carried a katana and left an origami figure in his wake. They were too alike to be just a coincidence. Either someone had decided to take up the killer’s mantle or the killer himself had never actually died.

  After all, there hadn’t been a body, she reminded herself.

  Maybe the Dragon had spent the past few years in hiding, recovering from injuries sustained from his last assassination attempt, and had only recently chosen to come out of hiding.

  But why would a political assassin be after Roux? she wondered.

  The most logical answer would be that he wasn’t. After all, Roux took considerable effort to stay out of the limelight and something like politics was anathema to a man like him. But what if the Dragon had decided to forgo political assassinations in favor of a mercenary lifestyle? Killing for hire, perhaps? That was a different story entirely.

  Garin had been right; Roux had angered enough people over the years that a list of those who held a grudge strong enough to try and kill him would be very long indeed.

  More than a few of them had the means to do it, too.

  This was not good—not good at all.

  8

  Given that she was starting to suspect the attack on the estate might actually have been an attempt to assassinate Roux, Annja decided that she was going to take another stab at discussing it with him and see if she could learn anything further that might help her fend off what she was beginning to see as a growing threat to his life.

  But when she called the estate, she was informed by Henshaw that Roux was out and wouldn’t return until evening. Annja explained that she needed to talk with him, but the majordomo guarded his boss’s whereabouts like a mother grizzly guards her cubs and wouldn’t tell her where he had gone or exactly when he was expected to return. Rather than spend any time arguing with him, she simply made an appointment to see Roux that evening and that was that.

  She spent the next hour pacing back and forth in her hotel room, watching the minute hand creep around the clock and wishing it would go faster. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she decided to get out of the hotel and play tourist for a bit—try to take her mind off her pending meeting with Roux. It had been some time since she’d had the opportunity to wander through the city at her leisure and she vowed that she’d make good use of what little time she had; after all, who knew when she’d be back this way again?

  After a quick shower she threw on a pair of khaki shorts, a deep blue T-shirt and her usual pair of low-rise hiking boots, grabbed an apple out of the fruit basket on the table and headed for the concierge’s desk in the lobby. Arranging for a rental car to be available upon her return took only a few minutes thanks to the concierge’s help, and with that taken care of, she was ready to enjoy the day.

  Her first stop, she decided, was going to be Sainte-Chapelle, the palatine chapel in the courtyard of the royal palace on the Île de la Cité. Originally built by Louis IX to store the many holy relics he had purchased from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, Baldwin II, including the supposed Crown of Thorns worn by Christ during his crucifixion, the chapel was best known for its fifteen stained-glass windows, each one nearly fifty feet high and picturing Biblical stories from Genesis to Revelation. Annja was as interested in the architecture of the restored chapel—the original having been heavily damaged during the French Revolution—as she was in the artifacts it had once contained. She had always wanted to visit, but had never found the time.

  Annja was thankful that the cab ride was reasonably short, for the traffic was terrible and terrifying. When the driver announced that they had arrived, she practically leaped out of the cab and had to suppress a smile at his bewildered expression. She thanked him for the speedy arrival and paid the fare, then turned her attention to the ominous-looking building behind her, with its dark stone towers and conical roofs circa the thirteenth century, known as the Palais de Justice. Now housing several French courts, this wing of the building had once been home to the Conciergerie, the oldest prison in Paris, and had held such infamous prisoners as Robespierre and Marie Antoinette. It was now a museum, but that didn’t do much to change the vibe that Annja picked up off the place. Just looking at it made her shiver, as she imagined what it must have been like to be a prisoner there, locked away in a cold, dark, vermin-infested cell.

  She walked down the street until she came to the entrance that served the majority of the complex. After buying an admission ticket, she slipped through the gates and made her way in the direction of the chapel.

  The royal pal
ace had once stood on the spot the Palais de Justice now occupied and Annja knew it had connected directly to the chapel via a narrow corridor. It was designed that way to allow King Louis IX to pass directly into it without leaving the palace, in much the same way the Holy Roman Emperor in Constantinople had been able to enter the Hagia Sophia from his own residence. The king, who had died of a plague while on crusade, had been canonized by the pope and was now known as Saint Louis. The palace itself had disappeared ages ago, leaving the two-level church on its own, surrounded by the less sophisticated buildings of the Palais de Justice.

  There was a fair-size crowd in attendance. Annja worked her way through it, intent on pursuing her own agenda and not wanting to get caught up in any of the guided tours that were taking place. Once inside the lower chapel, she pushed her way past the souvenir stand that seemed to occupy most of the space near the entrance and made her way out into the center of the floor. The high vaulted ceilings rose above her, the beams covered in red and gold, which provided a sharp contrast with the deep royal blue of the ceiling panels. The soft lighting gave the place a gentle and welcoming atmosphere. Annja knew that the lower chapel had served as a parish church for the inhabitants of the palace. It was rather plain, at least in comparison to the grandeur of the upper chapel, but she found a sense of peace and tranquility wrapping about her as she stood, gazing about. There was almost a sense of humility about the place, as if it knew not to overshadow its more famous cousin above, and Annja found that she liked the place despite its lack of sophistication.

  Enjoying what she had seen so far, Annja made her way toward the stairs to the upper chapel.

  UNNOTICED AMID THE CROWD by the souvenir tables, the Dragon watched Annja as she crossed the chapel floor, headed for the stairs to the upper level. The decision to follow her from the hotel had been an impulsive one. Watching her the night before had generated a certain amount of curiosity and, after some deeper reflection, it seemed that a bit of prudent observation might be in order at this point.