The Dragon’s Mark

by Alex Archer

  She ignored his comment and took a moment to think over what he’d just told her. Something didn’t make sense. Why would an assassin renowned for killing with a sword suddenly decide to use explosives? “So what happened in 2003?”

  Garin grinned. “I see I’m not the only one who knows a little something about the Dragon.”

  Ignoring her scowl, he went on. “I’ve heard a hundred different theories over the years as to what happened that day and I don’t agree with any of them. Killing is an art form, particularly for a man like we’re talking about. For him to resort to a suitcase full of plastic explosives when every single one of his victims before that date were killed by his own hand is simply ludicrous.

  “What happened in 2003 is that the Dragon, the real Dragon, had nothing to do with the attempted assassination of the British prime minister. It was someone else.”

  The waiter came in with their meals at that point, giving Annja some time to digest what Garin had said. She barely noticed what she was eating as the implications of what he had just told her poured through her mind.

  “You think the Dragon is still alive,” she said after a few minutes.

  Again the shrug. “For the past year or so there have been rumors that the Dragon has returned. Nothing more solid than that, understand, just rumors. Given what you found at Roux’s, however, I’d say the possibility just grew a little more distinct.”

  “Why would the Dragon be after Roux?”

  “Who said he was?” Garin shot back, and that brought Annja up short.

  “You think the Dragon is after you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  If not Roux, or Garin, then who?

  “No,” she said flatly when she realized what he was suggesting.

  He looked at her with a strange gleam in his eye. “Not Roux. Not me, though I must admit to being a bit concerned over that last one for a little while. No, I don’t think the Dragon is after either of us. I think he is after you.” He leaned forward, holding her gaze in his own. “And after what I’ve heard recently about the sword the Dragon always carries, I think I know why.”

  Her frown deepened, her lunch all but forgotten. “You are going to tell me, right?”

  He paused, gathering his thoughts, and Annja had the distinct impression that he was trying to figure out just what to tell her and what to keep close to the chest.

  After a moment, he continued. “Everything has an opposite, a dark twin on the cosmic scale of balance, if you will. The world itself is built on duality. How could we recognize white without black? Laughter without sorrow? Goodness without evil?”

  He looked at her, as if to gauge whether she was following the argument, and she nodded to show that she was.

  “The sword that you now carry is a symbol of truth, of justice, of all that is good in the world. It emulates the moral and emotional qualities of the one who bore it into battle all those years ago. And because you represent those things, as well, the chain continues, like an heirloom passed down through the generations.

  “You, me, Roux—we are all bound to that sword in one way or another. For Roux and me, our association with it, and with its original bearer, has resulted in a lifespan measured in centuries rather than decades. In your case, the sword has given you increased agility, speed, strength—even your senses are better than they once were.”

  There was little there for her to argue with. It was true; the sword had certainly changed her in ways that she hadn’t thought possible. Knowing that Garin was aware of the changes as well, made her a little uneasy, but she buried the thought as he went on with his explanation.

  “You know better than anyone else that the sword comes with a certain set of responsibilities. Defend the weak. Protect the innocent. Stand as a barrier against the evil in the world around you, just as its original bearer strove to do so many years ago.”

  He was right again. Her life had become far more complicated since taking possession of the sword. Where she might have turned away from a difficult situation in the past, maybe even told herself that it wasn’t any of her business, now she practically leaped into the fray whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  Garin continued. “So it stands to reason that if all things have an opposite, a yin to the yang, then there must be another weapon out there somewhere that represents the side of darkness as much as your weapon stands for the cause of light.”

  Biting back her unease, she forced herself to follow his line of thought.

  “You’re saying the Dragon has such a sword.”

  Her companion shook his head. “No. I’m saying that there are rumors that the Dragon, if he is still alive, has such a weapon. I don’t know for sure.”

  Annja thought back to the swordsman she had faced in the display room and the way his sword had suddenly seemed to appear in his hands, a sword she would have sworn he hadn’t had moments before.

  Of how it mirrored the way she handled her own so perfectly.

  “But you believe it, don’t you?” she pressed.

  Garin thought about it for a moment, and then nodded at her. “Yes,” he said, “I do.”

  His admission sent Annja’s pulse skyrocketing.

  “Why?”

  “For the past year or two I have been hearing rumors about a sword, one that is supposed to have considerable power, being carried by a man available for hire. Not just any man, but one with an impressive résumé, full of what has euphemistically been called ‘wetwork.’ At first I thought that the rumors were about you and the weapon you carry, that those who passed it along simply couldn’t imagine that it was a woman in such a role, but it only took a little bit of investigation to learn that the sword in question was not a broadsword, like your own, but a Japanese katana.

  “After that, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. I think the Dragon is back. I think somewhere, somehow, he learned about you and the sword that you carry. And I think he is curious to discover whether you are like-minded individuals or incompatible opposites.”

  He took a long sip of his drink. “If the former, I suspect he just wants to talk with you. If the latter,” he said rather bluntly, “then I’m quite sure he won’t hesitate to kill you.”

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME that Annja and Garin were sharing lunch, Henshaw was walking into a meeting in a pub along the docks by the Seine. It was a far cry from the restaurant that Garin had selected, but then again, the people that Henshaw was meeting were more concerned about anonymity than they were about how many varieties of wine were available to go with their meal.

  Marco was already in the booth at the back when he arrived.

  “It’s been a while,” Henshaw said when he reached the table.

  “That it has, mate, that it has.” The two men eyed each other warily for a moment and then Henshaw abruptly laughed and wrapped the other man in a bear hug. Had Roux seen such a display of emotion from him, Henshaw was certain his employer would have assumed he’d suddenly lost his mind, but he and Marco went back quite a ways and had literally saved each other’s lives more than once over the years.

  Of course, Henshaw didn’t talk about those days.

  Marco hadn’t changed much since then; his hair was long, but his grip was still as strong as steel and his gaze never stayed in one place too long as he was constantly assessing the situation around him, alert for whatever was to come.

  The two sat down at the booth opposite each other and waited a moment while the waitress brought them a couple of pints. Then they got down to business.

  “So what’s this gig that you’ve got for us?” Marco asked.

  Henshaw had thought long and hard about how to convince his old friend to take the job and had finally settled on playing it as straight as possible. “Executive protection,” he told him, slipping a photograph out of his coat pocket and passing it across the table.

  The picture showed Annja striding across the street, her hair flowing back behind her in the slight breeze. The jeans and T-shirt
she wore hugged her body in all the right places, which was one of the reasons Henshaw had specifically chosen this one. As he’d hoped, Marco’s eyes lit up at the sight of her.

  “Good God, isn’t she gorgeous,” he said, pulling the photo up for a closer look. “Who is she? And what’s she do? Recording artist? Film star?”

  “Her name is Annja Creed. And she is an archaeologist, actually.”

  Henshaw met his gaze squarely when the other man glanced up to see if he was pulling his leg.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Not at all.”

  The photo was tossed back down on the table. “Okay, this I gotta hear. You wanna hire around-the-clock surveillance and executive protection for an archaeologist? What’d she do, piss off the Vatican by discovering the tomb of Jesus or something?”

  Nothing like that, Henshaw thought. She’s just the current bearer of a mystical sword that once belonged to Joan of Arc and is now being pursued by one of the world’s most dangerous assassins.

  But he couldn’t say that.

  Instead, he explained that Annja’s work had made certain terrorist groups aware of her as a potential target of opportunity and that his employer was interested in protecting the investment he had made in her work without her knowing the extent of the danger she was in. As stories went, it was a decent one, and certainly good enough to pull Marco and his team into the mix. Henshaw felt bad about deceiving his old friend, but what else could he do? It wasn’t as though he could just come out and tell the man the truth.

  They spent a few minutes discussing terms and pay rates and concluded the deal over a handshake. Both men knew the other was good for it.

  When they were finished with their beers, Marco said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the team.”

  The left the pub, climbed into Marco’s old sedan and drove a few blocks deeper into the warehouse district, stopping at a small nondescript building to the west of the pub. Marco pulled out a set of keys, unlocked the door and ushered Henshaw inside.

  This was where the rest of the team waited for them.

  There were three women and four men. Marco introduced them to Henshaw one at a time—Dave, a cheery, good-natured sort who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five; Olivia, a dark-haired beauty with a background in demolitions; Jessi, a former SAS commando; Arthur, a quiet, unassuming man who was the group’s electronics expert; Clive, a former U.S. Marine who had turned his skills to the private sector; Glen, the team’s covert infiltration expert; and last, but not least, Sara, a short, pudgy woman who could shoot the cap off of a soda bottle at four hundred yards.

  They looked like a good, solid unit. Henshaw was pleased. After Marco introduced him, Henshaw laid out the requirements and expectations of the job in a clear, concise manner. There were a few questions, but none that he couldn’t answer and certainly none that might have brought his explanation into question. Not surprisingly, none of the team members recognized Annja. Chasing History’s Monsters just wasn’t their cup of tea.

  From inside his briefcase Henshaw produced a thick dossier of information on Annja, including her usual habits and preferences, the hotel she was currently staying in, address and layout of her loft in Brooklyn. Essentially anything he could think of that might help them do their job. After all, Annja’s life was possibly at stake and he wasn’t going to cut any corners. He informed them of her prowess in martial arts and commented that she often practiced with various types of weaponry, just in case they witnessed her with sword in hand.

  When he was finished, he left them to their perusal of the documents and joined Marco off to the side, where he passed him an envelope.

  “My employer will spare no expense,” Henshaw told him. “Inside the envelope you’ll find the access information for a bank account you can use for expenditures. Do whatever you need to in order to keep her alive.”

  Marco looked at him for a long moment. “This isn’t a hypothetical, is it? You really think someone is going to make a go at her.”

  Henshaw nodded. “I do. And I’m counting on you to stop them from succeeding.”

  Marco smiled. “That’s what they pay me the big bucks for, mate. Don’t you worry. We’ve got it handled.”

  11

  After her lunch with Garin, Annja decided to walk back to her hotel rather than catch another cab. It would give her some time to digest what she had just learned and she could do with some fresh air and a bit of thought.

  She suspected that the individual she’d fought the other night was, indeed, the Dragon. When you combined the stealth with which they had infiltrated Roux’s estate, the skill the swordsman had displayed when wielding his weapon and the presence of the origami dragon left behind at the scene of the attack, there weren’t too many other conclusions that made sense. She’d been so focused on figuring out why an international assassin was after her mentor and friend that she never stopped to consider the other possible targets in the picture, namely herself and Garin.

  If what Garin was telling her was true, then she had reason enough to be concerned.

  She’d been hunted before. That was nothing new. Since taking up the sword it seemed that everywhere she went she ran into some psycho with an ego the size of California who saw her as an obstacle to their plans for world domination or whatever this week’s fiendish plot might be. She fought back against them, each and every time, and had always managed to come out on top.

  This time, though, she wasn’t so sure.

  She’d never faced off against an international assassin for hire before.

  And to make matters worse, he’d already beaten her once.

  Her thoughts turned to the rest of what Garin had said. Rumors about a mystical sword were all well and good, but she was probably one of the few people on earth who had the personal experience to actually take them seriously. The very idea that there might be another sword with powers similar to her own was extremely unsettling to her. Where had it come from? What was its purpose? How had the Dragon gained possession of it?

  Garin had once told her that her discovery of the last piece of the sword that had been missing for so long was nothing short of a miracle. At first she had believed it to be the fortune of fate, the result of a chance earthquake that occurred while she was in the vicinity. Later, after hearing the stories related to her by Garin and Roux about the long search for the pieces of the sword, she began to question the validity of her early theory.

  Maybe the sword had recognized something in her and had done what it needed to do to bring them together. Could the same thing have happened to the Dragon?

  Not knowing was going to drive her crazy; she knew herself well enough to see that coming from a mile away.

  Since she didn’t have enough information yet to come up with a decent answer for the questions that were bothering her about the sword, she decided to try to focus on the Dragon himself. What did he want with her? And how did he know about her in the first place?

  She had to admit that she’d had a few close calls; she’d been forced to use her sword now and then when other people were nearby. But she’d always thought she’d done a good job of keeping it out of sight. People had seen her with it—there was no doubt about that—but she’d been confident that no one had ever seen her draw the sword out of the otherwhere. Or, at least, no one had seen her draw it and lived to tell the tale.

  So how had the Dragon known to come looking for her? Did his sword act like her own, providing the occasional flash of intuition or gentle nudge in the right direction? Had the Dragon come to Roux’s estate for some other reason, only to turn his attention to her after he recognized a kindred spirit?

  She had too many questions without answers.

  Annja had only walked a few blocks when the feeling of being watched fell over her. She recognized it right away, that creeping sensation at the base of her spine that let her know she was under someone else’s scrutiny.

  She casually stopped and looked a
round, making note of those in her immediate vicinity, but she didn’t see anyone who looked familiar. Still, she spent a few minutes checking out those she did see, trying to remember their faces and what they were wearing so that if she did see them again she would know it.

  After a few minutes she continued on her way.

  She was just starting to think the whole thing had been a figment of her imagination, just a result of the conversation she’d had with Garin, when the feeling returned. At the same moment she caught a mental glimpse of her sword, hanging there in the middle of the otherwhere, gently glowing, and that seemed enough of a warning for her not to brush aside her intuition.

  There was a bank ahead—she’d seen it on the way to the restaurant—and its windows were made from reflective glass. She waited until she drew abreast of them and then stopped, pretending to be searching through her pockets for something while actually using the glass to watch those who were coming up behind her. She was looking for someone who stopped suddenly, or who turned away abruptly, anything that might give them away as the watcher she knew was back there somewhere.

  But aside from an elderly woman on an electric cart, no one seemed to be paying her the least bit of attention.

  If they were out there, they were good—she had to give them that.

  She set off at a brisk pace, nearly twice what she’d been doing before. She cut down a side street, using the opportunity to look back in the direction she’d come for anyone cutting through the sidewalk crowd quickly enough to catch up to her, but again, no one seemed to be giving her any undue attention. She headed north at the next intersection, then cut back east at the next side street, bringing her back to her original route. Each time she changed direction she used the opportunity it presented to take a quick look at those behind her, watching for familiar faces, but there were none.

  She hadn’t seen them at first the other day, either, though. Just because she couldn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

  She decided to try one more trick. She was approaching an intersection and as she got close she kept a near watch on the lights, waiting for her chance.