by Alex Archer
One of the gunmen on the upper gallery looked over the barrier, letting off two shots in quick succession—not at Roux. Both hit the chandelier.
He felt the link finally sheer, and as it did he launched himself into the air, kicking out, arms windmilling frantically as he fell.
It was a long way down.
Roux reached out with his free hand and grabbed for the rail of the balcony where the gunman had been standing a moment before.
Wood and plaster splintered again as a bullet thudded into the balustrade. Another brother leaned over the gallery behind Roux as he tried to pull himself up with one hand. His feet flailed wildly trying to snag on to anything to stop him from falling. He kicked hard, arcing his back—once, twice, three times—and then his toes connected with something solid.
Roux leaned back, one hand on the balcony railing, one foot on the stanchion supporting it, and released two shots back in the direction of the gunman. Two shots. That left him with three more. Far from ideal, but better than dead.
The chandelier crashed to the ground, cracking the tiled floor as it hit. That mosaic had survived a diaspora—generations of worshippers driven out of their homeland—and the Christians who had come after them. It didn’t survive the chandelier. The man Roux had shot at followed it to the ground a heartbeat later.
The odds were evening up.
He almost felt sorry for them.
Roux hauled himself up with one hand, using the support of the stanchion to take his weight, and rolled over the railing. The man he’d shot in the gut was on his back. He wasn’t dead, but he was in a bad way. His face was ashen, sweat peppering his forehead. He was panting hard, struggling to suck in a breath. He wasn’t about to get up and fight. Roux stepped over him, looking for a door and a flight of stairs that would take him down to the ground level. He had to focus on what was important: getting Garin out of here. He found the door. It had a bolt, which he slid. He wasn’t sure how long it would buy him, but any extra second was one he wanted.
The stairwell was noticeably cooler than the gallery. There were no windows in here. Nothing to stir the air save the echoes of his feet as Roux ran down the stairs.
From somewhere he heard the sound of an engine starting. It was followed by the heavy metallic slam of a vehicle’s doors. They were trying to get Garin out of there. He charged down the stairs, but before he’d reached the bottom he heard the shriek of rubber spinning on stone. They were gone. So close. But they’d gotten Garin out while he’d been fighting for his life. Roux punched the wall in frustration. So close. So damn close.
He could only hope that meant they were taking him to the rendezvous with Annja, ready to trade for the mask, not out into a dusty field to put a bullet in the back of his head and drop his body into a shallow grave they made Garin dig himself.
Roux went back up to the gallery and the bleeding man.
He stood over him, not saying a word, letting panic seep in as the blood seeped out.
The man looked up at him with fear in his eyes. His gaze darted from Roux’s face to the gun in his hand and back again. Roux raised the pistol, allowing himself a moment to smile as if this was a part of the proceedings that he enjoyed. The man looked as though he was about to cry.
“Please,” he begged, the word coming between wet, sucking breaths.
“You’re asking me to spare you? I could,” Roux said agreeably. “But you weren’t going to give me the chance to beg, were you? You wouldn’t have spared me. Given the chance, you’d have put me down like a rabid dog. So give me a reason not to pull the trigger.”
“I’m...”
“What, sorry? That hardly feels adequate, certainly not enough to spare your life.”
The man squirmed. He knew he was about to die. He was frightened. That surprised Roux. Normally, zealots welcomed the chance to be martyred. Roux wanted to make that pay. And if it didn’t, then he’d pull the trigger and put the man out of his misery.
“What can I say?”
“You can tell me who is behind all this.”
“I can’t,” the man sobbed.
“Well, that is disappointing,” Roux said, crouching down beside him. He put his face no more than a few inches from the other man’s, and the barrel of the gun closer. “But let me check something, because words are important. Is that can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t,” the brother said, his eye fixed on the black hole of the barrel. Roux pressed the gun against the man’s cheek.
The last dregs of color drained from his face.
“Want to try again?” Roux asked.
“El Zogoybi,” the man said through clenched teeth.
“El Zogoybi?”
He nodded desperately. “Yes...that’s...the name...he uses.”
“What else?”
The man shook his head wildly. “It’s all I know. Please.”
Roux dropped the gun to his side. He had a name. El Zogoybi, the unfortunate. It was the name given to the last sultan of Granada. Boabdil, better known as Muhammad XII. El Zogoybi was the man who had been driven out of the Alhambra by the Inquisition.
“What else?” Roux repeated.
“That’s all I know.”
“Can I believe you?”
“I’m begging you.”
“Mercenary?”
The man nodded, grimacing against the pain.
“Stomach wounds are bad. Chances are you’re not going to make it through this. I can put you out of your misery if you want, make the pain go away?”
“I want to live.”
There was a hammering on the door—whoever was left standing coming to clean up the mess—and then a shot was fired, followed by another.
They were shooting at the lock as if that was what was keeping the door closed, not the body of their fallen brother.
“Looks like it’s your lucky day,” Roux said.
He sent a shot of his own back through the door and they stopped firing. Two bullets.
He started to make good his own escape.
21
08:30—The Alhambra
“Annja here,” she said into the phone.
It wasn’t Roux. It was the kidnappers.
“Welcome to Granada,” the voice said. “I trust you had an enjoyable flight?”
“What next?” she asked. “Where are we meeting? I’ve got the mask. You’ve got my friend. Let’s get this over with and get out of each other’s lives.”
“Tetchy, aren’t we? There’s a car in the parking lot,” the voice said, ignoring her question just as she had ignored his. “A red Alfa Romeo. The keys are tucked in the sun visor. Take the road to the Alhambra. I’ll give you instructions as you drive.”
“I want to know where I’m going,” she said.
“And you will. In time. Now get in the car and start driving. Ticktock. Ticktock.”
Annja headed out into the parking lot. Part of her was surprised that the man hadn’t mentioned the helicopter, but she took that as a sign that she had at least a few secrets from the kidnappers. She didn’t know if she’d be able to use that to her advantage, but it was always good to have an ace in the hole.
The bright red car was easy enough to find.
From the outside, it appeared to be in near-pristine condition. As she slid inside, she was hit by the new-leather smell. The dash still carried that sheen of showroom-fresh polish. The keys fell into her lap as she pulled the sun visor down. Annja put them in the ignition and felt as much as heard the roar as the engine burst into life. The odometer registered less than a thousand miles.
She pulled out of the parking lot, onto the airport-centric ring of roads that eventually pointed the way to the Alhambra. She kept the phone beside her on the seat, ready to answer the moment it rang.
She didn’t have to wait long.
“Next left,” the voice said, then hung up without waiting for her acknowledgment. She did as she was told. A few miles later, another call came, instructing her to take the next left to leave the main road and drive a few miles on another. This time the kidnapper didn’t kill the call. He directed her through a series of turns until she found herself in the middle of nowhere. In the distance she could make out the fortress city of the Alhambra bathed in the final rays of the setting sun, the light picking out some of the gilt-laden decorations.
“Look for the sign—it’s a parking lot. Pull in there and wait. Kill the engine.” She followed his directions and then waited.
Trees lined one side of the parking lot, making it feel like a viewing platform. She could hear the man’s breathing through the phone. It prevented her from enjoying the view that the Moors had left behind.
The light faded far faster than she had expected, shifting from gloom to near-darkness in what seemed like a matter of minutes.
She heard the approaching vehicle long before she saw it as it swept into the deserted parking lot. A black van, headlights off.
“Now get out of the car,” the voice on the phone said. She’d almost forgotten the call was still live.
She climbed out, leaving the mask on the passenger seat with the window down so she would be able to reach inside for it when she needed it. The van’s lights turned on, blinding her for a moment. The glare forced her to shield her eyes. She heard men getting out of the back of the van; a panel door slammed and feet crunched on gravel as the men moved toward her.
“Where is he?” she said, not sure which of the shapes belonged to the man who had been calling her.
“In good time,” one of the silhouettes said. Two figures moved forward, dragging a third between them. His feet dragged in the gravel. They dropped him. He fell forward, not even reaching out to break his fall.
Garin—it had to be him—was stripped to the waist with his hands tied behind his back. Even with the sack on his head, stained with dark patches of blood, it was obvious that he was in a bad way.
“Garin!” she cried, unable to stop herself.
She started to move toward him.
“Not so fast, Miss Creed.”
She stopped, fighting every instinct to run to his side. She could hear the ragged flare of his breathing, so she knew he was alive, but that was it. The two men who had dragged him out of the van stood in her way.
She faced them down.
The van’s headlights lowered from the dazzling high beams, revealing a little more than just the silhouettes of the men. They were like something fresh out of a nightmare, all of them dressed in black, all of them wearing silver masks.
They looked inhuman in the hazy glare of the headlights.
The silver masks were obviously intended to serve duel purposes—to intimidate and to hide their identities. Annja was face-to-face with the Brotherhood of the Burning.
She considered her options for a moment.
There had to be at least eight or nine men standing in front of her, all of them armed to the teeth with too much firepower—Steyr TMPs. Even in the bad light, the shape of the handheld machine pistols was distinctive. Joan of Arc’s sword was only an arm’s length away, and with it Annja was more than a match for the masked men, but all it took was one stray bullet, no matter how good she was or how unlucky they were. One bullet. That was how much a human life weighed at a time like this. She flexed her fingers, picturing the hilt of the sword, but stopped short of drawing it back from the otherwhere. It wasn’t worth taking the risk when she was this close to securing Garin’s freedom. They could stop the Brotherhood after he was safe.
“The mask,” one of the men said. His voice was muffled, but Annja recognized it as the one from the phone calls.
“It’s in the car,” she said.
“Get it.”
“Take that thing off his head first.”
“Very well. Do it,” the voice told one of his cronies.
One of the masked men bent down and pulled the sack from Garin’s head.
“There you go. See, no tricks.”
In the harsh blaze of the van’s headlights, Garin looked even worse than he had on the video stream. Shadows played on the cuts and bruises, distorting his features even more, making them almost monstrous. But there was no doubting that it was him. He coughed once, doubling up in pain, and spat blood. He didn’t try to struggle to his feet. He just lay there on the ground, breathing hard, blinking. He was alive. That was all that mattered.
Annja backed toward the car. Without turning her back on the masked men, she reached in through the window to retrieve the Mask of Torquemada and held it up for all to see.
“Is this what it’s all been about?” she asked.
What they didn’t know—couldn’t know—was that she’d photographed the relic from every possible angle, recording as much of it as she could. She and her colleagues could render those photographs and use them together with a 3-D printer to reconstruct the mask. It wouldn’t be the same, but if the mask itself was lost to the world here, a replica would be better than nothing. Still, losing the mask would be a pretty dramatic failure on her part, and she wasn’t in the habit of failing. She’d hand it over, yes, but Zanetti was already working on the mysterious swirls and text, trying to decipher them, and she’d do her damnedest to get the real thing back.
Contrary to what the kidnappers might think, it didn’t end here.
One of the brothers walked toward her. The others kept their Steyrs trained on her.
There was no going back.
Like it or not, she had to hand the mask over. Even then, she couldn’t be sure they intended to let her and Garin walk away from this little showdown. She looked down at him. He was in bad shape. He wouldn’t be able to do anything fast.
The man, the apparent leader, held his hand out. “The mask. Give it to me.”
She held on to it for a moment longer than necessary, mentally connecting with the sword in the otherwhere. A mistake now could be fatal for more than one of them. Right now it was all about staying alive.
He took the mask from her.
She could sense him smiling behind his own mask.
Before the night was out, she’d wipe that smile from his face. She promised herself that.
He turned the mask over in his hands, running his fingers over the curious swirls and symbols and debossed letters, then turned his back on her and started to walk toward the van.
And for a fraction of a second—less—she thought he’d given her the moment she wanted. It was too early, though. If she reached into the otherwhere now and struck him down, it wouldn’t end well. Different scenarios flashed through her mind. She could cut him down in a single slash, then grab him as he fell and turn his body into a shield. It would absorb a lot of the damage from the Steyrs, but at such close proximity, with so many of them trained on her, it wouldn’t be enough. This wasn’t her moment.
She watched him walk away, feeling lost and hopeless, as the other men climbed back inside the black van behind him. The door slammed, and seconds later, the tires spat gravel as it drove away, leaving Garin on the ground and Annja staring at their taillights, red spots disappearing down the road.
Annja ran to Garin’s side.
“Sight...sore...eyes.” He tried to grin.
“Shh, save your breath. We’ve got to get out of here.” She knelt down beside him and untied the cord binding his wrists. Without the headlights to show the complexities of the knot, it took a few seconds longer than it might have. “Then we’ll get you to a hospital. Get you checked out.”
“No hospital,” he mumbled.
“Yes, hospital. You’re a mess.”
“No...”
“We’ll arg
ue about it in the car,” she said, not exactly conceding the point as she helped him to his feet. He leaned on her every step of the way as they walked gingerly back to the waiting Alfa Romeo. It wasn’t the ideal car for transporting the weak and the wounded, but it was better than trying to walk the miles back to civilization.
“Not so fast,” a voice called from the darkness.
She felt her heart sink.
The Brotherhood had no intention of letting them walk away from here, after all.
She took a deep breath, steadying herself.
She was never comfortable around death, unlike Roux and Garin. She hoped she never would be, either. If there was another way, she’d always seek it out, even if the sword was only ever a thought away, waiting for her to draw it from the ether. It was a last resort, never a first option.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said. But of course they did. They were acting under orders. The boss had the mask, and now it was time to tidy up the loose ends. And that was exactly what Annja and Garin had always been to the Brotherhood.
And that meant she had no choice. Not everyone was going to walk away from this ambush.
“Step away from the car.”
She did as she was told. One step, and another, holding her hands out away from her body. It looked like a sign of meek surrender. It wasn’t. She was doing what was needed to be ready to defend herself. She could almost feel the familiar weight of the sword in her hand. Her breathing quickened.
She stared into the darkness.
She could make out three distinct shapes.
They were spread out a few feet from one another.
This was only going to happen one way, and there was no use pretending she’d be able to talk her way out of it. Her hand closed around the hilt of her mystical blade, and in an instant it was there, forging a connection between Annja and the saint, blazing white in her hand as her would-be assassins unleashed the first burst of bullets. The sword was a weapon of justice as well as death. And for as long as she could, she’d use it to stay alive, not to kill. Metal ricocheted against metal as the blade intercepted the shots, deflecting them harmlessly away. The bullets, more than a dozen, clattered onto the hood of the Alfa Romeo in a chorus of steel rain. More shots. Her muscles burned. She went with instinct over sight, picking each one harmlessly out of the air as she stepped forward to meet the deadly hail of bullets. One of the Steyrs stuttered.