by Alex Archer
Annja stared at the closed door a moment, then turned to Doug and asked, “Why are you Mr. Morrell and I’m just plain old Annja?”
“Because you’re the star of the show.”
“Exactly. Shouldn’t that be worth a little more respect?”
Doug shook his head. “Not when I’m the one paying her.”
That was, she had to admit, a good point. Putting aside office politics for the moment, she turned her attention to the envelope Doug handed to her.
It was made from a thick, richly textured creamy paper that practically shouted money the minute she laid her hands on it. The ribbon was a classy affair, as well—a wide swatch of red velvet tied in an intricate bow. Untying it, she laid it aside, opened the envelope and withdrew a small white card.
Sir Charles Davies requests the honor of your company for dinner this evening. Gascogne, 7:00 p.m.
There was a phone number underneath for her to RSVP.
Annja sighed. After working all day on the voice-overs, all she wanted to do was to go home and relax. Maybe grab some dark chocolate and red wine, then lounge in the bath. She certainly didn’t have the energy to be out entertaining someone she didn’t know, especially someone with the stature and notoriety of Sir Charles.
“Sorry, not tonight.” She dropped the invitation into the trash can next to Doug’s desk.
Doug, of course, freaked.
“Are you insane?” He snatched the card out of the trash and thrust it back at her. “You have to go!”
Annja put her hands behind her back, refusing to take it. “I don’t have to go. And I don’t want to.”
Doug stared at her in horror and disbelief. “But…it’s Sir Charles!” he sputtered.
“So?”
She didn’t care if it was the Queen of England. She was tired and didn’t want to spend the evening trying to be gracious and putting on a show. And what kind of notice was that? A few hours? He could at least have had the decency to plan in advance.
Doug clearly disagreed and, in fact, looked ready to pull his hair out.
“So?” He brandished the invitation in front of him like an exhibit in a court of law. “So? You’re not talking about some fan off the street, Annja. This is Sir Charles, one of the richest men in America, for heaven’s sake.”
Actually, one of the richest men in the world, she thought to herself. She didn’t dare say it aloud, however, knowing it would just fuel Doug’s argument. Davies hung around with men the likes of Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett—self-made billionaires who could do anything they ever wanted to given the vast size of their personal fortunes.
She was a little curious, she had to admit. It wasn’t every day a man like Davies came knocking on her door and she found herself wondering just what it was he wanted from her.
Doug took a deep breath and visibly calmed himself.
“Think about this for a minute, Annja. What show do you work for?”
“Chasing History’s Monsters.”
“Uh-huh. And what channel airs that program?” he asked in an exaggeratedly patient tone, like a parent talking to a slow-witted child.
Annja didn’t care for it. “You know well enough what cable channel we’re on, Doug.”
He acted as if he hadn’t heard her. “I’m sorry, what channel was that again?”
Annja glared at him for a long moment. Doug could be as stubborn as she could at times.
But he wasn’t about to budge.
He finally flashed a phony smile at her. “Now here’s the big one, Annja. Who owns the network that airs our little cable TV program?”
She didn’t even have to think about it. She saw the name every time she cashed one of her paychecks. None other than Sir Charles Davies.
The invitation had come from her boss’s boss’s boss. Which meant she could no more ignore it than she could sprout wings and fly on command.
“Damn.”
“Exactly!”
Grinning in triumph, Doug picked up the phone on his desk, dialed a number. When it was answered, he said, “This is Doug Morrell, executive producer of Chasing History’s Monsters. Please inform Sir Charles that Miss Creed would be more than happy to join him for dinner this evening.”
He listened for a moment, jotted something down on a piece of paper and then said, “Excellent. She’ll be expecting you,” before hanging up.
Annja was not happy with the situation, not at all. “Why don’t you go in my place?” she suggested.
“He didn’t invite me. He invited you.” He frowned as he said it and Annja abruptly realized that he was actually jealous of her. While she was content being a cohost for the show, Doug had ambitions of moving up the corporate hierarchy, perhaps spinning off a few program ideas of his own. A meeting with Sir Charles was the kind of thing that could change a career overnight.
For just a moment she debated asking him to accompany her for the evening, but decided against it. As much as she’d welcome the company, Sir Charles probably wouldn’t appreciate someone unexpected crashing that party.
Again, she found herself wondering what Davies wanted. Given what she knew about him, she couldn’t picture him even watching the show, never mind being one of her fans. Which meant it had to do with some other aspect of her life. She’d been approached by rich individuals and organizations in the past, usually to investigate the provenance of a particular collection or item, so perhaps that was it.
Heaven forbid it had anything to do with a new position at the network. Her current role left her time to pursue her first love, archaeology, while responding to the call of the sword.
Only one way to find out.
Doug handed her the piece of paper with a phone number on it. “Sir Charles is sending a driver to pick you up at your loft in Brooklyn at six. Call that number if you’re running late. And please, Annja, best behavior while you’re with him. Don’t say or do anything rash.”
An impish grin crossed her face. “Doug. You wound me. Would I do anything like that?”
The sour expression that crossed his face was answer enough.
She was still laughing as she headed out the door.
Chapter 3
Having resigned herself to going, Annja decided that she’d pull out all the stops and at least wear something nice. She took a sleek black dress out of the back of her closet, trying but ultimately failing to remember the last time she’d worn it, which said something entirely too depressing about her social life. She brought it to the bathroom with her, showered, dried off and put it on, pleased that the dress still fit.
The limo arrived promptly at six, as expected. Annja had seen it coming down the street and was just stepping out of her building as it rolled to a stop outside. The driver, a large man in a chauffeur’s uniform, held the door for her while she slipped inside, smoothing her dress over her legs.
Gascogne, the restaurant Sir Charles had chosen for their meeting, was on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan’s Chelsea District. Normally the traffic on a Friday night would make it next to impossible to get from her flat in Brooklyn and into the city in anything less than an hour, but the driver knew his job and he maneuvered the limo through the crush of traffic like a shark through a school of tuna. He had her at the door of the restaurant with ten minutes to spare.
There was a small line outside waiting for tables and Annja drew more than a few admiring stares as she emerged from the limousine. She was escorted inside by the waiting maître d’.
The restaurant had the ambience of a French bistro, with cream-colored walls, white linen tablecloths and muted lighting. It was artfully done and Annja knew that what looked effortless had probably been damned difficult to pull off.
Transferred to a waiter, she was led across the room toward a table in the back corner where Sir Charles—she recognized him from all the media coverage—sat waiting for her. He was alone, which surprised her. She’d expected either a private dining room or bodyguards. He was, after all, one of the richest men in t
he world, which would make him a target nine ways from Sunday.
She was getting closer to the table, and still puzzling it over, when she noticed a couple seated at a nearby table. The woman wore a finely tailored suit and Annja might not have seen the telltale bulge of what could only be a gun holstered beneath the woman’s arm if she hadn’t stretched to reach the saltshaker.
And just like that it was easy to pick out Sir Charles’s crew from the rest of the restaurant patrons. A pair of men in business suits a few tables over kept looking around the room a little too regularly, and a slightly older man drinking at the bar had been watching her in the mirror ever since she’d entered.
That Sir Charles wasn’t alone was oddly reassuring and she relaxed as she joined him at the table.
He greeted her warmly, extending his hand across the table for her to shake rather than getting up out of his chair. Annja wasn’t surprised or offended; an auto accident had robbed him of the use of his lower body more than two decades before. And if she hadn’t known, his wheelchair would have been a dead giveaway. He’d been a tall, broad-shouldered man before the accident and had managed to retain much of his physique in the years since. He had a crushing grip and a wide smile.
“Ah, Miss Creed. Wonderful to see you!”
As the waiter held her chair for her, Davies paused to let her settle in.
“Something to drink, mademoiselle?” the waiter asked in French, and was nonplussed when she immediately responded in the same language, selecting a glass of pinot grigio. It had been some time since she’d been out for a nice dinner. She was going to take advantage of the situation and enjoy herself.
Davies’s blue eyes were sparkling. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice. I’m only in the city for the evening and didn’t want to miss the opportunity.”
Despite her earlier thoughts, Annja felt herself swayed by his charm. “It’s my pleasure, Sir Charles.”
The elderly man waved his hand as if shooing away a bad odor. “Please. Charles is fine. I reserve that Sir Charles stuff for those I don’t particularly care for all that much.”
Annja laughed. “I think I like you already. Okay, Charles it is.”
The waiter brought their drinks—the wine for Annja and a refill of what looked like Scotch for Charles. He waited until the server was out of earshot before continuing.
“A mutual friend of ours in Paris said you might be able to help with a particular problem I’d like to solve.”
Annja only had one friend in Paris who could possibly run in the same social circles as Davies and that was Roux. Incredibly wealthy in his own right, perhaps even more wealthy than Charles Davies, Roux was unlike any other man she’d ever met. Save one.
He’d lived for more than five hundred years, which probably had something to do with that, she thought.
Roux had been an instrumental force in her life for years now. She had been with him when she’d discovered the final missing piece to the shattered sword that had once been wielded by Joan of Arc. Annja had been in Roux’s study with him when the blade had mystically reforged itself right before their very eyes and, by Annja’s way of thinking, had chosen her to be its next bearer. Since then Roux had become a kind of mentor to her, sharing what he knew of the blade and its purpose.
Which made sense given that the blade had had a significant impact on his life, as well.
He’d been Joan’s protector, charged with delivering her safely back behind French lines, a job he’d ultimately failed to do. Joan had been captured and, vastly outnumbered, he and his young apprentice, Garin Braden, had been unable to do anything but stand and watch as the English soldiers burned her at the stake for witchcraft and heresy. Joan’s sword had been shattered by the commander in charge of the execution detail, the pieces quickly gathered up by onlookers as souvenirs. It was only later that Roux discovered how his failure to live up to his vow to protect the young maiden had changed him and, by extension, his apprentice, as well. The two men stopped aging, appearing today just as they did five centuries before. Determined to be the master of his own fate, Roux had set out on a quest to reunite the shattered pieces of Joan’s sword, thinking that restoring the weapon might somehow end the curse.
Unfortunately, this brought him into rivalry with his former apprentice, Garin, who decided that he was quite happy living forever and didn’t see it as a curse at all. Because he saw the restoration of the blade as an attempt to undo the very act that had granted them an ageless life in the first place, Garin spent the next couple hundred years trying to kill Roux whenever he got the chance. It was only recently, when the blade had been reformed without any harm coming to them, that the two men had put aside their conflict and begun to cooperate.
Roux had sent customers her way on several occasions and so Annja wasn’t exactly surprised to hear of his recommendation.
“And how is the stubborn old goat?” she asked.
“As willful as ever,” Davis replied, “and determined to make everyone around him well aware of it.”
Their meal came, sea bass for Charles and a sirloin for Annja, and they spent the next thirty minutes enjoying the food and talking about inconsequential things. Once the table had been cleared and coffee ordered, Charles finally got down to business.
“What can you tell me about the Library of Gold?” he asked.
Annja didn’t even need to think about it. The library was one of the great unsolved mysteries of the archaeological world and she was well-versed in its history.
“It’s a collection of ancient books gathered over several hundred years by the Byzantine Empire and collected in the library at Constantinople. It supposedly included roughly eight hundred books written in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, including some exceedingly rare volumes as a complete set of the “History of Rome” by Titus Livius, poems by Kalvos, “The Twelve Caesars” by Suetonius and individual works by Virgil, Aristophanes, Polybius, Pindar, Tacitus and Cicero.”
Annja took a sip of her wine, warming to the subject. “Many of the books would have been written by hand, which, if they surfaced on today’s market, would make them incredibly valuable. Never mind the several hundred editions that were supposedly created specifically for the various emperors, which were rumored to have had their covers inlaid with gold and encrusted with jewels of all shapes and sizes.
“When the emperor’s niece, Sophia Palaeologus, married the Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan III, she took the library with her back to Russia. Reasons for this vary. Some say it was a part of her marriage dowry, while others insist that it was to keep the library from falling into the hands of Sultan Mahomet II, who was threatening Constantinople at the time. Either way it turned out to be fortuitous, because the sultan’s forces eventually sacked Constantinople. I guess in the end it really doesn’t matter. The library went to Russia and that pretty much sealed its doom.”
Charles was watching her closely, sizing her up it seemed. “Why’s that?” he asked.
“The difference in the cities themselves, for one. At the time, most of the buildings in Moscow were made of wood. Fires were frequent, the dry air leeching the moisture out of the wood in the summertime and causing them to burn fast. A small one-building fire could engulf an entire section of the city if it wasn’t quickly contained. Compare that with Constantinople, which was far older than Moscow and where most of the buildings were of cut stone. For this reason alone, the library was safer in Constantinople.
“Sophia apparently came to the same conclusion. Soon after arriving in Moscow, she convinced her new husband to rebuild the entire Kremlin, replacing the wooden structures with buildings of brick and stone. The library was moved to the Temple of the Nativity of the Theotokos and that’s where it remained until Sophia’s stepson, Ivan IV, came to power in 1533.”
“That hardly sounds like doom and gloom,” Charles said skeptically.
Annja smiled. “The library passed into the hands of Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible and
the Butcher of Novgorod. This is the same man who killed his own son and heir in a fit of rage by striking him repeatedly over the head with an iron rod. He created a secret police force that was actively encouraged to rape, loot, torture and kill in his name to keep the populace under control. Does that sound like the kind of man priceless texts should be entrusted to?”
Charles grimaced and shook his head.
Annja went on. “Recognizing the potential danger the library was in, the Vatican tried to purchase it outright from the self-declared czar. Ivan refused. Afraid his enemies would try to take it from him by force, Ivan hired an Italian architect named Ridolfo di Fioravanti to design and build a secret vault to house the library. Months into the project Fioravanti and the library both vanished.”
“So what do you think happened to it?” Charles asked casually.
Annja thought about that one for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t have a clue,” she said. “And given what’s gone on over there for the past century or so, we’ll probably never know.”
Charles leaned toward her, his eyes shining with excitement. “What would you say if I told you I knew where it was? Or, at least, had direct information that could lead you to it?”
Annja laughed. “If I had a nickel for every time someone told me they knew where to find a long-lost treasure, I’d be as rich as you are, Charles.”
He stared at her and then lifted his hand. The woman Annja had noticed earlier immediately got up and walked over. She nodded once at Annja, then slid a manila envelope into her boss’s hands before returning to her seat.
Charles put the envelope down on the table in front of him and folded his hands over it.
Annja couldn’t take her eyes off it. Her heart was racing with the same electric excitement she felt just before entering a lost tomb. When at last she tore her gaze away, she found Charles watching her with a wry grin.