City of Swords

by Alex Archer

  Annja tried to tell herself the Louvre could not be robbed. But she did worry. It had been robbed before.

  She looked through the contents of more folders, going faster now. News clippings. She passed by the first batch, but then gave them a quick study. A paragraph in one of the articles was circled. Dated November 7, 2005, it quoted a Muslim rioter talking about revenge for the deaths of two fellow Muslims who were electrocuted while trespassing at a power station: “It won’t end until two policemen are dead.” The paper clipped to it was a handwritten note with a dozen addresses. Where Muslims were living in Rouen? France had a sizable Muslim population, estimated to be between five and six million.

  Another clipping was an article about Jewish communities throughout the world, citing that France had the largest population of Jews in all of Europe. Census estimates put the number at about five hundred thousand, most of them in metropolitan areas…including Rouen.

  Folded behind it were a photograph and an article about a Jewish archaeological find in Rouen that experts believed was a yeshiva, a school for Jewish religious studies. The site was uncovered in the 1970s during a restoration project on one of Rouen’s court buildings. The site suggested that at one time the city was a Jewish center, and cemented the image of France as a melting pot. The address and tour information were circled; the monument was open to the public. Annja cringed.

  There were other clippings, small ones, on a Hindu speed-dating gathering scheduled for next week in a hotel ballroom in Rouen; an upcoming Wiccan gathering in a meeting room at the public library; an approaching lecture by a local Rastafarian. There was a scrawled note about Sikhism and a partial address, but something had been spilled on it, and Annja couldn’t make it out.

  She could spend hours in here going through every folder, losing herself in the collection of clippings and papers and trying to ferret out Lawton’s list of priorities. That would be for the police, though. They were resourceful and could throw enough people at the project to sift through it quickly…if they realized how much of a threat Lawton was.

  That he had liquid nerve gas.

  The police knew just how serious this was. They weren’t stupid.

  But she wouldn’t leave it all on them. Annja caught sight of herself in the mirror over the sink. She looked like hell. Strands of her hair hung in clumps around her face. She reached up with her right hand and tucked them behind her ears, then picked off bandages the nurse had put on her cheeks; already she was healing underneath. Her broken arm would take a little while, though.

  She dropped the bandages in the wastebasket. Wait. The police didn’t need to think they were clues to anything regarding Lawton. As she bent to pluck them out, she saw an empty pill vial in the basket.

  She stared at the mirror, which served as the door to a medicine cabinet. Opening it, she took a quick inventory of the contents. It revealed the usual stuff: aspirin, antacids, Band-Aids, rubbing alcohol and two prescription bottles reading temozolomide and isotretinoin. With no idea what they treated, she pocketed them, to look it up later. Tampering with police evidence, she realized. She’d have to clue them in if this led to anything concrete.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs. Poking her head out of the secret closet, she found them growing louder. Annja scampered into the room, gesturing toward the panel door when the policewoman and Roux came in.

  The officer’s surprise quickly melted into anger. She looked from Annja to Roux. “I think you two should be on your way.”

  “Certainly,” Annja replied. She walked past Roux and took the stairs two at a time, weighing destinations in her head. The Louvre, the Tower of London, back to Rouen… Where was Lawton going next?

  Chapter 35

  “Thank you,” she told Roux as she slid into the car beside him.

  “Not a problem,” he replied. “I always enjoy talking to Beatrice.”

  Maybe Annja would ask him later about this Beatrice. “Learn anything?”

  “Only that the police are taking this dead serious. They believe you about the liquid nerve gas. The description you gave matched other cylinders recovered from terrorist groups in the Middle East. Interpol is sending agents.”

  “He didn’t have a computer.” Annja was talking more to herself than Roux, who pulled away from the warehouse and headed north. “Not upstairs, anyway. Paper, though, lots of it. Old-fashioned.” She was disappointed in the lack of something she could have searched easily and taken with her…maybe taken with her. “Did the police say if they found a computer upstairs?” Perhaps they’d already taken it back to their headquarters.

  Roux shrugged. “They carried out boxes.”

  “Evidence of something.”

  “This reliance you have on computers, Annja…” He had to brake as a car turned in front of him, the passenger inside bobbing her head and singing to something playing on the radio.

  “They make things easy, that’s all.” She paused. “Do you have one with you? A netbook? An iPad? A—”

  He made a tsking sound. “Whatever for?”

  “I want to look something up.” She stretched back her good arm, pulling the student paper out and dropping it behind the seat to look at later. Then she dug in her pocket for the prescription bottles. “I should have left them for the police. But they’ve still got an empty one to work with in the trash. I just—”

  Roux leaned close, keeping one eye on traffic as he turned into a retail district. Sale signs were plastered across a few of the store windows, garish and bright and meant to attract customers like a fish to a shiny, spinning lure. It was working; shoppers were streaming into the largest place. Left hand on the wheel, he took the bottles from her with his right.

  “‘Temozolomide,’” Roux read, then sat straight and gave the traffic his full attention. “What’s the other one?” He turned the bottle so he could read it.

  Annja couldn’t make out the dosing information as she tried to read around his fingers.

  “They’re both prescribed for Charles Lawton,” he said. “This one is isotretinoin.”

  “I want a computer to look them up and—”

  “They’re cancer drugs, Annja.”

  Roux’s response startled her. “How would you know…”

  “I have lost friends through these years,” he said. “Not just to sword fights.”

  Or burning at the stake, Annja thought.

  “Temozolomide—Temodar—is prescribed to slow the growth of certain cancers. The other, the same thing. Since he has prescriptions for both, I’d say he has a brain tumor.”

  “I don’t follow your logic.” Annja pressed her back against the seat. Her first thoughts were of Roux, that he knew about the drugs. He must have been very close to someone taking them to know their names and exactly what they were for. His personal life was largely a mystery to her, and though she loved to find her way through a mystery…this was one she would leave alone.

  “It would explain quite a bit,” he said.

  “The way he’s acting. The obsession,” Annja suggested. “The driven single-mindedness and—”

  “No.” Roux’s expression was sorrowful. The sadness was deeply etched in the lines on his face. “It could explain why he’s moving so quickly. He’s running out of time. But I think the plan was there a long while ago. I don’t think a brain tumor has triggered his plan for a City of God.”

  Annja nodded. “All right, I’ll give you that. If he thought he was dying, he would be desperate to build it in whatever time he had left. Charlemagne, after all, died before he could see it happen.”

  Roux turned left and pulled over to the curb.

  “But why Rouen? Why build his city there and not here in Paris?”

  He looked at her. “Because the Christians in Rouen got it wrong, Annja, and in the process of building his City of God, he’s going to show them how to get it right.” Roux paused and pocketed the medicine. “At least, that’s why I think he selected that city. A good place to start, eh?”

/>   She pressed herself even deeper into the seat. Roux was talking about Joan of Arc, the trial that had branded her a heretic and had had her burned at the stake. It was the Church—Christians—who had tried her and killed her. Burned her body three times so there was nothing left to bury. They’d taken it back later, a “do over” as it were, and then named her a saint. But they’d gotten it wrong the first time.

  “Lawton is getting it wrong, too,” she said. “Killing Buddhists and—”

  “Scientologists.”

  She told him about the clippings mentioning upcoming events for Jews, Rastafarians and Wiccans in Rouen.

  “Killing everyone who isn’t Christian doesn’t seem very Christian to me.”

  “Wars in the name of God haven’t always been…” Roux searched for a word and came up lacking. “In any event, that is why I suspect Rouen.”

  “But we’re not going there first.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  A pair of teenagers strolled by and tapped on Annja’s side of the car, asking for directions.

  “I’ve not been to that restaurant before,” she said. “Sorry.”

  They meandered on and stopped someone on the corner, who, judging by his gestures, proved more helpful.

  “We’re going to Rouen. Well, I am.” Annja frowned. “Lawton and his…paladins…will be heading there, and that’s probably where they’ll release the nerve gas.”

  “Beatrice said the police in Rouen have been put on alert.”

  “But I think he’s got another stop or two planned first.”

  Roux scratched at a spot behind his ear. His cuts and scabs from the fight in the parking lot last night had all healed. “The Louvre.”

  “Yeah, it has to be on his list. He wants Charlemagne’s sword.”

  “La Joyeuse.”

  “There are others on his shopping list, but from what I’ve gathered, they’re with the crown jewels in the Tower of London.”

  “No more formidable than the Louvre.”

  “But farther away. He’ll go for Joyeuse first. We didn’t leave him a choice, did we, Roux? The police are swarming his place. He’s got to speed up his timetable.”

  “Then why not just—”

  “Go to Rouen right away and start cleansing it?” Annja dropped her chin to her chest. “Because he doesn’t have a sword. He wanted mine, said Charlemagne had it first. That it should be his. Archard had Durendal. Luc, Honjo Masamune. A big dwarf was swinging the Wallace Sword at me. There were some other blades out in the parking lot last night that looked like they could have come from a museum.”

  “Tizona.”

  “It might have been out there, too. It was pretty dark.”

  “And there was a lot going on.”

  “Controlled chaos,” she said. “I don’t think Lawton bought Tizona for himself. For one of his paladins, certainly, but he’d want something with a Charlemagne angle. Whether because he’s obsessed with his Charlemagne ancestry or the brain tumor is to blame, he’s going after a sword his ancestor used.”

  Roux pulled out into traffic and turned north at the next intersection. “To the Louvre, then.”

  “You don’t have to go with me,” Annja reminded him.

  He stepped on the gas pedal. “One never gets tired of seeing that museum.”

  The Louvre had had its share of thefts. In 1998 Sevres Road by Camille Corot was taken from an exhibit room that didn’t have video surveillance. Police believed a collector of nineteenth-century Impressionist paintings likely hired someone to make off with the $1.3 million work. In 1911 an Italian worker stole the Mona Lisa, which helped make the painting one of the most famous in the world. Only a decade ago officials at the Louvre had acknowledged that a pair of eighteenth-century candlesticks had been stolen, worth about $60,000. They’d been reported missing earlier, but the museum had managed to keep the fact quiet for some time. Auditors discovered that the museum had poor records of just how many pieces of art and artifacts it owned, and that it had been plagued by more thefts than it reported. Word had crept out that even a marble statue had been taken from one of the galleries.

  So Annja knew that while the museum’s security had improved, it was not infallible, and certainly not what it should be considering the treasures it contained. In its defense, museum staff continued to cite a small budget. Reporters from time to time printed stories about insufficient guards and employees that took coffee breaks stretching into hours.

  More than six million people visited the Louvre each year. One of them was going to be Lawton.

  Built on the bank of the Seine, the Louvre wasn’t a museum originally. It was first intended as a fortress, then a palace and later as a repository for Henry VI’s works of art. But it was opened to the public as a museum more than two hundred years ago.

  Annja had seen Charlemagne’s sword there in passing—twice—but had never stopped to really look at it. She’d been more caught up in the various collections of European paintings and sculptures. On one visit she’d spent hours in the rooms devoted to Roman, Egyptian and Greek art.

  She sat quietly now, watching the pedestrians and traffic, as Roux drove. Her thoughts drifted to Rembert and his grandchild, and to her producer, whom she hadn’t contacted for a few days. There was a story here for Chasing History’s Monsters—about Charlemagne and his descendant Charles Lawton, the collection of God-touched swords and his plans to build a City of God. But it wasn’t a story she wanted to film.

  It was a story she’d been forced to take a starring role in, and she wanted no part of it.

  At the end of the street, she could see a section of the Louvre. Traffic was heavy in this area, with many people heading home from work. The museum would be open for only another hour.

  The wing along the Seine, where she would find Charlemagne’s sword, was built during the sixteenth century. To get there they would go through the Richelieu wing, which had been added three hundred years later. The most recent addition was the glass pyramid, a controversial project constructed in 1989 by the American architect I. M. Pei. Annja didn’t like it. While the pyramid let sunlight shine down into an underground floor, she felt it incongruous to the old, classic feel of the rest of the place.

  “…one of the key figures in European history,” Roux was saying. “King of the Franks, warred against the pagans and Lombards and Saxons, the Moors. Crowned the emperor of the Western Empire, he was more than a figurehead. Law, agriculture, trade…it all flourished under him.”

  Annja’s right thumb rubbed across the seat belt as if it were a worry stone. “I don’t need the history lesson, Roux. I know all about Charlemagne.”

  Her companion fell silent and found a place to park. They walked the few blocks and paid to get in.

  “You’ve only got an hour,” the attendant told them.

  “That should be enough,” Roux said.

  Enough for what? Annja thought. Lawton and his crew only struck at night. But enough time to see the sword…really look at it…figure out how he might approach the theft.

  “Watch me be wrong,” she said.

  Roux cocked his head in question.

  “Watch my guess be the wrong one. Watch him go after the swords in the Tower of London or after innocent people in Rouen.”

  “So you’re changing your mind. Women do that.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m just hoping he doesn’t outthink me here and do something else.” Annja glanced at her reflection in the highly polished floor. She looked wretched. Hair mussed, no makeup, left arm in a sling and wearing the borrowed workout clothes of a generous policewoman. She looked like someone who had either just finished a jog or was about to start in on some serious housecleaning. No wonder the attendant stared at her.

  She started toward the wing where she remembered seeing the sword a few years ago. “First floor, Richelieu wing. Hope they haven’t moved it. Should’ve asked, I guess.”

  “The French police are good,” Roux said. “They have their best peopl
e on the nerve-gas hunt.”

  “Interpol is good, too,” she admitted. She didn’t have to save the world—or Rouen or Paris, for that matter—all on her own. Annja picked up the pace, the soles of her borrowed shoes squeaking against the floor. They were just a hair too big and her feet slid in them. She felt a couple of blisters coming on, but blisters were nothing next to the aches she couldn’t shake.

  She passed people who were clearly weary, their rounded shoulders and slow gait indicators that they’d spent hours here. One tall man rubbed his eyes with one hand and the back of his neck with the other. A solid day of museuming, as Annja called it, was hard work.

  The sculptures and Old Masters she passed were a blur of colors, the chatter of the other visitors a buzz that she shoved to the back of her mind. Eyes darting everywhere, she tried to find a familiar face—one of Lawton’s “paladins.” She could have sworn she’d spotted Luc, but a second look showed the black man as tall, but not tall enough. She realized she was huffing and drawing looks from the tourists, so she slowed down, but only a little, never glancing over her shoulder. She knew Roux was there.

  Finally, she came to the second room in the Richelieu wing, filled with collections of decorative arts from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Relics from Napoleon glittered for her attention.

  “There. Joyeuse.”

  Annja was struck by the magnificence of the sword.

  Chapter 36

  A dozen people milled here. One woman, squat-

  looking and on the arm of a young man, gave her a passing glance. The rest were men of various ages, enjoying the artistic weapons on display. These weren’t simply old military pieces the Louvre put in cases for the public to see. These were ones that glittered and gleamed, as much works of art as the paintings by Picasso, Michelangelo and Renoir.

  Why hadn’t she paid attention to the sword on her previous trips? It truly was a work of art.

  “Belle,” the squat woman said as she admired it. Indeed, Joyeuse was beautiful. “Magnifique.”