by Alex Archer
“Gris mentioned the name of the man who had learned the story of the hidden Merovingian treasure.” Orta looked at Annja.
“György Dózsa,” Annja said. “It would have been nice if we could have finished reading those pages.”
“Still, you have something. Do you know who György Dózsa was?”
“I’d heard of him before, but I did some research last night and his name turned up. Most historians believe he was a nobleman from Transylvania.”
“Which means we have more ties to the Kingdom of Hungary, yes. That places us roughly in the same timeline as Corvinus.”
“Dózsa raised an army of peasants to revolt against the nobles. He wasn’t successful and ended up getting caught. He was tortured and executed by his enemies.”
“Yes, and he’s remembered as both a freedom fighter and Christian martyr by some and a criminal by others. Gris said he got the story of the Merovingian treasure from someone who knew Dózsa. There is a scholar I can put you in touch with. A man named Istvan Racz. He knows more Hungarian history than anyone I know. You should probably talk to him.”
“Let me know where I can find him.”
Frowning, pursing his lips and narrowing his eyes, Orta studied her. “Just because these people have that crystal, doesn’t mean they’re done with this.”
“I know.”
“It would be better if you just let this go,” Orta stated.
Annja smiled at him. “Would you let it go?”
Wearily, Orta shook his head. “If I wasn’t in this bed, I’d go with you.”
“Then tell me where to find Racz.”
Orta gestured. “Let me borrow your sat phone. I’ll put his number into your address book.”
13
With her backpack settled over her shoulders and Istvan Racz’s phone number logged into her sat phone, Annja said her goodbyes to Vincent Orta, promised him she’d keep him apprised of her treasure hunt and left the hospital room. The uniformed police officer in the hallway watched her go and reached for his phone. She knew he’d be reporting her departure.
Two men in the waiting area overlooking Orta’s room abandoned their magazines and took up deliberate pursuit. Despite their effort at blending in, they didn’t try to disguise their interest. Or maybe they thought she wouldn’t notice them because she wasn’t looking or wasn’t skilled enough to spot them. Either way, Annja picked up on them immediately.
They wore casual clothes with lightweight thigh-length jackets. Shrapnel scars, gray with age, stood out on the side of one man’s face. The other man was smaller and biracial. Both of them moved in loose readiness and didn’t make eye contact.
Deliberately avoiding the elevators, Annja increased her speed, almost jogging to the stairwell door and ducking through. The men trailed her by a short distance, but they’d sped up when they saw where she was headed.
Instead of going down the stairs, Annja reached up and caught the side of the stairs leading up to the next floor. Moving quickly, she hauled herself up and pressed herself into hiding behind the stairwell wall. The men wouldn’t be fooled for long, but she didn’t need much time.
Balancing on the stairwell, pressed back against the wall, Annja watched as the door swung open. She took in a long, slow breath and let it out.
The scar-faced man came through first and hesitated just a moment, looking at the next landing, the door there and then down the stairwell shaft. He slipped a cell phone from his pocket and spoke into it briefly in French. Annja overheard his conversation easily enough.
“This is Claude. She spotted Edgar and me and is running. Stand ready. She has to be coming your way.” He started down the steps. “We’ll take her at ground level.”
The second man followed at the first man’s heels, but he wasn’t as locked into his notion of how Annja had disappeared. He stopped two steps down and turned to look up.
Uncoiling from her perch, Annja kicked at the man’s head, driving her boot at his face. Even with surprise on her side, Edgar almost got an arm up to block her kick. His open hand curled around her calf for just a moment, tightened, then loosened as her foot caught him full in the face and bounced his head off the wall behind him.
His eyes glazing slightly from the impact, Edgar struggled to recover. One foot slid onto a lower step, but he caught his balance and remained upright. Setting himself, he lurched back up the steps at Annja.
On her feet now, Annja watched Claude reaching under his jacket for the pistol leathered there. Ducking, Annja easily avoided Edgar’s lunge and stepped into him, letting his muscular arms pass over her head. Claude leveled his weapon and fired immediately. Annja didn’t know if the shots were intended as warnings or if the man planned on disabling her.
Or if he simply shot to kill her and claim her possessions.
Either way, the loud crack was deafening in the stairwell, and Annja suddenly felt as though she had cotton balls in her ears. Edgar shouted a warning to his partner but the words sounded far away.
Using Edgar as a shield, Annja grabbed his shirt in her left hand and kneed him in the crotch hard enough to take the fight out of him for a moment. He staggered and nearly became deadweight that she fought to balance.
Claude fired again and the bullet chopped into the wall only inches from her head, then ricocheted into the stairwell door with a low-pitched whine. Only a few feet away, he started forward and tried to find a shot around his partner.
Annja grabbed the 9 mm pistol from Edgar’s shoulder holster and pulled it free. Aiming instinctively, she fired two bullets into Claude’s left knee. Yelling in pain, Claude flailed for the railing, missed it and collapsed, rolling down the steps.
Shrugging out from under Edgar just as the man was trying to rally and wrap her in his arms, Annja swung the pistol butt into his temple. His eyes rolled up and he sank to the steps.
Holding the pistol ready, hoping she didn’t have to use it, Annja trotted down the steps. Behind her, the door opened. She glanced up and watched as a young man in a nurse’s uniform halted halfway through the doorway, eyes wide and fearful.
“Hey!” he shouted behind him. “Hey! Help!”
Then, suddenly realizing he was a possible target, the guy ducked back through the doorway. Although muffled by the closed door, his cries for help continued.
Despite his pain, Claude turned his gaze on Annja and tried to point his pistol at her.
Annja reached out and wrenched the weapon from the man with her free hand. As she stood in front of him, she stripped the magazines from both pistols and released the slides, letting the weapons fall in pieces to the steps.
“Who are you?” Annja demanded.
Holding on to his bloody knee, Claude swore at her in French. Giving no warning, Annja stepped forward and put her foot on the man’s wounded leg. He screamed in pain and tried to crawl away, but she kept the pressure on and wouldn’t let him retreat.
“I don’t have a lot of time here, Claude. Either your friends will arrive or the police will. Who are you with?”
Claude held his silence, except for some spirited moaning, for a moment longer, then lay still. “I work for Ligier de Cerceau.”
The name meant nothing to Annja, but she filed it away. “Who is he?”
“My boss.”
“What does he want with me?”
“He knows you have copies of those manuscript pages you were looking at with the crystal.” The man shifted, trying to find a good position for his injured leg. “The other pages are in police hands. He can’t get them.”
Based on her own inability to get the pages for at least one more viewing, Annja figured that was true. “What does de Cerceau know about the pages?”
Claude shook his head. “I don’t know. I just do what he tells me. Today he told me to bring you to him. Or to
kill you.”
A chill tingled across Annja’s spine, but she ignored it. She’d been in danger plenty of times before. “Why does he want the crystal and the pages?”
“I don’t know. We’re not told everything.”
Cunning gleamed in Claude’s eyes and reminded Annja that she needed to be going. He was obviously counting on keeping her occupied until the backup team arrived.
She leaned down to rifle through Claude’s clothing and had to elbow him in the face to get him to settle down. Sulking, with an obscene oath, he put up with her search. He carried his wallet in his pants pocket and she took it. She also grabbed his cell phone and Edgar’s. Then, aware that time was working against her, she turned and fled down the stairs.
She entered the next floor and walked to the elevators as a security guard trotted toward the stairwell.
“Hold up, miss.” The security guard raised a hand toward Annja and reached for his holstered weapon with his other hand.
Annja pointed toward the stairwell. “Be careful. There are two men in there shooting at each other.”
The guard hesitated just a moment, then reached for the walkie-talkie mounted on his shoulder and reported shots fired. He looked at Annja. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Annja chafed at having to wait, but she didn’t want to appear to be fleeing the scene, either. Even though she was. If the police got involved, she’d be answering questions again. She wanted to be moving.
“Good.” The security guard drew his sidearm. “Go downstairs, get somewhere safe and wait until I find you.”
“Sure.”
Still talking on his radio, the security guard closed on the stairwell door.
Annja didn’t want him to get shot, and she didn’t think her two would-be kidnappers were in any shape to put up much of a fight, but she repeated her warning about the guns.
The guard nodded and positioned himself by the door with both hands on his weapon. “Security!” he shouted. “Put your weapons down!”
Annja kept moving. She felt certain that Claude and Edgar’s backup team would be looking for them in the stairwells, so she had some breathing room in the elevator. After taking out her sat phone, she called a cab service and asked for one at the front of the hospital. The dispatch person assured her that a unit was en route and would arrive in minutes.
When the elevator hit the second floor, she got off, checked the hallway and saw no one suspicious, then headed for the nearest stairs leading to the first floor, avoiding the stairwells at either end. On the first floor, she strode toward the ER, threading the line of patient-filled gurneys and medical personnel streaming from that direction. A female police officer and two male security guards ran toward the stairwell with their weapons in their hands.
The ER was crowded with sick people waiting to see doctors or huddling nervously with family members and friends. Annja stood beside a potted plant with broad leaves and stared through the window as she gazed out in front of the hospital.
There was no cab yet, but she also didn’t see anyone who might be working with Claude and Edgar, which was a good thing. Still, she didn’t want to get caught out in the open in front of the hospital. Whoever de Cerceau was, he had professionals working for him.
She took out her sat phone again, then retrieved the card she’d gotten from Detective Leslie Connolly from the side pocket of her backpack and punched the number in. The connection was made almost instantly.
“Detective Connolly.” The detective sounded professional, but there was an edge in her voice.
“Hi, Detective.” Annja moved one of the plant’s broad leaves and took another look outside.
It took Connolly a moment to recognize Annja’s voice. “Ms. Creed, I’m surprised you called.”
The roar of an engine and the scream of a siren carried over the phone line.
“I’m betting you’re not too surprised. I’m sure you’ve heard about the shooting at the hospital.”
“As it turns out, we’re on our way there now.” Connolly sounded cool. “We’d heard you were involved.”
Realizing the hospital nurse must have outed her, Annja frowned. She’d had enough of the authorities for the moment.
“I was only involved to the point of self-preservation. Two men came after me. I left them behind for you.”
“Alive?”
Annja held back a barbed comment. “Yes, they’re alive. One of them told me they’re working for a man named Ligier de Cerceau. The name means nothing to me. I was hoping you could tell me more.”
“I really can’t—”
“If you’re not going to talk to me, there’s no reason for me to hang around here.”
“You’re involved in a shooting.”
“I was involved. Was. No thanks to the guard you’ve got covering Dr. Orta.” Even as she said the last remark, Annja felt guilty. There was no way Connolly or her partner could have known she would be attacked in the stairwell. And they were after her, not Orta.
“We could have put a guard on you if you’d thought you were in danger.”
“I can take care of myself.” Annja gazed around the ER waiting room and knew that she wasn’t attracting any untoward attention. Everyone was watching breaking news about shots fired at the hospital on the televisions around the room. “I thought we could compare notes. If you don’t know anything about de Cerceau, we have nothing further to discuss. I’ll let you get back to your day.”
“Wait.”
Annja held on to the phone.
“Ms. Creed? Are you there?”
“I am.” Through her own grayed reflection in the window glass, Annja watched a yellow cab slide to a halt in front of the hospital.
“I thought I’d lost you.” Connolly sounded relieved.
“Not yet.” But that was going to happen soon.
“De Cerceau turned up on some of our preliminary reports. The men we have in custody have worked for him in the past.”
“I’m betting they still are. So tell me about de Cerceau.”
Out in front of the hallway, the cabdriver looked around and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.
“The information’s still coming in. We’re building a better picture of the man.”
“What do you know so far?”
“He works as a mercenary, but he’s also done international security work for people who ship valuable artwork and artifacts. Some auction houses around the globe do regular work with him on high-end pieces. He has a reputation for being quite formidable.”
Annja considered that, knowing that work in those fields would allow de Cerceau to move around fairly easily and know a lot about expensive pieces, as well as the collectors who bought them. She wondered who wanted the crystal. And why.
“There are two men down in a stairwell.” Annja shifted her backpack over her shoulder. “One has been shot, but there’s no danger of him bleeding out. The other will probably still be unconscious. He got hit pretty hard. If you look around, I think you’ll find more people working for de Cerceau who will be concerned with getting those men out of there.”
“All right. Where are you going to be?”
“With any luck?” Annja smiled. “Gone.” She broke the connection on the sat phone, kept it in one hand and exited the ER room through the admittance door.
Outside, Annja stayed focused on the waiting cab and watched the surroundings for movement as she walked toward the vehicle. Two other cars sat in the waiting area in front of the hospital’s main door. People got out of the cars. An older man in a wheelchair propelled himself toward the entrance. Two young women trailed in his wake.
Reaching the cab, Annja opened the back door and slid inside.
The driver, a young man wearing a Jack White concert T-shirt, looked over his shoulder. “Are you
the one who called about the cab?”
“That’s me.”
The driver nodded at the hospital. “Visiting someone?”
“A friend.” Annja glanced at the entrance and spotted three men who looked as though they might have been friends of Claude and Edgar nervously searching the lobby. One of them started out of the building, trying to get a better look into the cab, which had tinted windows.
“I hope the person’s doing all right.”
“He is. Thanks. Could we go? I’m kind of in a hurry. I overstayed.”
“Sure, sure.” The driver turned to the wheel and took his foot off the brake. The cab slid forward, dodging the waiting cars and heading toward the street. He pulled to one side to allow an LAPD patrol car to roll by with lights flashing and siren howling.
“Something’s going on.” The driver hesitated long enough to let a second police car go by, as well, then accelerated out into traffic.
“Something’s always going on in this city.” Annja took out the captured cell phones and tried to get into them. Both were password protected, which bothered her only a little. She had other means of getting information. She turned them off, took out the batteries and dumped them both back into her backpack.
“It might even be a movie or television stunt, though they usually block the streets off for that, which can be a real pain.” The driver looked up at her in the rearview mirror. “Where do you want to go?”
“Santa Monica.” That was where Orta had told her Dr. Istvan Racz lived.
“Okay, I can take you there. Do you have a destination?”
Annja consulted her phone and found an internet café in Santa Monica. She gave the driver the name and address, then punched in Istvan Racz’s number and listened to the phone ring.
14
“I’m surprised you got out here without Krauzer tagging along.” Meszoly sat behind the SUV’s wheel and watched the police action in front of the Good Samaritan Hospital.
“He wanted to come.” Sabre focused through the camera’s telephoto lens and snapped shots of the men the uniformed police officers were guiding out of the hospital. “I reminded him he had a blockbuster to shoot and told him this probably wouldn’t turn out to be anything.” He pressed the button again and the camera whirred in response, taking a quick series of five images. “Do you recognize any of these men?”