23

The van jerked violently to the side, then flipped and rolled. Unfettered by a seat belt, Garin slammed against the vehicle’s sides with bruising force. The front of the van was on fire. He felt it through the metal plate that cut the front section off from the cargo area. He didn’t doubt that the men up front had died instantly.

Without warning, the van struck something and went sideways. Despite the reinforcement struts, the vehicle started to come apart. Smoke from the burning front section coiled inside the van. His nose and lungs burned with the noxious fumes.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the vehicle stopped flipping, skidded a few more feet and smashed against something solid. Garin remembered the trees that lined the estate grounds.

They’d smashed into the trees. Garin saw them through the rents in the roof. A branch stabbed into the cargo area.

He also realized they were targets for a second attack.

“Take out the rocket launcher,” Garin commanded. He wasn’t sure if his radio was still operational. He hoped that it was. He also hoped that his snipers had already eliminated the rocket team. If they hadn’t, he was overpaying them.

He reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a penlight. Before he could turn it on, another light came on with dazzling brightness.

Incredibly, Roux stood there looking for all the world as if he were out for a Sunday walk. Even standing amid the tangled sprawl of the mercenaries, he looked grim and capable.

“Get them out of here,” Roux ordered. “If you don’t, you’re going to get them all killed.”

Garin didn’t bother with a response. He turned his attention to the doors. The van had come to a stop on its side. One of the mercenaries stood. Blood spattered the man’s face from a broken nose. He looked unfocused and unsteady on his feet.

The doors were jammed. Garin pushed against them, but they wouldn’t open. He stepped back, hampered by the sheer number of people inside the van. Then he braced himself and kicked at the doors. Nothing happened. He kicked twice more before the lock shattered and the twisted hinges screeched.

Conscious of the time passing and grimly aware of how quickly a rocket launcher could be reloaded, he grabbed the semiconscious man and heaved him through the open door. Then he reached for another. In the next second, Roux was there with him, helping him get the men out.

Two were dead. One’s neck lolled at a sickening angle, and the other had a chestful of metal shards from the side of the van that had caught the rocket round blast.

Roux helped Jennifer through the door. The woman seemed dazed, as well. She had a large cut over her right eye.

Roux looked back at Garin.

“Go,” Garin said gruffly. He shone his light around the cargo van’s interior and found the pistol he’d dropped, as well as an H&K MP-5. By the time he’d grabbed his prizes and turned around, Roux was through the door.

Garin looked out the door. The mercenaries began to recover and took up positions among the trees. Flames licked at the front of the van.

Then a spark leapt from one of the second-story windows again. Evidently the snipers hadn’t picked off the rocket team, who’d managed to launch another rocket.

“Garin!” Roux shouted hoarsely.

Garin started to respond, but the missile struck the middle of the van. The explosion knocked him from his feet. Everything turned black.

* * * *

Consciousness returned to Garin in a rush, as if he’d been deep underwater and suddenly surfaced. A face, blurred and indistinct, hung above him. He clenched a big fist and threw a punch. Almost at the same time, he realized the face belonged to Roux. The old man was kneeling beside him. His face was stretched tight in worry.

Roux slapped the blow away as if it were a bothersome insect. Garin thought he must really be out of it if Roux could block him so easily, but he also knew the old man excelled at self-defense.

“Can you get up?” Roux demanded.

Garin read his lips more than he heard him.

“Yes.” Garin tried to get to his feet, but his coordination was shot. He kept expecting another rocket to strike them. With the twisted wreckage of the van burning nearby, he knew the darkness held no safety for them.

Roux stepped forward and Garin felt himself being wrenched to his feet. He groaned in pain. Fiery agony wrapped his midsection, and he wondered if he’d broken his ribs.

In the next instant, a disturbance raked the ground where he’d been. Clods of black earth flew up and left small craters.

“Evidently Salome hires better killers than you do,” Roux groused.

“Look, if all you’re going to do is criticize, I’ll save myself,” Garin replied. He looked at the carnage spread over the estate grounds. “Some of these men worked for me for years. And I bought into your troubles. This is no trouble of mine.”

“You’re right,” Roux said. “I apologize.”

The announcement stunned Garin enough that he forgot about his pain and the fact that bullets tore through the trees around them. Roux rarely apologized for anything.

Roux put Garin up against a tree and looked at him. The old man’s eyes held deadly intensity. “If possible, you need to regroup your men. We can’t let Salome escape with that painting.”

Garin put a hand to the side of his face and adjusted his earpiece. He quickly sorted the living from the dead. Most of the team in the van were alive. Two were dead and three were out of the action. The other groups held their positions around the main house.

“The snipers are still in position,” Garin said. “Salome and her people know they’re out there, though. The snipers took out the men with the rocket launcher.”

“That’s good. Let’s just hope no one else picks up the damnable thing.” Roux glared through the leafy branches at the big house. “True warriors fight with naked steel and close enough to see their opponents’ faces. This is a sacrilege to honor.”

“Honor gets you killed on the battlefield,” Garin said. “It’s better to have superiority. That way, if the other side can see your show of force, maybe no one has to die.”

“Generals have thought that for centuries. It’s not any more true now than it ever was. If a man has to fight you—if you’re going to take something precious from him or threaten his life even if he surrenders—he will. And it won’t matter who he has to go up against to do it. That’s the measure of a man.”

Garin forced the pain from his mind. Survival was all that mattered.

“Can you stand?” Roux asked.

“Yes.”

Roux released him and stepped back.

Garin stood unsteadily, but he stood.

A shadow stepped out of the darkness and closed on Roux. Garin brought up the pistol in his fist and took aim automatically. His finger curled around the trigger.

Roux knocked the pistol aside as Garin fired. The bullet went wide of the target. Garin saw only then that it was Jennifer. She stared at him in shock.

“Sorry,” Garin said. “Didn’t know it was you.” For a moment, he was back in that old mind-set, when it had been Roux and him against the world. Plenty of people had been willing to kill them in those days. Looking back on where he was now, Garin realized things hadn’t changed much.

“Next time, look,” Jennifer snarled.

Chastened, but only a little, Garin reached out for her at the same time Roux did. They both pulled her to the ground just before a fusillade of bullets slammed through the trees.

“The muzzle-flash of your pistol—” Roux said.

“Alerted the shooters still inside the house,” Garin finished.

“Rocket launchers and machine guns,” Jennifer whispered. “We never went up against people like this when we were together.”

“That’s one of the reasons I didn’t stay,” Roux said. “Things in this world insist on getting decidedly more dangerous.” He hesitated. “I do apologize for the way I left.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little late for an apology?” Jennifer replied.

It was a night for wonders, Garin decided. They still lived in spite of everything, and he was witnessing a side of Roux that he didn’t think he’d ever seen.

“That’s up to you,” Roux said.

“Late or not,” Garin told them, “this is an entirely inappropriate place. Maybe you could shelve the reunion until after we get out of here alive and are one step ahead of the police.”

In minutes, Garin organized his men and they armed themselves again. He set himself with his back to a tree and called out to the snipers. “Ready?”

“Ready,” they responded.

“Sir,” the leader of the security team said, “you don’t have to do this. One of the other men—”

“None of the other men on this side of the main house are in any shape to draw fire,” Garin interrupted.

Four of the men from the van remained mobile. None of them were capable of a hundred-yard dash at the moment. Garin just hoped they could help provide covering fire.

“Let’s do this,” Garin said.

“Yes, sir.”

Garin took a deep breath and ignored the flaming claws that raked his left side. He held the MP-5 in both hands.

Roux’s hand fell on his shoulder. “They’re going to be looking for you.”

“That’s what we’re counting on,” Garin stated.

“Be careful.” Roux squeezed his shoulder and took his hand away.

Garin turned his attention to the seventy-plus yards that separated him from the next copse of trees.

Three snipers had the front of the main house in their field of fire.

“Now,” Garin said, and he broke cover. He drove his feet hard against the ground and sprinted for the trees. Bullets cut the air around him.

24

Before the man’s pistol had time to clear the holster, Annja slung her backpack over her left shoulder and reached for the sword with her right. She had her fingers curled around the hilt when she realized that Luigi and the restaurant staff would see it.

Annja pushed out her breath in frustration. She could explain muggers attempting to rob her in the restaurant, even though it seemed she was the only one they’d come for, but she couldn’t explain the sword.

“Ms. Creed.” The man pointed his weapon at her.

Unable to go on the offensive, Annja turned and ran. She took two long strides, vaulted into the air and threw her feet forward to slide across a table. She dropped her feet to the floor just as the table started to tip, then dropped to her knees. She caught hold of the table’s edge and yanked so that it tipped over completely and formed a momentary barrier. Luigi didn’t stint when it came to furniture. He bought it once and bought it to last.

Bullets hammered the overturned table but didn’t penetrate. Annja hadn’t thought they would. She’d seen a suppressor on the pistol’s snout. That meant the pistol fired subsonic rounds, which generally meant less power.

I’m going to have to reimburse Luigi for that table, Annja thought.

“Get her!” the man roared.

Annja stayed in a crouch as she pushed herself into motion. She kept her attention riveted on the hallway off the main dining area. The hallway led to the back door that led into the alley.

She thought briefly of Charlie, feeling badly that she’d left him behind. They’re not after him, she told herself as she grabbed the partition wall and made the sharp turn. They’re after you.

Her fingers slipped from the corner of the low wall that separated the hallway from the dining area. Out of control, struggling to keep her feet under her, she slammed against the opposite wall hard enough to drive the air from her lungs. She threw her hand out and pushed off into a full run.

Bullets hammered the length of the partition wall. Wooden splinters and jagged pieces that had been colorful ceramic figurines became a dust storm in front of her. She aimed for the panic bar that sealed the door.

Feet slapped the floor behind her.

At the exit, she twisted and slammed a hip against the panic bar. The security system screamed to life as the portal swung open. She passed through and turned right immediately, away from the door as it opened.

Stale, hot air washed over her face as she stepped into the alley. Piles of trash lined the narrow thoroughfare. Homeless people were already working the bags.

“Get down!” Annja yelled. “There’s been a robbery!”

Galvanized into action, the homeless people sought shelter at once.

Annja was tempted to hide, but she knew if she didn’t allow her pursuers to see her they might search the alley and kill everyone in sight. She couldn’t allow that.

So she ran. She stretched out her stride and concentrated on eating up the distance. Her backpack thudded against her back. Despite the adrenaline filling her system and the way she pushed herself, her breathing remained under control. She wanted to reach for the sword but she held off that impulse.

You can do this, she told herself. This is your city. Your turf. They can’t catch you here.

Her phone rang. The noise sounded so loud in the alley that it jangled her nerves. She caught sight of the brightness behind her as the restaurant’s back door opened. The discordant scream of the panic bar siren filled the alley again.

There was no warning this time. The man pursuing her merely opened fire. Bullets slashed the air around her and cracked against the alley wall.

Annja ran across the street as more shots were fired. A cab missed her by inches and slammed into a delivery van, which braked to an immediate halt.

The confusion disrupted the traffic flow and caused a sudden eruption of car horns.

Annja ran behind the taxi and cut in front of the stalled oncoming traffic.

Footsteps drummed up behind her, and Annja caught sight of a man in her peripheral vision at the same time she spotted a MINI Cooper bolting around the two cars ahead of it. She checked the distance and speed and guessed that she had just enough time before the small car sped through.

The man behind her threw himself in a dive. He managed to wrap a hand around her ankle, but he was on the ground when he did it. The MINI-Cooper driver was concentrating on Annja. He didn’t even see the man on the street.

The man had time to give one startled yelp, then the MINI Cooper smashed over him. His fingers peeled away from Annja’s ankle.

She tripped and went down, then forced herself up on one elbow. The heat from the MINI Cooper’s engine blew over her.

“Oh, my God!” the male driver exclaimed as he got out of his vehicle. “I didn’t even see him! He ran out of nowhere!”

Annja pushed herself to her feet and ran for the nearest alley. Her pursuers hadn’t given up.

* * * *

Long minutes later, once she was certain she’d outdistanced the men chasing her, Annja finally slowed her pace to a walk. When she looked around, she got her bearings and aimed for a second-story cybercafé above a Vietnamese bodega. It operated twenty-four hours and was filled by hardcore gamers, crackers and scammers.

After checking and still not seeing any sign of her pursuers, Annja entered the small stairwell and went up to the cybercafé.

“Hey, Annja,” the guy behind the counter greeted. He was in his early thirties, short and dark haired, with round-lensed glasses and an innocent face. Tattoos featuring koi and dragons covered every square inch of his arms.

“Hey, Graham,” Annja replied. “Can I get a booth?”

“Always.” Graham turned his attention to the massive control panel and performed a few keystrokes.

Graham’s wife, Helen, worked the small kitchen area behind the main counter. The café didn’t offer much in the way of a menu, but the clientele wasn’t picky. Anything with cheese accompanied by anything with caffeine or sugar generally met their needs for marathon gaming binges.

“Do you have a window booth open?” Annja asked.

Graham checked. “Yep. You want that one?”

“Please.”

“Done.” Graham looked up at her and smiled. “Anything else?”

“Hot chocolate?”

“Sure.” Graham turned and called the order out to Helen. “It’ll be a minute. I’ll bring it out to you when it’s ready.”

Annja nodded and said thanks. She turned and started to head for the booth.

“You okay?” Concern showed on Graham’s face.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“You look a little discombobulated.”

Annja smiled at him. It had always amazed her how many friends she’d made around the neighborhood. She was gone a lot, and she’d been raised in an orphanage. Either of those things was generally enough to kill any friendship potential in New York. But she’d still managed to get to know people.

“Mugger,” she said.

Graham frowned. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Annja said.

“She probably kicked the mugger’s butt,” Helen said from the kitchen.

“Actually,” Annja said, “I might have set a new record for the hundred-yard dash.”

“I’ve seen you make grown men want to beat their heads against a wall,” Helen said. “I’m disappointed.” But she was smiling.

“First rule of every fight,” Annja said. “If you can, run.”

“I know, but fighting just sounds so much cooler.”

“My wife,” Graham said, “the UFC wannabe.”

Helen grinned and suggested a physically debilitating procedure Graham could do to himself.

“I’ll bring that hot chocolate,” Graham promised.

* * * *

Saladin’s men didn’t give up easily. They cycled through the neighborhood in two-man groups.

As she took her seat in the booth, Annja glanced out the window and saw two men obviously walking a search pattern. She recognized one of them from Luigi’s, and that made her wonder what had happened at the restaurant.

She opened her backpack and took out her digital camera. A nearby streetlight illuminated the two men as they strolled down the sidewalk. There was enough light to shoot by, and Annja managed a half-dozen frames before they disappeared back into the night.

She took out her phone and called Luigi’s. The line was busy and she couldn’t get through. Anxiety chafed her. She was just about to call Bart when her phone rang and his number showed up on caller ID.

“Hey,” Annja answered.

“What’s going on, Annja?” Bart demanded. “I just got a call from central that you’d been involved in a gunfight at an Italian restaurant.” He sounded nearly apoplectic.

“It wasn’t a gunfight,” Annja said a little defensively. “A gunfight is when both parties have guns and they shoot at each other. I didn’t have a gun. They just shot at me.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

Bart cursed. Then he took a deep breath. “Where are you?”

“Do I need an attorney?”

“Why would you need an attorney?”

“I don’t feel like being arrested. I didn’t do anything wrong. They came into Luigi’s—”

“Luigi’s! Man, that was one of my favorite restaurants.”

Irritation filled Annja. “It was still standing when I left. You don’t have to refer to it in the past tense.”

“Who were the guys that came after you?”

Annja hesitated. Then she felt she owed him that at least. “I think they were part of the same group that attacked me in Prague.”

“You think?”

“I didn’t exactly want to stand around asking for bad-guy references.”

“What do they want?”

“Nothing I can give them.”

“Obviously they don’t know that or they wouldn’t be chasing you.”

Annja silently agreed. “Look, why don’t you call someone and find out if Luigi and his employees are okay. I don’t want to think any of them got hurt because of me.”

“I need to talk to you,” Bart said.

“You can. Just not at this moment. Find out about Luigi first.” Annja paused and knew that Bart was going to erupt at any moment. “Please.”

“All right,” Bart replied.

“And find out if Charlie is okay, too.”

“Charlie?”

Annja didn’t know how to finesse that one. “The homeless guy.”

“The homeless guy?” Bart’s voice went up a few notches again.

“Yes.”

“He was with you?”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing with him? I told you to stay away from him.”

“It’s a long story, okay? Just find out about Luigi. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.”

For a moment Bart was silent. Annja felt certain he was going to argue with her again. But he surprised her when he spoke in a quiet, controlled voice.

“You realize that old man could have led these guys to you.”

“I don’t think so.” But Annja kept thinking about how Charlie had disappeared right before the arrival of Saladin’s men.

“One phone call from him, they’re all over you.”

“I don’t think he did that.”

“You just told me you don’t know what’s going on.”

“I don’t,” Annja agreed.

“Are you at home?”

“No.”

“Good. Don’t go there.”

“I hadn’t planned on it.” Annja didn’t know where she was going to go at the moment. She wasn’t sure how much information Saladin had about her. As a television personality and archaeologist, her secrets weren’t as impenetrable as Roux’s and Garin’s.

“I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,” Bart promised.

“Thanks. And if Luigi is okay, tell him I didn’t mean to bring any of that there.” Annja broke the connection because she knew Bart wouldn’t want to let go.

Graham brought the hot chocolate and left without a word.

Annja gazed at her reflection in the window and thought about Roux and Garin. She hadn’t had any contact with them in two days. A lot, she told herself, could go wrong in two days.

25

One of the bullets struck Garin’s Kevlar vest high on the back of his right shoulder and nearly knocked him down. He stumbled but didn’t fall.

Muzzle-flashes marked the positions of the shooters within the main house. Garin reminded himself again that the men he’d brought with him were good, and that they’d get the job done.

He threw himself the last few feet across the ground, then popped up behind the trees.

“Sir,” the team leader said. “We confirm five men down inside. They won’t be getting back up again.”

Garin grinned at that. Despite the risk, there was nothing that made him relish life so much as potential death. For a while he’d thought maybe he’d gotten that trait from his father, through the blood that they shared. Then, over time, he’d realized that Roux was the same way. And Garin had thought he’d learned the recklessness that fired him.

He set himself. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Garin picked another spot, closer to the main house now, and broke cover again.

* * * *

Salome stood near one of the windows and watched as a man ran out of the darkness across a moonlit patch of ground. His destination was a stand of trees only thirty yards from the main house.

“Kill him,” Drake ordered. He stood over a man with a machine gun in the window. Drake held a bolt-action sniper rifle and used the window frame for protection.

The mercenary opened fire and unleashed a stream of bullets at the running man. Without warning, the mercenary jerked back into the room and sprawled on the floor.

Another bullet tore through the window frame and dusted Drake in splinters. He cursed and drew back. Grimly, he worked the bolt to chamber a new round.

Anger surged inside Salome. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. The painting wasn’t supposed to be a fake, and they weren’t supposed to get trapped in the house.

But Drake had prepared for that eventuality.

“It’s time to call in the air support, love,” Drake said. “And time for us to get gone from this place.”

Salome nodded. She didn’t trust her voice. She hated retreating. In frustration, she listened to Drake make the call and silently cursed Roux for all she was worth.

* * * *

Within minutes the snipers cleared the windows. Garin reached the front doors of the main house and stood guard while the rest of his team arrived. The two other teams breached the back side of the house.

Roux and Jennifer joined him, as well. The old man had picked up an assault rifle.

“Sir,” the team leader said.

“Yes.” Garin took point as they battered the doors open and went inside. Nothing moved in the great room.

“Comm has been listening in on the local police band frequencies. Cars—a lot of cars—are presently en route.”

“Understood. Pull in the exfiltration teams. We’re going to clear this area.” Garin had two helicopters waiting nearby. They were only minutes away from the coastline. If they ran hard and fast and stayed below radar, they could be gone before anyone could track them.

When the helicopter rotors sounded a moment later, Garin knew they didn’t belong to the aircraft he’d arranged. These had arrived far too quickly.

He ran up the stairs and avoided the bodies of the servants left strewed there. At the landing, he gazed out the window and saw a helicopter slide into view. The moonlight barely brought the wide black body out into relief as it coasted toward the rooftop. Then it was out of sight.

Garin cursed.

“That isn’t yours?” Roux asked.

“No.” Garin ran up the next flight of stairs and gave orders to shoot down the helicopter.

“You can’t do that,” Roux said. “The painting may be aboard.”

Garin immediately rescinded the order and told his snipers to take out any people they saw. His breath came hard and ragged in his lungs. Pain sliced at his side.

He followed the house design by instinct. Hundreds of years of dwelling in houses, many of them bigger than this house, gave him experience to draw on. He found the master bedroom easily. The information Jennifer had on the woman who had bought the Nephilim painting included the fact that they kept a safe on the premises.

When he shone his flashlight on the room’s interior, Garin saw the dead man on the bed and the bound woman on the floor. She’d been shot once in the head. Her mouth gaped open in a silent scream.

“Salome doesn’t leave any witnesses when she works,” Roux said. If the violence touched him, he didn’t show it.

The sight didn’t bother Garin much, either. For the past five hundred years he’d watched thousands die at the hands of others. Sometimes it had been during a war, but most of the time death had been close and personal. He no longer remembered how many people he’d killed.

“She’s headed for the roof,” Garin said. “We still have a chance to catch her.”

Roux entered the room and hunkered down beside a painting lying facedown on the floor. Cautiously, he turned it over. His light revealed the paint that had bubbled free of the canvas, but enough of the image remained that Garin easily identified it.

“Salome destroyed the painting?” Garin asked.

Roux touched the paint with a finger. “No. This was a fake.”

Garin didn’t question how the old man knew. It was enough that Roux did.

Sudden thunder erupted overhead. Garin knew the sound was heavy-duty machine guns.

“Sir,” the security team leader called over Garin’s headset, “their helicopter is at the back of the house. The snipers up front are blocked. I’ve got two men at the rear wall. They’re reporting heavy machine-gun fire. They’ve taken cover.”

“Understood.” When he gazed around the room, Garin ran the house design through his head. Where would a helicopter most likely be able to pick up people?

Then he remembered the widow’s walk at the back of the house. He looked at the back of the bedroom and saw a doorway that let onto the widow’s walk.

“Here,” Garin called, and led the way to the back of the bedroom. He held the machine pistol in both hands as he whirled around the doorway.

Only a sixth sense he’d developed from long years of combat saved his life from the gunman lying prone along the roof.

Garin spun back inside and looked up at the ceiling. After measuring where he thought the man was, Garin emptied a clip into the ceiling. Roux stared at him, but Jennifer stepped back and covered her head with an arm.

Deftly, Garin changed magazines in the weapon as he turned back to the widow’s walk. He stepped outside again just as the dead man rolled from the roof and dropped over the side.

The helicopter hung at the back of the house. Shadowy figures boarded through the cargo doors.

Garin lifted his weapon, but a door gunner mounted on the side opened up. Fifty-caliber bullets raked the widow’s walk and drove Garin back inside. Several more rounds chewed through the walls at the corner of the room. Fortunately the angle was too acute to allow the gunner to fire into the bedroom.

“They’re getting away,” Roux shouted above the chatter of the machine gun.

“I’m not the only one lying here with my face on the carpet,” Garin replied. The vibrations caused by the bullets penetrating the walls echoed in the floor. “Feel free to run out there and stop them.”

Roux cursed.

“They’re not getting away with anything,” Jennifer stated. “They thought they had the painting. They didn’t.”

“I know,” Garin replied. “But killing that woman would have given me immense pleasure. Sooner or later, it’s going to have to be done.”

The machine gun kept firing and the angle of the bullets altered, but the sound drew farther away. Garin pushed himself up and checked outside.

As he watched, the helicopter sped away and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it.

26

“Hey. Are you there?”

Annja stared at the instant-message window that floated to the top of her computer screen. It took a moment for her to recognize the name of the sender and associate it with the information she was looking for regarding the painting of the Nephilim.

Hey, Annja typed back. Good to hear from you.

Is this a good time?

It’s fine, Annja wrote. She took a sip of her hot chocolate. Graham had replenished it from time to time. She glanced at the time.

Forty-three minutes had elapsed since she’d talked to Bart. There had been no news about Luigi or Charlie. The Internet news services had only stated that gunfire had broken out at the restaurant but there weren’t any reported casualties. She chose to take that as a good sign.

You in the states? Her contact asked.

Annja hesitated over the question. She still wasn’t certain how Saladin’s men had found her at Luigi’s.

Hey, it’s cool. You don’t have to tell me.

I’m in the States. Sorry. Was working. Clearing my head, Annja quickly typed.

Cool. You wanted to know about the Medici story and the Nephilim painting.

Excitement warred with wariness in Annja. Things didn’t come easily in her field. She was prepared for disappointment.

Yes, she typed.

I heard the painting was sold in the Hague yesterday.

Annja’s heart raced. Is that where Roux and Garin are? In the Hague? While I’m here dodging bullets and getting my friend’s restaurant shot up?

I didn’t hear that, she replied.

This whole thing seems kind of hush-hush.

Why all the secrecy? Annja asked.

Not really secrecy. Just nobody believes it.

What? Annja asked.

That the painting’s got the power to destroy the world. I mean, the kind of crap you see in B movies. LOL.

I thought it was kind of intriguing someone had painted a portrait of a Nephilim and a Medici family member wanted it, Annja typed.

Cosimo, Yeah. He was an odd guy. But he was head of the family when Constantinople fell. He had a difficult job managing the family fortunes. Lots of stress.

Annja waited, willing the person to tell the story.

Cosimo was interested in the painting because of the power it was supposed to contain, her contact wrote. Back then, you gotta remember they felt like the fate of the whole world was being decided in Constantinople. Real Old Testament stuff. Everybody back then swore that God and demons took part in the battles.

Annja knew that was true.

Constantinople was the crossroads between the Eastern and Western cultures, Annja typed. It was an important place. A lot of people and ideas passed through there.

Are you a teacher?

Annja thought about that. Sometimes, she wrote.

Cool. So am I.

Where?

Naples.

Italy?

LOL. Florida.

How did you know about this painting? Annja wrote.

Got a double major. History and Art. A lot of people don’t realize how much those two fields overlap these days.

I do.

What field are you in? the contact asked.

Archaeology.

Awesome. I thought about getting into archaeology. I still might. I want to take a doctorate before I’m through. Maybe then.

Annja didn’t want to sound impatient, but she also didn’t want to spend the night comparing degrees. How did you find out about the painting? she asked again.

I studied with a brilliant man named Dr. Anton Krieger. Ever hear of him?

Annja had. There had even been a Discovery Channel special on the man after his recent death. I have. Smart man. It was a shame to lose him.

Yeah. He was one of those rarities—a really good guy. But he was eighty-nine when he died. He’d lived a full life. The funny thing is, he’d never gotten to figure out the truth about the Nephilim Medici was trying to find. Dr. Krieger told me he had papers Cosimo de’ Medici left behind. He felt certain the secret location of the Holy Grail was hidden in that painting.

Annja didn’t believe that. If a code had been embedded in the painting it would have been figured out long before now. There were a lot of legends about paintings hiding secrets.

That’s pretty hard to believe, she typed.

I know. I don’t think I bought into it, either. But it was weird when you started asking questions about the painting.

Did Cosimo de’ Medici find the painting?

Maybe. There’s a rumor that he did. One of his men supposedly located it in Constantinople as the city fell to the Ottomans. He was supposed to have gotten out of the city with the painting, but something happened to him on the way back to Venice.

What? Annja asked.

According to the story Dr. Krieger ultimately got, this guy was killed by a jealous husband in an inn. Nobody said what happened to the painting.

What did Dr. Krieger think happened to it?

He thought there was every possibility that the killer or killers saved the painting and sold it. Or they might have destroyed it on the spot.

Or the innkeeper threw it out the next morning because the dead man bled all over it, Annja typed. Or because he thought it might have been cursed. The painting was incredibly suggestive from what I’ve read.

Right. There was even some conjecture that Cosimo had the man killed to prevent anyone from connecting him to the painting.

Do you know who the artist was? Annja asked.

The original artist was a man named Josef Tsoklis.

Annja took a moment and opened up another window. She Googled the name quickly but didn’t get any hits.

Doesn’t appear to be much on Tsoklis, she typed.

Except for this one painting, he was pretty much a nonevent. He died soon after he did the painting.

Then why did Krieger get interested? Annja asked.

Because of the Grail story. Dr. Krieger was interested in the aspects of the story that equated it to the horn the archangel Gabriel was supposed to blow that would bring about the end of days.

That was something Annja hadn’t heard before. How did Krieger arrive at that conclusion?

There have been other papers written about that possibility. Dr. Krieger was just covering his bases when he did the work on this project sixty years ago. But it was interesting enough that it stuck with him. Shortly before he died a few months ago, we had a breakthrough.

What happened?

Dr. Krieger had discovered some sketches in Cosimo de’ Medici’s personal effects. They showed what Cosimo had been told the Nephilim painting looked liked.

That bothered Annja at once. If sketches existed, there was every possibility that the work had been copied more than once. If so, finding the original painting would be infinitely harder.

While I was working with him, her contact wrote, I noticed that some of the sketches were a lot like another painter with moderate success at the time. I was preparing a paper on Venetian artists.

The cursor sat blinking for a moment.

Anyway, I found some notes in Dr. Krieger’s collection that he got from the Medicis’ records. There’s a possibility that this second artist was in Constantinople and did some touch-up work on the Nephilim painting before the city was sacked.

Define ‘touch-up,’ Annja wrote.

Bringing the color back into line. Smoothing out some of the texture. Back in those days, artists had a tendency to glop the paint onto the canvas.

Who was the other artist? Annja asked. She waited, wondering if she’d scared him off.

27

If Dr. Krieger was alive, her contact wrote, I wouldn’t give you this. It was his story. And in a way, because I worked so long with him on this, maybe it’s mine.

I understand how you feel. Mentally Annja crossed her fingers as she typed. I’d be protective, too. But that’s not the story I’m after.

The problem is, I’m not going to be able to do anything with the information I’ve got. The funding for Dr. Krieger’s research was cut almost the day he died. With what I’m getting paid, I can’t continue.

Annja assured her contact she’d give him full credit in her research.

The artist’s name was Jannis Thomopoulos. He was born and raised in Venice, but he traveled extensively. Some of those travels were to Constantinople.

What did he do there? Annja typed.

Found clients and did portrait sittings. He did several watercolors and sketched a lot. Pretty much lived a hand-to-mouth existence till the end of his days.

Okay, that’s great. Annja felt her cell phone vibrate. She glanced at the caller ID and saw that it was Bart. Can I get in touch with you again if I need more information? she typed.

Definitely. And if you find anything out, please let me know.

Annja assured him that she would. Then she took Bart’s phone call.

“Nobody got hurt,” Bart said.

Annja heard the sounds of traffic passing over the telephone connection and knew that Bart was probably on his way to pick her up. Still, the news was good. She let out a sigh of relief and started packing her computer into her backpack.

“Luigi’s all right?” Annja stood and stretched.

“Once you bolted,” Bart said, “the guys chasing you vanished.”

“Luigi has cameras inside the restaurant.”

“We got the storage drives from the cameras. I looked at the images myself. That’s one of the reasons I’m calling back so late. We’ve got a chance at identifying the men who came after you. If they’ve got records.”

“What about Charlie?” Annja asked.

That was clearly a sore subject with Bart. “There was no sign of him. I tell you, Annja, you may feel softhearted toward that old man, but the possibility that he set you up has to have entered your mind.”

It had, but for whatever reason Annja couldn’t believe that was really what had happened. She slung her backpack over her shoulder, then took another glance at the street below the cybercafé. A few pedestrians moved along the sidewalk. New York never ground to a complete halt in any of the five boroughs. None of the pedestrians appeared to be Saladin’s men.

“Where are you headed?” she asked.

“I’m coming to pick you up,” Bart growled. “I’m thinking that may be the only way I’m going to get any sleep tonight.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Annja said, meaning that she didn’t want him to do that.

“Hey, we’re talking about my peace of mind here.” And that meant that Bart wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “You’re at the cybercafé a few blocks down, right?”

Annja thought about lying. She had her own life and her own agenda. She really didn’t need her friends butting into it. Except that what was going on these past few days had left her owing those people.

“Yes,” she replied. “I’ll be out front.”

“Not out front,” Bart said quickly. “Stay hidden. I take it you’ve looked around.”

“Two of them passed by right after I got here, but I haven’t seen them again.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re not there hanging around to see if you’re going to show.”

“I know.”

“I don’t get the impression that these guys are going to go away easily. Not if they’ve followed you from Prague.”

Annja waved at Graham and Helen, who were in the process of turning the evening shift over to the night manager and night cook. They waved back. A few of the gamers called out halfhearted goodbyes, still wrapped up in the imaginary worlds on their screens.

She told Bart she’d see him in a few minutes, then folded the phone and put it away. She went down the steps quickly and waited just inside the doorway. Her mind spun as she tried to process the new information.

Okay, the news about the other artist is good, she told herself. That gives you an avenue no one else who’s been looking for this thing has explored. Maybe Roux and Garin don’t even know about Thomopoulos. Just focus on that for the moment.

As she stood in the foyer, she felt the night’s chill soak into her bones. Her eyes burned with fatigue. She hadn’t slept well in two nights and it was catching up with her.

A moment later Bart’s unmarked car slid to a stop at the curb. She pushed through the door as Bart got out of the vehicle and looked around. His hand rested on the pistol holstered at his hip.

Sliding into the car was almost anticlimactic. Annja sat back in the seat and cranked the heater as Bart slipped back into the car.

“Did you just offer to take the homeless guy out for dinner?” Bart asked irritably. He pulled the transmission into Drive and pulled away from the curb.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t even have to give you a sob story about being hungry.”

“I could see that he was hungry. He looked like he hadn’t eaten well in days,” Annja said.

“Terrific. You and I need to compare notes on your idea of keeping a low profile.”

“I didn’t expect those men to show up here.”

“You also said you thought they were after this guy, Garin Braden.”

“I think they were.”

“Well, where’s he?”

Annja refused to look in Bart’s direction, but she watched his reflection in the windshield. He clearly wasn’t happy.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “How did those men find me?”

“I told you, the old man—”

“He didn’t have anything to do with those men showing up at Luigi’s,” Annja protested.

“Do you have some special mutant ability for detecting lies that I don’t know about?” Bart asked.

“It’s the same one you have.”

“That guy, he was burying the needle on my radar.”

“You never talked to him.”

“I didn’t have to,” Bart said.

“There’s something decent about him.”

Bart shot her a perplexed glance. “Decent?”

“Yes.”

“He’s covered in street muck—”

“He’s relatively clean.”

“He doesn’t have a pot to—”

“There are public bathrooms.”

“Yeah. Normally anywhere those guys are standing.”

Annja didn’t bother to respond.

Bart sighed. “Look, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or get into an argument here. I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t believe it. You want my opinion—and yeah, I get that you don’t, but here it is anyway—that old man sold you out.”

“If he was hooked up with the men who came to Luigi’s, don’t you think he’d be better dressed? Better able to take care of himself?” Annja asked.

“Maybe he’s disguised.”

Annja turned to him. “Are you listening to yourself?”

Bart held up a hand in defense. “Okay, maybe that’s a little far-fetched. But I’m tired. And I’ve been worried about you.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You could act a little more appreciative.”

“And you could be a better listener.”

Bart growled in frustration. His jaws clenched and he readjusted in the seat. “Maybe I could,” he said.

“There had to be another way those men found me at Luigi’s.”

“The easiest way is for the old man to tell them.”

“He was with me at the museum all afternoon. Why didn’t he call those men then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he couldn’t get hold of them.”

“Think, Bart. There has to be a reason. You’re the trained investigator. You tell me.”

After a moment of tense silence, Bart answered, “You used a debit card when you paid for the meal. I checked the receipts.”

Annja remembered that. She’d given her cash to Charlie. “They can track my debit card?” she asked.

“It’s possible. If you want to factor the old man out of the equation, that’s what you’re left with. It plays.” Bart scratched his chin with his thumb. “The easiest way is to figure the homeless guy for it.”

“No,” Annja insisted.

“Then those guys could have tracked you through computer databases. You used your card while you were in Prague, didn’t you?” Bart asked.

Annja took only a moment to remember that she had used her card while shopping. “Yes.”

“They came at you in Prague. If these guys are as well equipped as they seem to be—and getting fully automatic weapons in this city, while not impossible, is still difficult, not to mention expensive—then imagining they have a geek squad able to do something like that isn’t a big stretch.”

Annja didn’t think so, either. Suddenly she felt incredibly vulnerable.

“Hey,” Bart said softly. “You okay?”

Not trusting herself to speak, Annja just nodded and kept her eyes locked straight ahead of her. She walled all the feelings out and concentrated on herself. That was what she’d always done in the orphanage when things turned against her.

More than anything, she wanted to talk to Roux at that moment. She wanted to know what was going on. But for the first time she was afraid to talk to him because she knew he’d turn down her attempts to question him.

He’s not your father, she told herself angrily. He doesn’t owe you anything. Despite the fact that he helped you find the sword—and that hasn’t always gone well, has it?—he’s never promised you anything. And he hasn’t gone out of his way to give you anything, either, has he?

And how many times has he nearly gotten you killed?

Still, she remembered the way he’d talked to her when they were together on occasion. And she remembered the conversation she’d had with him when she’d gone out with Garin that night in Prague. He’d been angry at her, but part of that anger stemmed from the fact that she’d hurt him.

“Hey, Annja. Are you okay?” Bart asked softly.

Annja tried to speak, but couldn’t. She just nodded.

“It’s going to be all right,” Bart said. “I promise.”

It sounded good to hear Bart say that, but he didn’t know about swords with strange powers or men who could live for hundreds of years. Annja had the distinct feeling that if he had, Bart wouldn’t feel so sure of himself at the moment.

He touched her shoulder hesitantly. Then, when she didn’t push his hand away, he put his arm around her.

“It’s going to be all right,” Bart said softly. “We’ll figure this out.”

“I know,” Annja answered, but she said it because she knew he expected her to say that. She didn’t believe it. For the moment she just simply shared in the illusion.

But when they pulled up to her building, Charlie was sitting on the steps with Wally.

28

Garin was late getting back to the house Roux had arranged outside the Hague. As he’d seen to the care of the men who’d been wounded, and to the disposal of the bodies of those who had been lost, his anger had become well stoked. By the time he parked his Mercedes in the large driveway, he was seething.

The encounter at the Danseker estate was hours in the past. News stories about the break-in and subsequent murders filled the news channels. CNN and Fox News had picked up the story because of the macabre nature of the painting.

Images of the painting had already flooded the Internet. So had vicious theories about devil worshiping and ritual sacrifice gone wrong.

Dressed in a suit, Garin left the armored luxury sedan and crossed the flagstone walk to the big house’s front door. The structure was three stories tall and felt empty. Garin wondered if Roux owned it or had leased it for the effort to get the painting.

To the east, the sun had started to streak the sky in purple and gold. Garin didn’t plan to be in the Netherlands by the time it reached its zenith.

Inside the house, Garin could smell frying sausages and potatoes. He followed his nose to the immaculate kitchen at the back of the big house. He kept his hand on the gun holstered at his hip. The next unpleasant surprise that met him was going to receive a bullet between the eyes.

Jennifer stood at the stove, bathed in the soft glow of a small television mounted on the counter. The channel displayed the scenes of the violence at the Danseker estate.

She’d put on slacks and a sleeveless blouse. With the short heels she wore, she looked like an elegant wife making a quiet and private breakfast.

Garin stared at her. The woman was beautiful; there was no doubt about that. He could see what Roux had seen in her.

She moved smoothly and reached toward a ladle, but her hand instead sought out a small flat black autopistol hidden in a dish towel. In the space of a single breath, she came around in profile with the pistol leveled before her.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

Garin left his hand on his holstered pistol, just in case. “I came to see the old man.”

“Why?” Jennifer didn’t lower her weapon.

Garin frowned. Now he had to entertain the possibility that she’d feel threatened enough to pull the trigger. Garin planned on living, so he’d be forced to kill her. It seemed like such a waste.

“To talk to him,” Garin answered.

“About what?”

“To let him know I’m out.”

“You’re quitting?” She didn’t lower the pistol.

“Unless he comes clean with me, I’m done with this thing.”

Jennifer held the pistol steady. “He told me, on more than one occasion, that I wasn’t to trust you. He also told me that you had a rather nasty habit of killing people who got in your way. And that you were vengeful to the nth degree.”

“Really?” Garin grinned. It was all true, and a savage part of him took pride in the fact that Roux had recognized those capacities in him. Of course, the old man was no pushover, either. Maybe not as vengeful in the long run, Roux still didn’t suffer enemies who were determined to return again and again.

“Yes. So you can appreciate that we’re at something of an impasse here.”

“Well,” Garin said affably, “you’re going to have to trust me a little, unless you plan on shooting me. If you’re prepared to do that, then go ahead.” Even though he said it in an offhanded manner, he still tensed in expectation of a bullet striking home.

Her eyes narrowed, but Garin paid attention to the nail on her forefinger as it rested on the trigger. So far the nail hadn’t whitened with pressure.

“After what happened back there, I didn’t expect you to come here,” she said.

“Actually, I hadn’t planned to come. I left. Twice, in fact. Both times I ended up retracing my tracks. Finally, I gave up and came here.” He shrugged. “I didn’t expect a party on my arrival, but I hadn’t foreseen this.”

“You lie. You know Roux doesn’t have a lot of faith in you.”

“No,” Garin said. “That’s where you’re wrong. That old man has every bit of faith in my ability, and in my nature. I sometimes think he knows what I’ll do before I do. I think that’s why I haven’t been able to kill him when I tried.”

“He said you hadn’t tried as hard as you could have.”

Garin shrugged. Maybe that was the truth, too. The world would certainly have been a different place without Roux in it.

“But he sent for you to help him in this,” Jennifer said.

“He did.”

“And you came.”

“I did.”

“Both of you are bloody buggy—you know that, don’t you?” Jennifer lowered her weapon and put it back on the counter within reach.

“He tends to make people that way.” Garin took his hand off his pistol and took a seat at the breakfast bar behind her.

“I know he’s had that effect on me.”

“It’s not just you,” Garin said. “Did you burn the sausages?”

“No.” Jennifer seemed frustrated. Her hands shook with restrained emotion.

Garin abandoned his seat and went to the stove. “May I?”

When Jennifer looked up at him, there were tears in her eyes. “Sure.” She took a cup of coffee from the stove and slid away to rest a hip against the counter. “Do you know how to cook?”

“I’m a fabulous cook,” Garin assured her. He set the sausages aside to steep in their juices.

“I’m afraid the eggs are ruined,” Jennifer said.

Garin scraped at the blackened husks. “So they are.”

“We’ve more in the fridge.”

Concentrating on making a meal, giving his hands something to do, Garin relaxed.

“He seems to prepare for everything, doesn’t he?” Jennifer asked.

“Except for failure,” Garin agreed. “When it comes to that, when it’s something he actually cares about, he doesn’t do so well. Is he here?”

“Out back. In the garden.”

“He’s brooding,” Garin said.

“He claims to be thinking.”

“He can call it whatever he likes. He’s brooding.”

“I know. I’ve seen it before. Not often.”

“Do you like crepes?” Garin asked.

“Yes, but you needn’t go to all the bother.”

“I’m having crepes. It won’t be any trouble to make you some.”

Jennifer wiped her tears away. “Thank you.”

Garin looked at her. “For what?”

“Breakfast.” Jennifer shrugged. “For not making me kill you.”

“You wouldn’t have killed me. And you haven’t had breakfast yet. You may want that pistol back.”

Despite her sadness, Jennifer laughed.

* * * *

Salome, dressed tourist casual, walked through Schiphol Airport. Her short skirt and one-size-too-small blouse drew attention away from her face. She wasn’t wanted anywhere, but it still helped blunt identification by onlookers if something should happen. The papers Drake had secured came through his private security corporation, but sometimes complications arose.

Last night happened, didn’t it? she asked herself again. She hadn’t slept yet. After barely escaping, she and Drake had fled. She stopped at the gate and checked her watch. It was twenty minutes until boarding time.

Less than three minutes later, Drake joined her. He was dressed in jeans, good shoes and a pullover shirt. He looked as if he’d just stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine.

“Hello, pet,” he greeted her.

Salome tilted her head up and presented her cheek for a chaste kiss. Drake’s stubble grazed her flesh. He smelled of cologne and male musk.

“Did you get the luggage dealt with, dear?” she asked.

Drake took her by the elbow and guided her from the gate and toward the nearest wall where they could have a little privacy.

“I did,” he said. “There was some argument about weight allowances. I told you not to pack so much. I had to pay a little extra for your bags.”

Salome smiled at him. “But you know I’m worth it.”

“I do.” Drake grinned back at her, and the ease and expression—even the answer—weren’t all due to playacting.

When they reached the wall, they were all business.

“Did you find Annja Creed?” Salome asked.

“I did.” Drake shrugged. “I have to admit that the feat was a lot easier than I was expecting. You would think that anyone involved in the television industry would be more protective of her address.”

“Where does she live?”

“In New York City. One of the boroughs. Brooklyn.”

Salome hadn’t been there, but she knew that Drake had. His American contracts—especially assassination—often took him to the largest metropolises.

“Is she there?”

“Yes. I’ve got a team posted at her address. Are you sure this is the avenue you wish to pursue, love?” Drake asked.

“It’s all we have left to us. Roux—”

“Only got a look at a forged painting the same way we did,” Drake said.

Although she knew he was trying to allay her fears, his efforts weren’t successful. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that. He worked very hard to please her, and she almost loved him for that.

But she loved the power of the objects Roux knew about even more. If she could get her hands on even one of those, she would have everything she had ever imagined.

“You don’t know what Roux is like,” she said. “He knows so much.”

“Not enough for him to keep from chasing the same painting we were after.”

“I’ve never seen him pursue the painting this hard before. Even though the painting was counterfeit, I’m certain he’s holding something back that we haven’t yet thought of.”

Drake’s face hardened. “I think you’ve turned that old man into your own personal boogeyman.”

“I haven’t.” Salome captured Drake’s chin in her palm and gazed into his eyes. “I haven’t done that. I just know what he’s capable of. And this thing he’s after, it’s important.”

“How do you know that? You’ve never said.”

Salome knew she was going to have to come forward with something. “While I was with Roux—”

“While you were his assistant, you mean.”

Salome nodded. “Exactly. While I was helping him with his studies, I discovered his secret.” There was more, of course, and Drake refused to hear that. An assistant would never have been able to find the things she’d found. It had taken the betrayal of a lover to do that. And she’d betrayed Roux’s trust in her with her youth and beauty that bewitched so many men.

Drake took her hand and kissed her palm. “And what was the old man’s secret, love?”

“He has a secret journal. It’s a catalog of artifacts, talismans of power, that have been lost through the ages. I copied the journal.” Salome shook her head in frustration. “I haven’t managed to translate the whole book. There are too many languages that are unknown to me. And to every expert I’ve been to.”

She’d been careful about that. Any one of those linguists could do the same thing to her that she’d done to Roux. As a general rule, she didn’t even trust the knowledge they locked away in their heads, much less committed to paper. She’d left all of them dead in her wake.

As she told this to Drake, she wondered if it wouldn’t be better to kill him, as well. If things didn’t work out, she knew she’d have to. She couldn’t afford anyone else knowing what she knew. Roux, she was certain, felt the same way about her.

“The painting is a map,” Salome told Drake. Even as she told him that, she knew she was passing a death sentence on to him. She wondered if he knew. She suspected that he did, but from Roux’s hand, not hers. He’d never expect her to harm him. That was the power she had over him.

“A map,” he repeated. “To what?”

“Power,” Salome said. “Possibly the greatest power known to this world.”

“I don’t know what that means.” He showed her a troubled smile.

Salome shook her head, frustrated. “Nor do I. But I know that Roux cares about Annja Creed. You’ve had men watching them. They’ve seen them together.” She took a deep breath. “If we kidnap her, we can force Roux to tell us everything we want to know.”

“What will you do,” Drake asked softly, “if that old man doesn’t care about Annja Creed as much as you think he does?”

Salome looked into his eyes. “Why, I’ll kill her, of course. I want Roux to know that I’m not going to be trifled with.”

Drake grinned. “Have I ever told you how very attractive I find your bloodthirsty side?”

Salome touched his lips. “Many times.” She kissed him just as the preflight boarding for their plane was called. Excitement thrilled through her. It wouldn’t be long before they were in New York.

Then she would find out exactly how much Roux cared about his newest darling.

29

As Annja got out of Bart’s unmarked police car in front of her building, Charlie stood and waved from the steps where he’d been seated. His smile was big and generous, as innocent as a child’s.

“Hey, Annja,” he called. “I’m glad to see those men didn’t get you. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t, but you never know.”

Annja wanted to ask Charlie how he’d gotten away, but there wasn’t time. Agitation rolled off Bart in waves as he threw the car in Park and opened the door.

Wally pushed himself to his feet self-consciously and dusted his thighs off with his palms. He wasn’t one to drink outside and usually confined his beers to watching ball games in his own apartment. He bent down and gathered the empty bottles. There was a considerable number of them and he quickly realized he was going to have to make more than one trip.

Annja also knew the meeting wasn’t going to go well. Bart was out of the car in a heartbeat. His left hand slid around under his trench coat to the back of his belt. When it reappeared, he was holding a set of handcuffs that he kept mostly hidden.

If Charlie saw the cuffs or suspected what was coming, he gave no indication. He just stood on the steps and looked at Annja.

“Bart,” Annja said softly.

“No, Annja.” Bart’s voice was hard and resolute.

“What are you going to do?”

“Arrest him.”

“Isn’t he supposed to do something wrong first?”

Bart ignored her, which was something Annja hadn’t experienced before. Normally Bart was attentive and willing to listen to her.

Annja managed four quick steps and cut him off. She gazed into his eyes. “This is so wrong,” she said softly.

“Annja, please don’t do this.” Bart stared back at her, but his eyes were also on Charlie. “You’re interfering with a police officer in the pursuit of his duty.”

“He’s an old man.”

“He’s a danger,” Bart replied. “To you. And to himself.” His eyes softened a little. “Please let me do my job. There are agencies out there who can help him. For all you know, he walked away from his family to track you down and tell you the world was coming to an end. He could have sons and daughters who are worried out of their minds right now. Grandkids.”

He’s right, Annja admitted to herself. And that was the awful truth of the matter. She didn’t think for a moment that Charlie had set her up with Saladin’s men. But the scenario Bart described was entirely possible.

“Annja,” Bart said quietly.

Reluctantly, she stepped aside and folded her arms across her chest.

Bart went forward. “Turn around. Put your hands behind your back.” His voice was hard, totally cop tone.

“What?” Charlie asked. He stood wavering slightly on the steps. He must have been feeling the beers.

“Sir,” Bart barked, “put your hands behind your back, please.”

“But why? I haven’t done anything.”

Bart moved quickly to step in behind the old man and grab his left arm. He slipped the cuff around Charlie’s left wrist with practiced ease. The metal clicked as it closed.

Annja watched, bereft.

“Let me go,” Charlie cried. “I haven’t done anything.”

Bart put a knee behind the old man’s leg and snapped it forward, buckling Charlie’s leg until he rested awkwardly against the short wrought-iron railing that lined the steps.

“I’m taking you into custody for your own good,” Bart said. “You need to relax. I’m not going to hurt you.” He captured Charlie’s other arm and pulled it behind his back, as well.

“No!” Charlie bellowed. “This isn’t right! I haven’t done anything!”

“Sir,” Bart said. “Please stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Charlie fought, but it didn’t do any good. Bart had size and strength and youth on his side. He kicked the old man’s feet out from under him as gently as he could and forced him to sit on the steps.

“Annja,” Charlie pleaded, staring at her as if he’d been betrayed.

“I’m sorry,” Annja said. She felt the tears burning in her eyes again, but she didn’t let them fall. How had everything gotten so screwed up?

“Annja,” Charlie pleaded again. He struggled against Bart, but Bart sat behind him and kept one hand on the short chain linking the cuffs.

“It’s for your own good,” Annja said, hoping she could make the old man understand.

“No,” Charlie said. “No, it’s not. You can’t let him do this. You need me. Annja, you need me! Without me, the world is going to end!”

“No, it’s not,” Annja said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Bart talked on his cell phone, and Annja heard enough of the conversation to know that he was calling in someone from psychiatric care.

Wally left the bottles in a stack and came over to stand with Annja.

“I didn’t know anything was wrong,” Wally apologized. “He just came by. Said he wanted to see you. I told him you weren’t here, but he said he’d wait. I figured I’d wait with him. Then I figured we’d wait better with a beer.” He shrugged. “I guess maybe the beers got outta hand a little.”

“Yeah,” Annja said hoarsely. “I guess they did.” As she stood there listening to Wally and watching the heaviness in Bart’s face, she realized that none of them were happy.

* * * *

After fifteen minutes of protesting his innocence and telling Annja that she needed him to stop the world from ending, Charlie fell quiet. He leaned against the railing and stared at her.

It took almost an hour for the psychiatric team to get there. When the ambulance pulled to a stop out in the street, the whirling lights flashed across the neighborhood and drew a few more of the neighbors out of their homes.

Bart used his badge to force most of them to stay back. He’d also suggested that Annja go inside and not hang around.

“I can’t,” Annja said. She stayed outside and waited and watched, and finally got cold enough to shiver.

Wally retreated to his apartment and returned with one of his baseball jackets. It was too big and the sleeves hung past Annja’s fingertips, but it blocked the wind.

The psychiatric team wore heavy jackets over pale blue scrubs. They talked to Charlie calmly and tried to get him onto the gurney by himself. When that didn’t work, they manhandled him. Charlie fought them with all his strength, but in the end he couldn’t prevail. Still, he’d fought them fiercely enough they’d had to medicate him.

When the drugs filled his system and sapped his senses, Charlie became a loose bag of bones. The attendants loaded him onto the gurney with ease, then belted him on across his forehead, chest, hips and knees.

All through the humiliating event, Charlie stared at Annja.

“Could I have a minute?” she asked as they were about to load him into the back of the ambulance.

“We really gotta get going,” a guy with dirty-blond hair and a heavy five-o’clock shadow said.

“Hey, man,” a big black attendant said. “Cut the lady some slack. Her grandpa ain’t doing so good here. This wasn’t any fun for anybody. Give her a minute.”

Annja put her hand over one of Charlie’s. “I want you to get better,” she said.

“I am better,” he croaked in the drug-induced slur. “I’m not supposed to be here. You and I are supposed to stop the sleeping king from destroying the world.”

“The sleeping king,” Annja said confidently, “isn’t here in this world to destroy it. He’s here to save it.”

“Not when he’s lost,” Charlie said. “And he’s lost.”

With a supreme effort, Charlie focused on Annja. “You’ve got to save him.”

“Who?” Annja asked.

“The sleeping king.”

“Who’s the sleeping king?”

The two attendants hefted the gurney, collapsed the legs and shoved it into the back of the waiting ambulance.

“Save the sleeping king,” Charlie said. “He’s been hurt too much for too long to know what he’s doing.”

“Who?” Annja asked. She started to pull herself into the ambulance with the gurney.

The black attendant blocked the way. “Sorry, miss,” he rumbled. “Grandpa’s gotta go. The docs will get him better in no time. You’ll see. We got great docs at Peaceful Meadows.”

Bart stepped behind Annja and wrapped his arms around her. “Annja, come on. Back off. Let them do their jobs.”

“Just give me a minute,” Annja said.

“No. This isn’t going to get any easier.” Bart held tight enough that she knew she’d have had to hurt him to get free.

“Annja,” Charlie called from inside the ambulance.

“I’m here.”

“You’ve got to save the sleeping king.”

The black attendant shut and locked the ambulance doors. He turned to Annja and gave her one final reassuring smile. “He’s gonna be better the next time you see him. You’ll see.”

Stunned, her mind whirling from everything that had been going on, Annja stood helplessly and watched the ambulance drive away.

Bart released her and stepped back. He kept his hands in front of him in case he had to defend himself.

“You gonna be okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Annja answered. She didn’t look at him, and she knew she didn’t sound fine. She didn’t know how she sounded.

She took a deep breath and let it out. More than ever, she wished she had some way of getting hold of Roux and Garin.

“Annja,” Bart said.

She acknowledged him with a brief glance, then quickly looked away. “I don’t really feel like talking right now.”

“Sure.” Bart stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “I get that. I just had to do what I did, you know.”

“I know.”

“He needs help.”

He needs my help, Annja thought. She didn’t understand the whole “sleeping king” reference, but she understood that someone was in some kind of trouble.

“They’ll give him help,” Bart was saying. “This clinic is really good. I’ve run street people through there before. They care about them.”

Annja didn’t believe that. When she glanced at Bart, he ducked away from her gaze. He didn’t believe it, either.

He’d acted to protect her. She knew that. But it didn’t make her feel any better.

“I can come up,” Bart offered. “Those guys that came after you are still out there.”

“I know. And no, you can’t come up. I don’t want to deal with that right now.” If Bart came up, Annja knew he’d spend hours justifying his actions to her. He wouldn’t understand that she’d already accepted what he’d done. She just didn’t like it, and that wasn’t going to change anytime soon.

In a day or two—or three—everything would be back to normal between them. She just needed to know that Charlie was being cared for.

“You shouldn’t stay here,” Bart said. “If they found you by your debit card, they can find your address.”

“I know.” Annja turned and headed up the steps.

“You should get a hotel room and get out of here,” Bart said.

“If I check into a hotel, I’ve got to show ID,” Annja said. “They’ll log that.”

“Annja, you can’t stay here.”

“I know. I know. Just give me some space here, okay?” Annja walked away from him and didn’t look back.

30

“How long have you known him?” Jennifer asked, meaning Roux.

“A long time,” Garin answered. They sat at the small breakfast table where they both watched over Roux.

The old man sat in the garden. Colorful blossoms covered bushes and plants. Garin couldn’t identify them but he liked them and he knew why Roux sat there in the muted sunlight under the sighing boughs of the trees.

The old man had always seemed closely aligned with nature, always more at home there and able to make use of it—whether as camouflage or in making herbal remedies—than he’d ever been able to demonstrate to Garin.

Garin hadn’t ever seen Roux looking so old. The realization was startling, and for a moment he considered going out to check on the old man. But he knew from past experience that would only make Roux angry. Roux would only talk when he was ready to talk.

“The way he talks about the two of you,” Jennifer said, “it sounds as though you’ve known each other forever.”

“We have.”

“He left me thirteen years ago without explanation.” Jennifer pinned Garin with her gaze. “You look almost young enough to be my son.”

Garin smiled at her. “That’s very flattering, but—if I may be so bold—you don’t show your age.”

“I don’t hide it as well as you do.”

“I owe it all to good genes.”

Jennifer looked doubtful. “He doesn’t trust you.”

Garin sipped his coffee. “He told you he has reason not to.”

“Yes.”

“He does.”

Jennifer studied him, and wistfulness touched her dark eyes. “That’s the way it is in families sometimes. You always hurt the ones you love.”

“We’re not family.”

“The way you fight and bicker? The way you dropped everything when he asked? The way he—and I know how pigheaded and stubborn he can be about asking for help—decided to ask you for help?” Jennifer shook her head. “You could have fooled me.”

“I was just a poor bastard child when Roux found me. He’s fond of saying that I’ve changed two of the three. I’m rich and I’m grown, but he says my breeding shows through.”

“That sounds like something he would say when he’s ranting.”

They watched Roux in silence for a while.

“You honestly don’t know why he wants the painting?” Jennifer asked.

“No. I wish I did. It might make it easier to figure out what I’m going to do.”

“I thought you were going to leave.”

Garin sipped his coffee. “I am. I just don’t know if I’m going to regret it later.”

“You mean, if he needs you.”

“Or I missed out on discovering some of those big secrets he’s been hiding all these years,” Garin said.

Out in the garden, a cloud passed overhead and blunted the sunlight falling on Roux. The old man gazed up at the sky in annoyance. Then he shook himself and stood. He stamped his feet to restore circulation, then headed for the house. He opened the door and let himself inside. He sniffed, then looked at the stove.

“Who made breakfast?” Roux demanded.

“Garin did,” Jennifer said.

Roux harrumphed. “Didn’t anyone think to invite me?”

For a moment, Garin thought about arguing and pointing out Roux’s own quarrelsome nature when he got in a snit. Then he realized that it would only be a waste of breath. Roux would never admit he was at fault.

Instead, Garin caught Jennifer’s arm when she started to get up from the table. “I’ll fix his breakfast,” he said.

Roux eyed him with bright challenge. “Can you resist the urge to poison it?”

“That’ll be hard.” Garin reached into the refrigerator and took out the batter he’d set aside. He’d known Roux would want breakfast.

“I’ll be watching you carefully,” Roux admonished.

“I wouldn’t expect any less.”

As he went about his preparations, Garin remembered how many times he’d fixed the old man’s breakfast while they’d ridden together on horses, then in trains and in cars as they’d explored the world and searched for the talismans for which Roux claimed to be a caretaker.

For most of those years Garin had resented the obligation of making breakfast and taking care of the baggage, even when Roux had been the only thing that had stood between him and certain death at the hands of bandits, wild animals or simply starvation.

They’d been through a lot together when they’d been together. Even now their lives weren’t totally separate. Since Annja had claimed Joan’s sword, they’d been drawn together on several occasions.

But as he fixed breakfast, he couldn’t help thinking that this might be the last time. What surprised him most was how sad that might be, and how much relief was involved.

“What are you going to do?” Garin asked.

“I’m going to pursue the painting.”

“The painting wasn’t real.”

“Not that one. You have to look beyond what we’ve discovered so far, Garin. I’ve told you that since you were a boy. You have to think beyond what you believe you know, because you don’t truly know even that.”

Maybe poison would have been good, Garin thought. He refused to be baited by Roux’s mysterious comment.

Jennifer, however, wasn’t so inured. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“I’m talking about the painting that sold at the auction.” Roux poured himself a cup of fresh-brewed tea Garin had prepared and sat at the table with Jennifer. “Someone brokered the sale. Someone painted the painting. I want to know who that was.”

“You think whoever made the copy knows something about the original,” Jennifer said.

“Yes,” Roux replied.

“Unless,” Garin stated pointedly, “it was merely someone who had enough knowledge of the painting to take advantage of old fools looking for it for reasons they don’t care to share with anyone else.”

Roux glared at Garin. “As you know, I keep my own counsel in many matters. I always have. This is one of those matters.”

As he looked at Roux, Garin knew he didn’t want anything to happen to the old man. At least, he didn’t want anything to happen to him today.

Tomorrow might be another matter.

And he also knew what he was going to do. Without another question or even another word, he finished making Roux’s breakfast. Then he rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher.

When he was finished he rolled down his sleeves, got his coat from the back of the chair where he’d left it and made himself presentable once more.

“I’m going to Istanbul,” Roux said. “I was thinking that you might get some of your mercenaries and have them—”

“No,” Garin said.

Roux regarded him with an owlish expression.

“I’m done working in the dark,” Garin said. “I’m done being treated like a child, and I’m tired of paying men to die for you for something I don’t understand. If you want me to help you, then you tell me why we’re doing it and what that painting means.”

Anger ignited in Roux’s eyes. “Then I don’t need your help.”

“That’s fine.” Garin forced himself to turn to face Jennifer. “My advice to you is to run. Whatever it is that you think you feel for this old man, whatever you think you owe him, you don’t. It’s too costly. He’s mean-spirited and thinks everyone but him is stupid and a dullard.” He paused. “If you remain foolish or beholden to him and he lets you, I wish you only the best. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

Without another word, Garin left the house. He didn’t look back. It was a struggle not to do that. Even worse, the silence that followed him out of the big house was crushing in its emptiness.

But he knew what he was doing. He had a plan. It wasn’t necessarily a good one, but it was the best that he could do.

31

In the end, not having anyone else she could call, Annja called Stanley Younts, the bestselling writer she’d met while searching for a friend’s murderers. He was able to arrange a well-secured hotel room at a moment’s notice.

The hotel staff was in awe, though many of them were disappointed when they found out the author himself wouldn’t be there. Stanley had a lot of fans.

“I’ll reimburse you for the hotel room,” Annja had offered. “When I get the final bill, I’ll cut a check. After this confusion has been cleared up. I don’t want these people trying to find me through you.” She had worried that they might track her bank-account activity.

“It’s no sweat,” Stanley had said. “Stay at the hotel as long as you like. It’s on me.”

Judging from the ornate lobby and the attentiveness of the staff, Annja knew the hotel stay was going to be expensive. “I can’t let you pay for this.”

“Sure, you can,” Stanley said, and she could hear the broad smile in his voice. “Did I ever tell you how much I made off that book I loosely based on our little adventures chasing that relic?” “No.”

“Well, between you and me and the wall, it’s an obscene amount. And it’s still rolling in. You just kick back and enjoy yourself. If you want, I can recommend some good bodyguards. I can send you one of my guys.”

“No. That’s all right. I just need a place where I can stay incognito. I can handle this.” If she couldn’t, Annja didn’t know what she was going to do. But she knew she couldn’t depend on other people. That had never been her way.

“It’s your call,” Stanley said. “But if you need anything, you know the number. Don’t hesitate.”

“I won’t. And thanks, Stanley.”

“My pleasure. Just make sure you take care of yourself. This sounds like a story I want to hear someday.”

Annja just hoped that the story had a good ending.

* * * *

After arriving at the hotel, Annja had started with the phone. She called art galleries in Istanbul first, asking about Thomopoulos, the man who had touched up the painting of the Nephilim, rather than Tsoklis, the man who had painted it originally.

If Roux had been tracking the painting for years, Annja felt certain he would have found any information that might be had there. She had to take a different route.

By seven o’clock that morning, after nearly five hours nonstop on the phone and on the computer, she had one of the first connections she needed.

“What did you say your interest in Thomopoulos is?” the woman at one of the Istanbul art brokerages asked. She sounded older and British. Her name was Liz Sharpe-Withers.

A busybody, Annja thought. That was a problem when dealing with people instead of a dig. An archaeologist sifting through the earth worked to satisfy her own curiosity, not assuage that of others. Ultimately, in the archaeologist’s point of view, they would all be served if her questions were answered.

But not answering could offend those whose help was necessary.

“I’m doing research into Thomopoulos’s influence on other artists,” Annja said.

“Who’s this for?”

Annja thought for just a moment, then seized on what she figured would be the most exciting and the hardest to confirm. “Steven Spielberg is putting together a new movie. Kind of a follow-up to Schindler’s List.”

“Well, that’s exciting.”

“It is,” Annja agreed. People loved being involved with movies. While she’d been in Prague with the special-effects crew, she’d heard a lot of the younger members of the crew pitching movie ideas to each other.

“But what does that have to do with Thomopoulos’s artwork?” Sharpe-Withers asked.

“The film centers around all the art Hitler’s soldiers ‘liberated’ from various families during the war,” Annja said.

“That’s a hot topic.”

Annja knew that it was, and it was the perfect cover for what she was doing.

“In my research I discovered that Thomopoulos had worked on a painting Hitler’s troops had hunted for during the Second World War.”

“There was such a painting. It was originally painted by—let me think—”

“I’ve got it here in my notes,” Annja said, and she paused as if she were checking her notes instead of simply knowing the name. “Tsoklis.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Sharpe-Withers paused. “It’s also very strange.”

“It is?”

“That painting was supposedly sold in the Hague yesterday. It’s been in the news. I’m surprised you haven’t seen it.”

“Really?” Annja checked some international news sites. She found a headline that promised details about a “bloody break-in and art theft” in the Hague. Photos of the victims, Mrs. Ilse Danseker and an unidentified man, were featured prominently.

“Yes, it’s—”

“I have it here on the Internet,” Annja said. She scanned the information quickly, searching for Roux’s or Garin’s name or description. Neither of them was mentioned.

“The police there appear to be quite stymied,” Sharpe-Withers said. “Also, the painting that the unfortunate woman—”

“Ilse Danseker,” Annja supplied.

“Yes. Her. Anyway, that painting appears to have been the catalyst for the break-in.”

“But it was fake?”

“Yes.”

“I thought the painting was lost,” Annja said.

“Apparently it was in a private collection for some time. That’s what usually happens with art pieces. Something as old as this, families will sometimes hold on to it for generations.”

Annja’s pulse quickened and she felt some of her fatigue evaporate. “Do you know the seller?” she asked.

Sharpe-Withers hesitated. “I could probably find out, now that this has all come to light. Of course, no one may be talking. It’s possible that the owners fell on hard times and had a forgery created of the original so they could sell the forgery and keep the original.”

Annja knew enough about the art world to know that was a frequent scam. But with all the verification possible these days, such things were harder to pull off. To complicate matters even further, several paintings believed to be originals were either copies by the original artist or knockoffs by others equally gifted and from the same time. Even museums had forged art hanging, sometimes with the knowledge of the curators.

“If you could do that,” Annja said, “I’d be very grateful.”

* * * *

Three and a half hours later, Annja scored again on an e-mail from a small museum. An assistant curator was familiar with Thomopoulos and his work, including the painting of the Nephilim.

The man, Anil Patel, had left a phone number. Annja called at once, hoping to catch him before he left for the day.

“Until the murders at the Hague yesterday,” Patel told Annja in a clipped Indian accent, “I’d thought the Nephilim painting was merely a legend. Or a rumor.”

“I wasn’t sure.” Annja paced the large hotel room. She wanted to go out, get away from the room and simply be in the wind. Usually she could take days and weeks of being alone, but now she wanted to see, hear and feel other people around her. “It would have been a shame if it were, of course. But for the purpose of the movie, it doesn’t really matter.”

“The murders were a very strange thing,” Patel said.

Annja massaged a shoulder. Her eyes burned and she felt the stiffness in her legs and back. She missed being physical. She needed a session at the gym, some time with the heavy bag and the speed bag.

She also needed to know how Charlie was. The homeless man hadn’t been far from her thoughts.

“It was a waste of life,” Patel said. “And it was made even more wasteful when the painting turned out to be a forgery.”

“I know.” Annja turned away from the window. A glance at the time in the lower right corner of her computer revealed that it was eight minutes to ten—almost five o’clock in Istanbul. Patel would be going home soon. “Do you know if any of Thomopoulos’s journals of sketches or his personal life remain?”

“One of the other museums has a small collection of his works,” Patel said.

“Collected or original?” Annja asked.

“Does it matter?”

“The closer to original, the better. The director on the film is insisting on as much authenticity as we can fake.” Annja was sticking with the movie cover story. “Authenticity, especially in a film like this, is everything to the director.” She’d heard that a lot in Prague.

“I understand. I believe one of the smaller museums, the Holy Constantinople Museum of the Apostles, has a collection of Thomopoulos’s journals.”

Annja could barely contain her excitement.

“You won’t find much in the way of helpful research in Thomopoulos’s journals, though. Primarily they’re just sketchbooks. Thomopoulos was largely illiterate. He was self-taught in art, but he never learned to read or write.”

“He was a craftsman,” Annja said.

“I’m afraid so. However, there are several other artists from the same time period that I could recommend. If you’d like.”

“I would,” Annja replied.

32

The Peaceful Meadows Mental Health Clinic was located in Brooklyn not far from where Annja lived. She’d been surprised at how close it was, and she’d wondered if Bart had chosen to send Charlie there for that very reason.

The clinic consisted of six buildings, all of them constructed of ancient gray stone. Annja stared at the squat structures. They looked like stunted gargoyles heaped on the green grass that surrounded them.

Annja decided that she wouldn’t ever want to be in a place like Peaceful Meadows. The landscaping inside the high fence was lovely, but she noted that few of the residents were out in the sunshine and the breeze.

She waited in the main office for over an hour before a young man came out to speak with her. He quickly explained that Charlie—they still hadn’t identified him, but the young man seemed certain that would happen at any moment—didn’t need company.

“We’re still adjusting his meds to get him to calm down,” Dr. Paul Davis said. He was young enough to have just finished med school. He also didn’t seem to have any particular affinity for his patients. “Outside stimulus is going to be a problem for him.”

“When do you think I could see him?” Annja asked.

Davis steepled his fingers in a manner that he wouldn’t be able to properly pull off for another fifteen years. Annja almost laughed at him but stopped only because she knew it would only cause problems.

“Are you family, Miss Creed?” the doctor asked officiously.

“No.”

“Then I’m afraid you really don’t have any rights where Charlie is concerned.”

“I’m his friend.”

The doctor grinned smugly. “Trust me, Miss Creed, in the state that old man’s in, he doesn’t know what world he’s in, much less who else might inhabit it. Friends aren’t much help there.”

“He wasn’t that bad,” Annja said. “When I spoke with him, he was coherent.”

“Really?” Davis flipped through a thin file folder in front of him. “Since he’s been here, all he’s done is ramble about saving the world.” He took out a ballpoint pen, clicked it open, made a few notations on the papers and closed the folder.

Annja sat quietly in the straight-backed chair even though she wanted to scream in frustration. She hated administrative apathy.

“He’s even built you into the architecture of his fantasy. So you see, your visit to him would only be detrimental to what we’re trying to accomplish with him.” Davis pushed Charlie’s folder to one side and reached for another. “Now, if you’ll allow me, I’ve got a ton of work to sign off on.”

Summarily dismissed, Annja left.

A few minutes later, she stood out by the curb and searched for a cab. She felt agitated and frustrated. It was never a good combination. Then she felt a presence beside her.

Automatically, she dropped into a self-defense stance on the balls of her feet as she spun around. Her hands came up to frame her face and head.

Charlie looked down at her and smiled. “Hello, Annja.”

Stunned, Annja could only stare at the man. He wore a hospital gown and looked clean and happy.

“What are you doing out here?” Annja asked.

“You came for me, didn’t you?” Charlie nodded and waved to passing pedestrians. Most of them just ignored him, or they glared at Annja as if she was somehow responsible for his presence.

Annja lowered her hands and smiled, feeling better almost instantly. “Yes. I did come for you.”

“And they didn’t allow you to see me.”

“No.”

“That being the case, since you weren’t going to be able to work within the system to free me, I decided it was best to free myself.”

“How did you do that?”

With a grin, Charlie leaned down and whispered conspiratorially, “I waited till no one was looking, then I sneaked out.”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Annja couldn’t help laughing in delight. She couldn’t believe it had been that easy.

Charlie laughed, too, but his voice was slightly off, a little too loud and a little too forced.

“You’re drugged,” Annja said, understanding then.

Grinning, Charlie said, “I have to admit, the medicines are quite entertaining.” He looked around. “I seem to see brighter colors. And if I stare just right, it seems as though I can see things from the corner of my eye that I couldn’t normally see.”

“What things?”

“Strange things, I assure you. I’m pretty sure they’re not real. You don’t see that, do you?” Charlie pointed across the street.

Annja looked but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Pedestrians walked in front of small businesses and shops. “What?”

“The griffin.”

Annja looked again, searching for a statue or an image painted on a window for a creature with head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. It wasn’t there.

“No,” she said.

“Ah, well, it’s probably better that it’s not real.” Charlie looked back at the entrance to the hospital grounds.

At that moment two burly men in hospital scrubs bounded out of the gate. They looked around, then one of them pointed in Charlie’s direction.

“Oops,” Charlie said. “We’d better make haste. My escape attempt no longer possesses stealth, I’m afraid.” He threw up a hand.

Annja stepped between Charlie and the approaching men. She knew it wasn’t going to do her relationship with Bart much good for her to help Charlie escape, but she couldn’t just leave him again.

Brakes squealed at the curb.

When Annja looked back over her shoulder, she saw that a cab had braked to a halt.

“Your carriage awaits, my lady.” Charlie opened the cab door and bowed.

Despite the desperate nature of their circumstances, Annja grinned and slid into the backseat of the cab. Charlie followed her with alacrity and managed to slam and lock the door before the two orderlies reached the vehicle.

One of the orderlies beat on the top of the cab and demanded that the driver unlock the door.

“Sheesh,” the driver said as he pulled away from the curb and merged with traffic. “What’s the problem with those guys?”

Annja couldn’t believe it. They were in front of a mental-health facility, in front of a sign that even offered a traffic advisory about mental patients, and Charlie wore a hospital gown. Maybe it was just New York and maybe it was the jaded nature of the city’s cabbies.

“Where are we going?” the driver asked.

Annja gave the name of her hotel.

“Sure thing. Have you there in a couple shakes.”

“Well,” Charlie said, relaxing in the back of the cab, “that was certainly exhilarating. Do you think we can get something to eat when we get to the hotel? I’m famished.”

“Yes.”

Charlie eyed her speculatively. “And you need to get some rest if you’re going to save the world.”

Annja started to ask him if he really believed she was going to do that. Then she stopped herself. Of course he did. But she didn’t. All she was trying to do was find a painting, and maybe the secrets it held.

“There’s going to be a lot of danger,” Charlie said thoughtfully. His rheumy eyes glanced around the cityscape. “So many things are different these days. And we have a number of powerful enemies arrayed against us.”

Annja silently agreed with that.

Charlie looked at her. “You’re a very special young woman, Annja Creed.”

“Because of the sword?” Annja whispered.

Charlie laughed and shook his head. “No. Of course not. The sword was drawn to you because you are special. You were marked for your destiny the day you were born.”

What he said sounded crazy, but so had several of the conversations Annja had had with Roux and Garin. Yet at the same time his words held the timbre of truth.

* * * *

Annja woke thinking that her travel alarm went off. Her hand shot out and silenced it only to discover it was 10:37 p.m. She’d set the alarm for midnight, hoping to get an early start tracking down the museum curator in Istanbul.

Then she became aware of voices in the outer room of the hotel suite.

She’d left Charlie there watching movies after they’d had room service delivered. That had been the first time either of them had eaten since dinner the previous night. Once the meal had been finished, she hadn’t been able to keep her eyes open.

Charlie had told her to go to bed, that he’d slept enough the previous night, thanks to the drugs. He’d settled into the plush couch with a banana split, and Annja went to bed.

But someone was with Charlie now.

Annja didn’t know who it was, but she couldn’t imagine anyone who would be there who would have their well-being in mind. She listened for a moment, but she only heard Charlie speaking.

“The battle at Roncevaux Pass was the worst of it,” Charlie was saying. “I fought at Roland’s side at that one. But as much as we wanted to triumph, the Basques wanted it more. I’d never seen Roland so crushed in defeat. It took him a long time to get over that.”

“I brought the army in across Vasconia,” Charlie went on.

Charlemagne, Annja remembered, the king of the Franks, had been in charge of that army. Charlie, whoever he truly was, knew his history.

Quietly, without making a sound, Annja rose from the bed. She wore only a football jersey and had her hair pulled back out of her face. She reached into the otherwhere and pulled the sword to her as she walked to the door. Her senses fired to full life and her blood sang in her veins.

33

Garin caught sight of Annja as she edged up to the door. Her eyes met his, then recognition—and maybe a little irritation—flared. She regarded him with undisguised wariness. Then, as she stepped into the room with the sword in her fist, he also noted the football jersey was short and her legs were long and supple.

Although he didn’t think it was going to work, Garin tried a smile. “Hello, Annja.”

“How did you find me?” she demanded. She kept her distance with her sword at the ready. Her stance was automatic, bladed so the sword could easily come between them.

Garin remained seated on the couch with the old man who had introduced himself as Charlie. The old man’s presence had been a complete surprise. When he’d knocked, Garin hadn’t expected to find Annja. The man wore baggy gray pants, a dark blue golf shirt and loafers. He looked like someone’s great uncle. Except for the hint of insanity in his eyes and the hospital band still around one wrist.

She referred to the fact that she wasn’t signed in at the hotel under her name.

“I tried your loft first,” Garin answered. “I let myself in and saw that you’d packed. I also noticed that someone had broken in, by the way. It was a professional job. Very good.”

“Burglars? Is my loft—”

“Everything is fine,” Garin told her. “This was a professional job. Nothing was out of place. But I could tell someone had been there.”

Annja didn’t look relieved.

“I had one of my people check to see if your passport had been used. It hadn’t. So I checked around your neighborhood—you’re quite popular, you know—and found out about the attack in the restaurant. I knew you’d go into hiding. Since you haven’t used your credit cards or hit any kind of financial records, I knew you probably hadn’t left the city.”

Annja held up her hand. “Enough with the Veronica Mars summary.”

“Who?” The name was lost on Garin.

“Never mind. You checked around and figured that I hadn’t left the city. How did you know I was here?”

Garin smiled. “You don’t have a whole lot of friends capable of hiding you, Annja. I knew you wouldn’t stay with friends for fear of endangering them. Especially after the attack at the restaurant. So you had to have money, and someone’s ID, to vanish. Whoever it was had to have money and be able to protect himself.” He held up three fingers. “That left three people that I know of that you would know and would—perhaps—ask a favor of. Roux. Myself. And Stanley Younts. It took me only a few minutes to find out Younts was registered in the city, but when I called him, he was at home.”

“I could have left the city for a job,” Annja said.

Garin’s grin grew larger. “With so many questions unresolved?” He shook his head. “No. Especially not after the attack on you here.”

“Okay.” Annja shifted her attention to Charlie. “And you—why did you let him in?”

“Because you weren’t awake,” Charlie said.

A dumbfounded expression filled Annja’s face. “You let him in because I wasn’t awake?”

“Yes. He wanted to wake you up, but I told him you needed your sleep and that you’d be up soon enough.”

“You shouldn’t have let him in,” Annja said.

“I had to,” Charlie said. “He’s part of this. You need him.”

“I don’t need him.”

“Of course you do. And he needs you.”

“I wouldn’t say that I—” Garin began. Then he shut his mouth because his denial was entirely hollow and everyone in the room knew it because he was there. He tried to escape from it as gracefully as he could. “Roux needs you.”

“The sleeping king,” the old man said, then nodded. “He’s lost at the moment. Caught up in his own guilt and despair. The two of you have to rescue him before he does irreparable harm to the world.”

Garin had heard a little of that while he’d talked with the old man. He didn’t understand it, so he’d ignored it. The only thing that had kept him from waking Annja had been the knowledge that he’d have to injure Charlie to do it, and that Annja probably wouldn’t like that. Waiting hadn’t been such a hardship. The old man told wonderful stories.

“Where’s Roux?” Annja demanded.

“In Istanbul,” Garin answered.

“What’s he doing there?”

“He thought he’d found the Nephilim painting in the Hague, but—”

“It turned out to be a fake.” Annja fixed him with her beautiful eyes. “Did you kill that woman?”

“No.” Garin acted offended. He wasn’t, though, and he could tell Annja didn’t buy into the act in the least. “Salome did.”

“Salome?”

“She’s another problem. An old problem. She’s after the painting, too, and she’s currently employing a man who is extremely capable and cold-blooded.”

“It’s funny that you should show up here so soon after I was attacked,” Annja said.

“I was busy in the Hague not killing that woman over the painting.”

“Why did Roux go to Istanbul?” Annja asked.

“To track down the man who brokered the sale of the painting. He thought the man might know more than he was telling.”

“We need to get to Istanbul,” Annja said. “Can you arrange it?”

“Of course. Do you know where the painting is?”

“No, but I may know where the next-best thing to the painting is.” Annja looked at him. “Why did you leave Roux?”

Garin reflected on that for a moment and tried to figure out what he was willing to tell her. Finally, knowing that she would recognize a lie, he decided to tell her the truth.

“Because I’m afraid for him. And of him.”

Annja’s eyebrows rose. “Why?”

“You’ve never seen him like this,” Garin said. “I rarely have.”

“Like what?”

“When he finds something like this, he gets consumed.”

“An artifact, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Like the sword?”

Garin nodded.

“What’s so special about the painting?” Annja asked.

“It contains a map.”

“To what?” Annja asked.

Garin shook his head. “I don’t know. Roux has never told me.” He paused. “That alone tells me how powerful whatever he’s looking for is.”

“It has the power to change the world,” Charlie said. “He mustn’t be allowed to possess it. It’s going to provide a temptation like he’s never before dealt with. Not even in his long years.”

Annja looked at the old man for a moment, and Garin could see that she was troubled by what Charlie said. She was still new to the oddness in the world that Roux drew to him. And he realized the sword probably attracted it, as well.

“If I get dressed,” Annja asked, “can you get us a plane to Istanbul?”

Garin nodded. “I’ve got one standing by.”

“How soon can we leave?”

“Let me make a phone call and we can be cleared for takeoff as soon as we arrive there,” Garin said.

The sword faded from Annja’s hand, and she turned back to the bedroom. “Let’s do that.”

* * * *

Salome sat in the bar across the street from the hotel where Drake’s private security team had trailed Annja Creed when she’d abandoned her loft the previous night. Frustration chafed at her, and she hated the fact that she was trapped and unable to act.

Drake, however, sat like a statue and looked as though he could sit there for days.

It was a skill, Salome knew. She’d learned it, as well, but it had been a reluctant skill and she still didn’t enjoy employing it. However, breaking into the hotel wasn’t an option because the security was too good. Drake had assured her they could work something out in less than twenty-four hours. If they had to. That was one of the last plans Drake wanted to put into action.

But sitting there was hard. Especially after they’d seen Garin Braden arrive almost an hour ago. Something was going on.

Drake’s head turned toward Salome. “Annja Creed and Garin Braden are leaving the hotel.”

Excitement flared within Salome. It was early in the morning, too early for movement to be a casual thing. She reached up and turned her earpiece back on. Listening to monosyllabic chatter among Drake’s troops was in no way entertaining, and it got on her nerves.

She listened to the men work through the containment structure Drake had established. Annja and Garin were in the hotel lobby. When the men inside the hotel announced their departure from the hotel’s interior, Salome saw the three of them emerge from the hotel.

She still couldn’t figure out what the old man had to do with anything. Drake’s team had taken the old man’s picture, but none of their research had thus far indicated any possibilities of identification. Their sources within the NYPD indicated that the police were coming up against the same thing.

“What do you want to do?” Drake asked.

Salome was torn. She was tempted to allow Garin Braden and Annja Creed to go wherever they were going and follow them. But the city was large and there were too many variables. If Drake hadn’t been able to put someone on Annja Creed as soon as she got off the flight from Prague, they might not have her now. The hotel security would have protected her.

A valet brought around a luxury car.

“The car’s armored, love,” Drake said.

Salome had suspected that. The car sat lower than it should have due to the extra weight, and she knew Garin wasn’t one to drive around unprotected.

“If we don’t take them now,” Drake said in an almost conversational tone, “it will be harder once they’re under way.”

Salome stood up from the table and reached into her handbag for the pistol that she carried. Getting armament was no problem for Drake. All of them had weapons permits.

“All right,” she said as she headed for the door. “Take them.”

34

“Annja, get in the car.”

Even before Garin’s growled command reached her ears, Annja knew something was wrong. Too many people, too many vehicles, converged on the front of the hotel at one time.

Garin shoved Charlie into the backseat, then slid behind the steering wheel himself.

Annja stood at the passenger’s side with the door open. She held her backpack by the straps in one hand. A van bore down on the front of Garin’s car.

“Annja,” Garin called urgently.

Immediately, Annja dropped the backpack on the floorboard in front of her seat and slid into the car. The van grew closer.

A man with an assault rifle leaned out of the van’s passenger’s window.

The hotel valet staff scattered and ran back inside the building.

“Are the windows bulletproof?” Annja asked.

“Yes. Why?” Garin asked.

“Because they need to be.”

The assault rifle suddenly danced in the man’s hands as muzzle-flashes lit up the man’s dark features. The bullets turned out to be a decent grouping over Garin’s side of the windshield. The glass spiderwebbed, but it held.

Annja let out a tense breath.

“Hold on,” Garin ordered. “He’s going to ram us.” Smoothly, he shifted the gear selector into Reverse and the transmission bucked.

Then the van met the luxury car head-on. Annja braced herself, one hand gripping the handle above her head and the other on the dashboard in front of her. The impact rocked the luxury car, but Garin maintained his grip on the steering wheel and kept backing up. The van’s momentum added to the car’s velocity.

The air bags deployed with thunderous booms and filled the interior of the car with the scent of gunpowder. Incredible force slammed into Annja’s chest and knocked the breath from her lungs. The air bag shoved her against the seat, but she fought against it.

Almost immediately, Garin had a knife in his fist. He thrust once into his air bag, then the one holding Annja. Both deflated.

Gratefully, Annja sucked in a deep breath.

Garin cursed as a delivery truck rocketed along the street at the rear of the car. Annja understood immediately that the second car was supposed to strike the rear of their vehicle and pin them against the raised wall in front of the hotel.

Garin stomped the brakes and shifted gears again. The car jumped as the tires fought for traction on the pavement. Shrieks of tortured rubber filled Annja’s ears, and the acrid burning stench stabbed her nose.

The delivery truck clipped the back end of Garin’s car and sped behind. Even though it missed smashing them into the raised embankment, the van tore across the back bumper and effectively boxed them in.

Garin cursed again, shifted gears to try to go backward but couldn’t. The tires whined against the movement as they spun without gripping.

Calmly, though she knew she had to hurry, Annja twisted and pulled up the door lock. She yanked on the lever and shoved the door open with her shoulder. By the time she slid out of the car, she had the sword in her hand.

“Annja!” Garin cried. “No!”

Ignoring the call, Annja ran to the back of the Mercedes while staying low. A man thrust an assault rifle through the window and fired at her. Bullets skipped across the Mercedes’s trunk.

In three quick strides, Annja was behind the delivery truck. When she glanced back at the side of the truck, she noticed the shadow of a man coming toward her position from the vehicle’s side. The man was unmindful of the streetlight behind him.

At the same time, a strong arm reached from under the canvas covering the rear deck section of the delivery truck. The arm closed around Annja’s neck before she knew it and lifted her off the ground. Annja acted out of instinct, curling her body around and planting both knees into where she judged the man’s face was.

The man crumpled and went down. He dropped Annja unceremoniously as he staggered back.

Annja twisted and landed on her outstretched left hand and both feet. She dropped the sword. Movement sounded above her. When she looked up, she spotted a rifle barrel poking through the canvas.

She reached for the sword without looking. Even though she didn’t know where she’d lost it, it materialized in her hand. With a quick push, she gained her feet and brought the sword around in a vicious arc that sliced through the rifle barrel at the time the man fired his weapon.

The rifle blew apart in the man’s hands, and he fell back screaming. Three other men bailed from the back of the truck.

At full speed Annja swept the sword around and knocked rifles from two of the men’s hands. Still in motion, she pivoted on her left foot and drove her right foot into the face of the third man as he tried to aim his weapon. He flew from his feet and thudded against the truck.

The man on the passenger’s side of the truck arrived faster than Annja was prepared to deal with. He had his rifle up and grinned, knowing she was aware she was done.

Then two quick cracks sounded and the man’s head exploded. As the man dropped, Annja glanced back at Garin and saw him leaning from the open door.

“Hurry!” he yelled.

One of the men reached for his weapon. Annja caught him by the collar of his coat and rammed him into the truck’s bumper. Unconscious, he dropped at her feet. She backhanded the remaining man hard enough to dislocate his jaw and whip his head around. He toppled without a sound.

She ran to the front of the truck, caught the pistol the driver thrust through the window and wrenched. The pistol dropped away as the man screamed in pain.

Still holding on to the man, Annja popped the door open, then released her hold on her opponent’s arm and yanked him out of the truck cab. With a leap, she pulled herself into the vehicle. The controls were familiar to her. She’d driven big trucks while at various digs.

After cranking the engine over and listening to it catch, she put the transmission in Reverse, shoved down on the accelerator and released the clutch. The truck bucked and rolled backward. She stopped it as soon as it cleared Garin’s car.

Garin raced the luxury sedan out from the hotel driveway. He slid to a tire-eating halt in the middle of the street. Traffic going both ways had halted.

The van tried to follow Garin. Annja shoved the transmission into first and powered forward. She hit the van and muscled it into the raised flower bed.

Other men raced on foot across the street. Garin pulled a machine pistol from under the car seat and sprayed the advancing troop. The line broke as the attackers took cover.

Another group of men fired at Annja. The truck’s windshield vanished in a deluge of broken glass. Chunks of the square-cut safety glass peppered her back as she slid out the door. She ran for the sedan.

The front passenger’s door was on the other side. She threw herself across the hood in a baseball slide and dropped to the street. Her hiking books thudded against the pavement. Headlights from the stalled cars played over her.

I hope there aren’t any photographers out there, she thought as she pushed herself up and toward the open door. Denying participation in a running gun battle in Brooklyn was hard to do. Especially if there were pictures or video footage. She’d learned that from experience.

She slid into the seat and closed the door. Bullets hammered the glass, spiderwebbing it, and beat a tattoo on the metal door.

Garin didn’t wait for her to fasten the seat belt. He applied his foot heavily to the accelerator and shot through the stalled traffic.

Annja looked over her shoulder and spotted a car racing after them. “There’s a car.”

“I see it.” Garin was calm. “It’ll be taken care of. I have to admit, the attack at the hotel was unexpected. Since no one had bothered you, I thought we might get out of there uninterrupted.”

“You brought them there,” Annja accused.

“No, I didn’t.”

At that moment a man with a rocket launcher settled over one shoulder stepped forward and took aim. The rocket leaped from the tube and struck the car, turning it into a roiling ball of flame that slammed into the side of an office building.

“If we got lucky,” Garin said, “Salome was in that car.”

“Do you think she was?”

Garin shook his head. “She’s too good to take chances out on the battlefield.” He sped through traffic.

Annja kept watch as Garin sped through the Brooklyn streets. There were no more signs of pursuit.

“How do you know you didn’t bring them with you?” she asked. “You said she was over in the Netherlands with you and Roux.”

“She was. They didn’t have time to arrange an elaborate setup like this since I arrived.” Garin took a hard left and reduced speed. “Remember, your loft had been burgled.”

“You said they didn’t take anything.”

“They were looking for you.” Garin looked at her. “They knew where you were. I’d say they had someone on you as soon as you got back from Prague.”

“And Salome isn’t linked to Saladin?”

“They’re bitter enemies.”

“So we have two groups after us?” Annja asked.

Garin nodded.

Annja sighed. “The more the merrier, I guess.”

“In your endeavors,” Charlie said, “you’re going to find that you have any number of enemies. You’ll certainly have many more enemies than friends who will be drawn to your calling.”

Annja settled in her seat. “Have you and Charlie met before?” she asked Garin.

“No. I thought he was your friend.”

“Not until recently.”

Charlie sat happily in the backseat. “Other than the ambulance the other night, it’s been a long time since I’ve ridden in an automobile. It’s much more exciting than I remembered it being.”

Garin looked at Annja. “You make strange friends.”

“Personally, I think it all started when I met you and Roux,” she said.

35

Annja carried her backpack to the spacious cabin area in the private jet. She took her computer out and hooked it into the aircraft’s communications array.

Charlie appeared utterly thrilled to be on the private jet. Questions flowed out of him, and they were all directed at Garin. Annja was pleased to see how much that annoyed him.

When Charlie mentioned that he was hungry, Garin took him forward to the kitchen and placed the old man in the capable hands of the young female chef he’d hired to cater for the flight.

Garin dropped into a seat beside Annja. “Why are we going to Istanbul?”

“Because Tsoklis wasn’t the only artist who worked on the Nephilim painting.”

“When I left Roux in the Hague, he told me he intended to pursue the forger who made the painting we were chasing,” Garin said.

“Why?”

“Roux said that the forger had to have a source he worked from.”

Annja agreed with that logic. “If the painting was good enough to fool Roux for a time—”

“It was. You should have seen his face when he thought it had been destroyed.” Garin grinned, but Annja knew his heart wasn’t in it. Worry showed in his face.

“Roux never explained the painting to you?”

“No.” Pain flickered in Garin’s black eyes. “He raised me, Annja. He was a father to me in so many ways. But even fathers don’t always tell their sons everything.”

“No parent does,” Charlie agreed. He strode back into the cabin area carrying a large platter filled with food.

Where does he put all that? Annja wondered. Eating that much just doesn’t seem humanly possible.

“Now that we’ve heard from Dr. Charlie,” Garin said disdainfully, “perhaps you’d like to finish what you were saying.”

“If the painting was good enough to fool Roux with all that he knows about it,” Annja said, “then someone else has to know a lot about it.”

“The forger.”

Annja nodded. “Was it an old forgery or a new one?”

“Roux believed it was recent.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say. I have to assume it was because of the materials involved.”

Annja tried to shrug off the frustration that scratched at her nerves.

“You said there was another artist who worked on the Nephilim painting,” Garin said. “Could he have been the forger?”

“No. His name was Jannis Thomopoulos. He lived about two hundred years after Tsoklis.”

“So?”

“At one point Thomopoulos touched up the Nephilim painting for the man who owned it in Constantinople.”

“Before the city fell?”

“Yes.”

Garin sat back. “Two hundred years later.”

“Two hundred sixteen, to be exact,” Annja said.

“Why did he touch up the painting?”

“Some older paintings required touching up because the materials the artists used didn’t last. A lot of pieces in private collections and museums have been restored. If the original is found, I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been touched up since.”

“So why is it we’re trailing Thomopoulos?” Garin asked.

“He had to have had reference to work from,” Annja said. “I’m hoping that reference might still be in some of his materials.”

“What kind of reference?”

“Sketches.”

“You think Thomopoulos may have made sketches of the original painting?”

“It’s how it’s usually done.” Annja had studied quite a bit about art during her university days, as well as after. Too many archaeological records resided in artwork to ignore it.

“And you know where Thomopoulos’s materials are?”

“I do.”

Garin smiled. “Now, wouldn’t that be interesting?”

“What?”

“If we—not having the original painting—are able to figure out the map before Roux does. And if the answer to the puzzle he’s worried about for hundreds of years was actually there in front of him the whole time.”

Annja frowned and bristled a little. “It wasn’t exactly in front of him. He may not know Thomopoulos was involved—”

“He doesn’t or he would have mentioned him before now,” Garin stated confidently.

“It’s possible that Thomopoulos’s work hadn’t been gathered up in a collection.”

“However it goes,” Charlie said, “you can’t allow what Roux seeks to fall into his hands.”

Garin looked at the old man. “You know what it is?”

“Of course.” Charlie wiped his hands on a napkin.

“Then tell us.”

“No.”

Anger, hard and frightening, flared to life within Garin. It was a part of him that Annja knew she would always have to be wary of, and she knew it would always be a part of him. Whatever had marked Garin in his early years had marked him forever.

“I could make you tell us,” Garin threatened.

“No,” Charlie stated, “you can’t.” He smiled. “And even if you tried, Annja would stop you.” He picked up a chocolate chip cookie.

Garin looked at Annja. “My way would be easier and faster.”

“We’re not going to torture him.”

“He’s old. It won’t take much. He may talk tough, but he’s not going to be hard to break.”

“No.” Annja tried to rationalize the way Garin had been in Prague when he’d taken her out and how he was now. It was impossible. Garin had two sides to his personality, and both were equally strong and passionate. She had to wonder which he would choose to be when they took up the trail on the map.

Garin cursed in disgust.

“You need to have open minds when you find it,” Charlie said. “Otherwise your expectations will affect how you treat it. Roux already has his expectations, and his needs, and that’s why it’s so dangerous for him to be near it.”

“Can you tell us anything about it?” Annja asked.

“I’ve told you, Annja,” the old man said patiently. “It has tremendous power. With it, the sleeping king can destroy the world.”

* * * *

“The door’s locked.”

Roux glanced at the ornate doorknob in front of him. “Is it?”

“Yes.” Hamid stood in the hallway outside the large condominium they’d come to burgle. Roux had known the man for over twenty years, and their business together had never been legal. He was small and dark, and his eyes moved restively and fearfully at all times. “And there will be alarms.”

“I thought you took care of the alarms,” Roux said.

Hamid shrugged. “I took care of some of the alarms. The men you can buy these days, they aren’t all trustworthy.”

Roux grinned at the little thief. “Not like you, eh, old friend?”

Hamid smiled. “Exactly.”

“Then it’s a good thing for you that I didn’t just count on your skills.” Roux turned and nodded at Jennifer.

With a quick look around the luxurious hallway, Jennifer reached into her coat and brought out an electronic device. She attached it to the electronic lock and activated a sequence.

“If we’re caught out here with that,” Hamid said, “they’ll put us in prison forever. They don’t suffer thieves over here.”

Roux knew that. “It’s fascinating, though,” he said as Jennifer worked with the device, “don’t you think? We’d be viewed as thieves for breaking into Vilen Bogosian’s residence. Yet, in certain circles, he’s known as quite the artiste of forged paintings.”

“He’s accepted here,” Hamid explained. “He hasn’t run afoul of anyone in Istanbul.”

“I’m sure that’s only because no one has yet discovered his crimes. I hardly think he’s living the life of an angel here.”

Jennifer straightened up with a frown. “I can’t get the combination. It’s not going to open.”

Anger seethed through Roux. He’d spent two days trolling the seamier side of the Hague to find out who was responsible for the forgery that had been sold at the art auction. Getting that information had taken time, money and many favors he’d called in.

Jennifer had accompanied him, but she’d remained tense. They didn’t talk about Garin’s decision to leave or the fact that they hadn’t been able to replace what Garin would have brought in the form of men and matériel.

Just go slowly, Roux thought. You’ve almost found the prize you seek.

Unless it was lost and gone forever. Part of him would have been relieved, he knew. But part of him would have gone ballistic.

“Try it again,” Roux said.

Jennifer hesitated only a moment, but she applied the device once more.

Roux hated trusting such things, but it was the way of the world these days.

This time the lock clicked and sounded like a pistol shot in the quietness of the hallway.

“Very good,” Roux said.

“I don’t understand,” Jennifer said. “It should have worked the first time.”

“You’re too edgy. Just be glad that it worked this time.” Roux pulled the door open and slid a pistol out from under his jacket. He stepped inside as Jennifer put the device back into her jacket and took out a pistol of her own.

Despite her misgivings, Jennifer had thrown her lot in with him. He still didn’t know if it was because she cared about him, in spite of what he’d done, or because she was curious about what secrets the painting held.

“This could be a very bad mistake,” Hamid said.

“Quiet,” Roux ordered in a raspy whisper. He entered the room. Even though it was cloaked in darkness, he knew his way around.

Hamid had arranged to get the blueprints of the condominium. For all of Hamid’s lack of a spine, he was quite the ferret when it came to getting necessary things.

Voices came from a room on the other side of the large and elegantly furnishing living space. Roux identified the room as Bogosian’s work space. Quietly, he crossed the room. His heart pounded in anticipation. There were other things he’d chased over centuries, but nothing like what he was after now. He calmed himself with effort.

Bogosian was in his early thirties, a bull of a man with a broad chest and curly black hair. Black leather pants encased his legs and hips. The black shirt was open to midchest and tailored to reveal his biceps and musculature. He laughed and joked with a model on the small stage in the workroom.

Lights flashed as Bogosian snapped pictures.

Roux vaguely recognized the woman. She was an American actress whose career had started to accelerate her to the A-lists. Roux couldn’t remember her name.

She held her long brown hair back off her naked shoulders as she flirted with Bogosian and his camera. Roux knew that the painter supplemented his forgeries with legitimate work. But even painting American actresses in the nude didn’t pay as well as forged masterpieces.

“Don’t worry about the tattoos,” Bogosian said in accented English. “I can airbrush those out. Just relax and have fun.”

The actress saw Roux as he stepped into the room. Her eyes rounded in surprise and she reached for the dark blue robe on the floor.

Even so, Bogosian kept shooting pictures and took a moment to turn around. “What are you—”

Unable to stop himself, Roux crossed the distance and grabbed the man around the throat with his free hand. Bogosian struggled and tried to get free. Roux’s anger and desperation gave him incredible strength. He lifted the man to his tiptoes with one hand and shook him.

“Quiet,” Roux advised. He showed the painter the pistol. “Quiet, and you may yet live in spite of all that you’ve done.”

Bogosian nodded.

Arm trembling from the effort of holding the man, Roux released Bogosian. “Now,” he said in a voice clotted with rage and need, “we’re going to talk, you and I. And if you lie to me, you’ll never paint or look at beautiful women again. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about the Nephilim,” Roux ordered. “How can I find it?”

36

“Ms. Creed,” Elton McPhee greeted as Annja entered the Holy Constantinople Museum of the Apostles. From the way he’d rushed up to her, he’d been waiting for her arrival. “It’s so good to meet you. I never miss an episode of your show. Fascinating. Simply fascinating.”

“Sure,” Annja said. Even after many similar encounters, she still wasn’t quite certain how to respond when dealing with the attention Chasing History’s Monsters brought her.

McPhee was a heavyset man with thinning blond hair and round-lensed glasses that matched his round face. He looked pale enough that Annja assumed he rarely went outside.

The museum was a simple affair and had a modest selection of exhibits. A large mosaic of Constantinople as it had been before the Ottoman invasion filled one wall behind the counter.

“And who are your companions?” the museum curator asked.

Charlie stepped up before Annja could say anything.

“I’m Charlie,” the old man announced, and took McPhee’s hand, though the curator seemed somewhat loath to let him have it.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Professor Charlie,” McPhee said.

“He’s not a—” Garin started to say, but Annja quieted him with a look. Garin sighed in displeasure, then turned and walked away.

“Thank you,” Charlie said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, too. We’re here to save the world.”

For a moment McPhee stood frozen. Then he noted the medical bracelet on Charlie’s arm.

“Of course you are,” McPhee said quickly after his discovery.

Annja ignored all of it. As long as they got to see Thomopoulos’s sketchbooks, nothing mattered.

Charlie folded his arms behind his back. He walked away and began inspecting the exhibits out in the main hall.

“Is he all right?” McPhee asked in a quiet voice.

“He’s fine,” Annja assured the curator.

McPhee tapped his wrist. “Because he, uh…”

“A private joke,” Annja said. “He can be a little eccentric.”

McPhee nodded. “Sure. Sure. I understand. Many people in the field tend to get that way after a while. Can I get you anything?”

“I’d really love to see the Jannis Thomopoulos collection.”

“Of course. I’ve already moved everything we have to a viewing room.” McPhee swept an arm forward. “This way, please.”

McPhee was organized. Annja saw that at a glance. The workroom was small, but the curator had made the best of it. Books and statues shared table space. Paintings, the few the museum had, hung carefully on the walls.

Annja walked through it all to get a sense of it and to see if anything leaped out at her. The paintings seemed to be generic, as did the statues.

“Our collection of paintings and statues is modest, of course,” McPhee apologized. “But we’re fortunate in some respects. Thomopoulos’s real worth hadn’t been discovered before the museum had most of these pieces. Later, they became harder to acquire.”

Garin picked up a statue of an archer.

“Please,” McPhee said tensely as he rushed over to take the statue and place it once more on the table. “Please, don’t touch anything.”

For a moment Annja thought Garin was going to strike McPhee. She stepped forward to block any attempt, but Garin blew out an impatient breath and nodded.

Annja settled into one of the chairs and donned a pair of gloves McPhee provided. There were at least fifty sketchbooks, all hand bound with paper that had survived hundreds of years without yellowing. That particular secret of making paper seemed to have vanished somewhere in time.

She turned the pages reverently. She knew she held history, unique and important, in her hands. The thoughts and ideas that were passed on from one generation to another were as important as a piece of pottery or armor. No artifacts told history and the lives of people like a book.

She had to focus on what she was there to find because each turn of the page threatened to lose her in history.

* * * *

Nearly three hours later, her back stiff and hunger gnawing at her stomach, Annja found the journal that contained the sketches of the Nephilim. She’d almost missed it because there wasn’t a fully drawn sketch on the pages. Rather, it held pieces of the finished painting. If Annja hadn’t seen the representation of the one that Ilse Danseker had been murdered for, she wouldn’t have found it.

Breathing shallowly, her head about to explode from excitement, her eyes burning from strain, Annja leaned forward, placed the book on the table and took her digital camera from her backpack.

“You found something?” Garin asked. He sat at the head of the table, a position he’d automatically assumed.

“Yes.”

Garin came to join her. Charlie did the same.

“Where?” Garin demanded.

“Here.” Annja took pictures with her camera.

“There’s no painting there.”

The page only held bits and pieces of drawings.

“You’re trying to see the whole painting,” Annja said. “Thomopoulos didn’t render his sketches that way.”

“He drew separate images of them.” Charlie grinned. “You did very well, Annja.”

“Thank you.”

“This is stupid,” Garin growled. “I still don’t see what either of you are talking about.”

Charlie leaned forward. “May I?”

Annja nodded and handed him the book. She dug her computer out and attached the camera to it through a USB cable. Then she brought the computer on-line.

“Here,” Charlie said. “This is the face of the Nephilim.” He pointed at the coldly handsome face that sat disembodied on the page.

“All right,” Garin said grudgingly, “I’ll admit there is some resemblance.”

“There’s more than a resemblance,” Annja said. “It looks drawn to scale.”

“How do you know that?” Garin asked.

“The thumbprint beside the face.” Annja brought up the pictures she’d taken and quickly saved them.

Garin had to lean close to see it. But it was there. Annja had noted the ghostly image and Charlie had seen it, as well. Finally, so did Garin.

“All right, there’s a thumbprint,” Garin admitted. “That doesn’t mean it was drawn to scale.”

“But it does,” Charlie said. “Artists often use their thumbs or a brush as a measuring tool to calculate sizes. There’s no other reason for the thumbprint to be there.”

“Is that important?”

“It tells us these other drawings are drawn to scale, as well,” Annja said. “And that is very important. If you’re going to draw a map, as you said Roux believes this picture holds, then scale is everything.”

“I saw that painting,” Garin said. “There was no map.” He looked over her shoulder at the image she was using.

Annja had captured the image from a CNN headline broadcast that had covered the Ilse Danseker murder. She’d lifted it from a repeat broadcast online that had been saved in high definition.

After she captured the Nephilim’s face from the photo she’d taken, Annja superimposed it over the image of the Nephilim she’d taken from the television broadcast. She had to shrink the image down to get it to fit properly. She paid attention to the percentage of shrinkage she’d had to employ.

Then she grabbed one of the pieces that had been around the face at the center of the page.

“What are you doing?” Garin asked.

“I think this belongs on the painting.” Annja shifted the piece around on the painting image.

“Why?”

“Because it was on that page.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Garin said.

“I think it does. I think all of those images were drawn to scale for a reason.”

Garin looked at the painting image. “It’s not part of that painting.”

“Not now,” Annja agreed. “But I think it once was.”

“You’re wasting time and—”

“There,” Charlie interrupted quietly. He pointed to a corner of the screen. Part of a design in the stone floor matched part of the image on the piece Annja was trying to manipulate.

Annja moved the piece into position, shrank it down and grabbed the next piece. It held a matching design in the painting, as well.

Garin became silent.

“I’m very good at puzzles.” Charlie smiled.

There were nine pieces in all scattered around the painting. It only took Annja a few moments to blend them into the digital capture of the forged painting Ilse Danseker had purchased.

“Whoever created the forgery saw the original painting,” Garin said.

“I think so, too,” Annja agreed. “However, the original painting is no longer original.” She nodded at the adjusted image she’d created. “Thomopoulos, for whatever reason, painted over the original and hid these pieces.”

“He did it to hide the legacy that was contained in the painting,” Charlie suggested.

“What legacy is that?” Garin demanded.

“One of the most powerful objects in the world,” Charlie said.

“What?”

“It’s not for me to say,” the old man replied.

“Gabriel’s Horn,” Annja said, remembering Dr. Krieger’s research.

Charlie looked at her. Then he smiled. “Yes.”

“What does Roux want with it?” Garin asked.

“The horn,” Charlie said softly, “has the power to unmake the world.”

37

“Roux,” Jennifer said, “you need to slow down and think things through.”

Roux regarded the woman. He remembered all of their years together, and some of the happiness they’d had. It had been hard to leave Jennifer. She was fiercely proud and extremely confident.

But the time had come those years ago, and it was either move on or reveal more about himself to her than he was comfortable doing. If he’d looked younger, he might have been able to give her more years.

In the end, though, Roux knew from experience, it would only have gotten harder to leave her.

“I am thinking things through,” he told her as he shoved another pistol into the pocket of the coat he wore. “I know where the painting is, Jennifer. I can’t leave it out there.”

“This could be a trap.” Jennifer folded her arms and regarded him defiantly.

“I don’t think it is.” Roux believed the story Bogosian had told about the location of the Nephilim. The painter had been given no room to lie, and Roux had put him in considerable pain.

“Then you’re a fool if you think you can just walk in there and buy it.” Her voice sounded ragged.

“The man who has the Nephilim doesn’t have any idea what he truly has,” Roux said. “He’s an art collector. He has an interesting piece. I have more than enough money to acquire it from him.”

“What if he doesn’t want to sell it?”

Roux knew wealth meant more to most people than simply owning something. “He’ll sell it to me,” he said confidently.

“What if he doesn’t?”

Roux smiled. “Then getting it will be a little harder. Not impossible.”

“Let me go with you.”

“You’ve done enough.”

“You shouldn’t be alone.”

“What I shouldn’t do,” Roux said patiently, “is allow you to risk your life any more than you have.”

Tears welled in Jennifer’s eyes. “You’re being bullheaded.”

“I am.” Roux gently stroked her face with his forefinger. “But I care about you.”

“This isn’t dangerous. You said it’s not dangerous.”

“I know. But I need to do this myself.” Roux drew his hand back. “Wait here. I’ll call when I have the painting. Then we’ll go celebrate.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “Be well until I return.” He left without a backward glance.

* * * *

“How does the map work?”

Annja felt pressured by Garin’s question, but she knew that came more from herself than from him. After saving the reconstructed image, she lifted the pieces off again, put them into a new file and started manipulating them.

“I don’t know. Yet.”

Garin leaned in closer to her. She was aware of his cologne and the heat coming off his body. She didn’t know if those things were attractive or threatening.

“If it’s a puzzle once,” Garin said, “maybe it’s a puzzle twice.”

“Now you’re an expert?” Annja mocked.

“I’m just saying.” He sounded as irritable as a bear awakened from hibernation.

Anxiety coursed through Annja. She pushed the pieces together. She realized there was no way all the pieces fit as one thing. She studied them and saw other ways they fit together.

Five of the pieces lay together in an interlocked design.

They’re complete, she told herself. Accept that. Now what do you do with the other four pieces?

Slowly she began putting them together. It was harder. She could get any three of them together but she couldn’t get the fourth to drop into place. The fourth piece had a section of design that fit over the other three pieces, and also allowed it to fit with any of the other two.

“It doesn’t go there,” Garin said. “It has to be something by itself.”

His words triggered a sudden understanding. Working smoothly, Annja fit three of the pieces together, then placed them over the last piece.

All the designs fit exactly.

“A hidden room,” Annja whispered, understanding. “Wherever this is, it has a room below.”

“But where is this?” Garin asked.

Annja looked at the grouping of the first five pieces. “This looks like a cross.”

Another memory clicked into place.

Annja walked out into the main museum lobby and looked at the mosaic of Constantinople on the wall. She searched the buildings represented there.

McPhee hurried over from one of the exhibits he was working on. “Is there something I can assist you with, Ms. Creed?”

Annja pointed at the cross-shaped building near the center of the city. “What church is that?” she asked.

“That’s the Church of the Holy Apostles,” McPhee answered immediately. “It was built in 330 by Constantine the Great. It was supposed to be a repository of the twelve apostles of Jesus. Unfortunately, at least this is what legend tells us, only the relics of Saints Andrew, Luke and Timothy were ever housed there.”

“Is that shape unique in the city?” Annja asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“The church fell, didn’t it?” Annja said. Bits and pieces of the story came back to her.

“It did. After the invasion of the Ottoman Turks the church was destroyed and a mosque was built on the site. It was called Fatih Carmi, the Mosque of the Conqueror. Most people know it simply as Fatih Mosque.”

“There was another structure in that area,” Annja said.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Something was there. Probably underground.”

The curator stared at the mosaic and thought for a long moment. Then the doubt cleared from his face, and he turned to look at her.

“There were catacombs in that area,” he said. “Burial facilities for the clergy and their servants. I’d just assumed the bodies were relocated and the catacombs were filled in.”

“But the catacombs might still exist?”

“I don’t know.”

“I need to talk to someone who does know,” Annja declared.

* * * *

Roux sat at a table in a bar across the street from the large brown building on Bagdat Avenue. He sipped wine and tried to keep the urge to do something at bay.

Over the past few days, since Jennifer had come to him and told him about the Nephilim painting, he hadn’t been able to rest. His sleep had consisted of brief minutes of pure blackness that he’d been able to seize.

For the first time in a long time, he wished that Garin were with him.

It’s your fault that he’s not here, he told himself angrily. Why would he stay for something he doesn’t understand? You wouldn’t.

Roux rubbed his burning eyes. He clung to the thought that the artifact was close to hand. Once he had it in his possession, he could fix the mistake he’d made all those years ago.

He would finally have some peace.

Roux knew he’d pushed himself too hard when he only then noticed that the two men who had been sitting at the table next to his hadn’t been talking. They’d been mostly noncommittal, like men waiting for something together.

His senses flared to life. The server hadn’t gone near them to check on them, either. That suggested they’d arranged for her to stay away.

Without a word, he dropped money on the table and started for the door. But it was too late. The men got up to follow him.

Then another man stepped through the door. He looked to be in his thirties, lean and muscular. He looked enough like his ancestors that Roux recognized him at once even without the green-scimitar tattoo on his neck.

“Roux,” Saladin said.

“You’ve got the wrong man,” Roux said automatically. But he knew he’d played it wrong the instant he’d come to a complete stop. A stranger would have kept walking.

“I don’t think so,” Saladin said. He smiled. “You see, I found the Nephilim painting only days ago. I haven’t been able to decipher its secret.”

“That’s because there is no secret,” Roux stated flatly. “It’s a fool’s errand.”

“Yet you’ve looked for it for a large chunk of your life.”

“Merely the vanity of an old fool.”

Saladin smiled, but the effort was cold and distant.

Knowing he had no real choice and no real chance of success, Roux reached under his jacket for the pistol in his shoulder holster.

But Saladin lifted a device and fired. Instantly two darts sped out and sank into Roux’s chest. They trailed microthin wires behind them. In the next instant they pulsed fifty thousand volts.

Roux felt his body convulse as every muscle screamed in protest and clenched. Then his mind slid into blackness.

38

Trying to get information from the mosque proved fruitless. Annja wasted nearly three hours waiting for someone to tell her that the old catacombs area wasn’t accessible from the mosque. The underground tunnel that led to the crypt area had been sealed centuries earlier.

Garin had been ready to give up but Annja was determined. She walked along the crowded street in the direction the crypts had lain. She’d discovered two buildings that might be above the catacombs. When she’d talked with the first building manager, the man had claimed no knowledge of the crypts.

A woman in her fifties managed the second structure. That building was renting out office space to small businesses.

“I don’t know anything about crypts,” the Armenian woman said in heavily accented English. She wore a long dress, a scarf, dramatic makeup and large hoop earrings. An unfiltered cigarette dripped ash from her mouth. “But there is storage space below.”

Annja’s spirits rose. “Could I see it?”

The woman looked from Annja to Charlie and then to Garin. His suit obviously inspired her.

“This job is a good one,” she said. “I don’t want to get into any trouble.”

“You won’t get into any trouble,” Annja assured her.

“If I send you on your way,” the woman replied, “I won’t get into any trouble.”

“We just need to—”

“How much do you want?” Garin’s voice overrode Annja’s. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a wallet thick with currency.

They haggled briefly, then a price was agreed upon.

“I always thought that place was creepy,” the woman said. “I told my boss that I felt something down there wasn’t right. He told me that it used to be part of the piracy network that filled the city. I believed him. At least, I thought I did. But I’ve never been at ease when I had to go down there for supplies. Is that what you’re looking for? Ghosts?”

“No,” Annja replied. “I’m not much of a believer in supernatural things.” She knew that was ludicrous to say, especially in light of the fact that she carried a sword that had reforged itself.

The woman introduced herself as Naz as she reached for a huge ring with many door keys on it.

In the storage room, Naz slid one of the many wire racks to the side and revealed a heavy trapdoor in the floor.

“It’s down here. My employer told me it was used a lot in the old days by pirates and black marketers. The building next door has access to the tunnel, too. They store things down there, as well.” She kicked the door’s iron ring. “But you’re not going to find anything. Only extra supplies are down there.”

“We’re paying you to take a look,” Garin said. “We’ll be back quick enough.”

Annja reached into her backpack and took out a flashlight. She switched it on. Then she leaned down and caught hold of the iron ring. As she pulled on the ring, she leaned back to put as much weight into her effort as she could.

Garin, a flashlight from his own pack in hand, caught the iron ring in his other hand and pulled. Together they lifted the trapdoor from the floor. There were no hinges. It came straight up. They placed it on the floor a short distance away.

Annja shone the flashlight into the opening. Irregularly spaced bricks jutted out to form hand-and footholds. The tunnel floor was at least ten feet down. It was made of brick, as well.

The thick stench of trapped, damp air filled Annja’s nose. She took a final deep breath and climbed down.

* * * *

“We could go in after them,” Drake suggested.

Salome took a deep breath, then focused on not exercising that option. “Is that how you’d handle it?”

Seated in the luxury car beside her, Drake shook his head. His gaze seemed centered on the mosque down the street.

“No,” he said. “I’d be patient. We’ve got the building surrounded. They can’t get back out of there without us knowing about it. It’s better if we wait.”

“Then why are you suggesting we go after them?” Salome tried not to let her anger show. They’d only just arrived in Istanbul after trailing Garin’s plane around the world. Drake had a team on the ground in the city that had tailed Garin and Annja Creed from the airport. So far keeping watch over the woman had been easy.

“I’m not,” Drake replied smoothly. “That course of action would be a mistake. If we flush them, try to catch them inside the building, we could lose them. There are too many hiding places and things will become hectic very quickly.” He glanced over at the computer screen that showed the video surveillance they had on the building. “It’s better if we’re patient.” He looked at her. “Better if you’re patient.”

“I know.” Salome made herself breathe. It was hard.

“Besides, we don’t know if Annja Creed has even found anything,” Annja said.

“She does have a remarkable knack for finding things.”

“Then let’s hope she finds this thing for us.” Drake took Salome’s hand in his and kissed her fingers. “If she does, we’re only a moment away from having it. It will be like we found it ourselves.”

“I know.” Salome made herself wait, but her eyes never left the computer screen. One way or the other, it wouldn’t be long.

* * * *

The passage ran a hundred feet and dipped slightly as it progressed.

Annja played her flashlight beam from side to side across the tunnel. It was almost ten feet tall and almost twelve feet wide. As Naz had informed her, there were a lot of boxes and crates in the tunnel that held supplies and equipment. There were also rats. Several of them squeaked and fled from the flashlight beams.

Concern tightened Charlie’s features. Maybe there was even a little fear there. “We’re very close now. You have to be very careful. The horn has been hidden away for a long time.” He frowned. “It would have been better safely forgotten about.”

The tunnel ended as it widened out into a room twenty-five feet across. Annja thought she could see where the stone had been chipped away for the crypts that had once honeycombed the walls. The dead had been laid in that place to wither away to dust. The thought chilled Annja for just a moment, then she concentrated on finding the entrance to the lower room.

If it existed.

She played her beam over the floor, searching for any kind of discrepancy that might reveal a hidden door. Nothing immediately met her eye. Whoever had put the room together had gone to considerable trouble to disguise the hidden level.

Charlie had dropped to his haunches against the wall in the entryway and simply watched. Annja didn’t ask him why he wasn’t helping. She just accepted that he wasn’t going to.

Despite her thorough search, it was Garin who found the concealed access.

“Here,” he called.

Annja got up from her hands and knees and went to him.

Garin aimed his flashlight beam at a section of the floor near one wall. That section looked like the rest of the ground except the symbol that had joined the three images from Thomopoulos’s sketchbook showed on the floor. Garin wiped away layers of dust and spiderwebs to reveal it.

“I can’t believe you found this,” Annja said.

“Me neither.” Garin shook his head. His eyes never left the spot on the floor.

“How did you find it?” Annja blew dust away in an effort to reveal an outline of the door she felt must be there.

“I felt it,” Garin said. “I passed over this section of the ground, and I felt something under the floor.”

“It’s his nature,” Charlie said. “He’s been around artifacts like this before. He’s sensitive to them.”

Annja kept blowing dust until a crevice finally revealed itself. As she blew, dust sifted through the crack and left behind a thin, empty line in the stone.

Satisfied that she’d found the secret of the floor, she reached into her backpack and took out a small pry bar that she’d packed for the excursion. She worked the bar around the floor section.

“There should be a release,” Garin said.

“I know.” Annja tried to keep the irritation out of her voice, but she knew she failed. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. I feel the same way.”

“Can you move the light over here?”

Garin did.

A moment later Annja found the locking mechanism. It was a simple pin construction that she easily negotiated. The mechanism slid a couple of inches, then clicked open. She pushed the pry bar under the edge and levered it up enough to wedge her fingers under.

When she lifted it, she stared down into the hidden chamber.

39

The chamber was thirty feet across and seven feet high. The low ceiling made Annja feel slightly claustrophobic after she dropped down inside and stood. She shone her flashlight around the space, and her breath froze in her lungs.

The room was filled with paintings, statues and books.

“I guess the church was better off than everyone thought,” Garin said drily. He shone his flashlight around, as well, then followed it to stacks of goods.

“Many churches had wealth,” Annja said automatically. “The Church of the Holy Apostles was ransacked by European forces in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. They took everything they could find.”

“Nothing’s sacred when gold is involved,” Garin said. “I’ve certainly taken my share of it when opportunity presented.”

Annja politely refrained from saying anything.

“Why hasn’t the old man come down?” Garin asked as he rummaged through the hidden treasure.

“I don’t know.”

“He acts like he’s scared.”

“Maybe he has good reason to be. Maybe we should be.” Annja tried not to think like that too much.

“That’s nonsense. All we had to do was beat Roux here. If you believe what that old man has been saying.”

“Do you?” Annja asked.

Garin was silent for a moment. “I don’t know.”

“Some of the artifacts you and Roux have searched for have had incredible powers.” That was the part that Annja kept trying to wrap her mind around. Her sword was proof of that.

“They have.” Garin shifted a stack of crates one by one.

“What’s the most powerful thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Other than your sword?”

“The sword can’t be the most powerful thing,” Annja said.

Garin looked at her. “You don’t completely know what that sword is capable of. Or you wouldn’t say that.”

Annja conceded that.

“There are things you’re not ready to deal with,” Garin said.

“Yet I’m here looking for Gabriel’s Horn.”

“That’s just one of the names the artifact we’re searching for is called.”

“I thought you didn’t know anything about what we were looking for.” Suspicion darkened Annja’s thoughts.

“I didn’t know what the painting hid,” Garin corrected. “I know about the horn.” He paused. “At least, I know part of the story.”

“Can it destroy the world?” Annja asked.

Garin hesitated. “It’s possible. What we’re dealing with here, Annja, are very powerful things. Your sword alone caused me to live five hundred years. Think about that. And that isn’t even what it was created for.”

“What was it created for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does Roux?”

“Maybe. You’d have to ask him.”

“I have.” Annja grimaced. “He’s not exactly forthcoming.”

Garin smiled. “He never has been. His business has always been his business.”

“Do you know what the horn looks like?”

“I’ve never seen it,” Garin said.

They began searching.

Annja spotted a battered wooden box tucked under bolts of rotting purple-colored silk. Nervously, she reached for the box. It was almost two feet square and a foot deep. A leather carrying strap had been affixed to either end. She somehow felt drawn to it.

“What’s that?” Garin crossed over to her, feeling it, too.

“I don’t know.” Annja steeled herself and reached for the box. When she lifted it from the shelf, it was lighter than she expected. Cautiously, she slipped the simple latch and opened the box.

Inside, on what felt like a feather pillow, rested a horn. It was constructed of conical brass tubing bent into five complete circles. The tubing ran through its own center, as well, to provide handholds. There were no keys to change the pitch of the notes.

“This is it,” Annja said quietly.

“Doesn’t look like it’s worth much,” Garin observed.

Annja turned around and found Charlie standing there.

“Decided to join us, did you?” Garin asked.

“After you found the horn.” Charlie nodded. “I wondered if you’d be foolish enough to try to blow it.”

“It doesn’t look overly complicated,” Garin said.

Annja knew Garin was only taunting. She’d seen the respect—and maybe a little fear—in his eyes.

“You won’t be able to touch it,” Charlie said. “Only she can. She doesn’t harbor the darkness in her heart that you do.”

Garin cursed. Bah,” he snarled. “Now that we’ve got it, what do we do with it. Destroy it?”

Charlie smiled. “You can’t destroy that horn any more than you can Annja’s sword.”

“The English destroyed the sword,” Garin said. “I saw that happen.”

“The sword was destroyed, yet Annja carries it still.” The old man’s smile mocked Garin. “It would be the same with this horn.”

Annja put the horn back inside the box and closed the lid. She set the latch, then slung the leather strap over her shoulder. “Maybe we should think about getting out of here before anyone else finds us.”

She led the way.

* * * *

Someone slapped Roux back to wakefulness. The pain stung sharply enough to get his attention even through the fogged recesses of his mind. A big man squatted before him. He struggled to remember where he was, then finally remembered he’d been shot with a Taser. His chest muscles still ached from the painful contractions triggered by the voltage.

“So you’re still alive, are you, old man?” the big man taunted.

For a moment, because his vision hadn’t yet returned to normal, Roux believed the man in front of him was Garin. The big man backhanded him across the face again. This time Roux tasted blood while his cheek and temple felt as though they had been set aflame.

Roux struggled to stand, but discovered that his hands were cuffed behind him. He lacked the balance. Fearlessly, he locked eyes with the man. “I promise you that you will die for that,” he said.

The big man laughed, and his casual disregard only stoked the fires of Roux’s rage. “You’re in no position to be making threats, old man. And you’re not going to live long enough to have any hope of making good on any of them.”

Roux sat silent and proud. He and death were old friends. It did not scare him.

As he looked around, he discovered he was in the back of a large cargo truck. He tried to peer through the windows to figure out where he was.

He felt certain he was still in Istanbul. Surely he hadn’t been unconscious long enough to be taken out of the country. There were no drugs in his system that he could tell.

Someone opened the back of the truck. Twilight had settled over the city. He also believed he was still downtown. Farther down the street, pools of neon light fought the encroaching darkness.

Saladin stood at the back of the truck. He glanced at the big man. “Get him out of there.” He spoke in Arabic, either not knowing that Roux spoke the language, as well, or so convinced of his triumph that he didn’t care.

40

The big man yanked Roux from the seat bolted to the truck wall and tossed him out. Roux tried to keep his feet under him, but it was impossible given the fact that his hands were bound behind him. His forward momentum was too great for him to handle.

Off balance, he smacked into the rough ground hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. He was only able to keep his face from getting smashed by turning it to the side. A cut opened up over his right eye and oozed blood that blurred his vision.

Roux didn’t try to get up. Instead, he looked around to get his bearings. The city was behind him. The Golden Horn stretched before him. The harbor and bay were filled with ships and freights. No one was close enough to see what was happening. Or perhaps no one cared. Istanbul was a dangerous city.

“Get him up,” Saladin ordered.

The thug grabbed Roux roughly and yanked him to his feet. Stubborn and defiant to the last, Roux stomped the man’s instep hard. When the man howled in pain and bent down toward his foot, Roux head-butted him in the face and broke his nose with an audible crack.

Dazed, the man rocked back and collapsed onto his backside. His nose drained blood. Before anyone could move, Roux kicked the man in the mouth and broke several of his teeth. This time he fell back totally unconscious.

Saladin drew a pistol and pointed it squarely between Roux’s eyes. “Keep it up and you’ll die now.”

Roux was tempted to push the fates. That was the way he’d done things when he was a young man. But that had been so long ago, and so much had changed.

Breathing raggedly, he stood straight and stared down the pistol barrel. He tested the cuffs binding his wrists but there was no give.

“Who knows?” Saladin asked. “If this goes right, maybe you’ll even get to live.”

Roux didn’t respond.

“Annja Creed is here in Istanbul,” Saladin said.

That surprised Roux.

“So is your friend Garin,” Saladin continued.

He ran straight to her, Roux thought.

“I believe she’s figured out how to decipher the Nephilim painting,” Saladin said. “Salome believes so, too.”

Roux grinned. “You’ve been following Salome.”

Saladin smiled back. “Of course. In fact, I’ve got someone within her ranks. After all, we’re all players in this little game. At the moment, Annja seems intent on following up an abandoned tunnel orphaned from the Church of the Holy Apostles. Do you know why?”

“No.” Roux’s mind raced. Had Annja truly found the horn? Despite his predicament, excitement flowed through Roux’s veins.

“Salome has managed to follow her,” Saladin said. “She and those killers she employs are waiting outside the building they entered.”

Fear for Annja replaced some of the excitement, but not all of it.

Saladin held out a cell phone. “I want you to call them.”

“Why? So you can ransom me?” Roux shook his head.

“If you don’t tell them,” Saladin said, “they’re going to walk into Salome’s trap. I can assure you she won’t show them any mercy.” His dark eyes focused on Roux. “I give you my word, on the names of my ancestors, that Annja Creed will not die by my hand.”

Roux knew that Saladin would honor his word. But he had no doubts that the man would also kill him as soon as it benefited him to do so.

“What do you want to do?” Saladin demanded.

Roux took a deep breath. There was no choice.

* * * *

Garin’s phone vibrated in his pocket as he and Annja replaced the trapdoor that led to the first tunnel.

The number was unknown to him. But the caller ID indicated it was Roux.

Garin frowned.

“What’s wrong?” Annja asked.

“I’ve got a call from Roux.”

“Answer it.”

“The caller ID shows Roux’s name,” Garin said. “He wouldn’t have a phone number in his name.”

“What do you think it means?” Annja asked.

“It can’t be anything good,” Garin assured her.

“Answer it,” Annja said.

The phone stopped ringing and the number faded.

“Too late,” Garin said softly.

* * * *

The answering service picked up the call.

Roux smiled and pulled his head back from the phone. “Evidently he’s busy.”

“I’ll call again.” Saladin punched the redial key.

Idly, Roux glanced at the water in the harbor. It was only twenty feet away. He might be able to get there before Saladin’s men gunned him down. He was quick. And he’d rather drown than be killed by his enemies.

The phone rang but this time Garin answered. “Hello.”

Saladin pushed the phone toward Roux’s face.

Roux spoke calmly and quickly. “You’re surrounded in that building. Salome has people all around it.”

“Where are you?”

“Saladin has me. He intends to trade me for whatever object you recovered.”

Saladin grinned in anticipation.

“Personally,” Roux said, continuing on in Latin, “I don’t trust him. Get Annja and yourself out of there. Run and don’t look—”

“Old fool!” Saladin snarled. He struck Roux in the face with his gun barrel and drove him to his knees.

Roux got his feet under him and tried to rush Saladin, but a man tripped him and another put his foot in the middle of Roux’s back to pin him to the ground. Roux struggled, but he couldn’t get up.

“Are you there?” Saladin demanded.

“I am.” Garin’s voice sounded cold and efficient. “Don’t hurt him.”

“I am sorely tempted. He is a most vexing man.”

“I know, but you’re not going to get what you want if he’s killed.”

Saladin let out a breath. “Do you have the treasure that the painting led you to?”

“Yes.”

“You could be lying to me.”

“I’m going to have to trust you not to put a bullet through Roux’s head. You’re going to have to trust me regarding the artifact.”

“Very well.”

“Is what Roux said about Salome true?”

“Yes.”

“Are you coming here?”

“No. You will meet me at the harbor.” Saladin gave directions.

“Getting out of here will be difficult,” Garin said.

“I will be praying for your safety.”

Garin’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Great. And I’ll tell you something else, Saladin. If you harm that old man, I will track you down if it’s the last thing I do. You’ll die a slow, horrible death.”

Saladin grinned. “I look forward to meeting you. I’m told your ancestor killed my ancestor.”

“It runs in the family,” Garin agreed. “You keep that in mind. I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

The phone clicked dead.

Amused, Saladin put the phone in his pocket and gazed down at Roux. “Your son seems quite full of himself.”

“You might be better off killing me,” Roux said. The side of his face had swollen badly. “No matter how this turns out, Garin is going to kill you.”

“He won’t live long enough to do that,” Saladin promised. “And I’m not going to kill you until I get the treasure. In case your son decides to get cute while we’re trading and wants to verify that you’re still alive.”

Garin would, Roux knew. And if he was dead, then maybe Garin and Annja would live. Calmly, Roux started voicing a litany of insults about Saladin, his parentage and everything else he could think of.

* * * *

As he stood in the fourth-floor office of the building and surveyed the team waiting out in the street, Garin felt scared. It was the first time the emotion had touched him so hard in years.

“Are you going to be all right?” Annja asked. She stood at his side.

“We’re trapped,” Garin said.

“We can get out of the building unnoticed,” Annja said. “There’s another trapdoor in the next building.”

They’d found it while searching for the hidden chamber. They’d also spotted another security team around the building and figured they belonged to Salome. Garin and Annja had caught sight of them at roughly the same time. Neither of them had taken their departure for granted.

“If we escape Salome, we’re only going to meet Saladin’s people and they’ll kill us.” Garin paused, then made himself voice the alternative because they both needed it said. “Or we escape and let Saladin kill Roux.”

Annja frowned.

“Escape isn’t an answer. Not if we’re going to save Roux. And I’m not going to leave him in their hands,” Garin stated.

“Neither am I. What about the men you have at the airport?”

“If they come in the helicopters, they’re going to be seen. If they try to drive, it’ll take too long.” Garin nodded. “There’s an army waiting out there. We just need to mobilize it.” He grinned. “Do you feel lucky?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I’m going to go after Roux. You wait till you get my signal, then let Salome’s people see you escaping from the building. The harbor is half a mile to the west. If you run fast and use the terrain, you can get there in a few minutes. Salome and her people will follow. If we get a break, Saladin and his warriors will come this way hoping to get their hands on the horn. If we get really lucky, they’ll fight each other and we can escape in the confusion.”

“How fast can you run?” Annja asked.

Garin looked at her. “I’m not going to—”

“Yes, you are. I’m smaller than you are. I should be able to get in closer. And if they see me, there’s a chance they won’t know who I am. For a while, anyway. You’re too distinctive.”

Garin started to argue.

“Garin,” Annja said softly, “you know what I’m saying is true.”

Garin cursed. He did know that.

“However you want to do this,” Annja said, not challenging him, “we’ll do it that way.”

She knew not to try to argue with him. By leaving the decision totally in his hands, he had to take everything into consideration. He was a master strategist.

“All right,” he said. “Just find Roux and take care of him. I don’t want—”

“I know,” Annja said. She turned to Charlie, who watched them both in silence. “Maybe it would be better if you sat this one out.”

“I can’t,” Charlie said. “If the sleeping king gets his hands on the horn—”

“That’s not going to happen,” Annja said. She’d taken her computer and other devices from her backpack and stored the horn there. “It’s not going to leave my sight.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. He didn’t look happy, either.

“You’ve got your phone?” Garin asked.

Annja slipped the phone from her pocket, showed it to him and replaced it.

“Try not to get killed,” he said.

“You, too,” she replied. Then she stepped from the office they’d broken into and disappeared.

Careful of the window, Garin waited and tried to remain patient. But he wondered if they were all going to be dead before morning.

41

Escaping proved to be relatively simple. Annja accomplished it in minutes. If Roux hadn’t been in Saladin’s clutches, she thought, they all could have gotten out of the building easily. But there were just too many people involved in the pursuit of the Nephilim painting and its hidden treasure.

Of course, Annja reminded herself, that overabundance of enemies was going to work for them in just a few moments.

The plan was daring, but anything less wouldn’t work. They had all agreed on that. Annja had been surprised at how quickly they had come to that agreement and that Garin wanted Roux to live.

Free in the alleys, Annja skirted Salome’s guards and started to run. It was only half a mile to the bay. At least no one was shooting at her. Garin wouldn’t have that luxury.

* * * *

Chest heaving and lungs burning, Annja stood in the shadows of the docks. She’d had to ask a fisherman repairing nets for directions to the berth where Saladin held Roux.

She took cover in the huge bulk of a freighter that was moored only a short distance from the truck Saladin had told Garin about. The proximity to the water was an unexpected bonus.

Heart rate and breathing once more at ease, Annja took out her phone and speed-dialed Garin.

“I’m here,” Annja said. “Roux’s alive. Give me two minutes to get into position, then get Salome’s attention.”

“Two minutes,” Garin agreed. “Don’t get yourself killed.”

“You, either.” Annja closed the phone and stored it in a waterproof section of her backpack. Then, keeping the freighter between her and Saladin’s men, she lowered herself into the dark water and started swimming.

* * * *

By the time the two agreed-upon minutes had expired, Garin and Charlie had taken up positions inside the adjacent building after coming up through the trapdoor.

Garin had pistols in both fists. He looked at the old man. “If you falter, I’m not going to stay behind to help you.”

Charlie nodded. “You won’t have to wait for me. You just need to concentrate on getting those people down to the harbor. And getting your people here in their helicopters.” He paused. “I know you don’t think so, but the real danger here isn’t Salome and Saladin. It’s—”

“The sleeping king. That’s what you keep saying.”

“The horn can’t be allowed to fall into Roux’s hands.”

“That’s not exactly the problem here, now, is it?” Garin didn’t bother to hide his flaring temper. He turned his attention back to Salome’s guards.

When he stepped from the shelter of the building, Garin felt as if a sniper’s crosshairs fell over him. He was quite surprised when a bullet didn’t crash through his skull.

He walked straight for the nearest guard. The man was stationed there with a small sedan. Another guard lounged behind the steering wheel.

Be patient, Garin reminded himself. Make sure of the kills. You don’t want a bullet in the back.

The guard didn’t pay any attention to Garin until he was within twenty feet of him. By that time, it was already too late.

Garin kept moving. He managed two more long strides before the guard reached for the weapon under his jacket. Garin recognized the Ingram MAC-10 submachine pistol as it came around on a sling.

Calmly, as if he had all day, Garin lifted his pistol and fired almost point-blank into the man’s face. The shots sounded incredibly loud even against the backdrop of city noises.

As the man fell, Garin stepped to the sedan’s door and hoped the glass wasn’t bulletproof. He fired three times, centering on the driver’s face.

The guard slumped against the door. Garin opened the passenger’s door and slid across. Shouts from other guards reached his ears as he opened the driver’s door and shoved the body out.

Charlie slid into the passenger’s seat as Garin keyed the ignition and started the engine. Garin put his hand over the old man’s head to push him down below the dashboard.

“Stay down,” Garin growled. He pressed the accelerator and pulled out into the street as bullets peppered the sedan. Heart racing almost as quickly as the sedan’s engine, he glanced in the mirrors and saw that Salome’s gunmen had sprung into action.

Garin pulled up onto the sidewalk to avoid a line of cars waiting for the light to change. He crashed through an empty sidewalk café. Tables and chairs went to pieces and flew by the wayside. Something smashed into his windshield and shattered it. Crooked lines snaked across the glass.

He roared through the intersection and clipped the front end of a car when he went against the red light. But he made it. He just hoped that Annja and Roux were still alive.

* * * *

Annja swam underwater to the harbor’s edge where Saladin held Roux captive.

Roux lay face-first on the ground. A man stood nearby and kept one foot lodged firmly between his shoulder blades. Amazingly, Roux somehow knew she was there. His head turned in her direction and his eyes found her in the darkness.

His lips moved but no sound came forth. He said, “No.”

Then gunfire broke out and Saladin’s warriors braced for attack.

One of the men said something in Arabic. He pointed up the street at the building near where the mosque sat. His men relaxed a little, understanding that the threat wasn’t to them.

The man spoke again, his tone indicating that he was giving orders this time. Most of the men crawled into nearby vehicles and quickly roared up the street. Evidently Saladin didn’t want to lose out on his chance to get the treasure that the Nephilim painting promised.

The man in charge returned to Roux. “You keep the company of fools, do you know that, old man?” He kicked Roux hard.

Annja had to force herself to stay in the water. Finally, the man turned his attention toward the street. Police sirens had started to mix into the sounds of battle.

Quietly, Annja eased from the water. Her clothes felt like lead. She reached for the sword and drew it to her, preferring that weapon instead of the pistol sheathed on her hip. She eased her backpack off and left it on the ground.

None of the five men looked in her direction. Only Roux watched her.

Coldly, Annja focused on the sword and the way she planned to take the attack to them. She kicked the back of the leg of the man who held Roux trapped on the ground. With his support gone, the man started to fall. He yelled in warning as he twisted and caught a brief glance of Annja.

Holding the sword blade, Annja rammed the hilt into the man’s forehead between his eyes. She knew these men were killers, but she would only kill if necessary. She had enough blood on her hands and wasn’t eager to add more.

The hilt met the man’s forehead with a dull thunk. His eyes went wide, then rolled back as he fell.

The next man turned around and swung his machine pistol toward her. She met the threat with steel, blocking the pistol, then driving an elbow into the bridge of the man’s nose. Knowing the other men were trying to track her, Annja spun and lashed out with a foot. She swept one man’s legs out from under him, and he flew backward.

The remaining two men opened fire. Annja stayed low. Their bullets chopped into the guard as he fell to the ground. By that time Annja had taken brief respite behind the truck. She flicked the sword out and cut the disposable plastic cuffs that bound Roux’s wrists behind his back.

Without a word, Roux hurled himself forward for the fallen weapon of the first man Annja had downed. A shadow drifted around the corner of the truck.

Annja stood with the sword raised in both hands.

When the man came into sight, Roux opened fire with the MAC-10. The bullets drove the man backward in short stutter steps. Then he looked down at the bright blood staining his chest in disbelief. After that he didn’t see anything at all.

Roux pointed along the side of the truck, urging Annja to get moving.

Annja gave Roux a quick nod, then went forward. There were at least two men left in the confusion of vehicles in the parking area. She’d lost track of both of them.

42

Garin dug his cell phone from his pocket, used the speed-dial function and held the instrument to his ear. “Where are you?”

“On our way, sir,” his man responded. “Our ETA is less than two minutes.” The sound of helicopter rotors provided a thundering backdrop to his words.

“Have you got GPS locks on myself and the two people with me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then make sure you don’t shoot us in the confusion.” Garin closed the phone before the man had time to reassure him that that wouldn’t happen.

A sports car shot up next to Garin. He didn’t recognize it, but he recognized Salome sitting in the passenger’s seat. He also recognized the assault rifle she held in her deadly hands.

God, how he hated her, he thought. He’d never been able to get along with her when she’d worked with Roux. Now he wanted nothing less than her death.

Knowing he couldn’t outrun her, he stomped on the brakes just as she opened fire. The bullets beat a savage rhythm along the front end of the car, then started chipping the street.

For a moment Garin felt pleased that his surprise maneuver caught the man driving the sports car off guard. Then the left front tire, obviously punctured one or more times, unraveled and dropped the bare metal rim on the asphalt. The rim chewed into the asphalt, then dug in.

Garin knew that he’d lost control. The steering wheel jerked and shivered in his grip. The wheels locked and the car turned sideways, then flipped.

Desperate, Garin threw himself toward the passenger’s side. He put a hand over Charlie to hold the old man in place because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The car rolled over and over.

Finally it skidded to a stop. Garin hung upside down, trapped by the seat belt. The succession of impacts left him dazed and disoriented.

The sports car braked to a halt only a few feet away. The lights shone inside the overturned car and nearly blinded Garin. He watched helplessly as Salome and a man he didn’t know got out. The smell of gasoline filled the air.

* * * *

A bullet ricocheted from the asphalt parking area less than an inch from Annja’s left foot. She knew immediately that one of the gunners had dropped to his knees on the other side of the truck and tried to take her out by shooting her feet. She’d gotten lucky.

Annja scrambled to the top of the truck’s hood and climbed to her feet. The fast move caught the gunner off guard. Still on the ground, his gun hand thrust under the truck, the man looked up in surprise and tried to bring his weapon to bear.

Annja dropped down beside him. One kick cleared the pistol from his hands. The follow-up kick, delivered to his temple, rendered him unconscious.

She sensed the movement behind her, rather than her side. She tried to move, but what felt like a sledgehammer slammed into the side of her head. Her knees turned to rubber and nearly gave way beneath her. The sword disappeared from her lax grip.

Blood trickled down the side of her neck. She knew from the spreading warmth that she had been shot. Fear screamed through her because she wanted to know how bad the wound was. If the bullet entered her brain, could she still function?

She didn’t know the answer to that. For all she knew, she was dying. But she also knew that she could move—just not very well. She slid sideways, tried to bring the sword to her but failed. Her concentration had to be sharper. She lifted her hands before her and wondered where Roux was. He should have been in a perfect position to shoot the man advancing on her.

“You think you’re clever, don’t you?” the man demanded. Anger pulled his face into a ruthless mask. “Now you’ve gone and gotten yourself killed.”

“You were going to kill us anyway,” Annja said.

Farther up the street, the sounds of battle—gunfire and the screams of wounded people—continued.

Annja concentrated on Saladin, for she was sure that’s who he was. He was smart with the pistol. He stayed just out of reach of a punch or kick.

“I was,” Saladin said agreeably. “That old man owes me blood. No negotiations or treasures would’ve gotten him out of that. Or anyone who claimed him as a friend. All of your lives were forfeit.”

Annja struggled to clear her head and get her balance back, but the pounding pain inside her head didn’t ease. Blood continued to spill down her neck and chest. Why doesn’t Roux shoot him? Then a bad thought entered her head as she remembered that she’d left the backpack and the horn near the water’s edge.

Saladin extended his arm and took deliberate aim. Annja knew he wasn’t going to wait any longer. Risking everything, she raced at Saladin. The closer to him she got, the more he’d have to move to compensate. If she’d tried to run away, the adjustment would have been small.

She ducked and rolled, landing on her shoulder and then shoving herself up on her hands. Her left foot caught Saladin in the chest and knocked him to the ground.

The pain in Annja’s head increased. Nausea spun through her stomach. She thought she was going to be sick. Instead of neatly recovering, she rolled awkwardly and managed to get to a seated position.

Saladin had maintained his hold on his pistol. He pointed the weapon at her while he shoved himself to his feet. He didn’t try to make any last-minute death threats or promises. He was just going to shoot her until she was dead.

Annja focused on the sword, imagined it in her hand and felt it there. As soon as the familiar weight was at the end of her arm, she reversed her grip on the hilt and threw the sword like a spear.

The sword flashed across the distance and thudded home in Saladin’s chest. He staggered back, staring down at the sword in surprise.

Annja called the sword back to her. Immediately blood poured from Saladin’s body once the wound was undammed.

The pistol tumbled from Saladin’s fingers and he fell.

On her feet, sword in hand, Annja jogged to the back of the truck. But everything she’d feared was true.

Roux was gone. So was her backpack.

* * * *

“Garin, are you still alive?”

Hanging upside down in the car, Garin didn’t answer. He tried to break the seat belt lock, but it held stubbornly. Then he noticed one of the pistols he’d thrown onto the seat when he’d taken the car.

Salome knelt down and folded one arm around her knees. She held a pistol in her other hand. Her smile seemed joyful and insane at the same time.

“Good,” she said. “You’re still alive. I was worried that the crash had killed you.”

A man came to stand beside her. He held a pistol in his fist.

The sound of helicopter rotors suddenly blasted across the street. There were four of them and they made a lot of noise.

Salome and the man looked up.

Garin didn’t blame them. If he hadn’t been the cause of the helicopters being there, he probably would have looked up, too. But only after he’d killed the man he’d gone there to kill.

With a twist, Garin freed his shoulder and scooped the pistol up from the roof of the car. He hoped the safety was off as he shoved it toward Salome. She had to die first. Even if the man killed him, Garin was determined the woman wasn’t going to live another moment. Not after the way she’d betrayed Roux and nearly killed him.

His movement must have caught her attention. She looked down just as he leveled the pistol. She tried to bring her own weapon into play, but Garin squeezed off a shot that caught her in the throat.

Knocked backward by the bullet, as well as her own frightened reaction, Salome tried to scream and couldn’t. Her lifeblood poured between her fingers.

The unexpected sight froze the man in his tracks. Instead of shooting Garin, the man dived for Salome.

Mercilessly, Garin empted the clip into the man. He sprawled across Salome and held her in his numb embrace as she breathed out her last time.

Charlie popped up and Garin pointed the pistol at the old man and pulled the trigger three times. Only then did he realize the pistol was empty.

“It’s all right,” Charlie said. He slashed the seat belt with a pocketknife. “We’ve got to get out of here. We have to stop the sleeping king.”

We’ve got to get out of here before this gasoline catches fire, Garin thought. He scrambled through the smashed window, but the top had crushed slightly and the fit was tight. His efforts ripped his clothes.

When he was on his feet, he reached back for Charlie and pulled the old man through.

“Are you all right?” Garin asked as he led the old man away from the overturned car.

Without warning, the vehicle exploded and became wrapped by flames.

“I’m fine. But we need to find Annja and the sleeping king.”

All around them, door gunners mounted in the helicopters marked Salome’s men and shot them down. They did the same for Saladin’s fighters. The street became a battle zone littered with bodies.

Garin’s phone rang and he answered it. “Annja?”

“It’s Roux,” Annja gasped.

Sickness swirled inside Garin’s head. He couldn’t believe the old man was dead.

“He’s got the horn,” Annja went on.

“The sleeping king has the horn,” Charlie echoed. “We have to stop him. We have to save the world.”

“Where did he go?” Garin asked.

“He stole a boat. I couldn’t get to him in time.”

Garin looked up at the helicopters hovering overhead. “We’ll get him. Stay where you are.”

43

Annja stared helplessly as the boat chugged away from the dock. The distance was already too far for her to catch up.

Police sirens screamed. When she looked back at the city, she spotted the flaming car at the center of it. Several police cars were already on the scene. She knew others would crowd the harbor once they realized the battle had stretched that far.

Then one of the helicopters retreating from the downtown area descended overhead. It hung only ten feet above her.

Garin waved to her from the cargo area.

Annja jumped and caught the rope ladder, then she pulled herself up. She got herself secure and pointed at the motorboat.

Garin nodded and talked briefly over the headset he wore. The helicopter streaked after the boat and overtook it within seconds. Carefully, the pilot held his craft only a few feet above the boat.

Roux tried evasive techniques, but the craft he’d stolen was too ponderous to do much. He angrily waved them off.

Annja leaned forward into the wind, judged the distance and jumped. She landed on the boat’s deck and felt as if she’d driven her legs up into her hips. She caught herself on her hands.

A heartbeat later, Garin landed beside her. Together, they walked toward Roux.

He looks different, Annja couldn’t help but think. He was bloodied and worn. Madness danced in his eyes.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he shouted over the roar of the engine and the helicopter’s rotor wash. “You should have stayed away.”

“What are you doing, Roux?” Annja asked.

“I’m going to fix what never should have happened,” Roux declared.

Annja focused on her backpack sitting at Roux’s feet. All she had to do was get it. Not that she believed any of the nonsense about saving the world.

As if reading her thoughts, Roux revealed the MAC-10 he was holding. “If you come any closer, if you try to take the horn from me, I’ll kill you, Annja. I swear that I will.”

Annja stopped moving and spread her hands. She couldn’t believe what was happening.

Beside her, Garin froze, as well. “Are you going to shoot us, Roux?” he challenged.

“I will,” Roux said. “I’ve searched for this for over four hundred years. Ever since she died tied to that stake.” Pain pulled at his face. “It’s my fault that she died there. She wasn’t supposed to die. She was supposed to live. She was supposed to do great things. I destroyed that.”

“Joan’s death wasn’t your fault,” Annja said.

“It was,” Roux said. “I was supposed to be with her. I let my own interests deflect me. I lost her and I cursed us.”

“This isn’t what you’ve stood for, Roux. All those years I followed you around, all those people we fought for, all those lost causes. You were always the good one. You’ve always been on the side of the angels,” Garin said.

Roux shook his head. “It wasn’t always that way. In my day, in my time, I’ve been every bit as black hearted as you are, Garin. Maybe more so. I had people who showed me how to live my life. You had no one.”

Garin took another step. “I had you.”

“Capricious fates,” Roux argued. “I wasn’t prepared to be either a father or a mentor. I took you because I didn’t want to prepare my own meals anymore.”

“No,” Garin said. “You cared for me. I know that you did. You took in a small boy whose own father had turned away from him.”

“Why are you doing this?” Annja demanded.

Roux pointed the pistol at her. “Stay out of this, Annja.”

Roux took a fresh grip on his pistol and shifted his aim back to Garin. “This needs to be done, Garin. Our lives—mine, yours and Annja’s—don’t matter in the long run.”

Without warning, Charlie jumped from the helicopter.

Roux was momentarily distracted.

“Annja,” Charlie said, “draw your sword.” There was steel in the old man’s voice. “Do it now!”

Annja reached for the sword, and it was in her hand. She held it up before her, wondering whether she could truly attack Roux if it came down to that.

Roux stared at the blade.

“Remember the sword,” Charlie said. “You searched for the pieces. You found them. You found the woman who is yet to face the evil that is let loose in this world.”

Roux wavered.

“Joan’s sacrifice wasn’t just for that time and that world,” Charlie said. “It was for you and for Annja and for this world, too. This world also needs protection. You know that. You’ve felt the evil loose here. Without that sacrifice in the past, there would be no one now to combat that.”

Roux lowered his pistol. “What am I supposed to do?”

“You know what you’re supposed to do,” Charlie said. “You’ve always known. The horn wasn’t meant to stay in this world.”

Roux looked at Annja’s bag. Then, without warning, he flung it far out into the sea.

Epilogue

Annja woke later than she’d intended to. The alarm by her bed showed that it was after 3:00 p.m. She realized she must have slept through her automated wake-up call.

And neither Roux nor Garin had come to interrupt her. That was surprising.

She showered quickly and dressed in some of the clothes Garin had ordered delivered to their rooms. It was good to be rich, she’d decided. Maybe someday she’d work on that.

After she was dressed, she tried calling Garin and Roux. Neither of them answered, but that wasn’t surprising, either.

Famished, Annja decided to find something to eat. If the others were sleeping, she could grab something by herself.

She found Charlie sitting outside her room in the hallway. He was reading Stanley Younts’s latest thriller novel.

“Good morning,” he said. He turned down a page to mark his spot.

Annja hated to see anyone do that to a book, but she smiled. “Good afternoon. Have you been out here long?”

Charlie shrugged and smiled. “A little while.” He nodded at the large window at the end of the hallway. “It’s a nice place to get indirect sunlight. I thought I’d take advantage.”

Annja settled her backpack over her shoulders. Garin had seen to having one of his security people recover her personal belongings and replace her knapsack. They had arrived with the new clothes.

“Have you seen Roux and Garin?” she asked.

“They’re gone,” Charlie said.

“Where did they go?”

Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know. They had things to take care of.”

“Of course they did,” Annja grumbled.

“I’d like to take you to eat. If you’d allow me,” Charlie said.

Annja sighed. “Okay.”

Charlie offered his arm in a gallant manner. She took it and he led her to the elevator bank.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“I did. Too well. I should have been up before now.”

“Nonsense. You’ve had quite an adventure.”

Annja grinned wryly at him.

“What do you think would have happened if Roux had tried to use the horn?” she asked.

“Perhaps nothing.” Charlie sighed. “Maybe he would have gotten hurt. That wouldn’t have been a good thing. Or he’d have had to realize that he’d chased something that didn’t exist for hundreds of years.”

“That could have been disturbing.”

“I know. But it didn’t work out that way.”

They left the elevator and crossed the spacious lobby to the restaurant Annja had spotted on her arrival last night. The food smells put a razor edge on her hunger.

Within a few minutes, they were seated at a table. Both of them ordered from the breakfast menu.

“You’re a complicated man,” Annja observed.

“Thank you.” Charlie smiled. “I wasn’t always homeless. I’ve had a rather eventful life.” He sipped the glass of orange juice the server brought to him. “In the meantime, you need to realize that time in this world has been forever altered.”

“Oh?” Annja raised an eyebrow.

“The sword,” Charlie said. “You won’t believe how many lives have been saved since the day that you picked it up. Or how many have yet to be saved.”

“This is all a little over my head.”

“Perhaps for now,” Charlie agreed. “But there will come a time when all of this is plain to you.”

“What about you?” Annja asked.

“What about me?”

“Am I going to see you again?”

“Perhaps, but I also hope it won’t be under such dire circumstances.”

“Am I ever going to know who you truly are?”

“A friend, Annja. I’m just a friend. You, Roux and Garin are all inextricably linked in events that are going to be important to the world. Danger will come at you from all quarters. Every now and again, you’re going to need a friend.”

Annja silently agreed with that. “Okay,” she said. “I can always use a friend. Especially when I’m spending time with those two.”

Charlie laughed. “Make no mistake. They love and hate each other at times, but that’s how it is between fathers and sons in every family.”

“Most of them don’t try to kill each other, though.”

“No. They don’t. What you’ve got, Annja, is a very special family.” Charlie regarded her. “And that’s what they are to you. Never forget that.”

“I’m beginning to understand that,” Annja replied. And, despite the danger and duplicity—and the fact that she always seemed to be the last one to know Roux and Garin’s secrets—that thought warmed her heart.

 

End