Grendel's Curse Page 8

  It took her a moment, running her fingers over the paper, to find the fragment but it had fallen into the crease and she couldn’t pick it out. She needed better light but neither the sunlight creeping into the caravan or the electric lamp made much difference. She went back to the door.

  “Johan, I need you.” He looked at her like she was half-mad.

  “Are you sure we should be doing this?” he asked.

  “Honestly? Yes.”

  That confused him. She debated not telling him what she’d seen at the accident, but the image of the burning man refused to leave her. She was sure it was Lars. It had to be him. It was more than just a gut feeling. He wasn’t coming back to the dig. She could only hope he’d left some bread crumbs for her to follow so she could find out what had happened to him. “I saw a body inside the burning car,” she admitted finally. “The car was a Volvo, like his. Had the same bumper sticker on the fender.”

  “Really?”

  “He said he wanted to meet me because he’d found something and a couple of hours later he’s dead. I want to know what he found and if he was killed for it, or if it really was just an unfortunate accident. He’d been up all night by the looks of it, so it could have been tiredness.”

  “Tiredness kills,” Johan agreed. “But in my admittedly limited experience what looks like coincidence generally isn’t. We really shouldn’t be in here if the police turn up. It won’t look good.”

  He was right, of course; getting caught rooting around in a dead man’s personal belongings a few hours after his untimely death could look suspicious. But they had only a small window of opportunity before the place was battened down and whatever clues Lars might have left were trampled under the feet of local law enforcement.

  “I need your light,” she said, pointing to the paper.

  “You want me to record?”

  She’d been about to say no, but then changed her mind. It wouldn’t hurt to have a visual record of everything in this room just in case they never got back inside here. “Do it.”

  Johan panned the camera lens around the caravan’s interior, lingering on the many stacks of papers. He went up the narrow aisle between the kitchen, dining and sleeping area, focusing first left, then right, then returned to shine the front-facing light on the open newspaper.

  “What do you think it is?” he asked as Annja pried the fragment up out of the fold with a fingernail.

  “Rust?” She picked it up and put it in the palm of her hand, keeping it in the full glare of the camera’s light. It wasn’t rust. It was more than that. This was old corrosion. It had a different quality to it, where the oxidization process had folded in on itself over and over again, building up thick layers like the strata of rock. The corrosive fragment had come off something that had been in the ground for more than just a single season. Carefully, Annja placed it back onto the newspaper and folded the top sheet around it, turning it into a smaller and smaller parcel until she was able to slip it into her pocket without fear of the fragment slipping out.

  “You think it’s important?” Johan asked, killing the recording. The camera light went out, plunging the caravan into near-darkness in comparison.

  “Who knows? We don’t have time to go through every notebook or piece of paper searching for clues, and as much as I want to, I’m not sure we’d get away with carrying out his laptop. There’s not much else we can do here.”

  She took one last glance around.

  It would be like looking for a needle in a very cluttered haystack, and that was even assuming Mortensen had written down what he’d found, or clues that led to its discovery. It was always possible that if it was such an important find he simply wouldn’t have recorded it yet because of sheer excitement. She’d been caught up in that kind of excitement before. And she remembered what the professor had said yesterday when she’d asked about what Thorssen got out of his altruism—first look at anything they dug up. Was that it? Was that why Mortensen had come running to her because he didn’t want Karl Thorssen getting his hands on whatever it was he’d found? Or was she just being paranoid?

  “Just because they’re all out to get you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  “Just thinking aloud.”

  “Want to check the laptop?”

  “No, let’s just get out of here before the others notice we’re in here.”

  Inge was waiting outside the door for them.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  “You were right, we could probably spend a week in there and not find anything if it wasn’t pinned to the fridge with our names on it.” She turned to Johan and said, “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  He nodded and left them alone.

  “Yeah, the prof’s a bit...special,” Inge said with a smile. “Guess we’ll just have to soldier on until he gets here.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Annja said, offering the girl one of her business cards. “I’ve got to head back into town. Could you ask him to call me when you see him?”

  “Sure.”

  The purpose of the card wasn’t purely masquerade; she wanted to make sure that Inge had her number. When the news about Lars Mortensen’s death was made public she wanted the girl to know where she was.

  It was purely gut instinct, but she’d learned to trust her gut ever since Roux and Garin exploded into her life. That pair made a habit of turning things upside down, then stepping back to watch others pick up the pieces—Garin especially, and often deliberately. With Roux it was usually a mere side effect of him getting what he wanted from any given situation, the old man mindless of the cost to others. It wasn’t selfishness so much as single-mindedness.

  Annja wanted to see how the pieces fell here. It was like divination; sometimes the truth was hidden in plain sight and simply by turning the apple cart over and stepping back to watch who scrambled for what you could learn so much more about a situation than if you spent a month asking the wrong questions.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to get on with things. Have fun,” she said, and headed off to join Johan.

  “Okay, boss, where now?” he asked as Annja opened the driver’s side door and slipped behind the wheel.

  “Back to the hotel.”

  He made an elaborate show of looking at his watch and sighing.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “I thought you were standing me breakfast?”

  “And I can’t buy you breakfast at the hotel?”

  “Not on a first date,” he said with a grin.

  “Good job there’s a decent little café around the corner, then.”

  “Will you be joining me?”

  “Sorry, Johan, you’re on your own. I want to take a look at the footage you’ve got so far, see how it’s coming together.”

  “So not only am I paying for my own breakfast, I’m giving you my pride and joy for the privilege? You women...given an inch you take a mile.” He smiled, showing he didn’t mean it.

  11

  It had only taken a few minutes to unpack Johan’s camera and hook it up to the huge flat-screen TV in her room.

  She hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside of the door and settled down to watch the footage, skipping through the stuff Johan had shot at the rally before the explosion and the horrific scenes of the aftermath. She didn’t want to remember it any more vividly than she already did. Annja had no idea he’d managed to capture so much of it. Not that they’d be able to use it in the segment. It was too hard-core. Every inch of the film was filled with unfiltered suffering. Just knowing that he’d caught the final moments of some of these people’s lives made it difficult to watch. It wasn’t like seeing it on the news, either. That somehow sanitized it. Made it safe by adding distance to it. This was intimate. Her skin crawled even seeing it flicker by in fast-forward.

  She replayed the scenes of the grand opening of the dig, watching Karl Thorssen milk it for what it was worth. The man was a consummate professional, a
showman to the core. He knew exactly what he was doing when it came to the camera, wearing his injuries from the botched assassination attempt as a badge of honor and a cloak of defiance. His demeanor gave a very precise message to the viewer: look at me, I will not be bowed.

  It had been the same when the rescue workers had pulled him from the rubble in the theater.

  Theater?

  That thought stopped her cold.

  Could there be a connection in the theatricality of it all?

  Annja began to spool backward and forward through the adjoining scenes, looking at Karl Thorssen in both of them. Something was off, strange, but she wasn’t getting it. She ran the film back again, trying to see exactly what it was about him that bothered her.

  He addressed the crowd, commanding the room. The explosion, then debris falling as death filled the space. Dust and panic.

  Annja watched him being helped out of the building and into the ambulance with blood streaming from his head.

  Men shouted and women screamed in the madness as people hurried to get to safety.

  She fast-forwarded again, watching Thorssen standing in the shadow of Skalunda Barrow. He was every bit as dynamic as he had been the day before despite the injuries he had suffered—not only unbowed and unbroken but barely touched by the trauma of the explosion, by the loss of his disciples. Bar a few scratches the only trace of weakness was the sling he wore to support one arm.

  Annja paused the image as it zoomed in close, his face a little grainy on the screen, eerie in its stillness.

  Who are you, really?

  And what do you want out of all this attention?

  They were big questions. And there were no easy answers to either of them. She’d seen enough of Thorssen on TV to know he was anything but straightforward, but did he really believe that being associated with the rediscovery of a long-lost hero—even one as mythical in nature as Beowulf—would propel him to political success? In the theater she’d thought that he was a passionate man who believed in something and that belief gave him the power to achieve anything he set his mind to. She’d seen that kind of charisma in religious zealots of every stripe, no matter their faith. They were dangerous men capable of whipping others up into an unthinking fervor. It wasn’t something that belonged to one particular religion or one part of the world; it manifested itself everywhere there was a need for a leader, everywhere someone with ambition craved power.

  There was something else about Karl Thorssen, though, and she knew it.

  It was there on the screen in his frozen face.

  It was there on the screen in his cuts and bruises.

  It was there on the screen as he moved without so much as a wince, caught up in the drama of his performance, despite having struggled so visibly to clamber up onto the platform.

  It was there for her to see, if she could just make the mental connection.

  But it was illusive, and seemed to mock her inability to grasp it.

  What is it?

  What am I missing?

  Annja’s thought process was interrupted by a gentle but insistent knock on the door.

  “You do know what Do Not Disturb means, right?” she called, annoyed that the sign on her door was being ignored.

  “Police. Open the door, please.”

  The police? What were they doing here? There was no spyhole in the door, so she couldn’t tell who was on the other side.

  “Just a minute.” She pulled the cables from the television and stowed the camera back into its case, and kicked it beneath the bed. It didn’t go all the way under. The knock on the door was more insistent this time.

  “Coming,” she called quickly, slipping into the bathroom to flush the toilet and run the tap. She answered the door with a damp towel in her hands and a sheepish smile on her face.

  “Sorry,” she said, letting the towel make her excuses for her. “What can I do for you?”

  There were two of them, neither in uniform, both in what appeared to be expensive black suits perhaps a year behind what was fashionable in the cut but no denying the quality. Neither showed any ID.

  “I understand that you had a meeting with Lars Mortensen this morning.”

  Both men were powerfully built. She looked for the telltale bulge of a weapon beneath the tailoring, but both jackets fell naturally.

  “No,” she said. “I was supposed to meet him for a coffee, but he didn’t turn up.”

  “Can I ask what that meeting was about?”

  “I don’t see how that’s anything for the police to worry about. And anyway, I told you, there was no meeting. He stood me up.”

  “As that may be, I’d like you to come along to the station to make a statement.”

  “A statement? Wow, that is harsh. He stood me up—I know I’m special, but missing our coffee date’s got to be somewhere below a national emergency in the great scheme of things,” Annja joked, trying not to let her concern show. It wasn’t easy. She’d already made a couple of mistakes—she should have asked for ID, she should have questioned the fact the first words out of their mouths were in English, not Swedish.

  “We are trying to ascertain Mr. Mortensen’s last movements.”

  “Last? Sorry? What do you mean, last?”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Mortensen was involved in a tragic accident this morning.”

  “Oh...what happened? Poor Lars... I can’t believe it. We only talked a few hours ago. I don’t know what to say....” It wouldn’t have won her an award, but her performance wasn’t terrible.

  The second man stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He didn’t say a word. There was something about the guy Annja really didn’t like. She’d faced men like him before. Men used to being violent to get what they wanted. She backed up a step. The big man who’d been doing all the talking didn’t even turn to look at his colleague. He just shrugged an eloquent shrug and shook his head sadly.

  “I had hoped we’d do this with a minimum of trouble. You’re lying to us. You know it. I know it. My friend here knows it. It’s a pity. A real pity,” the first man said. “But if you won’t come along for a nice little drive, we’ll have to improvise.”

  The big man stepped passed both of them without making eye contact and strode to the French windows she’d admired so much when she checked into the room. He pushed the doors open and took a deep breath, savoring it, then very slowly and very deliberately he leaned out to take a look at the ground below.

  It didn’t take a genius to understand the implicit threat.

  Annja felt the calm of battle settle over her as her heart rate slowed and a kind of serenity took the place of her earlier anxiety. It was always like this. Her world narrowed to a single point, beyond it there was nothing. She pictured Joan’s sword in her mind, and immediately felt the familiar weight of the blade in her hand as her fist closed around it.

  She smiled at the men who would try to kill her, enjoying the looks of confusion, surprise and then disbelief cross their faces as she drew the sword from the otherwhere. The sword was like an old lover in her hand, someone who’d not been beneath her touch for so long, someone her body and mind missed.

  Craved.

  And suddenly they were together.

  Joined.

  Annja Creed drew the mystical blade in across her chest, its cold, cold metal inches from her lips. It was alive in her hands. Its song sang in her blood. She stared at the men from behind it. The mood in the room had changed. They stared back at her. They were killers, she knew. The pair of them. They would not hesitate to end her life. In turn, she should not have hesitated to end theirs, but Annja had sworn never to kill unless there was no other way. She wasn’t a murderer. “Go on,” she breathed. “Run back to your masters. You have one chance. Don’t waste it. I’m not the kind of girl who offers second chances.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, then the big man smiled bleakly and reached inside his jacket. “Stupid woman, what good is a sword,” he mocked, drawing his weapon
.

  “One chance,” Annja repeated, feeling the thrill of the years coursing through Joan’s sword.

  She took a step toward the big man, forcing him to take one in turn, moving back toward the door. She felt strong. Good. The vitality of Joan of Arc’s fabled sword filled her. She felt invincible.

  The man fired once, the shot aimed at her heart.

  Body and sword as one, Annja’s reflexes were abnormally sharp: the only clue to what had just happened was the ringing of metal. The bullet had been deflected, the blade shimmering in her hands.

  “That was your chance,” she said calmly. “Run!”

  She whipped the sword around so fast the displaced air winnowed around it as the tip sliced into the big man’s suit, parting the threads without so much as nicking the skin beneath.

  The man stumbled back, firing wildly. The bullets drove into the wall above and behind Annja, none of the remaining shots coming close to her. His companion, the silent one, reached for the door and threw it open.

  Annja lowered the sword, her eyes flicking toward the silent man as he backed out of the room. His partner, empty gun in hand, hurled himself toward Annja.

  Instinctively, she stepped backward, catching her heel against the edge of the camera case sticking out from beneath the bed, and, losing her balance, stumbled. The big man threw himself at her, the impact driving the air from her lungs.

  She hit the floor hard and then he was on top of her, her sword arm trapped beneath his bulk.

  She fought to pull it free, but it was as though time stretched. The big man swung a fist down at her, but it came so slowly she had an eternity to think, to act. Annja used every fiber of her very being, every ounce of strength, to buck against his weight and throw him off—he barely moved an inch, despite her violent thrashing, but it was enough to unbalance him.

  As she bucked, his punch went wide, catching Annja with a glancing blow instead of shattering her nose. Even so, it stung. Her warrior’s instinct took over. Ears ringing, she drove her knee up, crunching hard between his legs. There was no finesse to it. It was a move meant to disable her attacker and it did just that. He didn’t scream, he just curled up and fell away, rolling off her, clutching his groin, gasping as though he couldn’t swallow any air no matter how hard he tried.