Tear of the Gods (11 page)

He was an irascible, ill-tempered, egotistical pompous ass who tried to tell her what to do all the time, but to Annja, who’d grown up in an orphanage, he was the closest thing she’d ever had to a family.

And when you needed help, that’s who you turned to.

Family.

The phone rang several times before Roux’s voice mail clicked in. She left a quick message, telling him she was all right in case he’d seen the earlier newscast and asking him to call her when he could.

With her thoughts still wrapped up in the stupid press conference Doug had held, she didn’t realize that she’d forgotten to give Roux her new number.

With Roux unavailable, Annja considered calling Garin but finally dismissed the idea. Garin had a way of confronting situations head-on, which was all well and good when you wanted to make a statement but this situation called for a bit more finesse for the time being. She’d hold off for now; she could always give him a call if things began to spin out of control.

In another part of London, miles away from where Annja was hiding out, the head of the Red Hand Defenders and his senior captain were watching Doug Morrell’s press conference.

“I thought you said you’d taken care of her,” David said, his voice dangerously soft, while on the screen Morrell insisted that his beautiful star was alive and well.

“I did. Apparently I was mistaken.”

Trevor Jackson waited for his employer to explode in anger but the other man somehow managed to retain control of himself. In Jackson’s opinion, this was clearly a first, and it made him nervous.

“Could she be responsible for the deaths of our two operatives?” Shaw asked.

His subordinate gave it some thought. The two men in question had been found dead at the side of the road some distance from the dig site, but that didn’t rule out the possibility. After all, if this Creed woman had survived being shot and then managed to cut cross-country after escaping from the bog, she could easily have crossed the motorway in that area. O’Donnell had been an independent sort of cuss; if he’d seen the earliest reports that had suggested the Creed woman was among the dead and then saw her by the side of the road, he might have tried to bring her in on his own. He’d been spoiling for Jackson’s job for some time; embarrassing him in front of Shaw after he’d claimed the woman was dead would have been right up O’Donnell’s alley. Apparently he’d bitten off more than he could chew this time around, though. Who’d have ever imagined that some television personality could be so ruthless?

He kept his thoughts to himself, however, saying instead, “Yes, it’s possible. We’re still working to locate their missing car, but if Morrell is telling the truth, and she is indeed here in London, it’s quite possible she simply stole the vehicle after killing our men and then used it to make the journey here.”

“She must have the torc,” Shaw said.

“It’s certainly possible, yes.”

As much as he hated to admit it, Jackson thought his employer could be right. She must have hidden the torc before attacking his people that night and then retrieved it when she escaped from the bog. The thought got his anger up. How she’d managed to survive that gunshot to the skull, never mind the cloying grip of the bog afterward, was something he intended to ask her, right after he beat her mercilessly for putting him in this position in the first place.

On the screen, Morrell was still babbling on about bog mummies or some other equally stupid subject for his television show. Shaw watched him for a moment and then tapped the glass, like a young kid knocking on the outer side of the pens in the pet store, expecting the canine, or in this case, the walking dead man, to notice him.

As the press conference began to wind down, Shaw said over his shoulder, “We still have people in New York, yes?”

Jackson nodded. “Of course.”

“Put them on Morrell. I want his phone tapped, his house and office watched. If he’s telling the truth, this Creed woman has been in touch and will likely reach out to him again. When she does, I want to know about it.”

“I’m on it.”

Shaw turned to face him. “The auction ends in thirty-six hours,” he said. “You have that long to get me that torc. No excuses and no more screwups!”

Jackson told him he’d handle it and then took his leave before things could get ugly.

He was out of chances, he knew. If he didn’t find the torc in time, there wasn’t any place that he could hide. Shaw would hunt him to the ends of the earth.

Failure was not an option.

At just after four that afternoon, a man got off the elevator outside the offices of the
Chasing History’s Monsters
production office in New York City. He was dressed in dark pants and a white shirt, with a tie that was intentionally tied an inch shorter than it should be. His hair, a little longer than the average corporate wage slave’s, was slicked back without much regard for style or flair. He wore an unattractive pair of glasses and an ID badge—showing his picture and the name Newman in large letters—was hanging from a lanyard around his neck. In his left hand he carried a scuffed leather computer bag that sprouted a few inches of Ethernet cable and the end of a flowmeter out of its partially opened mouth.

The operative had been hired by a local fixer, who in turn had been contacted by an acquaintance overseas, who himself was a secondary cut out from the man who actually wanted the work done. The operative liked it that way; if things went sour and he ended up across the table from a couple of cops looking to send him up-river for a few years, he really didn’t know squat, which meant that there was only so much crap they could hang around his neck and make stick.

He was always the type to face things head-on. None of this sneaking about in the middle of the night garbage for him—no, sir. At night, you had to deal with alarm systems and security cameras, never mind the guards themselves. You couldn’t finesse technology—at least, not easily, the operative told himself.

But people? People you could finesse.

And that’s what he specialized in. Finessing people. As he marched over to the reception desk, the woman behind it took one look at him and dismissed him as anyone interesting before he’d even opened his mouth. The operative knew that people saw what they wanted to see and very rarely ever looked any deeper than that. To the receptionist, he was just another computer geek from the IT department downstairs; she was probably hoping that if she ignored him, he wouldn’t mumble something about how rad his latest massively multi-player online role-playing game was and ask her out, like the last tech who’d been sent up to fix a problem with the firewall. The operative used this tendency to his advantage. Act like you were supposed to be there, dress the part, and nine times out of ten they just sent you on through without a word.

The switchboard phone rang just as he got ready to give his spiel and the receptionist simply hit the buzzer and waved him on through, like he’d been there a hundred times before.

It was exactly what he’d expected to happen.

Once past the reception area, the operative wandered through the warren of cubicles until he found the office he wanted. He knocked and then opened the door without waiting for a reply.

His target, a producer named Doug Morrell, looked up from behind his desk. “Yeah?”

The operative held his ID card away from his chest for Morrell to see and then let it flop back again.

“IT department,” he said with that tone of bored indifference tech guys cultivated the world over. “I’m supposed to check the phone jacks as prep for the fiber optic install next week.”

How you said it was far more important than what you said, the operative knew. Just the right amount of arrogance, that little bit of superiority that said, “You need me far more than I need you, Jack,” and that was often all it took to get them to do just what you wanted them to do.

Which, in this case, was to leave the room.

“How long are we talking about?” Morrell asked with a glance at his watch.

The operative shrugged. “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes? I gotta pull out the wall plate, test the circuits, make sure you’ve got room for when they lay the dual cabling next week….”

Morrell’s eyes were already glazing over. “Okay, fine. Fine. Do your thing. I’m going to go get a cup of coffee and I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

“Sure, man, whatever,” he replied, already dumping his bag on the small conference table near the desk and pretending to dig through it for the right set of tools. By the time he looked up again, Morrell was nowhere in sight.

Works every time, he thought.

He leaned over the desk and took a look at the handset for Morrell’s telephone. It was like a thousand others he’d seen in offices the world over; two pieces of dark-colored plastic glued together around the internal components. Easy to produce and cheap as hell, too. He’d seen factories in Malaysia that churned out a couple of thousand of them a day for pennies each, only to sell them to business execs back in the States for $64.95 or something equally ridiculous.

Shaking his head at the craziness of it all, the operative opened his bag and dug around inside it for a moment, until at last he found the receiver he was looking for. It was a near-perfect copy of the one attached to Morrell’s phone, with one major exception.

This one had a listening device already installed in the midst of the internal wiring.

Rather than trying to crack open Morrell’s handset and implant a bug before he got back from his coffee jaunt, all the operative had to do was calmly unplug the existing handset, toss it in the bag and plug in the new one in its place.

Just minutes after arriving, the job was done.

To keep up appearances, the operative actually removed the phone jack’s wall plate and pulled the wires out of the recessed box behind the plate, pretending to be sorting through the various pieces until he heard Morrell coming back down the hall, talking on his cell phone.

By the time the young producer came back through the office door, the operative had just finished screwing the wall plate back into place.

“All set?” Morrell asked.

“All set,” the operative said with a smile.

It took him less than ten minutes to exit the building and disappear into the crowd outside, with no one the wiser. When he was a few blocks away, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed his partner’s number.

“You’re good,” he said simply, and then ended the call. Even if Morrell left the office that very instant, his partner would still have plenty of time to get inside the man’s apartment, bug the telephones there and get out again long before Morrell could make the trip over to the other borough.

Everything had gone according to plan, which was just how the operative liked it.

Annja waited as long as she could stand it the next morning, then called Doug. She could tell from the fuzziness of his voice that she’d woken him up.

“What did you find out about the torc?” she asked.

“Huh? Find out about the what? What time is—”

“Focus, Doug,” she said sharply, not wanting to give him a chance to start complaining about the early hour. Once he got going, it would take a steamroller to stop him. “You were going to get me information on the torc, remember?”

“Yeah, the torc. Right. Okay, hang…agh!”

His unexpected shout made her jump in surprise.

“Doug? Are you all right?” she asked with some apprehension, visions of New York police detectives busting down his door to take him into custody were floating in the forefront of her mind.

“It’s still dark out, Annja!” Doug said.

He didn’t sound happy about it either.

Annja smiled, glancing at the clock on the desk beside her. It was 9:00 a.m. London time so it was just about 4:00 a.m in New York. Revenge can be so sweet.

“I know it is, Doug. After all, the sun still hasn’t come up on your side of the world, but over here it’s getting busy and I need to get going. So quit whining about the hour and tell me about the torc.”

“Fine. But don’t think I won’t remember this.”

“I’m shaking in my boots. The torc, Doug.”

There was a pause and then he said, “The research team struck out. They tried the usual sources, but didn’t find anything to match what you were looking for. The best they could come up with was to recommend that you talk with a guy by the name of de Chance, at the National History Museum in Paris. He’s supposed to be the resident expert on Celtic culture, now that your friend Craig has been, uh, passed away.”

Being reminded of Craig’s murder took some of the wind out of her sails. But at least she had some confirmation that de Chance was someone worth talking to, so that was good news.

“And the tattoo?” she asked wearily, not expecting much more success than the team had had with the necklace.

Doug surprised her, though.

“Well, the research team did dig up some information on that, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it. And I have to say, I don’t see how it’s even relevant.”

“Tell me,” she said.

He hemmed and hawed for a minute, then did what she asked, sounding as if he was reading directly out of the research team’s report, which he probably was.

“The Red Hand of Ulster, also sometimes known as the Red Hand of O’Neill or the Red Hand of Ireland, is an Irish Gaelic symbol that originated in pagan times. It is often associated with a legendary figure known by several different names, including Labraid Lámh Dhearg, Labraid Lámderg and Labraid of the Red Hand.”

“Go on,” she said.

“There are two stories associated with the symbol. The first states that at one time the kingdom of Ulster had no rightful heir, so a boat race was staged to see who would be king. The first man to lay his hand on the soil of Ulster would take the prize. One competitor, a man from the Uí Néill clan, loved Ulster so much that he couldn’t let the crown go to anyone else. When it looked like one of the other competitors might win the race, this man cut off his hand and threw it ahead of the other boat. Since his severed hand reached the soil of Ulster before anyone else’s, the Ui Neill kinsman was named king.”

“Gross. What’s the other story?” she asked.

Doug snorted. “Two giants were engaged in battle on the shores of Ulster. One of them cut his hand and left a bloody handprint on the rocks along the shore. The men of Ulster took it as their standard to show how powerful they were.”

Annja frowned. Giants? The Ui Neill clan? Ulster? What did any of that have to do with Big Red or the black torc?

“Is that it?” she asked him, her anger momentarily forgotten as she tried to see the connections between everything.

“Yeah, except for the terrorist thing. Personally, I think—”

“Wait! What terrorist thing?”

“Didn’t I tell you about that already?”

The urge to hit something reared its head, but she took a deep breath and simply said, “No, Doug, you didn’t mention that.”

“Oh. Okay, then, hang on a sec.” She heard him flipping the pages of the report in his hands.

“The red hand, specifically a tattoo of a red hand, has also been used in recent years as a symbol of the Red Hand Defenders, or RHD, a loyalist paramilitary terrorist group linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force in Northern Ireland.”

She stared at the wall of her hotel room, lost in thought. What on earth would Irish terrorists want with a two-thousand-year-old necklace? It just didn’t make much sense, from a practical standpoint. Sure, there was a burgeoning black market for rare archaeological pieces, but an unknown piece like this one wouldn’t command big dollar amounts by any stretch of the imagination. And if wasn’t about the money, why else would they want it?

Doug’s voice brought her out of her reverie. “I wouldn’t concentrate on that if I were you, though. Even the police seem to think that the RHD doesn’t really exist. There’s a quote here from a senior Irish official that says, ‘The title Red Hand Defenders has been used to claim murders on all sides and is not thought to represent any real organization.’ I’d think they’d be the ones to know.”

“Could be,” she answered, but she had a feeling they were finally on the right track. After all, if she’d run into just one gunman wearing the tattoo, she wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But the two men in the Mercedes had also had the same mark. That made it more than a coincidence for her.

There was something there. She was just going to have to figure out what.

She thanked Doug for the help and told him she’d be in touch. He started complaining again that the sun hadn’t even come up yet when she hung up the phone.

T
HREE BLOCKS AWAY
from Doug Morrell’s apartment, two men sat in the back of a van parked at the side of the street. They’d been there since early the night before and the air inside the vehicle was thick with the smell of body odor, stale coffee and the various cartons of take-out food that were piled in one corner of the cargo space in back.

As soon as Doug had picked up the phone in his apartment, the two men in the van had gone to work. Sophisticated computer equipment had begun the process of tracking where the call had originated. One man listened to the actual conversation, looking for clues to the caller’s location in what was said, just in case the call didn’t last long enough for the trace to go through. From the time references, it was clear that the caller was somewhere other than North America and the listener made a note to that effect on the yellow legal pad in front of him. As he worked to glean something from the conversation itself, his partner monitored the computer tracking program. It pinpointed the continent first, which turned out to be Europe, and then, a few minutes later, narrowed that down to the country, England. The man and the woman on the phone continued speaking and so the computer continued working, pinpointing the city the call was coming from as London. Finally, in the very last few seconds of the conversation, the computer was able to pinpoint the location right down to the building the call originated from.

By the time Annja hung up the phone, not only did the two men in the van know she was calling from a hotel on the outskirts of London, but they even knew the floor she was calling from.

The two men compared notes, agreed that they had reliable data to pass on to their employer and then sent a copy of the trace as well as a written report of the call to their employer.

Though neither one of them said it aloud, they were both thinking how funny it was that the woman their employer was searching for was right under his nose.

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
, Annja was sitting in a shadowy pub a few blocks from her hotel, staring at the greasy menu and trying to decide if she really trusted a place like this to cook something that wouldn’t give her food poisoning, when her cell phone rang.

She glanced at the caller ID.

Museum d’histoire naturelle…it said.

Annja answered it before it could ring a third time. “Hello?”

“Is this Annja Creed?” asked a rich, warm voice.

“Yes, it is. Thank you for getting back to me so quickly, Dr. de Chance.”

For a moment, he was confused. “How did you…oh, I see. Caller ID, correct?”

Annja smiled. “Yes, that’s correct. I don’t know anyone else at the Paris Museum of Natural History, so…”

De Chance chuckled. “Quite right, quite right. Silly me. Now what can I do for you, Miss Creed? Your voice mail mentioned something about a black torc?”

Relieved at both his receptiveness as well as the fact that he apparently hadn’t heard the authorities were looking for her in conjunction with the events at the dig site in Arkholme, Annja explained that she’d recently been involved in an excavation that had uncovered an unusual specimen of torc that seemed to have come from the early Iron Age and that she was looking for any information relative to such a find that might help her pinpoint its origin and purpose.

It wasn’t exactly why she wanted the information, but it was close enough to the truth that he shouldn’t question her motives.

He didn’t.

“Well, I’d certainly be willing to see what I could do to help you. Are you here in Paris? Could you make a three o’clock appointment tomorrow? I’ve had a cancellation and could fit you in then.”

“Three tomorrow would be fine, Dr. de Chance. Thank you.”

He told her he’d have a security pass waiting for her at the museum’s information desk and gave her directions from there to his office.

When she hung up the phone, Annja felt hopeful for the first time in days. She had several leads now and that, more than anything else, told her that she was making headway. She would get to the bottom of this, no matter what it took.