The Dragon’s Mark (7 page)

The Dragon had long ago learned that looking as though you belonged allowed you to get away with being somewhere you didn’t almost ninety percent of the time. It was all about acting the part and having the right attitude. The employees at the hotel where the Creed woman was staying were no different than those anywhere else in the world; the Dragon marched straight through the lobby and into the elevator as if it were the most natural thing in the world and no one said a word.

Once inside the hotel, it was a simple matter to “accidentally” bump into a maid and pick the passkey right out of the pocket of her uniform. A quick trip up the stairs, a knock on the door to be certain no one was in the room and not ten minutes after entering the hotel the Dragon was standing inside the Creed woman’s suite, just as easily as the night before.

This time, however, the Dragon didn’t waste any time pondering the situation but set to work immediately to try to find the sword. The weapon had been described as a plain, unadorned broadsword and something like that could only be hidden in a few areas. The safe was out of the question; it was far too short and shallow. The shelf above the safe, on the other hand, was long enough and that was where the Dragon began.

From there the search progressed through the room. Under the bed. Under the mattress. Behind the curtains in the corner of the room. Under the cushions of the sofa. Inside the entertainment center. Behind the bathroom door.

The Dragon looked everywhere that made sense, even taking the time to stand on a chair and look inside the heating vent, but it was no use.

The sword was nowhere to be found.

A glance at the clock said it was time to get out of there; almost half an hour had already passed and the Creed woman might return at any moment.

But still the question nagged.

What had she done with the sword?

A
NNJA SAT IN THE BACK
of a cab, trying to decide what to do next. The misunderstanding in the chapel had put her on edge, that was for sure, but Annja was determined not to let it ruin the rest of her day. She’d have enough tension once she had the opportunity to speak with Roux, she knew; for now, she needed to stop being so paranoid and enjoy herself. It wasn’t as if the Dragon was after her, anyway; it was Roux who should be worried.

Having satisfied her need for architecture, she decided to take in some of the city’s art. She directed the cabbie to take her to the Musée d’Orsay, overlooking the Louvre along the left bank of the River Seine. The building itself had once been a railway station serving Paris-Orléans, so she hadn’t fully escaped the tug of form and design, but it now housed one of the more formidable displays of art in all of Paris, short of the Louvre itself. Once there she spent hours wandering up and down the long rows of displays, drinking in the creative talents of Renoir, Degas, Monet and van Gogh, just to name a few.

Her visit was marred, however, by the memory of the figure she’d seen in the chapel and the now-constant feeling that she was under observation. More than once she tried to catch someone in the act, but each time she looked, she was unable to see anything or anyone out of the ordinary. No one turned away too quickly. No one let their gaze linger too long. The museum was full of patrons and they had their eyes on the paintings, not on her. Yet the feeling persisted and made her uncomfortable enough that she eventually decided to call it a day.

She returned to the hotel around sunset, took some time to freshen up and to calm her nerves and then, after picking up her rental car, she headed out of the city for her rendezvous with Roux.

The drive south passed without incident and it wasn’t too long before she was pulling up in front of the massive gates that guarded the entrance into the estate.

As usual, once inside the house, Henshaw led her to the study, where she found Roux seated in the leather chair behind his desk, reading the day’s copy of
Le Monde.

Seeing her, he rose and smiled. “Annja, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

She had already decided to play it straight. “I wanted to talk to you about last night.”

“Of course.” Roux ushered her over to a pair of leather armchairs and offered one to her while settling into the other one himself. “Before you say anything else, let me apologize for my boorish behavior at the end of the evening. My remarks were totally uncalled for and I hope you let them pass as the angry grumblings of a man whose home had just been invaded by thieves.”

He smiled pleasantly and Annja realized that he was being sincere; he really did feel bad for the things he had said to her. She gracefully accepted his apology and moved quickly past it to the reason she’d made the drive all the way out here.

Reaching into her backpack she withdrew a cardboard box in which she had safely tucked away the paper dragon, then withdrew the latter from inside the box. She stood the little paper dragon on the table between herself and her host.

“What’s this?” Roux asked, picking up the dragon and turning it over in his hands. “What a marvelous specimen. I didn’t know that you did origami.”

“I don’t,” Annja replied. “I discovered it in the display room last night while helping to clean up in the wake of the attack.”

Roux stopped looking at the figure and turned his head in her direction instead. She wasn’t surprised by his carefully blank expression—after all, he was a world-class poker player—but the very fact that it was there told her what she needed to know.

Roux understood the significance of what he was holding.

He wasn’t going to make it easy, though. “I’m sorry?” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her correctly.

She relayed the tale as quickly as possible—how she’d gone back to the display room looking for something, she didn’t know what; how she’d found the paper dragon and what she’d done afterward to try and understand just what the simple figure might mean. She told him of her suspicion that it had been left there intentionally, as a type of calling card, to let them know that this wasn’t yet over and that they were up against a foe who made your typical hired gunman look like a schoolboy compared to the skills the other could bring to bear.

“I think your life is in great danger,” she told him finally, and then sat back to await his reaction.

Roux had been silent throughout, had let her get her facts on the table and had patiently waited through her explanation as she pointed out the things she’d done and the thought process she’d used to arrive at her conclusion.

When she was finished, he sat quietly for a moment before speaking.

“You can’t be serious,” he said at last.

It was not the reaction Annja was hoping for.

“Of course I’m serious! Did you think I would drive all the way out here to talk to you just for the heck of it?”

“But, Annja, seriously. Do you really think an international assassin, this mysterious Dragon, a hired gun who specialized in political killings, is really trying to kill me? Whatever for? What possible reason could he have? And let’s not forget the fact that this Dragon is supposed to be dead.”

“I don’t know what reason he might have. That’s what I was hoping you could tell me,” she answered.

Roux scowled and waved his hand in dismissal. “Now you sound like Garin, for heaven’s sake. ‘Pissed anyone off lately, Roux?’” he mimicked, in a passable imitation of the other man’s voice. “I’m the least likely man ever to be involved in politics, Annja.”

“I know that, Roux. But what if it’s something more? What if the Dragon is no longer interested in political killing but has decided to branch out, handle contract work, for instance?”

Rather than convince him of her sincerity, her plea only made him laugh. “Now you sound like something out of a spy novel, Annja. Political killing? Contract work? It was a simple robbery, nothing more.”

“If that’s the case, then what were they after?” she asked hotly.

For just a second she thought she saw a triumphant gleam in Roux’s eye. It was there and gone again in less than a second, so she couldn’t be sure, but something deep down inside said she’d just played into his trap.

“While you were gone we were doing our homework, too, Annja. And we think we’ve found the answer to that very question.”

The older man rose and walked over to his desk. From behind its massive bulk, he lifted a sword box and carried it back to Annja. Handing it to her, he said, “Go on, open it.”

Annja did so, revealing the long curved blade of a U.S. cavalry saber, circa the late eighteen hundreds, with a leather-wrapped hilt and brass guard. It was pitted in a few places, but she could still make out the initials
GAC
etched into the blade just above the guard.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The saber worn by General George Armstrong Custer the day he fell in battle at the Little Bighorn,” Roux answered proudly.

Annja winced. “I wouldn’t be so quick to defend that claim.”

“Nonsense,” Roux said, taking the box back from her and closing it up tight. “I can assure you that the provenance of this blade is without blemish. Custer carried this sword the day he died and it has hung on my wall in that display room ever since I acquired it at a very private auction. It was the only item of any serious value in that room last night.”

Roux’s idea of “serious value” was enough to bankroll a small country, but that didn’t mean he was right. Annja would have bet her left arm that no one had come looking for that sword, namely because it wasn’t worth the steel from which it was made. She knew Custer hadn’t worn a saber at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and neither had any of the other officers in the Seventh Cavalry. Popular art showed him holding his cutlass aloft as the Indians surrounded him, but eyewitness accounts from that terrible day told a different story.

She tried to point this out to Roux, but he wanted nothing to do with it. Nor did he accept her arguments that a single experienced thief would have had an easier time breaking into the display room to steal the sword than a group the size of the one she’d encountered there. He had convinced himself that there wasn’t any real danger and it seemed that nothing she said would sway him from that conclusion.

When she finally left, hours later, she had gotten exactly nowhere. Her instincts were telling her that Roux was in danger, but he refused to see it.

As she climbed into her rental car, she was already trying to figure out what to do next. One thing was for sure, she wouldn’t leave one of her friends in danger.

R
OUX WATCHED THROUGH THE
window as Annja descended the front steps, climbed into her rental car and drove off toward the gates. He heard someone enter the room behind him and without turning, he said, “You heard?”

“Yes, sir,” Henshaw said. He never would have dreamed of listening in on his own accord, but Roux had ordered him to do just that.

“And?”

“I’m not sure, sir. I don’t think we have enough information.”

“Even with the rumors we’ve been hearing about the Dragon’s interest in a certain sword?”

“Even so, sir. After all, as you say, they are just rumors. The Dragon, if that indeed was who it was, could have been here for an entirely different reason.”

Roux thought about that for a moment and then shook his head. “I don’t see how. If the Dragon had been hired to kill me he wouldn’t have gone about it the way he had. The assault was staged and I think we both know why.”

“If you say so, sir.”

After a moment, Roux made up his mind and said, “I want her kept under surveillance twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Here and in the States, until I say otherwise. And she isn’t to know that you are there unless there is trouble.”

Henshaw nodded. “Understood—24/7, no interference unless her life is threatened.”

As Annja’s car finally disappeared from sight around a bend in the road, Roux turned to face his employee. “I want you to find me everything you can on the Dragon’s movements in the past two months. Use whatever resources are necessary. If he’s after Annja, I want to know how and why. In the meantime your people have authorization to do whatever needs to be done to keep her safe.”

“And you, sir?” Henshaw asked.

“Me?” Roux replied. “I’ll be perfectly fine, Henshaw. I’m not the target.”

Henshaw hoped those words wouldn’t come back to haunt either of them.

Kyoto, Japan
1993

Those who knew better disappeared like rats from a burning ship the moment the two men appeared at the mouth of the alley. Seen with the naked eye, there wasn’t anything noticeably strange about them, but those who had been on the street long enough developed senses different than the usual and something about the pair screamed danger like an air-raid siren.

It was a feeling that spread quickly, like a virus passed from one street hustler or teen runaway to another, and those who encountered it made themselves scarce if they knew what was good for them. Those who were too sick or stoned or weak to move on their own were grabbed, swiftly examined and then either tossed aside like garbage or trussed up like turkeys headed for slaughter and left where they lay for collection once the men were finished.

Most of them ran, but the girl near the end of the alley in the large cardboard box did not.

She’d only left home a few days before and already she was bone weary from all the hiding and running and scavenging. Life just shouldn’t be this hard, she’d told herself time and time again, and at last she had begun to believe it. Life that was this hard just wasn’t worth living, it seemed. When the owner of the box, a thick-faced Chinese boy named Wu, suddenly deserted his home, she wasted no time rushing in to get out of the rain. Flopping down among the discarded cushions and bags of trash that did double duty as Wu’s bed, Shizu sat there, waiting for the newcomers to get to her, too tired and worn out to care anymore.

It didn’t take them long.

Much to her surprise, when they reached into the box, seized her about the ankle and began to drag her back out into the rain, she discovered that she wasn’t so tired, after all.

Suddenly she wanted to live.

She kicked and screamed, fought them tooth and nail, threw everything she had into getting away, and none of it did the least amount of good.

When she got to be too much to handle, one of the men simply reared back and smashed her in the face with his huge, meaty fist, sending her plunging into the swirling darkness of unconsciousness.

S
HIZU HAD BEEN IN THE
cage for just shy of a week when the big man arrived to claim her. She didn’t know that yet, of course, being kept in a room all alone, without light, and inside a six-by-six-foot steel cage, but she would meet him soon enough as it turned out.

The guards came for her sometime after breakfast but before lunch, if you could call the cold gruel they fed them anything even close to the definitions of those words. Still, despite its horrible taste, she ate it when she could; every ounce of energy was important in a place like this. They dragged her out of the cell and stripped her clothes from her, an act which required several of them to hold her arms and legs down while they cut the material off her bucking form. If she had been a little older, if she had learned of such things at home the way most young girls do, she might have been afraid for her virtue, but these men were acting under orders and the thin, featureless body of a twelve-year-old girl did not excite them in any way.

When they were finished removing her clothes they dragged her into another room, still kicking and screaming, and left her on the floor in a heap.

They were gone only long enough to get the fire hose.

The water shot out of the nozzle, slashing across her body, pushing her about the floor like a discarded toy until she smashed into a nearby wall. She’d been through this once before, on the night she’d been brought here, and she understood what was happening enough to force herself to her feet and brace herself against the wall with her back to the water to keep from drowning. Her captors apparently took this as a good sign, for the force of the water eased off a little and she was scrubbed clean by the pounding water without too much difficulty.

When they were finished they gave her a light smock to wear over her naked form and led her down a series of hallways to another room. Inside were ten or twelve others girls who were dressed just like her in pale-colored smocks and bare feet. None of them said anything to her, their eyes cast dutifully downward as weeks of captivity had taught them was correct, and so Shizu didn’t bother speaking to them, either. Instead, she took the time to examine her surroundings and to wonder just why they were all gathered here.

She didn’t have long to wait to find out.

The guards came back a few minutes later and ordered the girls to line up shoulder to shoulder, facing one wall. From the door before them came an overweight man in his mid-fifties, surrounded by bodyguards. Shizu figured, rightly so, that this was the man in charge of kidnapping them in the first place.

With him was a tall gaijin, or foreigner, dressed like a
sariman
in a gray suit the color of river rock. His hair was long and he wore it loose about his face, his eyes alight with curiosity and fire.

Shizu couldn’t stop looking at him.

She hadn’t seen many gaijin before and so for that reason alone he was a curiosity in her eyes, but it was the sense of power that emitted from him that truly caught her attention. This was a man used to being in control, used to having his every word obeyed without question; even Shizu’s young mind could figure that out quickly enough. This man was a predator, her instincts screamed, and all that was left to determine was the identity of the prey.

He sensed her interest, though he didn’t acknowledge it in any way. Instead, he walked with the fat man to the end of the line and slowly began to move along it, looking at each of the girls, in turn. Sometimes he would ask them to do simple things—stand on one foot, touch their fingers to their noses—and other times he would examine them the way a doctor might, turning them this way and that, looking into their eyes, asking them to open their mouths and feeling their teeth.

When he got to her, he stopped and looked her over, just as he had the others. But rather than ask her to do any of the things she’d seen so far, he spoke to her in passable Japanese instead.

“What is your name?” he asked.

Afraid, she did not speak.

“Come, come, girl. I’m not here to hurt you. What is your name?”

This time she told him. “Shizu.”

“Would you like to leave this place, Shizu?”

Daring to meet his gaze, she said, “Very much.”

“Would you like to go away with me, Shizu?” he asked, softly this time.

She felt tears welling up at his kindness, something she hadn’t experienced in a long time, and she could only nod.

When she had dried her eyes and dared look again, she found him still standing in front of her, waiting patiently. He smiled and extended his hand.

“Come, Shizu. It’s time to go.”

She let him lead her out of that place and off to a different life.