The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (6 page)

“Good to see you too.” Her voice trembled due to surprise, that was all.

“The shakes work, like you need a fix.” He dug his fingers into his side and scratched as casually as a dog before he swished the mop in the water. His injury had certainly been faked, because he didn’t look or sound wounded. “Hold out your hands.”

“I don’t understand, but I’m guessing those were blanks in the gun?” Relief that she hadn’t tried to threaten Skafe with a useless weapon mixed with dread that she had considered it, and fear of what would have happened if she had.

He stretched the dripping mop at her, swiping it across her hands before she could jerk out of the way.

“Gross! I just washed my—”

“That’s the problem. You’re too clean for your clothes.”

That made sense, but she still wiped her wet palms on her denim-clad thighs.

“The private wing’s quite posh, but downstairs is where they bring the overdoses.”

“Thus the person I bought these from.”

“Under no circumstances open your mouth.”

“Why not?”

“Besides the painful accent, you have middle-class American teeth.” He grinned and his straight white teeth had been replaced by a yellowish, slightly overlapping bite. “No junkie has those pearlies. Bet you even floss.” He reached into his mouth and yanked until the teeth sat in his hand. “Here.” They glistened with his saliva in the middle of his more-than-grimy palm. She must have made a face, because he said, “You can’t afford to be up yourself.” He rinsed the teeth at the sink and held them out. “Not if you want to get out of here.”

“Use soap first.”

He rolled his eyes and returned to the sink. “Now pop them in, Miss Priss.”

They felt like a sports mouthguard, but when she smiled at the mirror, her face changed. She’d always had defined cheeks, not her mother’s rounded ones, so she imagined her biological father had been angles and edges, worked to lines like the wiry men she knew in the vineyard. With these teeth, her top lip stuck a little bit over and squished up to her nose enough to make it appear broader.

“Here’s the plan.”

“Ano-zzer one?” Pushing her tongue into the fake teeth was a weird sensation. She tried the motion again. “A-nother. There. This.”

“You sound natural. American, unfortunately, but natural.”

“Who the hell carries fake teeth in their pocket?” She crossed her arms and waited.

“What makes you think I stowed them in a pocket?”

She froze at the thought of the places these could have been.

“Gotcha, did I?” The grin that spread Stig’s face into almost honest openness was twice as big as the restrained smiles of the elitist wine broker he’d played the night before. Leaning on his mop, he looked and sounded exactly like a janitor who liked jokes, beer and television when he finished his shift. “A brow pencil, silicone cheek pads and a set of teeth are all a bloke needs to become someone else. Now, the plan. Since the alert announcement, security is badge-checking everyone. We can’t use the doors.”

Her fingers touched the teeth. They’d never be enough. She looked at the glass blocks in the window, turning this bathroom into a cell. “How do we get out?”

“Observe.” He unzipped his coveralls and with three exaggerated pulls removed and shook out a second set. “For you.” He bowed.

Maneuvering into the one-piece suit over the punk clothes felt almost as personal as taking clothes off in front of him, which was odd. She was shrouding herself with a shapeless thick layer of cotton, but the way his eyes followed her hands, dropped to her legs when she stepped into the suit, traveled up her body as she raised the jumpsuit, and then focused on her chest while she shimmied into the sleeves was disconcerting. She didn’t find it offensive, because he stayed more than an arm’s reach away. He never violated her personal space, and the aura that came from him was appreciation, not threat.

Swaddled in what must be ten pounds of clothing, she felt warm for the first time in hours.

“You have a knack for this,” he said.

“No, I don’t.” She’d given up her mother’s ring.

He shrugged before wheeling the mop bucket toward the door. “Deny it all you want, but keep that overall-clad arse close to me.”

Following him out of the temporary refuge and into the hall, still empty but brighter in the later morning light, made her shoulders hunch. Now she could hear faint sounds that she hadn’t noticed earlier. Beeps outside as if a truck was backing up. Yelling, far enough away that it might be on a different floor. A siren trailing off in the distance. None of it distracted him as he pushed the bucket.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“In a sense.”

His stride didn’t look hurried, but she had to quick-step to keep her spot slightly behind and to his right. “What do you mean, ‘in a sense’?”

“I know what I’m looking for.”

“But you know where it is? Don’t you?”

“Indeed I do.” Satisfaction lowered his voice as he stopped. “Here.”

On the wall, a laminated paper taped over a scarred wood hatch said Litter Only. No Sharps or BioHazard.

“Not a garbage—”

“No, this one.” His upraised palm indicated a second panel, to the right of the garbage chute. It was the size of an oven door and three feet off the floor, signed Linens Only! That Means No Waste. The last two words were underlined in purple marker.

“Nope.” She took two steps backward but couldn’t take her eyes off the dark hole as he lowered the hinged door. It was rectangular, bigger than she expected and very dark. Five, no, ten terrifying movie scenarios popped their heads out of that chute. “Can’t. Won’t.”

He showed her a coin between his fingers, then dropped it down the chute. She heard nothing, as if the bottom was cushioned by the linens mentioned on the sign.

“I could waste time cajoling you.” He left the door open and covered the space to her faster than she could back up. “Or I can just do it, which seems to be a Yank slogan.” He wrapped one rock-hard arm around her lower back, turned and scooped her toward the opening.

“I won’t—” She kicked backward but couldn’t connect with his body. The thick fabric of his overall sleeves meant her fingers couldn’t sink into his arm, so all she could do as he lifted her was brace her feet on the wall and lock her knees until her thighs trembled.

She was tiny, but she had the muscles of generations of farm women honed by twelve years of competitive gymnastics. She might have slacked off a little since college, but her thighs were still a force to reckon with.

He grunted and pushed, while she pushed back. Short of chopping her knee, which would require one of his hands to let go of her, he wasn’t going to budge her.

“Okay,” he panted in her ear and released her.

On her feet, she doubled over, hands on her thighs, and tried to catch her breath.

“New plan,” he said, his head down and chest heaving as well.

She sucked in enough air to speak. “I hate your plans.”

“Together, right?”

“What part of no, I’m not going down a laundry chute, don’t you understand?”

“Principle of physics. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. An object at rest tends to land in jail.” He climbed into the chute, his legs disappearing from sight as he perched on the edge. “At last count we have cops, hospital security and my two ex-friends searching for us.”

“For you. Maybe not me. And you forgot the man following us from Bodeby’s.”

“No, I didn’t.” He seemed to understand the sentence she hadn’t even understood. “That bloke was an innocent bystander. But since you’re clearly in with me, they’re looking for you too. Your face is all over the security cameras.” He patted his lap and leaned backward to make a bigger space for her. “Doors are closing, train is about to leave the station, hop on.”

She stepped nearer. His smile had the same look of suppressed laughter that it had held right before the gunshot at Paddington. “I really don’t like this plan.”

“Have a better one?”

She sucked in a deep breath and grabbed the upper frame of the opening. “No.”

“I admire an honest woman.”

On his lap, she tried not to press too hard into any personal spots as he wrapped one arm around her waist and crossed the other diagonally over her chest to her shoulder. The hole his feet dangled over was pitch black, and she reflexively laid her arms directly on top of his, locking their bodies together.

“Cross your ankles between mine and stayed tucked in.” Despite the difference in their heights when they stood, on his lap his feet stuck only a few inches past hers. “I’ll slide my feet against the sides to brake our fall.”

“Fall?” Her voice broke as the truth sank in. This wasn’t a giant slide. It was a drop.

“You clearly have nut-crushing thighs, but can you wall-walk down three stories? I’ll try to cushion the landing.” His chin rubbed her upper back when he spoke, more reassuring than his words.

“Or smash—” The drop stole the end of her sentence.

Rushing darkness disoriented her until she didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed. He squeezed her tightly enough to push the air out of her lungs until she gasped a wordless sound, but it was drowned by the clang of sheet metal as Stig bonked the walls of the chute, slowing then speeding in uneven bursts, but never letting her body scrape the side.

Then they hit. Not nearly as hard as she’d expected, and she managed not to bite through her tongue. He was underneath her in the pile of big blue bags. His arms unwrapped from her chest before she thought to push him away, and she sucked in the first good breath of her entire life, it seemed. The deepest, certainly. Overhead, the ceiling had yellow tube lighting hanging between beams. Beautiful lights. Visible and stationary.

She was still catching her breath when Stig started laughing his ass off.

“What’s so funny?” Her jeans and coveralls had wedged so high up her butt she suspected the waist snap was higher than the hooks on her bra.

“That was every boy’s fantasy.”

She rolled across the squishy bags of hospital laundry while yanking to loosen the bottom of her suit.

“Garbage crusher scene.”

She kicked free of a drawstring that had wrapped around her boot as securely as a garbage monster. The container they’d landed in was much bigger than a rolling cart, more like a full-sized garbage container, and deep enough that even standing on the laundry bags the metal rim came to above her waist.

“You can be the princess.” He caught his breath and held his hands over his head like a diver, then he wiggled under two bags. She felt his hand tugging her calf.

“Got your reference the first time.” She shot her foot behind her and planted the sole of her boot on his chest. He oofed from her push-off as she raised herself to the lip of the laundry receptacle. Elbows locked, the edge positioned perfectly across her upper thighs as if prepared to cast on a bar, she looked over her shoulder. He hadn’t moved from his sprawl, arms and legs splayed on the sacks of laundry like a kid in snow. His mussed blond hair and grin made him look younger and more accessible than the man she’d sparred with at the auction preview. “Hate to break it to you, but you’re no Luke Skywalker.”

He sat up, arms spread and mouth open in mock outrage. “Luke? Who wants to be that tosser?” One hand reached higher, as if elevating an imaginary trophy. “What about the universe’s master smuggler and hero to all who tread the wrong side of the law?”

“Sorry, but your chest hair’s not manly enough to be a Wookiee.” She swung her left leg up, pressed the ball of her foot on the container’s edge, and then swung both legs across and let go to complete her vault to the ground.

“Play princess with yourself,” she called to the man still in the container. “I’m out of here.”

Chapter Six

Stig could recline on these cushy bags and watch her execute that move again and again. If she lost the coverall and made that side-leg swing in the tight junkie jeans, he’d stay till Bonfire Night. In 2030. Unfortunately, he had to catch her before she managed to entangle herself in someone else’s not-so-friendly arms. If that happened to be the authorities, her explanations might stop the auction, so tabs on her it was, close tabs. He knew the perfect place to take her, out of the way, off the grid and completely secret.

His heave out of the laundry container wasn’t as picture-perfect as hers, but he managed to land on his feet. The room held rows of shelves stocked with shrink-wrapped clean bedding and a crowd of empty rolling carts large enough for a ward’s worth of sheets. In front of the exit, Christina was studying the fire emergency plan map.

“There’s a loading ramp at the end of the hall,” she said as he wheeled one of the sturdy canvas-sided rolling bins toward her.

“Your carriage, Miss.”

“Why not yours?” She crossed her arms and tilted her head.

“First of all, I’m bigger. You couldn’t push me—”

“Ha.” She lowered her chin and glared.

Too bad the gods didn’t pay bets, because his next reason was guaranteed to yank her chain. “Second, loading things is a man’s job.”

“Bull.” Her expressive face squinched in outrage.

“I’ll look more natural pushing a trolley. And third—”

“I’m still waiting for one good one.”

She was so easy, it almost felt like cheating. “If we meet someone at the exit, I actually speak English. Like an Englishman. You?”

She inclined her head and muttered acceptance. “Fine.”

After he threw packets of clean blankets on the bottom of the trolley to pad it, he watched her climb in. She showed the mouth of a woman pushed one decision past willing, lips pinched to a thin line as if locking her thoughts and feelings behind bars. He unfolded more blankets on top of her and stuffed a wad of sheets along one side.

“Can you breathe?”

“Yes.”

He dropped distilled water and an electric torch from the emergency aid kit into the cart.

“Oww, careful.”

“Hang on.” He backed through the doors and maneuvered the load down the short hall. Black scuffs from generations of wheels led to a service elevator, but he went past it to the exit. A padded anorak, the type a smoker threw on before grabbing five minutes in the rain, hung on a hook next to the double doors. He shoved his arms in the sleeves and raised the hood. Sometimes the gods gave bastards like him breaks they didn’t deserve, and this was one more chance to preserve his other identity. If he could get out of here without being linked to Geoffrey Morrison, call Bodeby’s to inform them he wished to continue the Asian buyer’s preview despite his unfortunate emergency absence, then possibly his plan could still bear fruit.

The loading doors led to a covered alley that bisected the old section of St. Mary’s. The warren of crannies left from London’s hodgepodge of pre-war construction and post-war additions offered safety compared to the wide sidewalks and spaciousness in modern town blocks. Outside the city, he felt as exposed as a fox in a field, but here he knew a den only steps away.

“Clear so far.” He’d have to keep Christina occupied through the middle of next week, away from phones, away from Bodeby’s and the wine world and any contacts she could use to stop the auction or halt post-sale payments. One in ten odds, at best, but he’d worked with less.

The alley emerged in a larger lane, one that was quiet compared to the cacophony of buses and cars jamming Praed Street to his far left. The sky was the average gray-green of any March morning, unfortunately not wet enough to chase the two real smokers inside until they satisfied their morning puff. Stig bopped his head in a musical rhythm as if wearing ear buds while he pushed the cart in the direction of Praed Street, showing the two people behind him nothing but his back.

“Thirty feet and we’re out of the hospital’s video eyes.” No one loitered down the grimy side street, Winsland Mews. Thirty-three million commuters a year passed through Paddington, a significant number of them on the move this minute, but nearly everyone avoided the area behind the abandoned postal sorting facility.

Out of sight in the mews, although that was too posh a term for a street that had once been dedicated to postal van access, he shoved aside the blankets and offered Christina his hand. “Hop to.”

Her dark hair was a nimbus of static. “At least we’re not playing garbage crusher.”

“Hold these, Red Leader.” He handed her the water and the torch, turned and unzipped his suit. One-piece clothing immunized you to the gaze of office workers, but retrieving items from pockets underneath was a hassle. If the grate still had a second-rate lock, his emergency kit of keys and picks should perform.

The lock was as easy as he remembered, the metal hinges harder to budge, but in less than a minute it opened. “Ladies first.”

“You’re kidding.” She looked from the rusted rungs of the service ladder descending into the dark to him. “We came out of the basement already.”

“This one’s even more basement-y. Actually it’s a tunnel.” Redevelopment wouldn’t reach this block of London until the postal service decided to liquidate empty facilities. Until then, he had a fabulous storage locker for the perfect price of free.

Motionless, she stared into the dark hole.

“Let’s skip the is-he-a-serial-killer chat.” He indicated the ladder. “I’m a fraud, a blagger and a liar, I’ll plead to those, but did I stick a knife at your throat last night? Or did I bugger the guy who did?”

“I know what that means, and no, you didn’t bugger him.”

“Semantics.” He circled his hand at the propped door. “Alright, Betsy Ross, get your arse in there before another smoker comes out to the corner.”

“This is...” But instead of completing her thought, she kneeled and turned around until her feet located the top rung.

“Good girl.”

“Shut up.” Her voice echoed from below his feet as he followed her halfway down the ladder, then paused to yank the grate into place and reattach the lock through the bars. Their tracks were masked.

At the bottom, Christina played the torch across the curved concrete walls. Reinforced pieces of tunnel shield connected to resemble ribs, giving a sense of being inside a whale or a very large snake. Her light lingered on the steel buffer stop and the rail tracks beyond it. “What is this? A miniature subway?”

“England’s least-known national treasure. The Mail Rail.” He pointed to the larger open space to their right, where the tunnel opened up. “The old Paddington sorting office, closed now. No one works upstairs. We’re completely alone—”

An overhead rumble came to them through the grate.

He grabbed the torch, flicked it off and shushed the start of her protest. “Against the wall,” he whispered.

She flattened herself next to him.

The engine didn’t sound low enough to be a lorry. It was cruising slowly, more likely looking for drugs or a parking space than for them. He’d never mentioned his love of the Mail Rail to any of the Vikings, so there was no chance Wend or Skafe knew about his hideaway.

The car idled directly above. It must be next to the grate.
Move on,
he willed it.

With her hair flowing loose, Christina’s outline blended with the darkness, separated from the wall at her back only by the slight reflective quality of the strands against the light-absorbing roughness of concrete. Faint illumination from above touched her forehead and the edge of her jaw, creating focal points.

“I told yer there’s nowt here.” Car doors slammed. “It’s a laundry cart.”

“If there’s a chance they’re still in St. Mary’s, we keep circling and looking. That’s what his majesty ordered.”

“Maybe he should sit on his arse turning the same square for an hour then.”

“That trolley wasn’t here last time, though, was it?”

Wishing he’d had a place to stash the laundry carrier was like wishing for the return of gold currency. The facts didn’t change.

“Dunno. Don’t care. Fancy a quick smoke?” In the silence, Stig imagined two men, middle-aged and gone soft in their dark blue uniforms, pulling out cigarette packs they weren’t officially allowed on duty. “Alright?”

“Be more alright when they call this fuckin’ hunt off and we can get breakfast.” The faint scent of tobacco smoke drifted into the cool must of the tunnel, the men were that close.

If he could see the highlights of Christina’s face, so could anyone above who glanced through the grate, so he eased left, away from the mail platform and its motion-sensing cameras. The tunnel ended in a dented steel door. He moved slowly enough to feel more like flowing than moving as he relocated farther from the spots of light.

“See the shooting?” one of the voices asked.

Logically he knew they hadn’t looked down the grate because nothing blocked the faint light, but instinctively he held his breath.

“No, I got there after. Floor was a mess an’ the door was shattered where Neil missed the bloke. Three days’ advanced sidearm training didn’t help him, poor sod.”

Stig exhaled and shifted, and Christina eased after him, each step carefully selected for silence. Approval tingled in his fingertips. She was a fine partner, almost able to read his mind. Continuing to play Geoffrey Morrison past this auction might be intriguing. Of course, that would mean actually giving Lord Seymour’s daughter the money.

“Almost seven. What say you we call it done? I’m parched.”

“Agreed. As much blood as that bloke lost, no chance he’s left St. Mary’s.” A cigarette butt dropped on the grate, the sound as soft as a moth at a window, then tumbled through the opening, still glowing, to the ground where they’d stood a moment ago. “Dead in a closet, I reckon. They’ll find him when he stinks.”

“I’ll drive.”

“Piss off...” The sound of doors closing cut off the conversation, then the car pulled away.

Stig swallowed to relieve his dry mouth before he led Christina to the door that was his goal. He ignored the caution signs and opened it. This room was never locked, only marked, so that the curious could see the heaps of seventy-year-old canisters and empty crates that matched the signs about chemical storage.

“We shouldn’t be in here,” she whispered.

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I installed the signs.” He’d framed out the whole room and bricked up the walls during Churchill’s underground building boom. Installing masonry wasn’t that far removed from sculpting. He handed her the torch and picked his way through the junk on the floor.

“Are there rats?”

“Of course not.” Even the hint of female fear aided his lying ability. “No food rubbish.”

The steel lockers on the back wall had warped from years of being kicked closed or slammed into place. They looked as worthless as they were, until he fitted his fingers into the crack between them and the wall behind. He pulled until the whole mess pivoted on a central axis, revealing the darkened room behind.

“What are you?” She turned the torch on his face, blinding him until he raised his hand over his eyes. “A spy or something?”

“Will you please get that out of my eyes?”

“Oh, sorry.” She shifted the light to the side wall. “This is very impressive. I’m sure the world is full of smugglers who’d like to hire you to dig under a border, but I’m still waiting for an answer. Where are we? And who the hell
are
you?”

“This is the start of six and a half miles of tunnel connecting most of the major neighborhoods of central London north of the Thames. The closed-circuit cameras are monitored by the post office, not by the police, so yes, I know this tunnel well.”
Keep talking, and she might forget the second part of her question
. “Anyone who likes to move unobserved through London should.”

“That’s...” She trailed off to stare at what her beam revealed through the doorway. The upward glow showed her mouth hanging open speechlessly as she slipped through the opening toward the pale figure of the courtier reaching from the dark depths of a painting. Her light turned the gold frame into a sculptural relief of twining leaves and shadows that only emphasized the deeper mysteries of the painting it surrounded. “Oh my God. Is that real?”

“That rather depends on your definition of real.” Perhaps placing a Caravaggio directly opposite the door had been a touch melodramatic, but the disused tunnel made an excellent vault. This room was a steady sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit, a shade cooler than optimum, but completely stable so the paintings never expanded or contracted. The humidity hovered at fifty-five percent. Since installation of the Thames Barrier floodgates, he’d had no worries about flooding, never had to move his treasures, never had to explain them and never worried about them.

Somewhat guiltily, he realized he almost never thought about them.

“Who painted this?” She breathed her question barely louder than the brush of fabric across skin, but in a room where the only sounds were the occupants’ heartbeats, it was a shout.

He’d painted this particular memento mori, as well as all the Caravaggios, but that was impossible to explain.

“Why is the skull full of flowers?”

That was within his power to answer. “The skull implies death, but the vines and blossoms emerging from the eye sockets symbolize life. In the corner, you’ll see an hourglass on the floor, with the sand at the top instead of running out.” Ivar had extracted three paintings as payment for bailing him out of a cell in Rome, and this jibe at the futility of death to their brethren had been a weak stab at humor. Tomorrow night he’d have the opportunity to face Ivar again and see for himself if their leader had changed as much as Wend and Skafe had hinted.

Her hair swung forward when she leaned closer, and she raised her hand to flick strands away from her cheek like the intimate motion of bathing caught by so many artists. Perversely, her fascination with his work irritated him. Four hundred years ago, deliberately using Ivar’s features on the subject had been his way of telling the Viking leader to sod off centuries before invention of the term, but now he wished it had been a self-portrait.