Rogue Angel 54: Day of Atonement (22 page)

There was no sign of matches or a cigarette lighter, nothing she could easily start a fire with, but there was plenty of material that would work as tinder, including the wadding of the comforter and mattress on the bed, which she could cut open with the nail scissors. There was nothing that would make a spark.

Frustrated, she stared at the paperweight on the desk and an idea began to take shape in her mind.

Annja made a nest out of a bundle of towels scavenged from the bathroom along with a mixture of fibers and paper gathered from around the basement. Her thought process was simple. Lots of different materials, all dry, all flammable. All she needed was one of them to hold the flame if she got something to ignite. Logically, the
comforter stuffing and the mattress fibers were probably flame retardant, but she wasn’t going to discount them because of logic. If there was a chance, even a slim one, that they might burn, she was happy to risk it.

It was all going to come down to the spark.

The exercise had done her good.

Her shoulders were moving with something approaching freedom, even if she could still feel a lingering tightness. She reached out, the sword singing in her hand as she brought it back again. She rested the point in the nest of tinder and held the blade upright before striking it with the paperweight.

Nothing.

She tried again.

This time a spark flew when the two materials collided.

It wasn’t enough to start anything smoldering.

She hit harder and the blade vibrated with the impact, sending something akin to an electric shock surging up the length of her arm. She felt it sear the already strained and tender shoulder joint.

Again.

This time a shower of sparks ran down the blade into the wadding, paper and feathers and the first wisp of smoke began to rise.

Annja removed the sword from the bed where the embryonic fire was just beginning to take hold. She leaned it against the ramp before going down on her knees and lowering her face to the wisps of black smoke curling up from the towels.

She blew softly across the surface, drawing the fire to life as it finally caught hold.

All she could do now was pray that she set the alarm off without the whole place being engulfed in flame.

Because if there was one thing in her life that gave her nightmares, it was fire.

“Garin.”

“Disappointed?”

Garin closed the heavy church door behind him.

The air had been enveloped in a draft that felt so much colder than when Roux had come inside only a short while before.

“What are you doing here?”

“Helping.”

“When did you become so altruistic? Or,” Roux said, drawing out the insult, “did you come here to steal this artifact for yourself? Maybe you have a buyer lined up?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Absurd? You can just walk away from all of this. What does it matter to you what happens to Annja?”

“Now you’re just being insulting, Roux, but I’ll forgive you this once because you are upset.”

The priest gave Roux the briefest of glances, obviously made uncomfortable by the exchange. Roux placed a hand on his shoulder.

“There is nothing to be concerned about. This is
Garin,” and a second later, deliberately insulting, he added, “My apprentice.”

“Once upon a time, maybe. Look, Roux, we both know just how stubborn you can be,” Garin said, walking toward the front of the church.

Roux replaced the silk over the breastplate and closed the lid of the box before Garin could catch a glimpse of what was inside. He would recognize it, and that would just lead to questions Roux had no intention of answering. Instead, he asked one of his own. “How did you know where I was?”

“I didn’t know. I just tracked your phone. You should be used to the modern world by now,
sir
. It isn’t the way it was even a couple of years ago. And I know, old dog, new tricks, but you really ought to embrace the future instead of burying your head in the past. For a while I thought you were on a suicide mission actually, heading straight to Cauchon to fulfill some romantic idea of a showdown. I figured he’d told you where to come and you thought you were being all noble. This is a nice surprise.”

“Disappointed?” Roux asked, throwing Garin’s word back at him.

“Well, let’s just say I didn’t like the idea of not getting to put things right between us and leave it at that.”

“So you just hopped in a car and came after me.”

“So I just hopped in a car and came after you. Seemed like a smart idea, and now it looks like I got here just in time. Believe me, there’s no way we’re getting back down the mountains in this weather.” He shook his head. “Not tonight.”

Roux didn’t need to check outside to know he was right; the snowfall had been intensifying during the journey here, and the roads were barely passable before he’d pulled over to walk the remainder of the distance. Even
the 4x4 would struggle, and in the dark, it’d be flirting with the reaper if not outright suicide.

“But lucky for you, I came prepared. Snow chains for the wheels.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought of everything.”

“Not everything,” Garin said. “But hopefully you’ve got the rest of that covered, boss.”

Roux saw that his gaze was resting on the box that he had been in the process of wrapping.

“The longer we stay in here, the less chance we’ve got of getting out of the village, with or without snow chains,” Roux said. He thanked the priest and told him that he would return, but knew in his heart of hearts this was no longer a safe hiding place, not now that Garin knew about it. He wouldn’t be coming back here in this lifetime, no matter how many years remained in it.

“Give me your keys,” he said, holding out his hand to Garin.

He turned to the priest and passed the keys to him. “We’ll pick this up when we return. Feel free to use it in the meantime.”

“Roux! It’s a Porsche! You can’t just go giving away a luxury car!”

“I’m not, you are. Now be gracious.”

“But I was just getting to like her.”

“You’ll like another one tomorrow,” Roux assured him. “Something bigger, flashier and more expensive.”

Garin nodded. “And with more under the hood.” He grinned, and for a moment it would have been easy to think he was talking about a woman, not a lump of metal.

The priest was lost for words.

It was unlikely the poorly paid priest would be able to afford to run a car like that in a place like this. He told
the man, “Feel free to sell it. I won’t be offended. Use the money for something good.”

“I will,” the man promised. “I will. Absolutely. Yes.”

His thanks were still ringing in Roux’s ears when they stepped outside, leaving him to clear up.

“Where are we heading?” Garin asked.

“No idea,” Roux said. “But I assume you are about to tell me. After all, you didn’t follow me here only to drive all the way back to Carcassonne. That means you’ve worked it out. So, where is he hiding?”

“You’re getting better at this, old man,” Garin said.

“So?”

“Cauchon made his first mistake. He tried to call his thugs in Carcassonne just after you left. The phone wasn’t connected to the network for long, obviously, with them being tied up with the local law. He didn’t leave a message. The good news is that it was long enough to narrow his position down to within a five-mile radius.”

“Is he still here in the Pyrenees?”

“He sure is. We get ourselves into that circle and wait for him to contact us. With a little luck he’ll still think that we are miles away, up at the chateau even. That should give us time to hit him where it hurts.”

It sounded like the closest thing they’d had to a plan in a while.

Roux wanted to get to Annja without handing over the box. Nothing good could come of losing possession of Joan’s breastplate to the man, even if Roux didn’t believe in hoodoo or witchcraft or any other nonsense. Playing his game, going along with his delusion, was dangerous.

The wind dropped.

The snow still fell in an impenetrable sheet. There was no visibility. Roux walked on memory, edging a few steps at a time, looking down at his feet, clutching the box and
its sackcloth to his chest like a shield. Garin’s footsteps were still visible in the thick blanket of snow, but they were fading fast, being filled in like those left by Roux and the priest only half an hour earlier, long gone now.

Somehow he managed to lead them to the 4x4, opening the backseat for the box, while Garin brushed away the fresh accumulation of snow on the windshield before he climbed in.

“Well, are you going to tell me what’s in the box?” Garin asked when they were both inside.

“You
still
don’t need to know,” Roux said, staring straight ahead as the wipers struggled to keep pace with the snowflakes settling on the windshield.

“Are you sure about that?” Garin asked.

“For now, yes.”

The towels smoldered rather than burned.

That was good. Better than burning herself alive. It didn’t take long for Annja to get the smoke to rise, as if she was sending good old-fashioned smoke signals to the ceiling detector. It didn’t need flames to go off. She offered another steady encouraging breath to try to muster flame from the smoldering cloth, feeling the heat starting to grow. She caught a lungful of acrid smoke and had to turn away for a moment, choking as it burned her lungs. She covered her mouth with her hand before she turned back in time to see a single tongue of flame reach a few inches into the air, surrounded by a belch of smoke.

It was a start.

She got to her feet and took a couple of steps back, still coughing.

The room filled quickly with thick tendrils of smoke, but then the near-silence was replaced not by the sound of an alarm or the spray of sprinklers bursting into life, but by the incessant hum of an extractor fan venting the smoke out of the small room.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Annja rumbled. Some cheap piece of household gadgetry wasn’t going to stop her getting out of there.

She wafted the flames, willing the fire to really take hold as the room started to fill with smoke despite the extractor’s best efforts. And then the smoke alarm sounded, bursting into shrill life.

Annja covered her ears just as the sprinklers came on.

She moved toward the bathroom door, realizing the one major flaw with her brilliant plan—she wasn’t going to survive too long out in the blizzard if she was dripping wet. Hyperthermia would take her out in a matter of hours. It was too late for second thoughts with constant water raining down on her head.

She needed to be quick about it. The door could open at any moment.

She grabbed the sword and slid the weapon back into the otherwhere.

Her thoughts were focused on escape, not killing. Primary objective: get outside. Secondary objective: find someplace to hide out until she was ready, or Roux arrived, whichever came first. As she gave up her grip on the sword, she heard the sound of a key in the lock.

Annja shouldn’t have been surprised to see Monique standing in the doorway, hypodermic syringe in her right hand. She’d assumed the car meant the woman had gone, but of course it must have been customized for Cauchon.

It changed things, but only slightly. It just meant it would be harder not to kill the woman because she wouldn’t back down.

Annja snatched up the remnants of the comforter from the bed, some of its stuffing spilling out as she started to sprint up the ramp. Annja intended to use it as a shield,
much like a gladiator might have used a net. That needle wasn’t going in her arm again.

She didn’t give Monique the chance to back out of the room; instead, she was on her in a second, knowing this was her one and only chance to escape—hopefully bloodlessly. She wasn’t about to waste it. Monique hadn’t been prepared for the ferocity of the attack. Too late, she tried to backtrack up the ramp and simultaneously block Annja’s path. Caught between the two maneuvers, the woman was trapped in an instant of indecision that cost her.

Badly.

The shredded comforter was too bulky to allow Monique to jab the needle through it and into Annja’s skin. There was nowhere for it to go as Annja’s momentum knocked the woman off her feet.

Annja didn’t give Monique any time to fight back; she landed on her hard, driving her knee into the woman’s gut in a solid blow she couldn’t fend off. Annja drove her elbow into the woman’s face, feeling the crunch of bone and blood as she rolled away. She was up on her feet in a heartbeat and running, not looking back. She had to keep moving. Annja guessed only Monique and Cauchon lived in the farmhouse. Others, however, could be there. But for now she focused on the fact that the wheelchair-bound Cauchon was gone.

She knew that in her place Garin would have acted differently. Leave no enemy behind was a mantra he seemed to live by. It would have made sense to go back and finish the woman, or even just stick her with her own damned needle and take her out of the fight for a few hours, but that wasn’t Annja’s style.

She pulled the door closed behind her, turning the key that was still in the lock.

Sometimes old-fashioned mechanics were every bit as effective as fancy drugs and cruel violence.

The fire alarm was still shrieking in the basement, and the sprinklers would have the fire under control in a few moments. Monique wasn’t going to drown down there, even if the fire department couldn’t make it up the mountain tonight. The same almost certainly went for any calls for the police. With the storm of the century building, the emergency services would be more concerned about accidents and keeping the roads open than a little petty crime in some remote farmhouse.

Annja was on her own.

She didn’t even contemplate Roux’s white knight act.

One look outside the window killed that particular fairy tale stone dead.

She scoured the place for keys. She could hear the woman in the basement pounding against the door, venting her frustration. All of the factors that had made it difficult for Annja to break through that ancient door still held for Monique. She was going nowhere. But without keys, neither was Annja.