Rogue Angel 54: Day of Atonement (16 page)

He left them to it.

He took the elevator back down to the lobby and headed out to get his car from the valet who brought it around from the hotel garage for him. As he passed through the doors, the valet stood beside the red Ferrari he had left behind at the airport.

“Your keys, sir,” he said, holding out a set of keys by the leather fob with the iconic Ferrari badge on it.

There was no doubt that they were his keys.

She’d worked fast when he was drugged up. Faster than he would have thought possible, unless he’d been under longer than he believed.

“Thanks,” he said, slipping his hand in his pocket for a folded bill. He handed it to the valet, who slid it into his own without giving it a glance. A moment later he was behind the wheel and roaring away from the hotel without really knowing where he was heading, not even completely sure where he was. He was loath to admit it, but he had been distracted by his abductor’s beauty, which no
doubt was part of her plan. Yet again he was left to ponder the wisdom of trusting in beauty.

Garin had been driving for a few minutes before he noticed that there was something off about the car, something different about how it handled.

He pulled over to the side of the road and took a look around to try to understand what it was.

When he figured out what was missing, he couldn’t help but laugh at just how devious the woman had been, and in truth how incredibly careful she had to have made her plans.

He climbed out of the car to take a look at the license plate to confirm that it was the same as his own car.

It was.

But this wasn’t
his
car.

It was the same make, the same model, but it wasn’t his.

She’d worked out the con to the minutest detail, determined to ensure that he was implicated in Jake Thornton’s murder, including putting on plates that would incriminate him.

But he’d slipped away before the noose had closed.

He had to assume she’d made an anonymous call to tip off the police, or was going to soon. He could only hope the law wouldn’t arrive in the middle of the cleanup.

Garin climbed back into the car, sure it was hot. He needed to switch vehicles, but he couldn’t just ditch a flame-red Ferrari in the middle of nowhere. First he needed to swap the plates out with some other vehicle—thankfully Monaco was a billionaire’s playground. There were plenty of supercars lining the strip and the seafront, and he left the vehicle in its natural habitat, where one more Ferrari wouldn’t set off any alarm bells.

He didn’t go back to get his own car, but hopped a
bus to the airport and went inside the terminal to the car rental desk, emerging with the keys for a tank of a 4x4.

The urge to skip the country was strong, just drive south, hit the border and keep going, but he couldn’t do that while Annja was still in trouble. Especially when there was just a tiny part of it that was his fault.

If Garin kept to the speed limits on the winding country roads, Carcassonne was a little over five hours away.

He had no intention of keeping to the speed limits.

Roux was itching to get out of the hotel room.

He was wasting far too much of his life in places like this, walking up and down a cramped room little bigger than a prison cell, even if it was better furnished.

The cameraman hadn’t shed any more light on Annja’s whereabouts, and Garin’s call was worrying away at him. There was more going on here than he was seeing. He clenched his fist and unclenched it, but the exercise did nothing for the frustration he felt building. He needed to do something. He couldn’t waste the day just
waiting
.

Roux grabbed his coat and headed out, checking his phone instinctively before he slipped it into his pocket. The caller ID was empty. No calls. No messages. No texts. No Annja.

He obtained a city map from the rack in reception and stepped out into the street, feeling the icy air hit his lungs as traffic swarmed past.

He took a minute to pick the best route to the cathedral and struck out, folding the map and slipping it into his pocket as he walked.

It felt good to be moving after being cooped up inside.

There was every likelihood that he was being watched. Cauchon knew too much about Roux not to have eyes and ears on him. Let the man watch. Let his spies report back. He wasn’t going to hide from him in some hotel room. Now he was going to take the fight to the mystery man. It would help to know the underlying cause behind Cauchon’s obsession with him, which had to have something to do with the papers Garin had stolen from his vault and the papers that had been liberated from the museum here.

While he wasn’t sure exactly which journal was missing, he knew the time of its writing, and that it tracked back to the death of Joan. He didn’t know the documents word for word, but was familiar with almost all of the secrets they contained, because they were his secrets. He had been there. He had lived through those dark days. If Cauchon had even the vaguest concept of the secrets he’d managed to procure, he could be a very dangerous opponent.

Roux used shop windows and car windshields to see if anyone was following, deliberately doubling back to retrace his steps and move counterintuitively against the flow of bodies, always checking the reflections to see if anyone followed him. To the casual observer his actions might have appeared erratic and more than a little strange, but Roux didn’t care about that. He wanted to flush out his tail. Get them to show themselves, to make a mistake. He’d happily face anyone head-on. He’d had showdowns before, even gone up against ArmaLites and AK-47s with nothing but his bare hands, and come out alive. And if he got to take one of them down, put a few questions to Cauchon bare-knuckle-style, then he’d happily take the opportunity to get a little exercise and learn more about this incarnation of the man.

Twice he thought he had spotted someone tailing him, but both came to nothing. They were just heading in the same general direction, attracted by items in shop windows that made them pause for a while before moving on again.

He was becoming paranoid.

He needed to shake himself out of it.

There was nothing on the route that seemed out of the ordinary, nothing that might have attracted Annja for more than a moment. She wasn’t a fashion-obsessed kind of girl. She was only happy when she was getting her hands dirty. Once the cathedral came into view he knew that there was no point going any farther. Philippe, her cameraman, would have seen her once she was this close to the site. He wouldn’t have missed her in the crowds.

As he turned to retrace his steps and return to the hotel, his phone rang.

He checked the caller ID.

It wasn’t Annja.

“Garin.” He said it fast, like he wanted the call over before it had begun so that he could free the line up in case Annja was trying to get through. “I gather you have taken care of your business?”

“It’s under control. It got a bit hairy there for a while, but I’ll join you shortly. I should be at your hotel within the hour.”

“And the number I gave you?”

“My guy’s on it. So far, he’s confirmed that the last time it was used was in Carcassonne, in the past twenty-four hours, but it’s inactive now so there’s no telling if he’s moved on or is still in the area until he puts the battery back into the handset. He knows what he’s doing, in other words.”

“Nothing that helps, then.” Roux wasn’t sure what he
had expected, but being able to pinpoint Cauchon’s base of operations from a cell phone number would have been a good start.

“When you say Carcassonne, is there any chance of narrowing that down? I don’t know how these things work, triangulating cell phone towers and such, but everything you see on the internet these days seems to talk about a surveillance society and these cell phones of ours being nothing more than electronic tags tracking our every movement.”

“Pretty much, but our boy is covering his tracks—or at least making it difficult for us. My guy’s monitoring the number. The second the phone comes online, he’ll let me know.”

“And in the meantime we do nothing?”

“In the meantime we do what we do best, we make trouble. If Cauchon is as keen to speak to you as I think he is, he’ll make contact. He’ll want to goad you. We’ll be ready for him.”

“Not much of a plan, Garin.” Sometimes it felt like he was talking to a small child who always made light of everything.

“If you don’t want my help, I’ll just turn around and head back home.”

Roux bit his tongue. He wanted to say,
Yes, do that, do exactly that
, but instead he said, “I think you owe Annja more than that.”

“It’s always about Annja,” Garin said after a few seconds of silence. “Have you noticed that? It’s never about us anymore. The only time we talk is about her.”

“We ran out of things to say to each other about two hundred years ago,” Roux said, and this time Garin did laugh.

“Probably. Look. You’re right. I owe her more than
that. And given everything else, my part in it—which I didn’t realize at the time—I owe you more, too. So no, I’m not going to head back home. I’m going to be with you in an hour and we’re going to put an end to this threat once and for all. You, me and Annja. The three slightly cranky musketeers.”

“That’s one way of describing us,” the old man said, and ended the call. Garin could always infuriate him. All he had to do most days was open his mouth and he’d manage it. But so many times that same infuriating man had turned out to be the solution to problems that were beyond Roux. Like it or not, they made a good team.

A horn sounded.

Roux took a step backward, not noticing that he had been so close to the edge of the sidewalk.

A woman on a scooter smiled at him, blond hair flowing from the back of her helmet, then blew him a kiss.

He smiled back, not knowing if his cheeks were flushed with embarrassment at almost walking into the road or at attracting the attention of a beautiful woman.

He watched as the woman rode away, her hair getting caught in her own slipstream as it trailed behind her. For a moment he wondered if he knew her, if that airborne kiss had been meant to remind him somehow, but the glimpse of her face had been so fleeting he couldn’t possibly place her from this lifetime or any other.

Moving the oil burner behind her back wasn’t easy. Annja worked it around so she could lift it with her hands, but before she’d taken half a dozen steps the heat from the wick was burning her skin.

She gritted her teeth against the pain, only just managing to lower it to the ground without dropping it in the process.

That would have been a disaster.

Her heart raced, as she couldn’t help but imagine all of the potential consequences of the thing smashing.

The worst was that it was only a short step away from what she was contemplating.

The wooden door at the top of the short flight of stone steps felt dry enough that she might just get away with the crazy notion she had: smashing the lantern against it.

If she got really lucky, the oil-fueled flame would be enough to start it burning. But to undermine its integrity enough that she could batter her way out? It was a long shot.

And for all that to happen before the woman returned? Perhaps impossible.

In the absence of any windows she had no idea how much time had actually passed since the woman had left. Annja didn’t even know what time of day it was. She hadn’t been able to hear any telltale sounds coming or going from the other side of the door, even when she’d kicked against it with her heel trying to get someone’s attention.

She was beneath some kind of church—that much was obvious—quite probably not in use. Her assumption, heavy on the irony, was that she was in the crypt of the cathedral where she’d been supposed to meet Philippe. The idea forced a bitter laugh from her.

When it finished, she heard the sound of a key being rattled into the lock.

She strained again at the ties, hoping that the heat from the lantern might have weakened them. They showed no sign of breaking no matter how hard she pulled at them. The plastic was uncomfortably hot from where the lantern had burned at it. Given a few minutes longer she would have tried to melt the ties, but knew that chances were the plastic would just fuse with the blood and abraded skin beneath them rather than snap. That was the kind of luck she was having today.

Annja scrambled back to her feet, ready to face the woman.

She had no intention of letting her look down at her.

Even with her hands behind her back she knew that she had a chance no matter how slight. If the woman had wanted her dead, she would have killed her by now. The fact that she’d taken the trouble to drug her and transport her to this subterranean crypt boded well for her opportunity
to survive. As long as that hadn’t changed in the intervening hours.

Annja backed away as the woman descended the short flight of steps.

It was a ploy to appear subservient, deferential. In other words, make sure the woman didn’t see her as a threat. She needed to draw her into the room and work enough space to get past her if she could bowl her over bodily.

“Good to see you up and about,” the woman said, pausing when she saw that the lantern had been moved from the sarcophagus. She nodded slightly, but made no comment as she bent to pick it up.

Instinctively, Annja knew that this was chance to strike. It wasn’t much of a disadvantage, but the woman was off balance and off guard. It was as good as it was going to get.

She took two quick steps and swung her right leg hard, in a high arc, before the woman knew what was happening.

The point of her toe made contact beneath the blonde woman’s jaw, snapping her head back and sending her sprawling to the ground.

She hit the stones hard, losing control of the lantern. The momentum sent it crashing against the side of the sarcophagus.

Fuel splashed against the stone and spread in a pool across the floor.

There was a moment’s breath, a deep and profound silence, before the flame chased across its surface with a whoosh, sucking the air to the flame.