The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (23 page)

She stared uncomprehendingly. The rain streamed off the tip of the pilot’s nose, into his open mouth and out again.

“Your pitiful begging cost me a good pilot. He wanted to help you twice. I can’t have employees who don’t do what they’re told.”

Her fault.

Not my fault,
she screamed inside her head.
Leif’s fault.

In a sick haze, she stumbled where Leif prodded her, toward the building assembled out of pieces on the far side of the platform. Three flights of exposed open metal stairs, saturated and slippery, loomed.

At the top, a flimsy door didn’t look like it would hold back the sea elements, but at least when they passed into the hall, her face could tell that it was a little warmer here. The rest of her was too cold and wet to know the difference.

She trembled. Cold. Fear. Hypothermia.

Her captor opened the last door on the right, flipped a wall switch, and she knew the true ordeal was about to begin.

Chapter Twenty-One

Despite the chill, the blue and yellow decorations in the English beach house reminded the man called Thomas Locke of a place Jane had once rented along the Florida coast. He savored the memory while he cleaned his Heckler and Koch P7M8. On that Florida trip he’d been halfway through the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant and had intended to read eight hours a day, but Jane had insisted he join her and Emmie to walk the beach. She’d herded him miles looking for shells and wave-smoothed glass, debris they could have bought in ten minutes, but she’d preferred to beachcomb.

The tacky shell picture frame perched on the fake mantel opposite his seat stabbed Locke with the memory of why Jane had insisted on collecting all those shells and flotsam. She and her daughter had surprised him at Christmas with a family picture in a homemade frame. The glue had been visible enough around the shells that Em, still in braces, had protested, “It was supposed to dry clear.” He’d said he couldn’t see what she meant, because it was clear. Another memory burned into his heart as surely as the awkward little craft project had burned to ash last summer.

He left his semi-automatic in pieces on the table and crossed to the mantel. Glue didn’t show on this frame. Probably made in a factory in Asia.

This mission was for Jane and Em. His last, maybe.

The little band of three men and a dog had connected with the immortal soldier and his doctor wife, Wulf and Theresa, at the airport in Hull this morning, then driven to the coast at Grimsby. Neither Wulf nor Theresa recognized him, a testament to his world-class blandness. Wulf had arranged a fishing trawler to run them out to the oil platform, departure in six hours fifteen minutes. Theresa and Porkchop were staying on shore.

He’d never actually been a hero, the type who ran toward gunfire or sirens instead of away. His inclinations, his training, his livelihood had always focused on staying undetected. Hiding who and what he was, as surely as he’d hidden his pay in Luxembourg banks.

Tonight was different. Tonight was for Jane.

“Thomas?”

He turned at the name he’d used for the last two months.

Stig must have called him more than once. “You were wool-gathering.”

“Pardon me. I was recalling another beach house.”

Stig’s look requested details, even while his hands busied themselves reassembling his own semi-automatic.

“Thailand. Fishing trip.” And running CIA money to informants ratting out arms dealers.

Wulf stopped cleaning his weapon’s bolt action to look from Thomas to Luc. “Tonight won’t be so warm and pleasant. Both of you should stay here.”

“No, thank you.” Relief battled annoyance at the soldier’s implied criticism. While he wasn’t former Special Forces, neither had he spent his life selling cars in a suburban mall. “I’m still in.”

“I vouch for them both,” Stig said. “And for Porkchop, if he wants to join our pleasure cruise. He’s a cantankerous little git and as good in a tight spot as they come.”

Wulf stared at Stig. “They’re with you, not me. I’m not responsible for their safety.”

Stig nodded, and Luc launched into a descriptive refusal of the offer to stay behind.

It had been a long time since Thomas could remember feeling as if he had a colleague. A person who vouched for him or trusted him.

Wulf’s phone rang before Luc could finish his umbrage. “Coming to the door,” Wulf told the caller as he crossed to check through the side window. All of them knew better than to look out a peephole.

Only when the former soldier was on station did his wife get out of the car, plastic takeout bags for their last lunch swinging as she splashed through puddles. Her husband opened and closed the door. She had been in the open between the car and house no more than five seconds. They were a careful team.

More careful than Jane had ever learned to be, but then, Theresa had been in the army too and suffered her own losses, the type that made a person either extremely reckless or extremely cautious.

“I bought this instead of Indian,” she said as she tracked water across the wood floor.

Over the last six months he’d accepted that even if he hadn’t stuck his neck out, his world would still have exploded. He’d still be without Jane, but he’d have no self-respect to help shoulder his grief. When Unferth had given him termination orders for Theresa, he’d spoken up. That counted, and it let him sleep. A little.

Seeing Wulf and Theresa together reminded him he’d been right, and honorable, but it didn’t lessen his pain.

“I’ve heard the national food of Britain is chicken curry or chicken tikka.” Theresa squeezed four bags onto the table between boxes of ammunition, then shed her rain parka. “But this place was closer, and driving on the left in the rain freaks me out.”

As he processed the printed Green Papaya logo on the bags, the familiar aroma reached him, starting an ache so painful that he wrapped his arms around his waist and backed away. He and Jane had loved Thai, until the day his boss had said,
We can debate my decision over Thai food. I hear it’s your favorite.
That day had sealed his family’s fate.

Luc asked about the rice, and Stig dealt clamshell containers across the table like
vingt-et-un,
as happy as those who were about to die could muster.

Red curry and skewers of peanut chicken had been Jane’s way of celebrating when he was home from a trip.

“Thomas? Are you eating?” Theresa held a paper plate in her hand, spoon poised over a container of jasmine rice.

He nodded and reached for the plate of rice. The steam hit his nose, curled inside his body with the sweetly subtle call of his wife’s skin. He missed her. He missed her very much. And the men on the oil rig had killed her.

“Thomas?” Theresa hadn’t started to eat. Her dark hair and eyes, the combination like Jane’s, blurred into Christina’s features too. They were alike, those three women. Falling for men who were too at home with danger, and not at home with them.

“My name isn’t Thomas.” The bubble inside his ribs grew. He wasn’t a religious man, merely one who believed in seeing the signs life placed in front of you, and the Thai food was a big one.

The crew around the table fell silent.

“My parents named me John Alan Draycott. If tonight ends as it likely will, I’d prefer to depart as I arrived. As John Draycott.”

They all processed his announcement in the pause, but Theresa spoke first. “Is there someone I should...”

“No, not anymore.” Last year Jane’s body had been identified in the burned shell of their Fairfax home, a victim of a failed gas line. Those were happening more frequently, the news announcers concluded, due to lack of infrastructure spending. Even suburbs ringing the seat of national politics weren’t immune. Thus a murder morphed into a footnote in an endless budgetary debate. His stepdaughter must be gone too, because she hadn’t responded to the personal ads that contained the family safe words. Perhaps the Agency would want to know, but only to reroute his pension into a clandestine account. They were always looking for a way to move legitimate personnel appropriations into black ops funds. “Please take care of Porkchop.”

“Of course.”

“Draycott.” Stig reached his hand across the table. “Nice to know you, John.”

* * *

Artifact hunters are curious people, aware that the worst weather exposes the best finds. The most avid are as enthusiastic as storm-chasers or war correspondents. They weigh the comfort of a couch against the thrill of the search, and reach for their squall gear.

Twenty-five miles southwest of Copenhagen, Denmark, the town of Gammel Lejre sits quietly in the heart of old Viking lands. Farmers plow curving rows around ancient stone monuments. Golfers play past barrows of unknown warriors. Archaeologists with poetic natures search cremation mounds for links to Beowulf, for these fields and hills supposedly held the Hall of Heorot and the throne of Hrothgar, King of the Spear-Danes.

Thirty years ago, seekers uncovered the postholes of a 160-foot-long great hall on a hilltop. Those who hoped Heorot had been found were disappointed when carbon-dating revealed the hall to be from AD 880. Heorot remained lost. Digging deeper, they uncovered the remains of another hall, equally great and two hundred years older, but not old enough to have supported the roof under which Beowulf ate, drank and fought.

Infected by the passion that drives both discovery and obsession, the devoted persevered for twenty more years until they found the remains of a third great structure occupying another hilltop. Half the length of a soccer field, but more importantly, built in the middle of the sixth century, the evidence confirmed their faith. If there was a Heorot, if King Hrothgar was real, the hilltop at Lejre was the place.

To the west of the royal hills of Lejre lies an inhospitable landscape of rocks and rubble left by melting prehistoric glaciers. Boggy marshes dotted with trees and scrub link the small lakes and tarns, making the land simultaneously too wet and too boulder-strewn for farming or village life. Although ancient people avoided these bogs, modern man does not generally believe in evil, or at least in evil landscapes, so the rocks have been removed and the fens drained. The marsh has shrunk; it has not disappeared. Drier, it became a destination for hunters who use beeping metal detectors.

In February, farmers hunkered in their snow-locked homes had a sight straight from ancient lore when flames lit the nearby Lejre historic museum complex like a coastal signal of centuries past. After dousing the massive fire, searchers found two bodies, assault weapons that didn’t belong with the historic collection and a blood-covered snowmobile.

March brought storms to churn the mud and throw winter-killed tree limbs into the bog. Wind raked the water’s surface, pushed the sulfurous water into inland waves where no tide normally existed and hurled the depths onto the land. The wind plunged across the bog like horse-hooves of apocalyptic riders, churning, churning, to the dark bog floor.

The most devoted treasure seekers set out before storms finish, hoping to find another Tollund Man or Lindow Man, perfectly preserved by the anaerobic mud for a thousand years, or perhaps a hoard of rings and goblets. They all know of a farmer somewhere who turned up something, and now it’s in this museum or that one. They all hunger to be next.

The man in the yellow all-weather coat, overalls and thigh boots was devoted. Rain that kept others indoors never dissuaded him, because he loved the anticipation of a find revealed by forces of nature.

He’d been right to venture out this afternoon as soon as the rain slackened, because he had the prize of a lifetime in front of him. An armored, headless torso lay half in and half out of the mud. The body was perfectly preserved, with a suit of unusually fine chainmail and two complete gauntlets on his hands. This would be the first major find of the twenty-first century, perhaps called Lejre Man, and his name would go in the books as the discoverer.

Then he saw a head with bits of intact flesh on the mostly exposed skull tangled in tree roots only meters away. It must belong to the same body, pushed out of a bog burial and ripped apart by the storm.

His hands trembled as he picked vegetation from the skull and fit it to the torso, his mind already racing to condense his biography for the news. Lejre Man’s armor was remarkable, and even his teeth were complete under the mud-crust. This find would bring him fame, perhaps a museum job if he handled the publicity correctly.

He stepped away to snap a photo and sent it to his girlfriend.

Not quite the placement he wanted, so he bent to adjust one of the bog man’s mummified hands and looked at his tiny mobile screen.

He didn’t see the other hand move.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Christina didn’t know how long she’d been absent from her body before her consciousness checked back after its visit to a better place. She’d tipped over her chair, struggling to lift her bound arms over the back. Now her right arm was numb pinned underneath her weight. Her clammy jeans stuck uncomfortably and the twist ties binding her to the chair legs dug into her skin above her socks. All of this was unpleasant, but her survival instinct sent one mantra to the blue screen that was the rest of her mind.

Don’t open your eyes.

Her captor had shoved her into a not-quite-empty room on the top level of the stack of generic building blocks. She vaguely remembered him snipping her first set of zip ties and redoing her wrists behind the back of the brushed-steel chair. The room wasn’t heated, only lit, and her feet had lost sensation a long time before she’d stopped struggling.

Don’t look.

He’d left the lights on. She didn’t have to open her eyes to visualize the room. The light green walls were constructed of poorly hung drywall panels. Two electrical outlets were metal boxes stuck on top of the walls. Plastic tubes that must contain wiring connected them to overhead lights. It was all temporary or cheap, no ductwork, no heat, no window, no way out other than the door. All this she’d dutifully cataloged and recataloged in an effort to keep her gaze away from the only furnishings other than her chair.

They haven’t changed.

She refused to look at the steel shelf unit on the short wall. After Leif had departed, she’d tipped her chair and rotated it with her knees and body, but not far enough to put the shelf unit behind her back. Even without opening her eyes, she could see the twelve multi-gallon glass jars, the type used for storing church-sized quantities of pasta or industrial amounts of pickles. Five of the jars held a man’s forearm and hand immersed in a clear liquid. She thought she knew whose arms they might be. Five other jars contained variously sized pinkish or pinkish-brown blobs.

Don’t count the empties.

Before her mother had married Frank, they’d eaten a lot of cheap meat cuts. She recognized organs. Dead was dead, she’d always glibly assumed, and the how didn’t much matter, but that opinion changed when she faced rows of human body parts on a shelf and wondered if the previous occupant of her chair had counted more than two empty jars.

Her thumb wiggled the metal band of her ring, prompting a weak little inner voice to offer hope.
Stig knows they took you.

The cold, exhausted woman aching on the floor didn’t listen. Sure, he’d seen her claw at the car’s rear window, but that didn’t mean he’d find her. He might try, but what could he do to find a dot in the middle of the sea?

Manny would be nineteen and alone, since Uncle Robert barely acknowledged his only brother’s son. At least she’d been twenty-three and out of college when Frank died, and she’d had Manny to help her confront their uncle’s threats to call immigration. At thirteen years old, her brother had already been obsessed with following Frank’s footsteps into the Corps, and he’d challenged Uncle Robert’s intimidation with a Marine’s determination. He’d been in junior high, but her tactically clever brother had threatened to sell his inherited half of Mancini Brothers to a giant conglomerate—and he would have—if their uncle had so much as said
adios
to Christina. Manny had kept her safe while she’d finished raising him, but he’d never know what had happened to her.

Dying sucked, no doubt, but she knew how years of uncertainty over her biological father’s fate had darkened her mother’s faith. Even falling in love with Frank and marrying him hadn’t filled all the voids in her mother’s heart. Her fingers curled into a fist, driving the thin band against the tip of her thumb until it hurt. If she couldn’t get out of this room and off the oil rig, her brother would carry the burden of a perpetual question too.

The rattle of the door highlighted her first, last and only need: survival.

With her eyes closed, she heard hinges grind open. Listening without looking was a skill she’d developed over years of visiting Uncle Robert. When Manny was a baby, Christina had realized her stepfather’s brother never spoke directly to her mother, not even to say thank you for a coffee. Sensing that Uncle Robert hated to be ignored, she’d mastered not looking when he walked past. Now, as then, small victories might be all she achieved.

Footsteps crossed the metal floor. Picturing Uncle Robert, fake tan making his skin darker than the Mexican immigrants he hired, despite his prejudices, helped keep her eyelids closed.

The hair on her neck must have recognized the tread, because fear shriveled her skin until she knew what a grape dropped in the field must feel like after a week of sun had baked every drop of liquid from its body. She was too desiccated to swallow or cry. Her captor had returned.

“Miss Alvarez Mancini.” The voice was Leif’s.

She refused to give him the satisfaction of opening her eyes or responding.

His footsteps sounded hollow in the nearly empty room. When he kicked the seat of the chair, the impact jarred her body from ankles to teeth and drove her several inches across the floor. Skidding pinched her knee between the chair leg and the linoleum and twisted her sore shoulder, but she clamped her lips together so hard they flipped inward. Not even a whimper passed that seal.

“I expect an answer when I say your name. Good morning, Miss Alvarez Mancini.”

The singsong greeting made her neck and shoulders feel as if he’d touched her, but she repressed her shiver and stayed silent. Answering would turn her into a weakling.

The second kick was harder, skidding her farther and more painfully, but she didn’t yelp.

“Good morning,” he said.

This time she sensed that if she didn’t answer, he’d kick her instead of the chair. So far she hadn’t had any broken bones. Any hope of escape needed that to remain true, so she had to reply.

“Fuck off,” she choked.
Weak, Christina, weak,
but her brain was the only tool she had access to, and it told her that this man had liked her defiance on the helicopter. He’d punished her, but he’d smiled with excitement when she fought. Stig had mentioned the boredom of immortality, so maybe if she kept Leif off-guard and amused, if she did or said the unexpected, he’d let her live long enough for Stig to make a plan.

“May I call you Christina?”

The brush of air on her face told her that he’d bent close to her, but she listened to the little voice that chanted
don’t open your eyes.
She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of looking.

“Perhaps you prefer Tina?”

“Only if I can call you...” She had nothing but false bravado and a blank mind. “Porkchop.”

She heard a huff of air and pictured his lips pulled back from those horrible teeth. His clothes made the sound of starched fabric gliding across other starched fabric before something warm and dry touched her cheek. His fingertips. “You made quite an impression on my friend Stig.”

Her shoulder bones shrank inside her skin, leaving her feeling hollow enough to rattle.

“And on me.” The touch moved slowly to her jaw, and she clenched her molars to repress a shudder. Speech disappeared, replaced by images of arms waving in jars of liquid when wind rocked the container. She was one word away from screaming.

Focus. Find anger.
This man was toying with her, but she was nobody’s toy. She controlled her life, not him, and he couldn’t make her afraid unless she let him. She found a tiny bit of fire in her stomach, enough to ask, “What do you want?”

Hearing her voice echo as loudly as his gave her a surge of strength.

Then fingers reached into her hair and yanked her head back so that her cheek dragged along the floor and her earring snagged, until thankfully the catch released. With her hair pulled this tightly, her eyes popped open.

“I want your lover.”

She squeezed her cheeks and forehead at each other hard enough to force tears out of the corners of her eyelids, needing to close her eyes to avoid the yellow pointed canines inches from her face.

“I could be very nice. I have that power.”

Instinct begged her to promise she’d do whatever he wanted, but her brain told her to challenge him. “I don’t think you have power. I think you’re chicken shit.” Years of a double-life as both Geoffrey Morrison and Christina Mancini let her lie with a tiny bit of confidence. “If you had any balls, you wouldn’t have kidnapped me. You’d have faced Stig like a man instead of—”

He twisted her hair into a rope through his fist, cutting off her words. “You smell like sweat and fear. Did you know that?”

“How can you smell me after whatever you ate?” Having a person in the room, even her captor, gave her a voice. “Last week’s garlic fries?”

He laughed. “You could be an attractive woman.”

“And you could learn how to talk to a woman. But I guess it’s too late for that.”

“I don’t need to. You’ll agree to whatever I want.”

Even though he let go of her hair, her senses screamed to high alert because his voice had too much satisfaction, too much anticipation, for him to be leaving. “No, I won’t.”

He lifted the whole chair, including her, in one motion. A little ill from the sudden reorientation of her head into position above the rest of her body, she slumped.

“None of that despair, Christina. It’s not flattering.”

Her arms fell forward. He’d cut the zip ties but she was too numb to notice the change until the tension holding her hands behind the chair had disappeared. Before she could think of what to do next, he’d crouched, snipped the ties on each leg and stood.

“If you can get up and walk, I might keep you.”

“If you try to keep me, I hope you don’t ever need to sleep.” She’d trade her business for a knife like Skafe’s. The immortals apparently needed a few minutes to heal, so she imagined how she’d roll to the floor and go for Leif’s Achilles. Immobilize him and then lock him in the room, that was all she needed to do.

Except she didn’t have a knife and her legs didn’t function yet.

“That’s the spirit.” He laughed, those feral teeth incongruous against his fancy striped shirt and tailored pants. “Let’s go where it’s a bit warmer, shall we?”

Until that moment she hadn’t thought there could be somewhere worse than the room with the jars full of human parts, but suddenly she wondered about the reason for locating on an offshore platform. Horrible as the jars were, they could be concealed anywhere. A massive oil rig wasn’t required for a row of arms and livers. Leif’s hands wrapped around her upper arms and lifted her. She had nothing more than painful pins and needles in her limbs, no control, no way to struggle.

She was about to learn what required complete inaccessibility.

* * *

On his hands and knees at the edge of the bog, gloriously functioning hands and knees, Unferth averted his eyes from the muck-coated viscera in front of him. What his urges had thrust upon him was the one deed even the oldest gods punished, but his primitive hunger abolished all rules and left him a bare animal, a creature of the mud. This deed was territory he’d never entered, not on the plains of Kursk where he’d eaten grass and drunk from puddles while the Eastern Front burned, not when he’d crawled through stacks of plague-dead in Milan nor when he’d marched the walls at the Siege of Scutari. Never.

He flexed his fingers and touched the supple skin across his cheekbones. The nose he’d had for fifteen centuries brought him the scent of spring-thaw mixed with blood. His ear cartilage had re-formed, so he could hear the calls of ravens too far away to see. Whatever micro-organism in his system caused his eternal repairs had performed its duty; the gifts of blood and protein had blessed him. He was whole.

If he wanted to return seamlessly to the human world, his flesh needed clothing and shoes. He looked at the yellow parka and boots on the ground. The unfortunate man who had put him together again would have to donate more of himself.

* * *

Stig had wished for many things in his long life. Most had been luxuries like hotel suites, some necessities like an armoire large enough for hiding himself in a married duchess’s bedroom, but never had he wished to switch places with a dog. Watching Porkchop press his damp nose to the window of the rental car parked on the refuge of terra firma while Stig tried his damnedest to ignore the trawler moored at the dock, he considered offering Loki his bollocks to change spots with the dachshund.

The sky grumbled low and far away, Thor chuckling at his creature’s misery. The old gods had spent centuries expressing amusement when reminded of his existence. No other reason explained how a Titanic survivor also booked passage on the Lusitania’s last voyage. If Loki granted his wish to become a dog, it would be a bloody retriever expected to enjoy jumping out of boats to fetch mangled ducks.

His stomach lurched as he watched Wulf and his wife cuddle in each other’s arms next to the car. Marital happiness affected him like hairy spiders affected some women, the reason he’d never painted couples, only groups or solo portraits. Forging
The Raft of the Medusa
had been a picnic in comparison to the skin-crawling paean to complacency, a painting of a married couple.

However, Wulf and Theresa’s sentimental haggis was a better view than the rubber inflatable lashed to the deck of the trawler. Wulf intended them to make a silent final approach to the rig, rowing undetected. On the fucking North Sea in a rubber dinghy. Even if it was the type American SEALs used, it was a raft, and the North Sea was not the Serpentine in Hyde Park.

The other Viking had laughed, thumped Stig’s back and reminded him that he’d rowed across the strait to Heorot more than once. That had been fifteen centuries ago. He’d been sick then too, and he’d had a few incidents on ships since then. So fuck Wulf and his jokes.

“Stig!” Draycott called from beside Luc on
HMS Doomed
. The meaning of his circling hand was obvious.
Get on with it.

Right. He was standing out in the rain when he could at least be inside the cabin of the trawler. He could take the first step to join the men he’d sucked into this rescue operation, or he could keep staring as Wulf tilted Theresa’s face and breathed a kiss onto her cheekbone.