Cradle of Solitude (11 page)

Annja didn't need any further encouragement. She turned and ran for the helicopter…only to fall flat on her face as the hem of the robe got tangled in her feet and spilled her to the ground.

The sound of gunfire joined the growl of the car engine, both of which were suddenly drowned out in the rhythmic beat of the helicopter rotors as the pilot saw what was going on and prepared to get his aircraft out of there.

Annja glanced back to see the Mercedes change direction and head right for her.

She scrambled to her feet.

Bullets whip-cracked through the air as Annja frantically glanced around looking for some protective cover, but there was none to be found. She could make a run for the helicopter over open ground or she could turn around and head back inside the monastery, hope to find a different way out before the gunmen caught up to her.

She was wavering between the two actions when the choice was decided for her.

A hand with a grip like steel grabbed her arm.

“Come on!” Garin shouted, half carrying her along beside him as he ran for the chopper.

This time Annja used her hands to hike up the hem of the robe, not wanting to trip on it again. There wasn't anything she could do about the gravel slicing into the bottoms of her feet, though, so she just ignored it. She'd been through worse and it was a damn sight better than getting a bullet in the head.

Garin's security team had finally gotten into the act, sending a blistering hail of gunfire at the Mercedes as they raced forward to plant themselves between the enemy and their employer, protecting him as they had been trained to do.

The open door of the helicopter loomed ahead of them.

Garin's longer stride put him out ahead of Annja by a few feet, so he reached the helicopter before she did. He jumped inside the open doorway and then turned to face her, ready to lend a hand.

She was looking right at him when the bullet took him high in the right side of his chest, tossing him backward into the darkness inside the helicopter.

“Garin!” she screamed.

She covered the last few feet and then leaped inside the helicopter as bullets slammed into the metal fuselage around her. She barely had time to grab hold of a nearby seat before the pilot took them up, arcing away from the gunfire as quickly as he could.

Annja spent an anxious minute holding on for dear life as the pilot leveled out and then she scrambled over to where Garin was lying against the opposite bulkhead.

She ripped open his suit coat, desperately afraid of what she'd find. Whatever mysticism gave Garin his extended lifespan also helped him heal more quickly than the average individual, but a sucking chest wound was serious even for him.

The black face of a bulletproof vest stared back at her.

“Thank God,” she said.

“Can't keep your hands off me, huh?”

Annja glanced up to find Garin watching her with an amused look on his face.

“You bastard!” she said, backing up to give him some room. “I thought you were shot.”

He coughed, grimaced and said, “I was. That's how I ended up on the floor, remember?” He pulled himself up into a nearby chair, then indicated Annja should put on one of the headsets hanging off the nearby bulkhead as he reached to do the same.

She did as instructed and she heard him telling the pilot to head for his Frankfurt house.

“What about your men?” she asked.

“They'll be fine. They'll neutralize the threat and then disperse as necessary. Don't worry, they know what they are doing.”

The flight lasted about half an hour. Annja was too worn out to say much and Garin kept his thoughts to himself, which was fine with her. She was still surprised at his sudden appearance and previous experience had her wondering what else he was keeping from her.

As was typical of both Garin and Roux, the “house” could more accurately be labeled a mansion, with two large wings extending off the main building. The pilot set them down on a helipad atop the roof without issue.

Once inside, Garin led Annja to a private suite in
the west wing of the house and suggested that she meet him in the den after showering and changing into more practical clothes.

She was all too happy to oblige.

The suite was beautifully decorated, with a luxurious king-size bed and a sunken tub that one could probably swim in. She eyed it enviously for a moment and then decided that a hot shower might be more practical.

She looked around for the clothes Garin had mentioned and found an array of styles and sizes in the wardrobe and the walk-in closet. She stared at all of them for a moment, wondering just who they belonged to. The styles were all quite current, so it couldn't have been one of Garin's lovers from ages past. Perhaps he just kept a well-stocked wardrobe of women's clothing available for whenever one of his companions might need it?

She wouldn't put it past him.

Annja sought out the most practical outfit she could, which wasn't easy given most of the clothing was designed to be skintight or extremely revealing. In one of the drawers, however, she found a pair of cargo pants and paired them with a black T-shirt.

She took a hot shower, scrubbing the last of the river grime from her body, and then dressed in the clothes she'd found. They fit her as if they had been custom tailored. That made her speculate that perhaps they actually had been, which took her down all kinds of roads she didn't want to think about. She found socks in the wardrobe drawers and saw more shoes than she'd ever seen anywhere outside of a shoe store in the closet, including a pair of hiking boots that looked like they'd fit reasonably well. She decided to pad around shoeless for the moment.

Feeling pretty much back to her usual self, she wandered out of the bedroom suite and went in search of Garin.

She found him in the den, dressed casually in jeans and a loose-fitting shirt.

Annja didn't bother with pleasantries. She'd been patient; now it was time to get to the bottom of things.

“What were you doing at Berceau de solitude?”

Garin stared at her.

Misinterpreting his silence, she said, “The monastery, Garin, the monastery.”

His reply was in perfect French. “I understood you perfectly, Annja. I was simply distracted by the notion that I think you looked better in that brown robe of yours.”

Typical Garin.

In the same language, she replied. “And that's just about what I'd expect from a bore like yourself. Shall we do this all night?”

Garin laughed, a deep baritone that filled the room with his pleasure.

“Always the feisty one,” he said, switching back to English. He held up his hands, palms out. “I surrender, Annja. You win. Please, sit down. We have a lot to talk about.”

She did as he asked, taking a seat on the couch opposite where he sat and curled her legs up underneath her. The room was furnished in post-modern minimalist, it seemed—all black and chrome functionality with little that wasn't absolutely needed. The couch, however, proved to be surprisingly comfortable.

Garin gave her a frank look for a long moment and then answered her original question. “I was at the Cradle of Solitude because of you, Annja.”

She raised her eyebrows but didn't say anything, waiting for him to expand on his remark.

“As I'm sure you realize, information is power and much of Dragontech's success comes from the fact that we have greater access to more detailed information than our competitors.”

Or your enemies, she thought.

“We monitor a wide variety of communication channels through several different processes, looking for certain words or phrases that can give us a leg up in our business dealings. After you came along and claimed the sword, your name was one of the terms I asked our monitors to watch for. As the emergency response lines are one of the frequencies we monitor, when you gave your name to the 1-1-2 operator this afternoon, the call was flagged and sent to my attention.”

So that's how he always seems to keep tabs on me, she thought.

“No sooner had word of your call been relayed to me than we intercepted another transmission, this one from a cell phone tower in Paris, which also mentioned you by name. That was a tape of that call I played for you earlier.”

Annja suddenly had an image of Garin sitting amid a bank of computer monitors, listening to signals bounced down from satellites all around the world. Shades of Big Brother. It was just a bit creepy to think that a man with Garin Braden's resources was intentionally keeping regular watch over her.

Garin went on. “I tried to reach you by cell phone to warn you of the problem, but was unable to do so. As my team and I were already here in Frankfurt, I made the decision to attempt to warn you in person. It would seem I arrived just in time.”

His story had the ring of truth to it. He hadn't been able to reach her on her cell because by then it was lying at the bottom of the river somewhere; she'd had it in her pocket when she made the leap off the roof. The distance from Frankfurt to the monastery was about half an hour air time, which would have put his arrival in the right time frame for him to have intercepted and then reacted to her emergency call.

Given what they'd been through in the past, it wasn't a big surprise that she hadn't trusted him right off the bat. In the early days, he'd tried to kill her on more than one occasion. Lately, though, he seemed to have come to peace with the fact that she wasn't going to surrender the sword to his control willingly and had gone from being a threat to an occasional ally and, dare she say it, even a friend.

One thing was for certain, no one could ever say her life wasn't complicated.

“What, exactly, are you caught up in this time, Annja?” he asked.

Deciding to take him into her confidence, she told him everything that had happened to her since leaving the dojo the morning before.

He listened silently until she got around to describing the note Parker had left for Sykes, then interrupted.

“The FotS? You're certain that's what it said?”

She was. She no longer had the letter, but her recall of anything she'd read was quite good and she was certain she had it down word for word.

“That's interesting. I wonder…?”

Before she could ask what it was he was wondering about, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and hit the speed dial key.

“Griggs? Dig up whatever we have on the Friends of the South and bring it to me, please.”

He closed the phone and gave her his attention once more. “Go on.”

She finished out the rest of the tale, describing the letter the puzzle box had contained and her belief that it led to the missing Confederate treasure.

In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought. She'd trusted him this far so letting him know her ultimate objective—recovery of the treasure—wasn't all that big a risk. Besides, Garin knew her pretty well and would sense that there was a bigger motive behind it all than just identifying the remains.

His next comment showed that was true.

“You don't care about the value of the treasure itself, do you?” he asked. “You just want to solve the mystery.”

She nodded. Finding the actual treasure would be nice, no doubt about it, as her bank account was looking more than a bit dismal, but for her, the real accomplishment would be discovering exactly what had happened after the treasure had supposedly been “stolen” on that night in 1865. That was the prize she was after.

The door behind them opened and a medium-size black man with a shaved head and a soul patch on his chin stepped inside. His name was Matthew Griggs and he was some kind of senior operative with Dragontech Security. Annja had first met him in the aftermath of the Indian tsunami, when he'd flown in by helicopter to rescue her and the rest of her dig workers.

“Ms. Creed,” he said in that lilting island accent of his, a smile on his face.

She smiled back at him. “Nice to see you, Griggs.”

Griggs crossed the room and handed a manila folder
to Garin, who thanked him and began leafing through its thin contents as Griggs left them alone once more.

Annja itched to know what was in the file, but there was no way she was going to give Garin the upper hand by asking. She'd known him long enough to understand that he was constantly turning everything into a competition, vying for dominance with every issue no matter how big or small. He knew she'd want to know what was in the file. He would purposely keep it from her until she asked. But if she asked, she lost face in his eyes, which only reinforced his already monumental ego. Of course, making her play the game at all was considered a win for him as well in his eyes, so it was a losing proposition for her either way.

Instead, she sat back and waited patiently for Garin to finish reviewing the documents in front of him. Several minutes passed. Finally, perhaps realizing that he wasn't going to get any kind of rise out of Annja, Garin closed the folder and spoke up.

“You might not care about the treasure but it's clear that someone else does.”

There wasn't any doubt about that. Whoever they were, they were clearly willing to kill over it, as well.

“Sounds like you're going to need some help,” Garin said.

She had to admit that was true. She
was
going to need some help. The question was whether Garin Braden was the best person to provide it.

“What did you have in mind?” she asked.

He didn't hesitate.

“Sixty-forty split on the treasure, with the larger portion going to me as I'll be putting up all the financing and security for the search.”

Annja immediately shook her head. That would give
him control over the find and there was no way she was going to allow that. He'd auction it off to the highest bidder and the lost Confederate treasury would disappear into some private collector's vault, never to be seen again. As far as she was concerned, the treasure was a part of history and deserved to be shared by all. The finder's fee they'd receive from the government would be more than enough compensation.