Roux was enjoying a nice cup of Kenyan coffee the following morning when there was a knock at his door.
“Come,” he called.
It was Henshaw, as he knew it would be.
“I have that information you asked for, sir,” Henshaw said, crossing the room and laying a file on Roux’s desk.
Roux glanced at it, noting its thickness. “Why don’t you give me the highlights,” he suggested.
“Very good, sir. With respect to the news conference last night. The man’s name is Ian Beresford. Detective Inspector Ian Beresford. He’s a twenty-year veteran of the force, primarily with the Specialist Crime Directorate, handling high-profile cases and working multijurisdictional task forces. A few years ago he was transferred to Special Operations, specifically the CTC.”
Counter Terrorism Command? That’s interesting, Roux thought. Why would someone like that be looking for Annja?
“Several nights ago an archaeological dig site in the West Midlands just north of Arkholme was attacked by armed intruders. The local office of the regional police received a call from a woman identifying herself as Miss Creed. She informed them of the attack and asked for immediate assistance. When the officer in charge tried to obtain more information, the call was abruptly terminated.
“At first the call was considered a hoax. Why would armed insurgents attack an archaeological site? Then someone decided to check into the name and discovered Annja’s background as a television personality and host. That prompted them to send out a patrol to look into the situation.”
Roux frowned. “And by the time the patrol got there, the intruders were long gone, right?”
“Yes, sir. To make matters worse, when the patrol arrived they discovered the call hadn’t been a hoax at all. The site personnel had been murdered and their bodies dumped in a nearby bog. An initial report incorrectly listed Miss Creed among the deceased and then later, when it was clear she was not, there was some speculation that she might have been in league with the perpetrators.”
The very idea was preposterous, so Roux brushed it aside with barely a thought.
“Do we have any idea where she is now?”
Henshaw shook his head. “No, sir, though she is clearly alive. She contacted you twice, and she has apparently been in contact with her producer, Doug Morrell, as well. He held a press conference in New York recently claiming to have the inside story on exactly what happened at the Arkholme site.”
Roux doubted that, doubted it highly. He’d met Annja’s young acquaintance and hadn’t been all that impressed.
“Suspects?”
“The police haven’t released that information. Unofficially speculations are running rampant, from al Qaeda to resurrected bog mummies. The latest reports out of—”
Roux interrupted. “Did you say bog mummies?”
Henshaw colored slightly. “Yes, sir. Oddly enough, the suggestion came out of the press conference Mr. Morrell recently gave in New York. A few of the more liberal news organizations have apparently decided to run with that as their lead theory.”
And to think he said that all with a straight face, Roux marveled. Aloud, he said, “I think we can dismiss that possibility, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
His majordomo took a moment to compose himself again, and then said, “The latest reports out of New Scotland Yard claim that they have several suspects in the case, but they aren’t releasing any more information than that. Miss Creed is still wanted by the police, but as a witness rather than as a suspect.”
Roux wondered how much of that was true and how much was simple posturing. If the Met really had a suspect, they wouldn’t want to tip them off before they could take action. On the other hand, if they didn’t have a suspect, perhaps claiming that they did would cause those responsible to panic and make a mistake, bringing them to the police’s attention. It was impossible to know which was more accurate—which, he supposed, was the point of it all, anyway.
“There’s something else,” Henshaw began. “I’m not sure of its relevance, but it seems like too much of a coincidence to ignore.”
Roux raised his eyebrows, indicating Henshaw should continue.
“In the first few days following the massacre at the Arkholme site, Detective Inspector Beresford was called out to look at two other homicide scenes, one on the highway south of Arkholme and the other in a run-down hotel on the outskirts of London.
“There were two bodies recovered from each crime scene, all men in their late twenties or early thirties, all with criminal records of one kind or another. In each case the men had been identified as alleged members of the Red Hand Defenders, an Irish terrorist group with the goal of freeing Ireland from British rule and oversight.”
“Do the police consider the three events to be connected in any way?” Roux asked.
Henshaw shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure. My contact inside the MPS didn’t want to dig too deeply and risk tipping his hand to anyone who might be watching. But he was able to tell me that at least one individual at each crime scene had been killed with some kind of bladed weapon, most likely a sword. There’s also a report from a clergyman who claims to have been saved by a ‘dark-haired angel wielding a holy sword’ on the highway earlier that afternoon.”
The combination of events made Roux sit up and take notice. The connection between them all was obvious, once you had the right cards in your hand. A quick shuffle put the cards into the proper order and let him see them the bigger picture.
An unknown group attacks the dig site at Arkholme. Annja witnesses the assault but is unable to do anything about it—hence the call to the regional police. Before she can finish the call she’s interrupted, perhaps even discovered by the enemy. Despite this she manages to escape capture but ends up being confronted by her pursuers again on the highway not too long after that, this time in full view of the traveling clergyman.
Forced to defend herself, Annja uses the sword and leaves the two men dead on the road in her wake. Somehow she makes it to London, where she rents a room, believing she’s escaped her pursuers. The latter turns out to be untrue, however, and she must flee for a second time, leaving even more bodies in her wake.
So if the Red Hand Defenders were after Annja, then it stood to reason that they were the ones who had attacked the archaeologists at Arkholme.
But what had they been after?
That was what was bothering him about this whole scenario. The idea that an Irish terrorist group would have an interest in something unearthed from a peat bog in the middle of…
All of a sudden the connections came together in his head.
He glanced at the calendar in his head, then turned to Henshaw. “When was the attack on the dig site?”
The other man told him.
Just as he’d suspected, it was the same night that Shaw had announced that he would be auctioning off a one-of-a-kind Celtic torc that he’d recently acquired. If it had been any more obvious it would have sat up and hit him in the face.
How could he have missed it?
The implications were staggering.
He needed to get in touch with Annja and he needed to do it quickly.
“Do we have a number for Mr. Morrell?”
Henshaw nodded.
“Let’s get him on the phone. Perhaps he knows how to contact Annja.”
The first two times they tried to reach Morrell the call went straight to voice mail, which irritated Roux to no end. It was only when Henshaw offhandedly reminded him that he’d inadvertently done the same thing to Annja that Roux was able to stifle his irritation and wait with a bit more patience.
Then, on the third try, almost an hour later, someone finally picked up.
“Morrell,” a young man said.
Roux wondered if he’d ever sounded that young and decided that no, he never had. Even if he had, centuries of life had certainly burned the memory out of him.
“Hello, Mr. Morrell. My name is Roux.”
“Roux? That’s it? Just Roux? Like Prince or Madonna?”
Roux gritted his teeth. “No, Mr. Morrell, I am nothing like one of your so-called American pop stars. You might remember me as a friend of Annja’s?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the name before,” the other man said cautiously, “but how am I supposed to know it’s really you?”
Roux was taken aback for a moment. “Who else would it be?”
“There are a lot of people looking for Annja right now, Mr. Whoever-You-Are. If you think I’m just going to turn her over to the first person claiming to be a friend of hers, you’ve got another think coming.”
“Do you have caller ID, Mr. Morrell?”
“Of course. Doesn’t everyone?”
The know-it-all tone was starting to get to him. It must have shown, too, for Henshaw was now staring at him quizzically from the other side of the room. Roux ignored him, concentrating on keeping his temper, something he wasn’t very good at.
“If you do, then you should see that I am calling you from Paris, France. Perhaps you might remember Annja mentioning that is where I live the last time we met?”
Morrell snorted. “That doesn’t mean anything. You could be any Joe Blow calling me from France.”
That did it. Roux finally lost his temper. Snarling into the phone, he said, “Why you little cur! When I get my hands on you I’ll have you whipped and then tied to the back of my horse for an energetic ride around the estate until you’ll wish that I’d simply gutted you on the spot! You will help me find Annja!”
There was a moment of silence and then Morrell said, “Hello, Roux. I thought that was you.”
If he’d been in the same room with him, Roux probably would have killed him. As it was, he needed a moment to regain control.
“Roux? You still there, Roux?”
“I am,” he said through still-gritted teeth. “It is urgent that I speak with Annja—her life may be in danger. Do you have a way of reaching her?”
“Did you try to call her cell phone?”
Roux paused again as he fought to keep from yelling a second time. When he was reasonably confident that he could do so without losing his cool, he answered, “Yes. It seems to be out of operation at the present time.”
“Oh,” Morrell said with a little laugh. “Not that cell phone, her other cell phone.”
Dear Lord, granted me patience… “Her other cell phone?”
“Yeah. She lost the first one when the bog mummies attacked. Or, at least, that’s what we’re going to show on the episode. It’s going to be incredible! I’ve already got special effects working out this fully articulated bog mummy replica that we can—”
“Morrell!” Roux said sharply, stopping the other man in midsentence. “The cell phone number?”
“Oh. Right. Hang on, I’ve got it right here.”
Roux could hear some rustling in the background and then Morrell was back, reading off a phone number from the piece of paper that he must have been holding in his hand.
He was still chattering away about something or other when Roux hung up on him.
Shaving a few grains of material from the torc proved to be a simple task with the help of the laser. Sebastian collected the sample and moved over to the mass spectrometer that Annja had seen earlier upon entering the room.
Sebastian placed the sample inside the device and then fired up the computer that was a part of the unit. As he worked, he explained to Annja what was going to happen.
“The first thing we’re going to do is vaporize the sample, producing a gas that includes all of its component elements. The gas will then be exposed to an electron beam, which will charge the molecules of the gas and convert them into ionized particles.”
There was a brief flash of light from inside the spectrometer as the first step he’d mentioned was carried out. He barely acknowledged it, continuing his explanation while manipulating various controls through the computer.
“The ionized particles will be exposed to a series of magnetic fields that will sort the ions by their masses. The detector will then provide a quantitative analysis of the ions that are present.”
Good-looking and intelligent, Annja thought as she watched him work.
“In the end, we should know exactly what our legendary blacksmith used to manufacture the torc.”
He set a few more switches and then sat back to wait. They spent the time sharing a bit of background information about each other; Annja talked about some of the projects she’d been involved in while filming
Chasing History’s Monsters
while Sebastian entertained her with tales of being a mineral scout in some of the most remote places on earth while working as a contractor for the big petroleum companies that were his bread and butter.
Finally, after almost an hour of waiting, though it only seemed like ten or fifteen minutes to Annja, the spectrometer churned out its results.
Sebastian picked up the report off the printer and began paging through it.
“Pretty consistent with an achondritic meteorite, just as we suspected. Iron, nickel in limited quantities, some silica formations and various assorted minerals.”
He got quiet all of a sudden.
“Sebastian?” Annja asked.
He didn’t seem to notice, his attention absorbed in whatever he’d found there on the page.
“Sebastian?” she said, a bit sharper that time. “What is it?”
He looked up from the paper, a dazed expression on his face.
“Plutonium.”
“What?” she asked. She wasn’t sure that she’d heard him correctly.
Couldn’t
have heard him correctly.
“Did you say plutonium?” she repeated.
Sebastian nodded, his attention still on the report in front of him. He was tracing the lines of information with one finger, then double-checking the numbers against a reference volume he’d pulled from a nearby shelf. “No doubt about it. In fact, it is probably one of the purest samples I’ve ever seen outside of a nuclear laboratory.”
“But plutonium is virtually nonexistent in nature,” Annja protested. “You can sometimes find it in uranium, but only in the tiniest trace amounts.”
“I know, Annja, I’m a geologist, remember. But I’m telling you, the torc has one hell of a lot of plutonium in it.”
That just didn’t make any sense to her. Bewildered, she sought an alternative solution. “Can the spectrometer be malfunctioning? Or calibrated incorrectly or something?”
“There’s one way to find out.”
Sebastian got up and began digging through the cabinets on a nearby wall. After a few minutes of searching he returned with a small handheld device about the size of a waffle iron. A small wand was attached to the device.
Annja immediately recognized it as a Geiger counter.
Stepping back over to the laser where the torc still rested, Sebastian turned on the counter and waved the wand over the torc.
A sudden series of clicks erupted into the room from the side of the Geiger counter.
Annja knew what that meant without having to be told.
The torc was radioactive.
Sebastian, and his spectrometer, was right. As crazy as it sounded, the torc had been fashioned from a meteorite that consisted primarily of naturally produced plutonium.
At that moment, a phone began ringing.
Annja looked at Sebastian, expecting him to answer his phone, but he shook his head.
“Not mine,” he said.
Surprised, Annja realized it was her new phone. She hadn’t heard it ring before and didn’t recognize the sound.
She dug it out of her backpack and answered it, already expecting the caller to have hung up given the few frantic moments it had taken her to find it once she’d realized it was her own. “Hello?”
“If you expect me to call back,” Roux said, “it is generally a good idea to actually leave me the number where I can reach you.”
“Roux!” Annja exclaimed, surprised by the call but delighted to finally hear from him. She’d seriously started to worry that something had gone wrong on his end.
As it turned out, Roux was right. In all the craziness that was going on, she’d forgotten to leave her new cell phone number with him when she’d called. She endured a few minutes of scolding; as her mentor and friend, she figured he was entitled.
“I’ve been seeing your name all over the press, Annja,” he said. “Just what have you gotten yourself into this time?”
“Hang on,” she told him, then turned to Sebastian. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to take this call.”
He flashed his megawatt smile again. “Of course, why don’t you use the reception area, where you’ll have a little privacy? I’ll continue working on these results.”
A moment later she was sitting by a window in the front room, looking out over the street, and bringing Roux up-to-date on everything that had happened to her since finding the torc.
S
EATED IN THE
back of his limousine with Henshaw at the wheel, Roux listened to Annja’s story and as he did the pieces of the puzzle he’d been struggling to understand finally fell into place.
It was Annja’s dig team that had uncovered the torc. How Shaw had learned about it, Roux couldn’t say, but somehow he had and had decided to acquire it and sell it to the highest bidder. He’d sent his thugs from the Red Hand Defenders to
acquire
the torc from those who had uncovered it.
Annja’s presence at the dig site had prevented that from happening. When the intruders had shown a callous disregard for the lives of her associates, she’d hidden the torc and fought back.
Her explanation also revealed why she was so reluctant to go to the police to share what she knew; seeing one of her attackers wearing the uniform of a regional police officer would have caused Roux to question just who he could and could not trust, as well.
Learning of her escape, Shaw had sent some of his thugs after her, determined to recover the torc, while all along he’d been deceiving those he’d called together to bid on the object. He’d never had the torc in hand at all…
“Where are you now, Annja?”
“In Paris, at the offices of Dr. Sebastian Cartier, a geologist I’ve hired to analyze the chemical composition of the torc. And get this, we’ve just discovered that the torc was fashioned from a meteorite full of plutonium.”
“Plutonium? Give me his address,” Roux said, jotting it down on a piece of paper as she did so. Forget the meeting. This was too important. “Henshaw and I are going to…”
Roux trailed off in midsentence as the memory of the last conversation he’d overheard in Shaw’s office replayed in his mind.
“She’ll be at this address in the morning. Recover my property and then get rid of her.”
“What about the geologist?”
“Get rid of him, too.”
With a growing sense of horror, Roux realized Annja had the plutonium Shaw needed to turn his inoperable suitcase nuke into an operational one. Even worse, Shaw had known since sometime last night where Annja would be this morning and had already dispatched a team to eliminate her and recover the torc!
“You’ve got to get out of there, Annja!” Roux said urgently. “Drop everything but the torc and get out of there now!”
Annja didn’t understand. “What’s going on, Roux?”
“I don’t have time to explain,” he replied. “Shaw knows you’re there and he’s already sent his men to recover the torc. No matter what, you can’t let that happen.”
“Shaw? Who the hell is Shaw? And how do you know someone is after the torc?”
She was just about to demand that Roux explain himself whether he wanted to or not when she happened to glance out the front window. She was just in time to see a group of armed gunmen wearing black face masks exit the van parked across the street and head directly for the walkway leading to Sebastian’s front door.
Into the phone, she said, “We’re too late, Roux. Shaw’s men are already here.”
She then ran for the back room, calling her sword to her as she went.