Day Of Atonement

5

By the time Annja had left the hotel with her cameraman, the sun had started to sink in the sky. The late-afternoon chill had turned into full-on cold.

She couldn’t dislodge the thought that the two men in the Mercedes had been following her. Had it been Brooklyn instead of the South of France she would have been worried about carjacking, or that insurance scam where people deliberately rammed into you for the claim. But without them mysteriously reappearing on her tail, there was nothing for her to actually worry about.

“Are you okay?” Philippe asked as they drove away from the restaurant. The food had been good, rustic farmhouse fare. Good, plain, healthy, but tasty, too. Farm fresh. It had been his recommendation. She was always happy to take advantage of local knowledge when it came to food, stay off the tourist track, keep it cheap, keep it wholesome. “You seem distracted.”

“It’s all good,” she promised. “Just thinking.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

She chuckled at that. “Isn’t it always?”

They were heading back to the site to take a few night shots with the castle lit up in the distance. It was always good to hit the atmospheric stuff when the sun was down. It added to the mystique.

Philippe kept talking, telling more stories about growing up in the area and days on the farmhouse where his grandma would stain her toes purple crushing grapes and his grandfather would nurture cheese that smelled almost exactly the same as his grandma’s purple feet. Annja smiled, jealous of the trappings of a normal childhood. Every few minutes she’d glance in the rearview mirror, only for her heart to skip a beat if she spotted the shape of a car behind them, silver or not. She had to snap out of it; she was jumping at silver ghosts.

The spot they’d been filming at earlier was covered in three inches of fresh snowfall, though mercifully the night was clear and crisp, not so much as a flurry to be seen. What had worked during the day wasn’t as suitable for the night shot, and she’d never intentionally put herself in the exact same position—that would only serve to make the segment look like some weird time-lapse photography experiment. They moved around, looking for a better angle where the spotlights accentuated the harsh old stones and served as a great reminder of just how old the fortress was.

“Inside could work,” Philippe suggested. “A different aspect, very mean and moody. It would give the shoot an air of foreboding.” He opened his case as he talked, pulling out the camera and beginning the prep work before they started shooting properly.

“I get what you’re saying, but a distance shot, looking up at me with the wall rising to tower over me and really highlight the insignificance of man in this harsh winter landscape, could look pretty impressive.”

“You’re the boss,” he said, hoisting the camera onto his shoulder.

Annja skimmed through her rough notes, familiarizing herself with the facts even though she’d read them dozens of times and knew them inside out. It was a compulsion. She could recite this stuff in her sleep. That was just the way her mind worked. She couldn’t wipe it away even if she wanted to.

She swept her hair from her face, took a deep breath and gave him the nod.

The moment the red light glowed in the dark beside his face she was in her element. The spotlight on the side of the camera threw her features into stark relief, the perfect accompaniment for the tale of murder, witchcraft and heresy she was about to tell.

“In his book Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis—Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Wickedness—the Inquisitor Bernard Gui wrote a section related to sorcerers and diviners and the invokers of demons.” She considered that for a moment. “His work proves beyond the shadow of any doubt that the Inquisition was concerned with the idea of witchcraft one hundred and sixty-five years before the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, and refutes the notion that paganism in France had been suppressed by the year 1000…”

“Look out!” someone shouted.

Almost too late, Annja launched herself away from the wall, barely managing to shove Philippe aside as a huge piece of masonry hurtled down from far above, shattering on impact as it cracked the ancient flagstones. Philippe stumbled backward, desperately trying to cling to his camera even with his balance gone. Annja reacted faster, already looking up at the top of the wall, at a loss to understand how the huge slab could have fallen, and not seeing anyone on top of the wall who might have thrown it.

“Are you all right?”

She turned to see an older man in a wheelchair.

The woman pushing him had turned an unhealthy shade of white.

Annja offered a wry smile. “Thanks to you,” she said, dusting herself off.

“I don’t even know what possessed me to look up,” he said. “I was just enjoying listening to your recounting of our ancient history. I assume it’s for a news bulletin? Has something happened?”

“Oh no,” she said, realizing his misunderstanding. “I work for an American cable TV show called Chasing History’s Monsters. We’re filming a segment about Bernard Gui, the Inquisitor.”

The man offered a polite smile that spoke volumes. There was no reason why he should have heard of the show, and despite his cultured English there was a strong trace of Italian in his accent. She noticed that his left hand was trembling, just a slight tremor. He saw the direction of her gaze and offered a rueful smile. “My affliction,” he said, meaning the tremor, but it could equally have been a reference to the macabre history of the place.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s perfectly all right, my dear. I’m just glad my big mouth could save the day and that you and your colleague are in one piece.”

Before she could thank him, he craned his neck and said something rapidly, in Italian, to the woman behind him. She turned him around without a word, and as she wheeled him away, the old man offered the briefest of waves. Annja watched the woman struggle with the wheelchair in the snow, following the tracks they’d made a few moments earlier as they returned the way they’d come.

Philippe was still checking the lens and various attachments on his camera for damage when Annja went to help him back to his feet; she rather liked the fact he’d stayed down on his butt in the snow, more worried about the camera than he was about himself.

“Did it survive?” she asked.

“Looks like the spotlight’s broken, meaning we can’t shoot in the dark, but otherwise everything looks good. It could be worse. Still, it means we’re not going to be getting anything else done tonight.”

“Okay, let’s draw a line under today and start from scratch tomorrow.”

6

The call was unwelcome when it came, just as most telephone calls were, as far as the old man was concerned.

Roux sank into a large leather recliner. He had been doing his best to try to enjoy the old black-and-white movie on the huge flat-screen TV, which was the room’s one and only concession to modern living. The buttery leather of the armchair was almost enough to transport him back the two hundred years to the time it had been made. Casablanca was quite possibly the greatest film ever made, and Ingrid Bergman the most beautiful woman ever to grace the silver screen. She was certainly one of the most beautiful women he had ever met, and he had met his share of beautiful women across the centuries. Even as fashions changed what people professed to be beautiful, there was never any mistaking true beauty. Of course, the fair lady had only ever seen him as an old man, but Roux had had the privilege of watching her age with grace and poise, and seen her slowly fade while he had remained the same.

That was the nature of his existence.

He’d been forced to drift out of her life before she noticed he wasn’t aging as she had.

Although she would always be the lovely woman captured on celluloid.

The temptation to ignore the call was great. He hated to have his privacy invaded. He couldn’t understand the obsession that the modern generation had with always being available. Time alone with one’s thoughts was precious. He had an answering service. It would be easy enough to check any messages once the movie was over. But the caller was persistent, dialing again. And again when he ignored it a third time. It could, of course, be Annja. Or Garin—he always had impeccable timing.

Roux paused the image on the screen with Bogart and Bergman close to a kiss that might never happen.

He didn’t recognize the number.

“Yes?” One word, not offering his name or number. There were few people who knew how to get hold of him. He wasn’t in the habit of sharing his secrets, and he considered the sanctity of his own home the most precious secret of all.

“Have you heard from Annja?”

He didn’t recognize the voice, despite the obvious familiarity the opening gambit suggested. “I’m sorry, who is this?” The old man had met a lot of people during his long life. Some, quite simply, didn’t make enough impact to be worth remembering.

“My name? My name is Cauchon.”

“What do you want?”

“Want? Nothing. I just thought you might want to be sure your precious Annja is safe, that is all. Consider it a public service.”

The phone clicked and fell silent before it was replaced by the dial tone.

He didn’t like it.

Forget the fact that the stranger had found his number, forget the fact that he knew his connection to Annja, which was hardly public knowledge. Why would someone call to ask if she was safe if not to goad him because the person knew for certain that she was anything but?

Roux punched in her number and waited for it to ring at the other end.

It seemed to go on forever.

Cauchon.

The name was in there somewhere, locked away in some dim, distant memory. No more than that. Truth be told, he’d made a habit of forgetting the names and voices of those people who, when it came right down to it, meant nothing.

It was harder to forget those who did.

“Hi,” Annja’s perpetually perky voice answered, and he felt a wave of relief even though he knew she was more than capable of looking after herself.

“Annja,” he said, only to be interrupted by the rest of the message.

“Sorry, I can’t take your call right now—you know what to do.”

Voice mail.

The devil’s own damned invention. Knowing that he could leave a message was no help.

He hung up.

She’d see that he’d called and would call him back. He didn’t contact her unless it was important. That was the nature of their relationship. It wasn’t about frivolity and social niceties. There were no “How are you doing?” calls or “Happy Birthday” moments.

Of course, now that he was rattled, there was no way he’d be able to concentrate on anything other than Annja, so there was no real point in pressing Play and waiting to see if this time maybe Bogie would get the girl.

His phone rang a few seconds later, jerking him back into reality.

Roux answered, half expecting it to be this Cauchon calling to mock him again. “Yes?”

“You called?” Annja said, sounding like she was right behind him. He felt like a weight was lifted off his shoulders. And again, he couldn’t say why he’d been worried, not really; she was a force of nature was Annja Creed. He felt stupid for worrying.

“Ah, yes, sorry, my dear,” he said, offering an easy deflection. “I must have dialed the wrong number. Fat fingers and all that.”

“No worries,” she said, then paused as if she was on the verge of saying something, but decided against it.

“Is everything all right?”

“Well, yes, I guess. I mean, nothing’s actually wrong, but it probably depends on your definition of all right.”

“Talk to me, Annja. Right now. Tell me what’s going on.” He didn’t care if she could hear the edge in his voice.

“It was the weirdest thing. We were filming less than an hour ago…”

“Are you still in Carcassonne?”

“Yes. I was doing a piece to camera below the walls of the fortress, and somehow a huge chunk of masonry came crashing down. It could have been pretty nasty.”

He closed his eyes. “But you aren’t hurt?”

“We’re fine. The camera took a battering, but we’re not even talking cuts and bruises. It was a lucky escape.”

Roux didn’t say anything. His mind raced. Cauchon’s call took on a darker meaning, taking it beyond the strange into threatening. It wasn’t a coincidence. Live six hundred years and a person learns that there’s no such thing. It’s all cause and effect. He almost told her about the peculiar call, but there was no point in worrying her before he knew what the hell was going on.

“And you’re sure it was an accident?”

“There was no one on the ramparts, if that’s what you mean. Don’t worry. It’s not like I haven’t done this before,” she said. “Maybe I’ll come up and visit you at the chateau when we’ve wrapped things up here. We’ll spend Christmas in front of an open fire roasting chestnuts and toasting marshmallows or whatever the French do.”

“Sounds lovely,” he promised her.

She hung up.

He needed someone to try to trace where Cauchon’s call originated, but no doubt it had run through a dozen satellite relays and masking services to make that all but impossible, but if anyone could do it, it was Garin.

7

“Roux, you old bastard, what an unexpected and, if I might say so, delightful pleasure,” Garin said, laying it on thick. The universe worked in mysterious ways, he thought, smiling to himself. He’d been agonizing over what excuse to use as a pretext to call the old man, even going so far as to suggest a good old-fashioned Christmas dinner at the chateau, just the three of them. “What can I do you for?” Apart from liberate Guillaume Manchon’s papers from your vault. Though, if he stole Guillaume Manchon’s papers during a cozy visit, the wagging finger of suspicion would point toward him—but it always was. And Roux would forgive him; he always did.

They were peas in a pod—him and the old man. Partners in crime. They were, even without the blood bond, family. They needed each other. What was a little theft and profiteering against a backdrop as profound as that?

“I need your help,” Roux answered.

Interesting, Garin thought. The old man never made a habit of asking for anything lest he be beholden to someone. He’d negotiate, blackmail or manipulate Garin into getting what he wanted before he would say please. This wasn’t exactly uncharted territory, but it was seldom-ventured waters. He knew Roux well. There were a lot of things he was unable or unwilling to try to deal with, including technology and murder.

“So who do you want killed?” he laughed, only half joking.

“It’s the exact opposite…”

“You want someone brought back to life? I’m good, but I’m not even that good.”

“Shut up, Garin.”

“Is that any way to ask for help?”

“I’ve already asked. I’m not asking twice. Now stop being an ass. I’ve just had a most peculiar telephone call…”

“A mouth breather? I hate those.”

“I need you to see if you can trace the call.”

“I’m assuming this won’t be as simple as hitting last-number redial? You have tried that, right? I know you’re not exactly down with the kids.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“Time?”

“Twenty minutes ago, maybe a little less,” Roux said. The old man was using that annoyingly matter-of-fact tone he always had when he was worried. That was the giveaway. There was no banter. No back and forth. He was genuinely worried. That meant Garin, in turn, was fascinated—because anything that worried the old man was worth digging into.

“On this number? Not the main line of the house?”

“This number. Can you do anything?”

“Probably. There are ways and means. Nothing’s truly hidden in this modern world. I’m going to assume this wasn’t a crank call, so what is it all about?”

“The caller wanted me to believe he had hurt Annja.”

Garin fell silent for a moment. That changed things. Annja was neutral territory. They were both protective of her. She was the glue that kept their dysfunctional family together. The implications zipped through his mind like a runaway train. First, it wasn’t impossible that someone had joined the dots and learned of the connection between the two of them. It wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t public knowledge, either.

Then there was the fact the old man was paranoid and didn’t share this number with anyone, including the phone company who serviced it, having used his charms a long time ago to seduce the operator and have the private number “lost.” That meant the caller had gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to track down a number that to all intents and purposes hadn’t existed for the best part of fifty years. Third, which was completely selfish in origin, if the mysterious caller knew about Annja, odds were that they’d found the connections between the old man and him. That made it personal. That was a world of inconvenience he’d rather avoid.

“I’m on my way,” he said, realizing he’d just been given the key to the house.

“There really is no need to come running,” Roux said. “Just find out where the call came from. If you want to impress me, find out who made the call. Let me know when you have any news.”

The old man had hung up before Garin could bluster about how he was heading over no matter what he said. Of course, that didn’t mean he had to sit on his hands.

Garin was good with machines. He understood their universal language in a sense that far surpassed his knowledge of most things in this life. Most, but not all. He smiled at the woman who stood in the bedroom doorway, shadows not leaving much to the imagination.

“I just have to make this call. I’ll be right there. Why don’t you get started without me?” She turned on her heel. He enjoyed how her curves were accentuated by the soft light. Simple things offered the greatest pleasures in life. That was a life lesson worth hundreds of years, right there.

Another was, why sit hunched over a computer trying to track a call when there was a delicious woman waiting to do unspeakable things to you in the bedroom?

He made the call.

The drowsy voice on the other end of the phone didn’t sound pleased to hear from him. Garin looked at the clock and then remembered his favorite hacker was half a world away. Instantly making the time zone adjustments, he apologized and said, “Sorry. I figured you’d have the phone turned off if you were crashing.”

“Garin,” was all the hacker could manage for a several seconds.

“I’ve got a job for you.”

“Usual rates?”

“Do it right and I’ll throw in a nice bonus,” Garin said, and started to fill him in on what he needed.

“Leave it with me,” the hacker told him. “Assuming the caller tried to mask his whereabouts, I’ll set about stripping away his anonymity. That’s always the fun part with these guys. First, I’ll send a crawler into the satellite stream and try to backtrack the signal. That should give us a rough location pretty quickly, then I’ll start narrowing the focus. Give me a couple of hours. But you know the odds are it’s a burner phone and there’ll be nothing to find at the other end apart from the batch number.”

“That’s not a dead end. Batches go to shops, shops have CCTV. Get me everything you can, starting with a location. I’ll take it from there.”

He hung up and made another call. He would need to have his plane ready within the hour. That gave him plenty of time to finish what he’d started in the other room and to shower before he left for the airport.

8

Cauchon pulled the SIM card from the phone and snapped it in two.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the smile from his face. He had Roux exactly where he wanted him. For the time being, at least, and that was a fact worthy of celebration.

Roux would speak to the girl. She would tell him about the near-miss and the falling rocks at Carcassonne, and the old man would know it wasn’t accidental. He would know that she had been lucky—lucky to have been warned just in the nick of time that she was in the path of the masonry, sent falling at his word. And for that moment Roux would know Cauchon had had her life in his hands and could easily have snuffed it out had he so wanted.

The change in the tone of Roux’s voice as he’d mentioned Annja’s name had been delicious. It was all the confirmation he had needed to know he was right. He had never intended to kill the young woman, just shake her up, and only then so that she could pass the scare on to the old man so he would realize his mysterious caller meant business.

The old man was going to pay.

Cauchon played his fingers across the row of SIM cards he had lined up on the table in front of him, each one still attached to the credit-card-size retainers.

He had no intention of making it easy for Roux. That would only serve to take the sport out of it. Cauchon knew Roux wouldn’t turn to the police. That was an avenue that was never open to him. Far more likely was him taking matters into his own hands. Cauchon welcomed the idea. Let the old bastard fight back. Breaking him then would be so much more satisfying.

It didn’t matter if the girl herself believed that the incident was actually an accident. No doubt Roux would disabuse her of that notion when he talked to her, and that would keep her looking over her shoulder, on edge. Uncomfortable.

Cauchon was banking on the belief that Roux was protective of her. He had plenty of reasons to believe he was right.

He watched the hands of the clock on the wall slowly turn.

He wanted to give the old man time to find out what had happened and then more time to think about the call, to let his words get under his skin. He wanted him to start worrying, to imagine what might happen next. He wanted him to be constantly worrying, doubting, looking at strangers and thinking, Are you the one trying to get to me?

And then he wanted to visit the man’s worst nightmares upon him.

9

They drove back to the hotel in near-silence, Philippe constantly tuning the radio in search of a song that wasn’t going to get on his nerves. Obviously it wasn’t about the music. It didn’t matter what he found. Nothing matched his mood. Annja resisted the temptation to lean over and kill the radio. She concentrated on the road, checking her rearview mirror a couple of times more than she normally would have.

As much as she didn’t want to admit it, Roux’s call had disturbed her. She knew he was always concerned about her well-being, but that the first thing he said was to question whether the incident at Carcassonne was an accident…that was a little paranoid, even for him. So she was watching, even if she wasn’t sure what she was watching for. Of course it had crossed her mind that the falling masonry could have been something other than a freakish accident, especially as Roux had chosen that moment to call her. Annja had been in the old man’s orbit enough not to believe in coincidence. He hadn’t misdialed as he’d said. He was checking up on her. And once her mind started down that path she knew it wasn’t an accident.

She thought about the silver Mercedes.

Cause and effect? Or seeing patterns where there were none?

“What do you want to do about food?”

“I like the way you think.” She grinned.

Philippe shrugged and started to fiddle with the radio again. “I’m French. We love good food and good company.”