Tear Of The Gods
Tear Of The Gods
Alex Archer
The legacy of a pagan king could unleash terror on the worldIt started as a dream–a redheaded warrior king fought and died for his men centuries ago. The dream would lead archaeologist Annja Creed to the king's undisturbed corpse…and one of England's greatest mythical artifacts.Deep in an archaeological dig in England's Midlands, Annja locates a braided necklace around a mummified king's neck. Made of an unusual material–not quite obsidian, but gleaming with multihued color–the torc is an astonishing find. But someone knows exactly what the torc means. And he will do anything to get his hands on the Tear of the Gods. When the dig is compromised and innocent archaeologists are slain, even Annja herself is left for dead. Now she is fleeing for her life, not knowing the terrifying truth about the relic she risks everything to protect–or the devastating consequences should it fall into the wrong hands….
“I want that torc, Mr. Jackson.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Good enough.” The man turned and headed up the stairs, but stopped before he’d gotten more than a few steps away. He turned to face Jackson once more.
“This woman, the one with the sword. Do we know who she was?”
Jackson nodded. “An American archaeologist named Annja Creed.” He took a photo out of the file folder in his hands and passed it to his employer. The picture had been taken at the dig site and showed Annja’s still and bloodied face.
The other man stared at it for a few seconds, then passed it back.
“She was a pretty thing, wasn’t she?”
Titles in this series:
Destiny
Solomon’s Jar
The Spider Stone
The Chosen
Forbidden City
The Lost Scrolls
God of Thunder
Secret of the Slaves
Warrior Spirit
Serpent’s Kiss
Provenance
The Soul Stealer
Gabriel’s Horn
The Golden Elephant
Swordsman’s Legacy
Polar Quest
Eternal Journey
Sacrifice
Seeker’s Curse
Footprints
Paradox
The Spirit Banner
Sacred Ground
The Bone Conjurer
Tribal Ways
The Dragon’s Mark
Phantom Prospect
Restless Soul
False Horizon
The Other Crowd
Tear of the Gods
Rogue Angel
Tear of The Gods
Alex Archer
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
THE LEGEND
…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.
The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade. The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.
Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.
Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn….
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
1
Myrrdin sat high astride his horse and stared down the slope of the hill at the Roman army amassing in the valley below. What was left of his command was gathered at his back, but it was pitifully small compared to the enemy presence before him.
It was hard to believe that things had gone wrong so swiftly.
Less than a week before, he’d been war leader to Queen Boudica herself and had led an army of more than eighty thousand souls across Britannia, carving a path of destruction in their wake. They had destroyed the colony at Camulodunum and had marched against first Verulamium, and then Londinium itself, sacking each city and slaying as many of the invaders as they could find. Blood flowed like a river wherever they went, appeasing the anger of the gods at the presence of the Roman invaders and bestowing blessings upon the Iceni as a result.
Nothing, it seemed, could stand in their way.
Nothing, that was, until the coming of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus.
Even thinking of the Roman’s name was enough to make Myrrdin curse aloud and spit on the ground. He longed to carve the man’s flesh from his bones and feed it the crows. He prayed to the gods that he would get his chance before the battle was over.
What a difference seventy-two hours made.
Less than five thousand men remained of the army that had met Paulinus and the soldiers of the XIV Gemina on the field of battle three days before. Few, if any, of his senior commanders still lived, for they had stood their ground and fought on even when the battle had turned in the Romans’ favor. Myrrdin would have gone down fighting alongside them if the queen hadn’t ordered him to retreat, to ensure that someone still remained who could rally the remnants of the Iceni and see to it that their people’s sacrifice was not in vain.
How he wished he had never left her side!
He reached up and fingered the torc he wore about his neck, the one Boudica had entrusted to him before the battle. She’d always claimed it to be the root of her power, that the metal from which it was formed, the metal given to them by the very gods themselves, protected her time and time again. But Boudica was dead now, poisoned by her own hand while in Roman custody rather than be handed over to Paulinus’s troops as a plaything for their amusement. When word reached him earlier that morning of her fate, he wept, wondering if he’d condemned her to death simply by taking the torc.
Not that it mattered now; what was done was done.
Myrrdin was a good enough tactician to know that at this point there was no way the Iceni could win. They were outnumbered and the Romans were not only better armed but better armored, as well. If he hadn’t been able to beat them with eighty thousand warriors at his command, there was no way he was going to be able to do so with only five thousand. But there was no question of retreat. He would rather die on the field of battle, sword in hand, than be hunted down like a dog in the weeks to come.
And perhaps, Awran willing, he could take a few Romans with him as an offering before it was his time to die.
He let his gaze roam over the soldiers gathering on the field below. Unlike his ragtag band of warriors, who often wore as little into battle as possible, the Romans were all dressed in identical coats of chain armor worn over a short jerkin with thick-soled leather sandals on their feet. They each carried two iron-tipped spears, pilums he’d heard them called. The short swords were designed primarily for stabbing in close-quarter combat. The soldiers also held large rectangular shields, big enough to cover a man from ankle to chin.
The legion’s standard, a charging boar on a field of crimson that was so dark as to be almost purple, flapped in the afternoon breeze, the Romans arrogantly claiming this land on behalf of the Emperor.
Myrrdin turned and surveyed the men assembled behind him. What a sharp contrast to those they were about to face. Where the Romans were tall and muscled from years of disciplined labor, his men were smaller and wiry in nature, built for speed and dexterity. Where the Romans were armored and carried multiple weapons, many of his men were naked or nearly so, their fair skin decorated in blue woad. They clutched swords made of iron and carried small, round shields of leather stretched over wooden frames.
Of his illustrious horse soldiers, less than fifty remained. They sat stiffly in the saddle off to his right, weary from the days of fighting and the long chase they had endured so far, yet none hesitated to return his gaze or gave any sign they would shy away from the confrontation to come.
As he turned away, one thought was prominent in his mind.
We don’t stand a chance.
Myrrdin shook his head, clearing it of such defeatism. The simple fact was he no longer had any choice; there was nowhere else to run. He’d never get his men through the bogs on the other side of the hills before the enemy could catch up with them. He had no choice but to stand and fight.
Like all good commanders, Myrrdin wanted that fight on his terms, not the enemy’s, which was why he’d assembled his men along the crest of the hill while the Romans attempted to set up camp in the valley below. He hadn’t been able to choose the field on which they would meet, but he’d be damned if he wouldn’t choose the time.
And that time was now, before the enemy got themselves organized and settled in.
He brought his horn to his lips and blew a long blast. The sound echoed across the valley, like a great voice shouting from the hilltop, and Myrrdin smiled in defiance as he watched the Roman soldiers milling about in response.
Behind him, his men took up the call to battle, pounding the flats of their swords against their shields, calling up a frightful racket, letting the spirits know that there would soon be newcomers, friend and foe alike, entering the land of the dead. Bare-breasted women moved among the ranks, screaming in hatred at the Romans massed below and whispering words of encouragement to their men, stoking the twin fires of courage and power.
Myrrdin let it build for a few minutes, allowing his men to whip themselves into a killing frenzy, and then, when he judged the time was right, he raised his right arm above his head, his fist clenched for all to see, and then brought it slashing downward.
Like a breaking wave his army surged into motion, pouring down the hill toward the enemy, shrieking their war cries as they went.
With a joyous shout, Myrrdin spurred his horse and joined them, thundering down toward the rapidly forming enemy line. Behind him came the rest of his horse soldiers, their voices raised in harmony with his own.
Ahead of them the Romans stood shoulder to shoulder in a long, unbroken line, waiting with disciplined ease for the enemy to make contact, their oversize shields held before them to form a wall. As the Iceni warriors closed in, the Romans unleashed a blistering rain of stones and spears from behind the protection of that wall, hoping to blunt the force of the attack. The Iceni had faced the Romans before, however, and they were ready, having expected just such a move. Almost as one they bent low over their mounts, their heads sheltered by the animals’ long necks, and as a result the majority of them made it through the storm unscathed.
Mere yards separated the two forces and Myrddin felt his lips peel back from his teeth as he bared them at the enemy like a wild animal defending its den. Heart racing, blood pumping, he let out another shout of defiance and drove his horse right into the ranks of the enemy, smashing aside that wall of shields, trampling those foolish enough to stand firm in the face of the attack under the hooves of his battle-hardened mount. Beside him, his horse warriors did the same, smashing aside the Roman line, creating a breach for their foot soldiers to exploit as they caught up with the charging cavalry.
In seconds the orderly nature of the Roman defense had dissolved into chaos.
The air was full of the coppery scent of fresh blood, the smell of leather and sweat, the screams of the injured and the dying. Myrrdin slashed about him with his sword, hacking at anyone who got close enough, striking down as many of the enemy as he could, driving his horse relentlessly forward, doing all he could to widen the gap, to give his people a fighting chance at survival. If they could break through the other side of the Roman battle line, some of them might survive to fight another day.
A tall Roman rose up on his right side, his battle-ax already in motion, but Myrrdin took the blow on the buckler strapped to his left arm. The shield shattered, smashed to pieces by the force of the blow, but it served its purpose, giving Myrrdin time to thrust his sword deep into the other man’s chest, killing him where he stood. The Iceni chieftain turned in the saddle, searching for his next foe.
The spear came out of nowhere, whistling through the air with all the grace of a weapon of war doing just what it had been designed to do. It struck him high in the right side. As luck would have it, he’d been in the midst of turning and the projectile drove into the narrow gap his mail coat failed to cover at his armpit, burying itself deep in his chest.
It was like being buried in an avalanche of ice, his sword falling away from fingers gone suddenly numb, his grip on the saddle loosening as he lost the feeling in his legs, and he tumbled from his mount to lie in the mud of the battlefield as the fight raged on around him.
As his vision began to narrow and the darkness closed in, Myrrdin could have sworn he felt the torc about his neck pulse in time with his heartbeat.
2
Annja Creed studied the decapitated heads on the table in front of her.
Two of them had their eyes closed, as if they’d died peacefully in their sleep, but Annja knew better than to trust in simple appearances. There had been nothing peaceful about their passing; the fact that they were sitting on the table minus the rest of their bodies was proof of that, she thought wryly. The eyes of the third were open and surprisingly free of detritus from the bog. From her position in front of the table, the dead man’s eyes seemed to stare directly back into her own, as if he were as intently curious about her as she was about him. It would have given most people the creeps, but after all she’d been through over the past few years since inheriting Joan of Arc’s mystical sword, she barely even noticed.
The heads had been unearthed in an isolated peat bog several hours north of London in the West Midlands. She’d been invited to the site just over a week earlier by an old friend from the British Museum, Oxford University professor Craig Stevens.
From what he’d explained over the phone, a pair of farmers had reported seeing a head staring up at them out of the bog while they were out hunting. Further investigation revealed that the two men hadn’t been hunting at all, but rather running an industrious little business on the side selling cut peat for fuel. They hadn’t wanted the police to know that the section of the bog they were harvesting didn’t belong to either of them.
“Of course, when it comes to decapitated heads, the police tend to be a bit pushy,” Craig said with a laugh, something Annja didn’t have any trouble believing.
The detective in charge had seen enough bog mummies to know the difference between a recent murder and one that had happened a few centuries before. He dumped the head in Craig’s lap, given his specialty in Iron Age Celtic cultures, in an effort to avoid as much paperwork as possible. Craig was more than happy to take care of the problem.
It had only taken a few days at the site before a second head turned up and that had been enough to get Oxford University to fund a small dig to see what else might be present. Annja had worked with Craig on a previous dig in Wales and he’d called to let her know that he was looking for a few experienced hands to help him out. Did she think she could make it?
It had been a while since she’d had the chance to work an actual dig. The cable television show she cohosted, Chasing History’s Monsters, had kept her incredibly busy for the past few months, rushing around the world to highlight one legend after another. As had her unofficial role as protector of the innocent and the bearer of the mystical sword that once belonged to Joan of Arc. A week or two with her hands in the mud doing honest-to-goodness science was just what she needed.
But when she’d called her producer, Doug Morrell, in New York to get the time off, he’d gone ballistic.
“Are you insane?” he cried when she finished laying out her request. “We’re talking decapitations, human sacrifices and bog mummies here! How can you think of leaving us out of it?”
Quite easily, she’d thought at the time, but she knew if she stiffed Doug now he’d only get even with her later. He’d saddle her with hours of editing work or, even worse, handle it himself. And if he did that, who knew what would show up in the middle of one of her episodes? She still hadn’t forgotten the bloody mechanical shark incident….
In the end, they’d cut a deal. The show would pay for her airfare and her expenses while on-site and in return she’d deliver enough material to put together a special double feature on bog mummies, druids and ancient Celtic culture. It was as good as she was going to get and she quickly got Doug off the phone before he decided the episode wouldn’t be complete without a full-scale reenactment of a druidic ritual, preferably with plenty of special effects and a well-endowed blonde as the sacrificial centerpiece. If it drove ratings, Doug was all for it, science be damned.
She’d landed at Heathrow the day before, headed to a hotel and slept off the jet lag. This morning she rose early and set out for the dig site in a rented Land Rover. The dig was pretty remote; it took her until early afternoon to reach the landing stage where the rest of the vehicles were parked and then another hour of hiking up and down a series of hills thick with birch groves before finding the camp on the far side, down near the edge of the bog.
Annja bumped into one of Craig’s graduate students, a curly-headed guy named Zeke, just after arriving at the site and Zeke had been kind enough to offer to let “Dr. Stevens” know she was here. While waiting, she spotted the heads through the open flap of a large canvas tent, like those used by army encampments the world over. She wandered in to take a look.
Up close she could see that each head was held upright in a frame of clear polymer, designed no doubt to protect the artifact while at the same time allowing the scientists to study all three dimensions at once. It was a clever piece of equipment, one she hadn’t seen before, and she was moving in for a closer look when a cheerful voice boomed out from behind her.
“At last, she arrives!”
Annja jumped in surprise; she’d been so intent on her examination of the heads that she hadn’t heard him come up behind her. Working with bog mummies was an entirely new and exciting experience for her.
Craig looked much as he did the last time she’d seen him—a bear of a man with a thick beard and a mop of unruly hair the color of pine sap. He towered over her at six and a half feet and she could have easily hidden behind his nearly three-hundred-pound body if she’d ever had the need to, but his imposing size was a complete contrast to his open and general ebullient nature.
“Now we can do some real work!” he said, a twinkle in his eyes, before crossing the space between them in that smooth gliding gait that always looked so out of character on such a large man. He wrapped her in one of his trademark hugs.
When he finally released her, and she double-checked her ribs to be certain they were all still intact, she couldn’t help but smile at him in return. One thing about working with Craig: his good humor was infectious.
“You’ve got an interesting interior decorator,” she said, nodding at the heads on the table behind her.
Her fellow archaeologist beamed. “Marvelous, aren’t they?” he said, and then stepped around her to squat in front of the center head.
“This was the first,” he said, “the one the police sent over. Isn’t it beautiful?”
His voice held a note of awe, the kind reserved for those who’ve just had some kind of religious epiphany or incredibly mind-blowing experience, and Annja almost laughed in response. She wasn’t sure that beautiful was a word she would ever use to describe a decapitated and mummified head, but it was certainly striking, she’d give him that. The victim, if that was indeed what he was, appeared to have been a male in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, with sharp cheekbones and a prominent nose. His skin had the look and appearance of well-tanned leather. His hair, still held in a ponytail with a short piece of braided rope, was a fiery orange, just short of red.
“It’s certainly something,” she replied. “I’m amazed at the level of preservation. I thought bogs were basically swamps.”
Craig nodded. “Yes and no. It depends on where they are in their development.”
He stood and faced her, doing his best to explain. “When moss dominates a low-lying section of land, the soil becomes waterlogged and acidic. Since bacteria have a difficult time surviving in such conditions, it isn’t present to break down the dead moss and other vegetation. Instead, the stuff just piles up and eventually becomes peat.”
Annja got the implication right away. “So the acidic nature of the water itself actually protects the body rather than destroying it. No bacteria means no decomposition.”
“Right,” Craig said, smiling. “And the tannins produced by the moss add an extra level of preservation, turning the skin to something like leather and keeping it from tearing in response to the pressure from above as the peat grows deeper.”
“Is that why their skin is so dark, because of the tannin?”
Craig nodded. “And why their hair is red, too.”
“You mean that lovely color isn’t natural?” she asked curiously.
“Not even close. In fact, I’m pretty sure all three of them were Romans, which means their hair was probably darker than either of ours.”
“Romans? Seriously?” She’d never heard of Romans being uncovered in a peat bog before.
“Yeah, I know, it’s unusual to say the least. But it’s hard to argue with the evidence. Here, look.” Moving to the head on the right, he reached out and turned the frame around, pointing at something on the back of the man’s skull.
At first Annja couldn’t figure out what it was, but after staring at it for a minute and mentally smoothing out the skin while doing so, she finally got it.
“It’s a tattoo, isn’t it?”
Craig’s eyes twinkled. “Yes, but a tattoo of what?”
Annja leaned in closer, trying to puzzle it out. “It’s an animal of some kind, I think. A dog, maybe? Or a wolf?”
“Close,” he replied. “Look at its mouth. See anything unusual?”
She peered at it harder, trying to sort out the details of the tattoo from the natural lines of the aged flesh. It looked like…
“Is that a tusk?” she asked without looking up.
“Right! Which makes that,” he said, pointing at the tattoo, “a wild boar.”
He beamed at her, as if the presence of the boar explained everything. But Annja wasn’t seeing the connection.
“Okay, so it’s a boar and not a wolf. So what? I still don’t see why that makes him a Roman rather than a Celt.”
Craig led her across the tent to where another table held two laptop computers and a combination printer/scanner. He sorted through a stack of papers next to one of the laptops until he found the page he was looking for and then handed it to Annja without a word.
She found herself looking at a scanned image of a battle standard photographed from a museum collection somewhere. She could even see the edge of the glass box in which it was housed. But what really caught her eye was the image of the charging boar that dominated the center of the standard. It was the exact same design that was tattooed on the back of the bog mummy’s head.
“XIV Gemina, or the Fourteenth Legion,” Craig said. “Under the command of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, it was ordered back to Britannia by the emperor in A.D. 67 to quell the Boudican rebellion.”
Boudica was the warrior queen of the Iceni clan, Annja knew. She’d inspired and led one of the largest uprisings against Roman rule in the history of the empire. The Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that she was “most tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce”—a description that made Annja smile the first time she’d read it. Annja’d been called fierce once or twice in her day, too.
She had to give Craig credit; it was a nice piece of detective work. But it raised more than a question or two in her mind. “I thought Boudica made her stand near Mancetter?” That was at least fifty miles south of where they now stood.
“She did. And that’s where the story ends for most historians. But there’s a small group, myself included, that believe a portion of her army escaped the battle that day and tried to make it to Anglesey by cutting overland across the moors. If they had, and if Paulinus pursued them as I believe that he did, then it’s not inconceivable that they met again in battle and that we’ve stumbled on evidence of that very encounter. If you examine—”
Craig’s explanation was cut short by the sound of running feet. He and Annja turned to face the entrance just as the flap was thrown open and Zeke stuck his head in through the opening.
“Dr. Stevens!” he cried, his voice full of excitement. “We’ve got another one!”
3
After delivering his message, Zeke turned and took off at a run back across the camp. Annja made as if to follow, but then hesitated. Given his size, there was no way Craig would be able to match the younger man’s pace.
He must have guessed what she was thinking, for he waved a hand at her in dismissal. “Go on! Quickly, before he’s out of sight. I’ll meet you at the excavation,” he said with a chuckle.
That was all she needed to hear. Annja was five feet ten inches tall, with chestnut hair and amber-green eyes. She had an athlete’s build, with smooth, rounded muscles and curves in all the right places, and it took her only a moment or two to sprint along until she had the eager grad student back in her sights.
She kept her eye on Zeke as he left the camp behind and moved at a quick pace through the trees for about a hundred yards, following a path worn into the earth from the passage of the dig team over the past several days. Ten minutes later Anna emerged from the trees to find herself standing on the gentle slope of a small hill, the dig site laid out before her.
The site was roughly half the size of a football field and was located in a hollow between several small hills like the one she stood on. There were two significant features that set this particular valley off from dozens of others in the nearby area. The first was a large rock cairn that had been erected at the base of the slope on which she stood, its stone face now overgrown with moss and lichen but still recognizable for what it had once been. The second was the skeletal remains of an ancient oak tree standing near the middle of the site, a jagged black scar of a lightning strike clearly visible even from a distance.
Although Craig’s team had only been here a short while, Annja could see that they’d been busy. A grid had been laid out on the valley floor in colored string, dividing the space into individual sections that Annja knew from experience were roughly two feet square. Work had begun in several sections, with the top layer of the peat removed, revealing the rich substrata beneath. Sifting stations had been set up beneath canopies to the right of the grid and there was a plethora of shovels, rakes and handheld trowels scattered about.
Most of the team was clustered around a single grid square, obviously the location of their most recent find. Annja made her way down the hill and across the dig site to join them.
The smell hit her as she moved closer, the unmistakable scent of scorched earth that accompanied a peat bog of any decent age. She resisted the urge to cover her nose; the human body only recognized an odor in the first few minutes of contact, after that it was as if it didn’t exist.
Two grad students were on their hands and knees near the corner of the grid, using hand tools to clear the debris away from the blackened face that was peeking out of the peat. While this one wasn’t as well preserved as the others, the similarities were still obvious. It was clear that the four men had the same ethnic background; the prominent nose and high cheekbones were as easy to see in this specimen as they were in the others. And like the others, this head had been severed and lay by itself in the peat that preserved it.
Who were they? Annja found herself wondering. And what happened to their bodies?
It was mysteries like these that had helped her fall in love with archaeology in the first place. She couldn’t wait to get her hands dirty.
Craig finally caught up with them then, his face red and his chest heaving from his hike through the woods, but it did nothing to stem his enthusiasm for what they’d uncovered. Being the excellent teacher that he was, Craig let his people continue unearthing the find, guiding them with encouraging comments here and there rather than taking control of the process for himself as Annja knew others she’d worked with in the past would have done. It was what made Craig such a good student of archaeology; he cared more about the artifact and what it could tell them than the academic reputation associated with whoever unearthed it.
For the next two hours Annja lost herself in the simple joy of doing what she loved, helping Craig and his students excavate the mummified head from the peat surrounding it and then carefully packing it into a foam-lined carrying case for transport back to the campsite for further examination. Several of the students recognized her from Chasing History’s Monsters and it wasn’t long before she was surrounded by a small group of her own, dispensing advice and stories of former digs just as Craig was doing with the others a few yards away. It was such a welcome relief from the recent craziness in her life that Annja found herself relaxing for the first time in weeks and enjoying the simple pleasure that came from doing something you loved in the presence of others who felt the same way.
By the time dusk fell over the campsite, Annja felt like she’d been working with the team for weeks.
“Not a bad first day, huh?” Craig asked her as they helped the others cover the site with tarps to protect it in case of rain later that evening.
“It was wonderful, Craig. Truly,” she said with a smile. “Thanks for inviting me.”
He grinned. “Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t tasted what passes for cooking around here.”
Once they were finished at the dig site, Annja was introduced to Sheila James, a fellow American, who gave her a tour of the camp, showed her the tent she’d be using for the duration and introduced her to some more of the students over dinner that night.
Worn out from the hard work and the lingering effects of the jet lag, she thanked them all for their hospitality and headed off to bed.
Annja found herself walking in the woods beneath the silvery light of a full moon, though she knew she was not herself. The hand at the end of her arm was decidedly male. She was part of a group of four warriors carrying the body of a fifth on a funeral bier made of wood, fashioned together with rope and vines. Around her came a host of others, warriors mainly, but some women were scattered amid the company here and there, as well—all of them moving through the trees in a long, snaking procession. Torches threw flickering light across the scene, highlighting the faces of those around her, revealing the geometric designs painted on their faces in blue woad—whirls and spirals and circles that interlinked and crossed one another so that it was difficult to discern where one ended and the next began.
The body on the bier was that of a tall warrior with long red hair. He was dressed as he’d been when he’d fallen on the battlefield, his tunic and mail stained with blood, both his own and that of his enemies. His arms were folded across his chest, his hands grasping the hilt of the sword that he’d carried into battle, the blade broken off halfway down its length.
Annja’s eyes were drawn to the necklace of gleaming black the dead man wore around his neck. It was made from a substance that she couldn’t identify, at least not from this distance, and it reacted to the light the same way an oil spill does, reflecting myriad colors back at the viewer. She felt the need to reach out and touch it….
The moonlight suddenly grew brighter, breaking her reverie, and she looked up as the group emerged from the trees into the open. They stood upon the crest of a hill that sloped gently downward until it met the edge of a wide marshland. A spit of land jutted out into the bog for a short distance and a white robed druid stood upon it, waiting for them. Behind him a massive oak tree rose out of the depths of the bog, its branches spread wide, forming a living canopy over that part of the swamp.
The procession descended the hill. When they reached the narrow spit of land, the rest of the group came to a halt while Annja and the other pallbearers continued forward. The druid directed them to place the bier on the ground at his feet. They did so and then, as a group, stepped off to one side to wait for further instructions.
The druid raised his hands to the sky and began to chant in a deep voice, his words rolling out across the night air. The words were spoken in a language Annja didn’t understand—Welsh or Gaelic or some derivative thereof—but she was familiar enough with ancient burial ceremonies that she knew the general gist of it. The druid was asking for the blessing of the four elements and calling upon the gods to look with favor upon the one they were committing into their care that night.
When the chant was finished, four male prisoners were led forward from the rear of the procession. They were naked and bound at the wrists with thick hemp ropes. Their movements were sluggish, their expressions unfocused, and it was clear to Annja that they’d been drugged.
She understood why a moment later, when the first of them was made to kneel at the edge of the bog with his head resting sideways on the stump of a tree Annja hadn’t noticed before now. The man’s eyes roamed over them, seeing but not seeing, and the real Annja breathed a sigh of relief when it was clear that he didn’t understand what was to come. As if on cue, the druid approached the prisoner, a gleaming sickle-shaped blade in his hands. There was another chant, this one much shorter in length, and then that blade rose and fell in one swift, sure motion.
The druid turned to face the procession, the Roman’s severed head held aloft by the tangle of its own hair, and at the sight of it a shout went up from the rest of the onlookers. Inhabiting a body not her own, Annja found herself shouting along with the rest of them.
The cry was repeated three times—a ritual response, Annja realized—and then the druid turned to face the dark waters at his back. Another prayer flowed forth, a request to Arawn, god of the underworld, to accept the blood offering they were making on behalf of their slain chieftain, most likely, and then the slain prisoner’s head was flung outward into the night.
Annja heard the splash as it hit the water and watched as the bog swiftly sucked it out of sight.
The first prisoner’s body was dragged away and the second victim was brought forward. The ceremony was repeated, and then twice more with the final two victims. The stink of blood filled Annja’s nostrils by the time the druid was finished, so thick that she could almost taste it on the back of her tongue.
At a sign from the druid, she and the other pallbearers hefted the bier back up again. Following the druid, they marched out into the bog.
Much to her surprise the bog did not swallow them whole. Her feet instead found the hard surfaces of stones laid just beneath the waterline, a hidden walkway extending out across the marsh to the base of the sacred oak. They carefully placed the bier under the tree’s sheltering boughs and returned to the shoreline.
Annja and the rest of the pallbearers rejoined the main procession, leaving the druid standing alone on the small strip of land where the ceremony had taken place. As she watched, the high priest raised his arms toward the heavens and shouted in a voice full of power.
In the sky above him, thunder raged and lightning cracked, answering his call as the funeral bier of the last of the Iceni chieftains sank toward the bog’s heart.
ANNJA AWOKE WITH a start. Lightning flashed, lighting up the sides of her tent for a moment before the darkness returned to smother the camp in its embrace.
Just a dream, she told herself. Just a dream.
But dream or not, it took a long time for her to fall back to sleep.
4
Annja rose the next morning with the dream still fresh in her mind, which was unusual for her. More often than not, she forgot her dreams upon waking, but something about this one stuck in the forefront of her mind and wouldn’t leave her alone. All through breakfast her mind worried at it, the way your tongue will worry a loose tooth.
It was as if her subconscious was trying to tell her something.
While the others were still finishing their food, she excused herself and made her way through the trees and down to the excavation. Once there, it only took a few seconds for her to understand why the dream was bothering her so much.
The location of the ceremony in her dream matched the location of the dig.
The bog, the rock cairn, even the remains of the massive oak tree were right where they’d been in her dream. A glance at the excavation grid showed her that the four heads had all been found in the same general locations as she’d seen the High Druid toss them in the dream.
Her dream, it seemed, had come to life.
Now hang on a minute, she told herself. Don’t get carried away. You saw the site yesterday; you spent several hours working right in the middle of it all. Is it any wonder that you saw it again in your dream?
Of course not.
She’d taken her excitement about the day in the field, her first in weeks, and carried it with her in her dreams that night.
That was it; it had to be.
Still she lingered, her eyes going again and again to the shell of the ancient oak rising in the middle of the peat. In her dream, someone important had been buried nearby.
Ignoring the voice of reason that was quietly protesting in the back of her mind, she grabbed a shovel from the pile of tools nearby and headed for the oak.
That’s where Craig found her ten minutes later. She’d eyeballed the distance from the tree as best she remembered it from her dream, telling herself she was crazy all the while but unwilling, or unable, to give it up without at least looking first. After all, she told herself, what harm could it do?
Craig, however, had a different opinion.
“Annja! What on earth are you doing?” he shouted in dismay when he saw the trench she had begun digging into the peat. “I can’t believe that you, of all people, are ignoring procedure like this! We haven’t photographed or measured that section of the site, and we’re not even close to being ready to begin excavations….”
Craig’s tirade suddenly fell silent. Annja followed his gaze to where he was staring at the ground a few inches from her left foot. A shout of triumph almost passed her lips when she saw what he was staring at.
A hand was thrust upward through the peat, as if reaching for the light of the sky above.
THERE WAS ROOM for three of them to work the find so Craig brought in Paolo Novick, a professor from the University of Turin and an expert on pre-Roman Gallic cultures, to help them. Most of the rest of the team gathered about to watch. Little by little, the peat was peeled away, exposing another inch of the man’s remains.
It took them almost four hours to bring the chieftain’s body into the light of day for the first time in millenia. Unlike the remains they’d uncovered to date, this one was completely intact. Everything from the shoes on his feet to the tunic he wore beneath his long coat of mail was in excellent condition, seemingly none the worse for wear after their years of submersion in the bog. Even the small piece of twine that bound his long red hair in a ponytail had survived.
A quick measurement put his height at seventy-four inches, and that was after the bog’s natural preservation process had shrunk the body slightly. In life, he’d probably been closer to six and a half feet tall, which Annja knew was a literal giant for that day and age. His size, combined with the massive knot of red hair that still hung from his skull, quickly earned him the nickname Big Red.
Photographs were taken, covering Big Red from every angle possible so that a record would be preserved of how and where he had been found before the laborious process of removing him from the peat could begin. The previous night’s thunderstorm had Craig worried that the weather would take a turn for the worse soon, however, and he didn’t want the body left exposed to the elements. The decision was made to cut a block out of the peat, body and all, and move that back to the camp where it could be studied and worked on at leisure, away from the potential damage the elements could inflict.
As Craig sent several members of the team back to the camp to organize the tools they would need to pull off their plan, Annja bent over the body with a set of hand tools. She was still shocked that Big Red had been there at all; she’d almost convinced herself that everything she’d seen in her dream had been just that, a dream. Obviously it had been something more. She wondered just what part Joan’s sword had played in it all. It wouldn’t be the first time its powers had surprised her, that was for sure.
Using a miniature pick and a small brush, she began to work at the peat still covering the front of Big Red’s throat. She remembered the strange gleaming necklace the chieftain had worn around his throat during the burial ceremony and wondered if that, too, had been real.
A chunk of peat cracked and fell away from the rest, partially revealing the gleaming surface of the tribanded necklace Big Red was wearing around his throat.
“What have you got?” Professor Novick asked from his position at her side.
“Looks like a necklace, maybe a torc of some kind,” she said, and leaned back to let him take a look.
He whistled at the sight of it. “What is that? Obsidian?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. It looks metallic to me. It seems too shiny but maybe it’s iron. We’ll have to wait until we can get him into the lab to examine it more closely.”
As the day wore on and the hard work of removing Big Red from his resting place got under way, Annja was forced to forget about the necklace and concentrate on the task at hand.
The damage, however, had already been done, though Annja didn’t know it.
The block they cut out of the peat reminded Annja of one of the stones used in the building of the pyramids; it looked that big. It was also heavy enough that they had to use two different winches to get it up out of the earth and into the front of the Bobcat they’d had brought up from London to serve as their transport vehicle. Once the peat slab was secured in place, the Bobcat made its way up the hill and down the path through the woods to the camp that part of the team had spent the afternoon clearing.
A new tent had been erected in their absence—a thick tarp rolled out in the center of the floor—and it was on this that the peat block was finally placed. Seeing Big Red’s body partially protruding from its surface reminded Annja of Star Wars; Han Solo encased in carbonite was far less interesting to her than this ancient Gallic warrior, however.
She, Craig and Paolo worked through the afternoon, slowly chipping away at the heavy peat surrounding Big Red’s body, freeing him inch by inch from the preserving matter. By the time they called it a night, the sun had long since set and many of the camp’s other residents had gone to bed.
As they were leaving, Craig pulled her aside.
“How’d you know?” he asked. “How did you know to dig there, of all places?”
She answered him as honestly as she could. “I saw it all in a dream.”
He laughed. “Right,” he said. “And I suppose tomorrow you’ll wake up and tell me you’ve discovered the location of Genghis Khan’s long-lost tomb.”
Annja smiled. “Nah. Been there, done that.”
The look of shocked surprise on his face was the perfect end to a perfect day.
5
Shortly after midnight a man slipped out of a tent in the middle of the camp and quietly made his way across the clearing to the tree line just beyond. At the edge of the woods he stopped and turned, looking back the way he’d come. He waited, one long moment, then another, watching, listening, making certain that no one had followed him.
Assured that he was unobserved and alone, the man disappeared into the woods, following a faint path through the trees until he reached the deadfall he’d selected as a landmark. There he turned and traveled for another hundred yards before stopping beside a huge boulder that had probably been there since the last ice age.
Again he paused, listening, sweeping the path behind him with his peripheral vision, searching for anyone who might be on his tail. While it was unlikely, it never hurt to be careful, and with something like this he didn’t want to be wrong.
Finally satisfied, he reached into a cleft in the rock and pulled out a satellite phone. Switching it on, he waited for it to power up and then dialed a number. When it was picked up on the other end, he said, “It’s Novick. I need to speak to him.”
There was a pause. Novick figured the man on the other end of the line was considering the wisdom of waking their joint employer at this hour of the night, and so he said, “It’s about the torc.”
That seemed to convince the other man, for he said, “Just a moment,” and put the receiver down.
Several minutes passed.
Finally Novick heard the phone on the other end being picked up.
“You have something for me?”
Novick swallowed the sudden hesitation he felt at the sound of that voice and answered him. “Yes. At the new site in the West Midlands. We found a body in the bog this morning, an Iceni warrior.”
“And?”
“And he was wearing a torc that fits the description of the one you’ve been seeking for the past several years.”
“You’re certain?”
“Absolutely.”
“What about the test?”
Sneaking into the artifact tent with the device in hand had been easy. “It was positive.”
There was a long silence as the other man considered the implications, then he said, “Very good. I will dispatch someone to meet you tomorrow afternoon.”
With thoughts of the reward money he’d been promised for finding the torc dancing in his head, Novick said that he understood and ended the call.
6
David Shaw rose the next morning with anticipation thrumming through his veins. He’d been searching for the Tear of the Gods for more than a decade. Many had scoffed at his dedication and focus. It’s just a legend, they’d told him. Nothing more than a myth, like the Holy Grail or King Arthur’s Excalibur. You’ll never find it because it doesn’t actually exist. But Shaw had believed differently and now, in less than twenty-four hours, he was going to be holding that so-called myth in his own two hands.
Shaw was in his mid-forties, with brown eyes and a sharp nose set in a narrow, aquiline face. The combination of his facial features and his shoulder-length dirty-blond hair often resulted in others mistaking him for the actor Sean Bean, a suggestion that Shaw would publicly chuckle over but which infuriated him to no end. That he could be mistaken for an actor, of all things, was an insult to all he’d worked to achieve since graduating from Oxford at the top of his class and founding the Vanguard Group.
To say Shaw was driven would make one guilty of a gross understatement. He had ambitions and dreams the likes of which not even his board of directors were aware and obtaining the Tear of the Gods was just the first step in a process he’d been planning for years.
After a leisurely breakfast he had his driver take him to the Vanguard offices. Several men were seated outside his office waiting for him, as he had known they would be. His executive assistant had sent word to them all the night before, requesting their presence in the office by nine this morning, and if there was one thing his people knew, it was not to disobey his orders.
Shaw pointed to one of them, a man named Trevor Jackson, and the former SAS commando and current Red Hand Defenders strike team leader followed him into his inner office, shutting the door behind them.
“I’ve got a job for you,” Shaw began as he took his seat behind his desk and waved Jackson into the chair before him. “A particular artifact was uncovered at an archaeological dig in the West Midlands last night. I want it.”
He handed the other man a thin folder. Inside were an assortment of documents, including aerial photographs and topographical maps of the surrounding area, dossiers on Stevens, Novick and other personnel they could expect to encounter at the dig site, as well as a snapshot of the torc that looked like it had been taken quickly with a cell phone.
“The photo was taken by my source on the ground,” Shaw explained. “It’s not perfect, but it should be good enough to let you verify it when you arrive on-site.”
Jackson glanced through the materials, lingering on the photograph. “What kind of opposition can we expect?” he asked.
“Little to none,” Shaw replied. “They’re a bunch of academics. Somebody might have a gun with which to shoot snakes, but that would be about it, I’d think.”
“So we go in, recover the necklace and get out again. Sounds simple enough.”
But Shaw was already shaking his head. “You need to take any steps necessary to ensure that no one knows the artifact was recovered from the site.”
Jackson had worked with Shaw long enough to know what the other man was talking about. “And the bodies?”
Shaw shrugged. “Dump them in the bog, for all I care. Just be sure there aren’t any survivors. I don’t want someone turning up at a later date to counter the official report.”
“What about your man on the inside?”
Shaw didn’t hesitate. “Get rid of him, too.”
“Fair enough,” Jackson said with a smile. “Consider the problem solved.”
WITH THAT TASK behind him, Shaw could turn to the other major item he had on his agenda for the day—informing the Committee about the discovery of the torc.
The Committee was a group of wealthy collectors that he’d put together slowly and carefully over the past several years. Each of them was interested in the discovery and acquisition of ancient artifacts for one of two reasons—either to add to their own personal collections or to sell them on the black market to the highest bidder in order to fund some other project or ideology. Shaw didn’t care which it was, provided he was paid on time and in the proper currency as agreed. Whenever Shaw found an item worthy of their consideration, he called a meeting of the group and presented it to them. A bidding war would usually ensue, with Shaw taking ten percent of the asking price plus expenses to cover the costs of acquisition.
There were five members of the Committee—six, if he considered himself. Conrad Helmut was a German financier with a gift for the international commodities exchange who saw the artifacts solely for their monetary value. He had no interest in the past, whether it was yesterday, last year or last century. He treated artifacts recovered from tombs untouched by human hands for more than four thousand years the same way he’d treat something picked up at a rummage sale. It was all just merchandise to him—something to be bought and sold but never desired.
Allison Brennan was the opposite extreme—a fanatic who made no bones about her intention to craft a truly legendary collection. She was always trying to get a leg up on the others, beat them to the choicest prices. Standing in her way was the Frenchman, Roux. Just thinking of the man brought a scowl to Shaw’s face. The arrogant bastard didn’t use a first name; it was always just Roux. As much as he disliked him, Shaw had to admit that Roux had access to some first-rate intelligence and had helped them find some choice items over the years.
Sebastian Kincade had inherited his fortune at the ripe old age of nineteen, when his parents had died unexpectedly in a car crash. He’d added to it through a series of almost breathtakingly audacious financial moves in the decade since. He was as ruthless as Genghis Khan himself and twice as greedy. Rumor had it that the accident that killed his parents hadn’t been an accident at all; Sebastian had supposedly wanted access to his part of the family fortune before dear old mom and dad were ready to give it to him.
The fifth, and final member of the Committee, Saito Yamada, owned one of the largest telecommunications entities in the Asian market and, like the others, was regularly listed as one of the top fifty most wealthy individuals in the world. Shaw knew that Yamada’s legitimate fortune was dwarfed by his illegal one; as one of the major yakuza bosses in all of Japan, Yamada had his hands in a lot of different pies. He didn’t buy all that often but when he did it was usually for big money.
It was going to be an interesting morning.
Shaw stepped over to his desk and settled into the high-back leather chair behind it. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was time for the meeting to begin. He purposely waited several more minutes before activating the videoconferencing link.
When the link was established, four windows opened on his monitor, each one showing the video feed from the four committee members who were on the line. Brennan, Roux, Helmut and Kincade stared out at him. Only Yamada was absent.
Four out of five’s good enough, he thought. Something so European probably wouldn’t have appealed to the yakuza boss, anyway.
Shaw put a smile on his face, activated his own camera and said, “It’s a pleasure to see you all again.”
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, each of the Committee members could see and hear Shaw through the conferencing link. Their identities were kept secret from one another, however. They could hear when others chose to speak, but they didn’t have access to the video feeds and could never be certain just how many others were on the call with them.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt, Shaw thought. The key to any successful sale.
Since the Committee was well aware that Shaw only scheduled meetings when there was an item in play, he got right down to business.
“Near the end of the first century, Rome nearly lost control of Britannia when a warrior queen named Boudica staged a revolt,” Shaw began. “Despite being outnumbered and underequipped, Boudica’s forces overwhelmed the Roman legions.
“Some say it was because she caught the Romans napping. Others, that she was a military genius the likes of which the Romans hadn’t ever encountered among the tribal Celts before or since. But there are those who believe that Boudica’s power came from an external source, a strange and unusual necklace, or torc, that she wore about her neck at all times.”
The Committee members had long since learned how to keep their emotions off their faces, but Shaw had been studying them carefully over the past several years and thought he’d identified some of their tells, those non-verbal cues that they couldn’t control when they were excited about something. Like the way Helmut’s right index finger would tap on the arm of his chair a few times before settling down again. Or the way Brennan would cross her legs in one direction, then quickly switch them to another position, as she was doing now.
“The Tear of the Gods, as it is known in certain circles, has been lost to history for almost two thousand years. Lost, that is, until today.”
He tapped a key and the photograph Novick had sent to him last night appeared on the screen in front of each of the callers. He left it there for only a few seconds—just a short, tantalizing tease—then sat back and waited for a reaction, knowing that he who spoke first ultimately ceded power to the others.
Brennan was the first to break the silence, as Shaw knew she would be. The chance to add something actually carried by one of Boudica’s chieftains, perhaps even by Boudica herself, was a prize too good to pass up for a woman who considered herself a modern-day warrior queen.
“It looks just like every other torc I’ve ever seen,” she said derisively. “What makes you think this is the—what did you call it? The Tear of the Gods?”
Shaw smiled. Her interest was so obvious. Did she honestly think she was fooling anyone with her feigned disbelief?
“The torc was found around the throat of a Celtic warrior who’d been ceremonially buried in a bog in the West Midlands region,” he told the group. “Four sacrificial victims surrounded the body, proof that the warrior was more than just an ordinary soldier or low-ranking chieftain, for such sacrifices required the presence of a druid, perhaps the High Druid himself, and would not be wasted on anyone less than the royal family or their close companions.”
Brennan frowned, apparently uneasy with Shaw’s quick answer. “But that still doesn’t prove that this is the torc you are claiming it to be,” she said stubbornly.
Shaw surprised her a second time by agreeing. “You’re correct. That alone is not proof enough. Which is why we turn to more, shall we say, personal sources?”
He pulled a book off his desk and held it up to the camera. “A copy of Tacitus’s Agricola, which I’m sure we will all agree is a reasonable source.”
Turning to a marked page, he began reading. “‘This necklace, or torc as it is known among the Britons, was fashioned of the most unusual metal, unlike any other I have seen in all my years. It gleamed in the darkness, as if lit by an internal fire, and in the light it reflected the many hues of the rainbow. It was neither gold nor silver, copper nor bronze, iron nor cold hard steel, but something new and different under the sun. Three bands it was made of, twisted about one another like the coils of a snake, though no wider than a man’s first two fingers at its thickest point.’”
Shaw snapped the book closed and looked at the group with a triumphant smile. “Given what we’ve seen today, I’d say that’s pretty conclusive, wouldn’t you?”
Roux caught Shaw’s attention with a quick lift of his finger. “You have the artifact in hand?” he asked.
Shaw lied without missing a beat, the smile still plastered on his face. “Of course,” he said. “It is being packed up for transport to my offices as we speak.”
The Frenchman looked skeptical, but sat back as if satisfied enough by the answer.
“Bidding will commence within the next forty-eight hours through the usual methods, with a minimum starting bid of ten million dollars. You will be notified via cell phone five minutes before the auction begins and bids will be accepted for just seventy-two hours.”
Shaw looked at each of them in turn, trying to gauge their reactions, to figure out just who would bid and who would not. Helmut was listening to someone offscreen, so Shaw took that as a lack of interest in this particular piece, but he was pretty sure that both Brennan and Kincade were in. Brennan for sure, he thought. Roux, on the other hand, was as inscrutable as always.
It didn’t really matter, though. The auction was just a front to raise some extra cash for the final phase of his plan. He had no intention of turning over the torc; if the legends were right, it would be far more useful to the Red Hand Defenders and his ultimate cause if it remained in his possession. By the time the winning bidder realized that he, or she, had been had, he’d be long gone with both the money and the torc. Shortly after that, England, and the world itself, would have far more pressing issues to concern themselves with.
After reminding them that they’d only have seventy-two hours to cast their bids once the auction began, Shaw wrapped things up and ended the call, a smile of satisfaction on his face.
WITH THE CLICK of his mouse, Roux ended the videoconferencing session, but left the tunneling program he’d activated while in the middle of the call running in the background. That particular piece of software had cost him a small fortune, but it had been worth every penny he’d spent on it so far. By creating a virtual private network between the two computers via the videoconferencing link, it turned the other computer’s microphone into a two-way listening device. The connection would be severed when Shaw turned off his monitor, but until then, Roux was privy to everything being said inside Shaw’s London office.
He’d first begun spying on Shaw to get a leg up on the various artifacts and items of interest that he uncovered. The man was a cretin, no doubt about it, but he had an uncanny sense for locating some truly unique treasures and Roux wasn’t shy about using that to his advantage. Lately, however, he’d begun to suspect that Shaw was involved in something darker than illegal artifact smuggling. There was something there, just beneath the surface, like a shark in blood-infested waters, and Roux was determined to expose it to the light.
Hence, the eavesdropping worm.
So far, though, it had yielded little in the way of worthwhile results. He’d caught a few snatches of conversation here and there, but nothing that helped him narrow down what Shaw’s overall plans were or the true nature of whatever it was he was involved in. The minute Shaw shut down his monitor, the bug went inactive, so its use was by nature limited.
Today was one of those days. Roux could hear Shaw shuffling things around on his desk, heard the snap of a briefcase lid closing down and then nothing more as the monitor was switched off on the other side.
But after living through the centuries, Roux had learned to be patient. Shaw would let something slip one of these days, and when that happened Roux would be ready for it.
7
While Craig and Paolo got back to work the next morning excavating Big Red from the midst of the block of peat they’d cut from the bog, Annja turned her attention to the necklace that she’d removed from around the warrior’s neck the night before. The artifact had been soaking in a chemical bath overnight and she went directly to it after breakfast, removing it from the solution and washing it under a gentle flow of cold water. Slowly, bit by bit, the dirt, silt and hardened peat that had encrusted it began to fall away, revealing the artifact to the light of day for the first time in almost two thousand years.
It was a torc; she’d been right about that. The braided strands of metal were easy to see now that the gunk had been cleared away. What struck her as strange, however, was the fact that this one hadn’t been fashioned from gold, as almost every other one she’d ever seen had. Rather, this one was made from some kind of darker metal that threw off a scintillating array of colors when the light was shined on it just so. She’d thought it might be iron at first, but closer examination revealed that it was much too refined for that.
Perhaps a combination of various metals?
There really was no way to tell until they had a chance to get a sample of it into a gas spectrometer to analyze the component elements. And that wouldn’t happen until they got the necklace back to Craig’s lab at Oxford. For now, she’d just have to wonder.
Annja didn’t know all that much about torcs; Iron Age civilizations hadn’t ever really been her specialty. That was one of the reasons she was so excited to be taking part in this excavation. The chance to break ground, literally, on a new site coupled with the opportunity to learn more about a period of history she wasn’t all that familiar with was like winning the lottery for her. She did know that, in general, the wearing of a torc was usually a sign of nobility or high social status. The time and cost in creating them almost made it so by default. That fit with the events she’d witnessed, if she could call it that, in her dream from the other night. Big Red had clearly been a warrior of some renown; otherwise, they never would have had such an elaborate burial ceremony. But exactly who he was or why he’d been honored in such a fashion might never be known. It was up to Annja and the rest of the team to try to answer those questions, and others like them, as they worked with the body and the artifacts that had been buried with it.
As the cleaning continued, Annja noticed that each end of the torc was adorned with a small sculpture in the shape of an eagle’s head. The ornaments were made from a hard white substance, perhaps bone or even ivory, and it looked as if the beaks once fit together in a certain way to form a clasp that kept the torc secured around the wearer’s neck. Annja marveled at the design; it was quite ingenious.
They broke reluctantly for lunch and were back at it again within the hour. More artifacts were turning up as Craig and Paolo continued the slow but steady process of freeing Big Red’s earthly remains from the peat that surrounded them. A beaded necklace was first, followed by a pair of chain-mail gauntlets and an assortment of coins, their faces blackened from the tannic acid of the bog. As each one was unearthed, they were passed over to Annja for cataloging and cleaning.
Throughout it all, Craig and Paolo shared with Annja stories of prior digs they’d been on and she, in turn, told them about some of the remote places and legends the cable show had sent her to investigate. It was a companionable afternoon and Annja thoroughly enjoyed herself.
Late in the day they heard several shouts coming from the center of camp. The occasional raised voice was common in camp—friends shouting after friends, that kind of thing—but this went on for several minutes, which was unusual and caught their attention.
Craig frowned, then got up from his stool, setting the tools he’d been working with down on the table in front of him. “What’s the heck’s going on out there?” he said, though it was clear he wasn’t expecting an answer from either Paolo or Annja.
He crossed the tent and disappeared through the flap, apparently intent on finding out. Paolo followed him a moment later.
Annja ignored the interruption and kept working, at least for a few minutes. But when the others didn’t return, she began to get worried. The sense that something was seriously wrong stole over her, like a chill wind blowing through an open door, and she shivered in response. The shouting had stopped, but the silence that had replaced it only made her more concerned.
Something was clearly wrong.
She could feel it in her bones, like that sense of unease just before a sharp summer storm.
Annja stepped away from the worktable, intending to go and see what was happening for herself, when her gaze fell upon the torc. Something told her that leaving it behind would be asking for trouble, so she snatched it up and slipped it into her pocket before leaving the tent. On any other day she would have been appalled to treat an artifact so cavalierly, but she was somehow convinced that it was the right thing to do.
She could always put it back afterward, if it turned out to be nothing.
She drew back the flap of the tent, intending to step outside, but stopped short when a man with a pistol in hand stepped into view, leading two of the dig workers forward at gunpoint. They were headed for the center of camp, just as Craig and Paolo had done, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there was probably more than one of the intruders in camp at that very moment. That realization kept her from immediately going to her coworkers aid; she didn’t want to draw attention to herself until she knew exactly what was going on.
She waited for them to move out of sight, then slipped out and looked around. There didn’t seem to be anyone else about. Even if she hadn’t seen the gunman, that in itself would have been unusual. People were always moving about the camp. Now that she was outside and the tent walls were no longer acting as a sound baffle, she could hear several angry voices coming from the center of the camp. She cautiously made her way in that direction, slipping in and out between the tents rather than walking openly down the main path. As she drew closer to the center of camp, she crouched down beside one of the tents and peered around the corner.
From where she crouched she could see that most of the dig team had been herded into the open area in front of the mess tent. Craig stood alone in front of the group, facing a bearded man in dark fatigues who was pointing a pistol at Craig’s head. Behind the newcomer were several more men, all dressed the same way and all holding firearms of their own, pointing them indiscriminately at the rest of the dig team. Annja recognized the guns as MP-5s, the stubby machine pistols that in recent years had become the weapons of choice for more than a few special-operations units across the world. They were effective little things, capable of firing eight hundred rounds per minute on full auto.
If the armed men opened fire, the archaeologists would be cut down in seconds.
Craig glared at the men in front of him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
The leader looked past Craig as if he didn’t matter and addressed his words to the rest of the dig team huddled behind him. “I’m looking for a necklace. A black one. Surrender it now and there won’t be any trouble.”
Annja couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How did they know about the torc? Craig hadn’t even reported it to the trustees from Oxford overseeing the dig yet, never mind to anyone else.
Craig stepped forward, causing the gunman to turn his attention back to him rather than the others.
“I don’t know what anyone has told you, but we haven’t uncovered anything of value here. There’s no gold. No treasure. Certainly nothing to make you rich.”
The man laughed. “I want the torc,” he said. “We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way. I don’t really care. Now where is it?”
There was a look in the gunman’s eyes that Annja didn’t like. Almost as if he was eager for a confrontation.
Tell him, Craig, Annja thought. Tell him what he wants to know.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Craig replied.
The man shrugged. “That’s too bad,” he said.
Then he pulled the trigger.
The shot took Craig in the forehead, knocking him over backward to the ground. He was dead before the sound of the gunshot had finished echoing over the campsite.
Silence fell as the rest of the dig team stared in stunned horror at the body in front of them.
The gunman seemed to drink in their fear and terror like a fine wine. A slow smile spilled across his face as he watched them stare at the dead body in front of them and then, almost casually, he said, “Okay. Now that we’ve established that I’m not screwing around, I’ll ask again. Where is the torc?”
The need to charge out and avenge her friend screamed through Annja’s bones, but she fought the urge back down, knowing that to do so right now would be tantamount to suicide. Running out into the open and confronting the mercenary leader—for that is what she guessed them to be, mercenaries—would only get her killed. That would serve no one, least of all the people she needed to help. If she was going to get the rest of the team out of this alive, the next few minutes were crucial. She would need all her wits about her if she was going to succeed.
She slipped slowly backward until she was out of sight behind the nearest tent and then reached into the otherwhere, summoning her sword to hand. It slid smoothly into existence, appearing with the speed of thought, fully formed and ready for use, the hilt fitting her palm as if it had been made for her and her alone.
Sometimes she even thought that it had.
Her life hadn’t been the same since that fateful day when she’d brought the broken, scattered pieces of the sword together again for the first time since their original owner, Joan of Arc, had been burned at the stake centuries earlier. The sword had miraculously reformed in a flash of power right before her very eyes and, in some strange way she still didn’t quite understand, had chosen her to be its next bearer.
The role came with its own unique set of responsibilities, protecting the innocent seemingly first and foremost among them. Her own innate sense of justice seemed amplified when she carried the sword and she’d found herself forced into any number of situations that others would have simply walked away from as a result. Numbers didn’t matter, nor did the odds, only that she acted whenever possible to defend those who couldn’t defend themselves.
Like now.
Craig’s death made the intentions of the intruders quite clear. There was no way they were going to let the other dig workers live after witnessing Craig being killed in cold blood. That meant it was up to Annja to get them out of this alive.
Despite knowing that they would never get there in time, Annja pulled out her BlackBerry with her free hand and placed an emergency call to the regional police. She told the sergeant who answered her name and that the archaeological dig just north of Arkholme was under attack by armed insurgents. When he began to ask questions she hung up. She didn’t have time to sit there and chat with him; people’s lives hung in the balance.
As she slipped the phone back into her pocket, her fingers touched the torc. Something told her that it wouldn’t be safe there; if she was caught, her captors would find it in seconds. She took it out of her pocket and slipped it inside her sports bra instead. That way, at least it would pass a casual search.
Then she took a moment to consider her next move.
Clearly she couldn’t take them all on at once. But if she could even up the odds a bit, she’d have a better chance of succeeding in the end.
With that in mind, she faded back into the shadows, waiting for her chance at vengeance.
8
The gunman ordered his men to herd the rest of the dig workers into the mess tent behind them, and as they began doing so, Annja slipped around behind it and found a place to crouch down out of sight near one of the windows. From this position she could see and hear most of what was going on inside the tent, while potentially being ready to do something to help if an opportunity presented herself.
The lead mercenary stood facing the group, his gun still in hand.
“Where is Professor Novick?” he asked.
No one would look at one another, for fear of giving Novick away. They had seen what had happened to Dr. Stevens; it didn’t take too much imagination to figure out what was likely to happen to Paolo.
For a moment, Annja didn’t see him and she began to hope that he had slipped away in the initial confusion, but it was not to be.
“I am Novick,” a man said from the back of the crowd and Annja watched as Paolo stepped forward.
“You,” the man said, pointing at Novick, “come with me.” He turned and faced the two guards who had entered the tent with him. “If they try to escape,” he said, nodding back over his shoulder at the prisoners, “kill them.”
Paolo and the mercenary leader walked out of the tent, leaving the entire workforce guarded by only two men.
This was her chance.
Annja slipped over to the corner of the tent and peered around it. From where she crouched she could see other guards moving around the camp, hunting through the tents, apparently searching for the torc. She thanked her intuition for making her grab it at the last moment; at least that would keep it out of their hands for now.
If she didn’t call undue attention to herself, she should be able to make it to the entrance and slip inside the tent without anyone on the outside being any wiser.
Taking a deep breath to calm herself, she released her sword back into the otherwhere and did just that.
The guards had their backs to her as she strode inside. They were having too much fun terrorizing the dig crew, particularly the female students, and Annja was able to cross most of the distance to them before one of her fellow coworkers called out her name in surprise upon seeing her approach.
“Annja!”
The guards whirled around, reaching for the guns they’d let hang free on the straps around their necks, but Annja was much too fast for them.
Her right leg was already coming up in a perfectly executed crescent kick that caught the first guard across the side of the head, driving him to the floor.
She didn’t let that stop her, though, using the momentum of the kick to spin herself around one hundred and eighty degrees, delivering a stunning hammer fist to the other guard’s face and then, when the blow momentarily stunned him, grabbed either side of his head in her hands and pulled it down toward her rapidly rising knee.
As he fell Annja was already turning back in the other direction. She’d seen the first guard trying to get back on his feet and she lashed out with a powerful side kick that knocked him into unconsciousness like his partner.
The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.
Annja didn’t give the others time to think about what had just happened.
“Quickly, this way,” she said, rushing over to the rear wall of the tent. She snatched a knife off a nearby table and thrust it through the canvas, ripping downward with all her strength as she did so to create a big gash in the fabric.
“Run for the woods and get as far away as you can,” she said to the others.
“What about Dr. Novick?” one of the men asked.
“I’ll get him. Right now you have to get as far away from here as you possibly can. When you’re free, call the territorial police. Hurry now!”
As they began to file out one at a time into the growing darkness at the rear of the tent, Annja headed in the opposite direction. If they were going to have any chance of getting away, she had to create a diversion, something to keep the gunmen occupied. And she knew just how she was going to do it. She summoned her sword.
As she drew closer to the entrance to the tent, the flap was suddenly pulled back and Annja found herself staring down the barrel of the gun held in the lead mercenary’s hand.
She didn’t stop to think, didn’t look where she was going or what she might land on, just reacted on instinct and threw herself to the side.
He pulled the trigger.
The bullet that should have killed her merely grazed her instead.
It was enough to save her life, but not enough to keep her conscious.
The darkness claimed her before she even hit the ground.
9
Trevor Jackson was furious.
They’d been searching the camp for over fifteen minutes and still hadn’t located the necklace that he’d been sent to find. Perhaps he’d been a little too hasty in dealing with the prisoners, especially their inside guy, Novick.
The professor had led them to the tent containing the bog mummy and the artifacts that had been found alongside it, but the torc wasn’t there. Novick had sputtered in surprise, putting on a good act, but Jackson hadn’t believed a word he’d said. When the man wouldn’t reveal the location of the necklace, Jackson had grown impatient and put a bullet through his skull, figuring he didn’t need the man and that he’d simply find it himself.
Now he was starting to regret that decision.
With Novick dead, Jackson focused his attention on the other prisoners, fully expecting one of them to tell him what he wanted to know. It only took a few minutes for him to realize that there was a problem, however; they really didn’t know anything. The majority of them had spent the day down at the dig site and had only been rounded up when he and his men had shown up and forced them back to camp at gunpoint. Those who’d been in camp all morning said the same thing Novick had—the torc should be with the rest of the artifacts in the main tent.
Jackson had never been a patient man and at that point his day’s supply exhausted itself. “Get rid of them,” he’d told his men, and walked out of the tent where they were holding the prisoners just as the chorus of gunfire started at his back.
Now he stood in the center of camp, weighing his options. Shaw would be expecting him to report in shortly and Jackson didn’t want to do that without having the torc in hand. Shaw was a harsh taskmaster; admitting he’d failed to secure the necklace might have some unhealthy consequences. No, the best thing to do was to hold off on making the call until he had the stupid thing in hand.
That would be better for all involved.
“Sir, I think we’ve got a problem.”
The sound of the man’s voice pulled Jackson out of his reverie. He turned to find one of his men standing nearby, extending a cell phone toward him. He took it, noting as he did that it was a recent-model BlackBerry much like his own, and then glanced at the screen. The number displayed there, the last number the phone’s owner had apparently dialed, was the emergency line for the regional police.
His man was right; this complicated things considerably.
Jackson checked the phone’s log and noted that the call had gone through about twenty minutes earlier. He guessed the phone belonged to the chick with the sword; the call had been right before she’d done her best to throw a wrench in his entire operation and it made sense that she’d have tried to get help before moving to stop them on her own.
He wondered what she’d said. She hadn’t been on the phone very long; the call had lasted less than a minute according to the log. How much information could a person relay to another in less than a minute? Had she had time to give the police their descriptions? Had she told them what they were looking for?
He didn’t know. That meant he had to treat it like a worst-case scenario and go from there, hoping that he covered all the bases.
With that in mind, he considered what he knew about the regional police force’s procedures in a situation like this. Their most likely response would be to do a quick flyby, probably via helicopter, to determine the reliability of the report itself as well as to assess the situation on the ground. If the flight crew deemed it necessary, a ground team would be sent in to investigate further.
The nearest airfield was more than fifty miles away. The report would have taken time to filter up through the channels as the initial responder tried to decide if it was an actual call for help or some crazy teenagers trying to have some fun. Since the call had come in on the emergency line, the origin point would have been automatically plotted and logged on the response board. It wouldn’t have taken long for the duty officer to note that the call was coming from the middle of nowhere, increasing the likelihood that it was authentic. Their inability to get the caller back on the line would have tipped the scales that much further into the “believable” column and a response team would eventually have been dispatched to check things out.
From the time of the call to the point where the response team’s transportation went wheels-up at the airfield would probably be fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, at most. Flight time was roughly another fifteen minutes, depending on course and airspeed, Jackson reasoned, so call it a good half hour, maybe forty minutes before they’d be over the site.
That meant they had anywhere between ten and twenty minutes left before company arrived.
Plenty of time, he thought.
He ordered several of his men to gather up the bodies of those who’d been killed when they’d first arrived and to dump them in the mess tent with the others. Three men were stationed inside the tent with orders not to open fire, no matter what happened, unless it seemed evident that they had no other choice in order to avoid discovery. Others were told to spread themselves out about the camp and to look busy. When the first response team arrived, Jackson intended to pass them off as the camp’s legitimate personnel. All they had to do was convince the flyboys that everything was A-okay and they’d buy all the time they needed to finish up what they’d come here to accomplish. It was already late in the day; no one wanted to dispatch a ground team at night if they could help it and the recommendation would be to wait until morning if there wasn’t clear evidence of a problem on the ground.
Jackson had every intention of showing them that things were just fine and dandy.
No sooner had they finished policing the camp and making certain the bodies were all out of sight than the sound of the approaching helicopter echoed through the trees toward them. Jackson stepped out into the open space at the center of the camp and waited for them to come into sight.
It didn’t take long.
The chopper was a small, two-man unit, the kind of thing he could knock out of the sky with a few well-placed shots from the pistol he carried at his hip. He restrained himself from doing so, though, smiling up at them instead and waving with one hand as he used the other to shield his brow. They circled the camp once, then again, before coming back to hover a hundred yards or so above him.
The downdraft from their rotors was stirring up dust and starting to pull at the canvas of the nearby tents, so Jackson began waving them off, figuring that’s what any good camp administrator would do.
To his surprise, it worked. The pilot gave him a thumbs-up sign and then quickly gained altitude before heading back in the direction they had come.
Leaving the inmates in charge of the asylum, Jackson thought with a grin. With the immediate threat taken care of, he and his men would have all the time they needed to dispose of the bodies and find that damned necklace.
SEVERAL HOURS LATER Jackson found himself standing in the foyer of Shaw’s private estate, waiting for an audience with his employer. He’d been working for Shaw long enough to know that while he disliked incompetence, he hated those who shirked personal responsibility even more. Jackson stood a better chance of coming through this alive if he delivered his report in person, as backward as that might seem.
Surviving the next fifteen minutes was something he very much wanted to do.
Motion at the head of the stairs caught his attention and he stood straighter as he saw his employer come into sight. Shaw was still dressed; that was a good sign. That meant Jackson hadn’t had the misfortune of waking him from one of his infrequent periods of sleep. In the back of his head, Jackson rated his chances of getting through this five percent higher than he had a moment before.
But only five.
“Do you have my property, Mr. Jackson?” Shaw asked as he descended the stairs.
Nothing to do to play it straight.
“No, sir.”
That obviously wasn’t the answer Shaw had been expecting to hear. Jackson watched as a series of expressions crossed the other man’s face, everything from surprise to distaste, but thankfully outright anger wasn’t yet one of them.
Knock that percentage up a few more notches.
“Pray tell me why not,” Shaw said. His tone had gotten noticeably colder.
Like the good soldier that he was, Jackson laid out the events of earlier that evening in clear, concise sentences. Shaw didn’t say a word until Jackson got to the part about the woman and the sword.
“She actually attacked you with a sword?” he asked, though Jackson couldn’t tell if that was because Shaw didn’t believe him or if he found the whole situation as weird as it sounded.
Settling on the latter, Jackson replied. “Yes, sir. While I’m no expert on medieval weaponry, if I had to hazard a guess I’d say it was an English long sword. Perhaps something they uncovered in the dig?”
Shaw waved the question aside.
“What did you do with this woman?” Shaw asked.
“I shot her, sir.”
“Dead?”
Jackson thought about the way the woman’s body had flopped when they’d tossed it into the bog with the rest of them. “Yes, sir.” Though, now that he thought about it, he didn’t know what had happened to the sword.
“A pity. Might have been an interesting conversation there. Go on.”
Jackson explained how they’d tricked the team that had responded to the call for help, after which they searched both the camp and the bodies of the dead, but had been unable to find the torc anywhere. “Perhaps they packed it up and sent it back to Oxford before we arrived?” he ventured, looking for some reason, some excuse, why he was standing there empty-handed. He was not a man accustomed to failure and he particularly didn’t like the way that this assignment had turned out. It was always the easy ones….
“Give me your assessment of the police response,” Shaw ordered.
Jackson was prepared for the question and didn’t hesitate. “They have to send a team out to the site in the morning, sir. It’s standard operating procedure. They would have done so tonight if they’d had anyone reasonably close. The fact that the site is in the middle of nowhere played to our advantage.”
His employer considered his assessment for a moment and then nodded. “I want you on the ground with that regional police unit when it arrives in the morning. If the torc turns up, I expect you to do what is necessary to recover it. Are we clear?”
Jackson nodded. There was a reason he knew so much about the regional police; he’d been on the active duty roster for the past seven years, ever since mustering out of the regiment. He’d expected Shaw to give that very order and had already made sure that he’d be assigned to the duty in the morning. With dawn only a few hours away, it meant even less sleep than he’d expected to get, but beggars can’t be choosy. He was just happy to have escaped his employer’s wrath.
“I want that torc, Mr. Jackson.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Good enough.” Shaw turned and headed back up the stairs, but stopped before he’d gotten more than a few steps away. He turned to face Jackson once more.
“This woman, the one with the sword. Do we know who she was?”
Jackson nodded. “An American archaeologist named Annja Creed.” He took a photo out of the file folder in his hands and passed it to Shaw. The picture had been taken on-site and showed Annja’s still and bloody face.
The other man stared at it for a few seconds, then passed it back.
“She was a pretty thing, wasn’t she?”
10
Annja came to with a start.
She was on her back, staring up into the sky. Light was just starting to peek over the horizon, which meant she been out for several hours, maybe more. Her head hurt something fierce and when she tried to move it she was nearly overwhelmed with a wave of dizziness that threatened to return her to the darkness from which she’d just come. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and fought it off.
The ground beneath her rolled gently, reminding her of how it felt to drift on an inflatable raft in a swimming pool, but in her pain and confusion she didn’t pay it any mind.
Until she tried to sit up.
She put her hands down flat on either side, barely registering the cold, clammy feel of whatever she’d placed them upon, and tried to lever herself into an upright position. When she did, the surface she was laying on shifted dramatically beneath her, tilting to one side and dumping her face-first into a thick pool of muck.
In her surprise she panicked, flailing her limbs, feeling the muck pulling at her, dragging her down, but then her feet hit the bottom and she realized she wouldn’t drown if she could just get control of herself.
She stopped thrashing, planted her feet firmly beneath her and stood up straight, bringing her head back above the surface. She gasped in a lungful of air and then breathed a sigh of relief when she realized that the muck only came to her waist.
Her relief was short-lived, however.
As she looked around, the dim morning light revealed that she was standing in the middle of an active bog, surrounded by the partially submerged corpses of her former colleagues!
What had happened the night before came rushing back—the sudden appearance of armed intruders at the dig site, the demands to surrender the torc, the deadly gunfire when the archaeologists had refused to do as requested and her own struggle to get as many of her fellow scholars to safety in spite of it all.
The last thing she remembered was staring down the barrel of a gun and her last-ditch effort to get out of the way of the bullet….
Her head throbbed, a not-so-subtle reminder that she apparently hadn’t moved quickly enough.
She brought a hand up toward the side of her head, wanting to know just how bad the wound might be, but stopped herself when she saw the thick coating the peat bog had left on her limbs. There was already enough of it dripping from her head; rubbing it deeper into an open wound didn’t seem like a bright idea.
Despite the early hour, it was already light enough for Annja to see the bullet wounds and dark splotches of blood that stained the bodies around her. These weren’t strangers; she recognized several of them. She recognized Paolo Novick from his curly gray hair. The bright yellow of an NAU sweatshirt identified another body as that of Sheila James, one of the graduate students who’d come overseas just last week. There was Matthew Blake and Dalton Ribisi and… She turned away, shaking off the feeling of despair that threatened to overwhelm her. Several of the dead lay with their eyes open, staring into nothingness, and Annja had the sudden urge to reach out and close them, pulling the blinds on the windows of the souls that had long since fled.
Knowing how close she’d come to her own death, and seeing the deaths of others she cared about, set a red-hot fire burning in her veins.
A careful look around showed her that the shortest route to solid ground was directly behind her, where thick tufts of grass were growing along the bank. But when she tried to move in that direction, she discovered a new problem.
Her feet had sunk into the thicker silt at the bottom of the bog and were now trapped.
Visions of being sucked down beneath the surface swam in her mind and caused her to try pulling her feet free with brute force, yanking upward first on one and then the other. Rather than loosening the bog’s hold, however, all her actions managed to do was to get her feet to sink deeper.
She was stuck.
Annja opened her mouth, intending to call out, to see if there was anyone close enough to help. Surely someone else had survived the brutal attack. But then she thought better of it. While other survivors might be within earshot, so, too, might the very men who had slaughtered her friends. Calling attention to herself while she was trapped would just make her a target.
One that would be almost impossible to miss.
She was going to have to get out of this on her own.
Taking a deep breath to calm her already frayed nerves, Annja considered the situation. She knew she had to work with the bog’s natural qualities rather than against them, if she hoped to get out of this alive.
She slowly began to wiggle her left foot, gently rocking it back and forth. Each time she did so it let a little more of the water within the bog slide between her foot and the thicker particles of peat that kept it trapped. Gradually she was able to loosen the bog’s hold on her foot.
With one foot floating free she reached out and grabbed hold of the nearest corpse, using it to maintain her balance while she began to work on the other leg. The body was that of a blonde woman dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, though Annja made a point of avoiding looking at her face, afraid of seeing the face of another friend. Her efforts pushed the corpse a little deeper into the bog, but it maintained enough natural buoyancy that she could still use it to support herself despite that fact that it was now mostly underwater.
After several minutes she was able to work her other foot loose enough that she could lift it when the time came.
With her feet free, she had to fight the urge to lean forward, to power through the muck with big strokes of her strong arms, for she knew that doing so was exactly the wrong thing to do and would only leave her trapped again, perhaps in an even more precarious position. She knew the surface of the bog would support her if she let it; the corpses floating around her were proof of that. With that in mind she leaned backward instead of forward, letting her head and upper back come in contact with the surface of the bog. When she felt its chill wetness lapping at her skin, she lifted her legs and spread her arms wide, allowing the bog to bear her weight.
It worked!
She floated on the surface and if she’d held still an observer wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between her and any of the other dozen corpses surrounding her.
So far, so good. Now comes the hard part, she thought.
Solid ground was only fifteen, maybe twenty feet away, but if she moved too quickly she’d sink and wind up trapped all over again.
Slow and steady wins the race, she told herself.
Using the nearest corpse as a lever, she pushed it firmly toward her feet. The act sent her own body gliding across the surface of the water, taking her a foot or two closer to the bank and what she hoped was solid ground.
Little by little, she made her way to safety.
When the water beneath her grew so shallow that she was having a hard time keeping her feet up, she rolled over and discovered that the bank was less than an arm’s length away. Letting her feet down beneath her, she stood cautiously.
The bog immediately tried to tighten its grip.
This time she was ready for it. Rather than fight it, she simply let herself topple forward like a downed tree. Her upper body easily reached the bank. Sinking her fingers into the thick grass she found there, she pulled herself up onto firm ground and crawled away from the bog’s edge on hands and knees.
Once she had her heart rate under control, she sat back on her haunches and thought about her next move. The sun was up now, its thin light breaking through the trees around her, and by its height she estimated that it was somewhere around 6:00 or 7:00 a.m., which meant that it had been at least that many hours since the attack had occurred. She had no idea if the killers remained at the camp or if they had fled once their job here was done, but it didn’t matter either way. There were things she wanted at the camp and that was where she needed to go.
She stood and did what she could to wipe off the worst of the muck from the bog, which wasn’t much. She purposely left the wound on her head alone; no sense messing with it until she had some way of cleaning it properly.
When she finished, she reached inside her sports bra and retrieved the torc from where she’d stashed it the night before. She had a bit of a bruise from where it had pressed against her tender flesh, but the torc itself was no worse for the wear. Not that she’d expected it to be; it had already survived a couple of thousand years in the bog.
Still, she was relieved that the killers hadn’t found it. With it in hand, her chances of discovering what this was all about, as well as who was behind it all, went up considerably.
It also told her that the killers, whoever they’d been, made mistakes. The bodies should have been searched before being dumped into the bog. If they had been, those doing the searching hadn’t been very thorough at all.
Not that she was complaining. A proper search would have shown them that she was still alive, so their poor effort had actually saved her life.
She stuffed the torc back into its hiding place and spent a few minutes searching through the tall grass at the edge of the bog until she found the trail the killers had used to get there. The added weight of the bodies they’d carried had pushed their footsteps deep into the soil and it was an easy matter to follow them back through the woods in the direction of camp.
It was cold and she was wet—not a good combination. Her first order of business was going to be dry clothes. After that she would figure out a more solid game plan. The authorities had to be notified, the bodies recovered from the bog, but before any of that happened she wanted a few minutes alone with whatever evidence the killers had left behind at the scene. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the police to do their job; she did. This one just happened to be a bit more personal for her and she wasn’t going to leave justice in the hands of someone who might not care as strongly as she did about seeing it served up properly.
Craig’s smiling face flashed in her mind and she swore that she’d make those responsible pay for what they had done.
As the telltale flashes of color that marked the camp’s tents became visible through the trees, Annja slowed down. It wouldn’t do to just blunder into the middle of camp, particularly if the killers were still hanging about, so she stopped and listened instead.
Aside from the calls of a few morning birds, no other sound reached her ears. While that didn’t mean the perpetrators were gone, it was certainly a good sign.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to be armed.
She reached out with her right hand and plucked her sword from the otherwhere. It flashed into existence in a heartbeat as it always did and just having it in hand was reassuring.
Cautiously she continued forward.
11
The camp had been ransacked. Several of the tents had been torn down entirely, while the contents of the others were strewn about, left to lie where they had fallen during what Annja assumed was the search for the torc.
She slipped from one piece of cover to another for the first several minutes, leery of suddenly running into any of the men she’d encountered the night before, but eventually she realized that the camp was deserted and that let her move about more freely in the open.
The killers, whoever they had been, had fled.
Her free hand touched the torc through her shirt. What was so important about it that someone would kill to possess it? she wondered.
The entire attack just didn’t make sense. While she knew there was a burgeoning trade in black-market artifacts, she wouldn’t expect a piece like the one she currently carried to be of particular interest. They’d only dug it up yesterday, for heaven’s sake!
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Alex Archer
The legacy of a pagan king could unleash terror on the worldIt started as a dream–a redheaded warrior king fought and died for his men centuries ago. The dream would lead archaeologist Annja Creed to the king's undisturbed corpse…and one of England's greatest mythical artifacts.Deep in an archaeological dig in England's Midlands, Annja locates a braided necklace around a mummified king's neck. Made of an unusual material–not quite obsidian, but gleaming with multihued color–the torc is an astonishing find. But someone knows exactly what the torc means. And he will do anything to get his hands on the Tear of the Gods. When the dig is compromised and innocent archaeologists are slain, even Annja herself is left for dead. Now she is fleeing for her life, not knowing the terrifying truth about the relic she risks everything to protect–or the devastating consequences should it fall into the wrong hands….
“I want that torc, Mr. Jackson.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Good enough.” The man turned and headed up the stairs, but stopped before he’d gotten more than a few steps away. He turned to face Jackson once more.
“This woman, the one with the sword. Do we know who she was?”
Jackson nodded. “An American archaeologist named Annja Creed.” He took a photo out of the file folder in his hands and passed it to his employer. The picture had been taken at the dig site and showed Annja’s still and bloodied face.
The other man stared at it for a few seconds, then passed it back.
“She was a pretty thing, wasn’t she?”
Titles in this series:
Destiny
Solomon’s Jar
The Spider Stone
The Chosen
Forbidden City
The Lost Scrolls
God of Thunder
Secret of the Slaves
Warrior Spirit
Serpent’s Kiss
Provenance
The Soul Stealer
Gabriel’s Horn
The Golden Elephant
Swordsman’s Legacy
Polar Quest
Eternal Journey
Sacrifice
Seeker’s Curse
Footprints
Paradox
The Spirit Banner
Sacred Ground
The Bone Conjurer
Tribal Ways
The Dragon’s Mark
Phantom Prospect
Restless Soul
False Horizon
The Other Crowd
Tear of the Gods
Rogue Angel
Tear of The Gods
Alex Archer
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
THE LEGEND
…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.
The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade. The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.
Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.
Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn….
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
1
Myrrdin sat high astride his horse and stared down the slope of the hill at the Roman army amassing in the valley below. What was left of his command was gathered at his back, but it was pitifully small compared to the enemy presence before him.
It was hard to believe that things had gone wrong so swiftly.
Less than a week before, he’d been war leader to Queen Boudica herself and had led an army of more than eighty thousand souls across Britannia, carving a path of destruction in their wake. They had destroyed the colony at Camulodunum and had marched against first Verulamium, and then Londinium itself, sacking each city and slaying as many of the invaders as they could find. Blood flowed like a river wherever they went, appeasing the anger of the gods at the presence of the Roman invaders and bestowing blessings upon the Iceni as a result.
Nothing, it seemed, could stand in their way.
Nothing, that was, until the coming of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus.
Even thinking of the Roman’s name was enough to make Myrrdin curse aloud and spit on the ground. He longed to carve the man’s flesh from his bones and feed it the crows. He prayed to the gods that he would get his chance before the battle was over.
What a difference seventy-two hours made.
Less than five thousand men remained of the army that had met Paulinus and the soldiers of the XIV Gemina on the field of battle three days before. Few, if any, of his senior commanders still lived, for they had stood their ground and fought on even when the battle had turned in the Romans’ favor. Myrrdin would have gone down fighting alongside them if the queen hadn’t ordered him to retreat, to ensure that someone still remained who could rally the remnants of the Iceni and see to it that their people’s sacrifice was not in vain.
How he wished he had never left her side!
He reached up and fingered the torc he wore about his neck, the one Boudica had entrusted to him before the battle. She’d always claimed it to be the root of her power, that the metal from which it was formed, the metal given to them by the very gods themselves, protected her time and time again. But Boudica was dead now, poisoned by her own hand while in Roman custody rather than be handed over to Paulinus’s troops as a plaything for their amusement. When word reached him earlier that morning of her fate, he wept, wondering if he’d condemned her to death simply by taking the torc.
Not that it mattered now; what was done was done.
Myrrdin was a good enough tactician to know that at this point there was no way the Iceni could win. They were outnumbered and the Romans were not only better armed but better armored, as well. If he hadn’t been able to beat them with eighty thousand warriors at his command, there was no way he was going to be able to do so with only five thousand. But there was no question of retreat. He would rather die on the field of battle, sword in hand, than be hunted down like a dog in the weeks to come.
And perhaps, Awran willing, he could take a few Romans with him as an offering before it was his time to die.
He let his gaze roam over the soldiers gathering on the field below. Unlike his ragtag band of warriors, who often wore as little into battle as possible, the Romans were all dressed in identical coats of chain armor worn over a short jerkin with thick-soled leather sandals on their feet. They each carried two iron-tipped spears, pilums he’d heard them called. The short swords were designed primarily for stabbing in close-quarter combat. The soldiers also held large rectangular shields, big enough to cover a man from ankle to chin.
The legion’s standard, a charging boar on a field of crimson that was so dark as to be almost purple, flapped in the afternoon breeze, the Romans arrogantly claiming this land on behalf of the Emperor.
Myrrdin turned and surveyed the men assembled behind him. What a sharp contrast to those they were about to face. Where the Romans were tall and muscled from years of disciplined labor, his men were smaller and wiry in nature, built for speed and dexterity. Where the Romans were armored and carried multiple weapons, many of his men were naked or nearly so, their fair skin decorated in blue woad. They clutched swords made of iron and carried small, round shields of leather stretched over wooden frames.
Of his illustrious horse soldiers, less than fifty remained. They sat stiffly in the saddle off to his right, weary from the days of fighting and the long chase they had endured so far, yet none hesitated to return his gaze or gave any sign they would shy away from the confrontation to come.
As he turned away, one thought was prominent in his mind.
We don’t stand a chance.
Myrrdin shook his head, clearing it of such defeatism. The simple fact was he no longer had any choice; there was nowhere else to run. He’d never get his men through the bogs on the other side of the hills before the enemy could catch up with them. He had no choice but to stand and fight.
Like all good commanders, Myrrdin wanted that fight on his terms, not the enemy’s, which was why he’d assembled his men along the crest of the hill while the Romans attempted to set up camp in the valley below. He hadn’t been able to choose the field on which they would meet, but he’d be damned if he wouldn’t choose the time.
And that time was now, before the enemy got themselves organized and settled in.
He brought his horn to his lips and blew a long blast. The sound echoed across the valley, like a great voice shouting from the hilltop, and Myrrdin smiled in defiance as he watched the Roman soldiers milling about in response.
Behind him, his men took up the call to battle, pounding the flats of their swords against their shields, calling up a frightful racket, letting the spirits know that there would soon be newcomers, friend and foe alike, entering the land of the dead. Bare-breasted women moved among the ranks, screaming in hatred at the Romans massed below and whispering words of encouragement to their men, stoking the twin fires of courage and power.
Myrrdin let it build for a few minutes, allowing his men to whip themselves into a killing frenzy, and then, when he judged the time was right, he raised his right arm above his head, his fist clenched for all to see, and then brought it slashing downward.
Like a breaking wave his army surged into motion, pouring down the hill toward the enemy, shrieking their war cries as they went.
With a joyous shout, Myrrdin spurred his horse and joined them, thundering down toward the rapidly forming enemy line. Behind him came the rest of his horse soldiers, their voices raised in harmony with his own.
Ahead of them the Romans stood shoulder to shoulder in a long, unbroken line, waiting with disciplined ease for the enemy to make contact, their oversize shields held before them to form a wall. As the Iceni warriors closed in, the Romans unleashed a blistering rain of stones and spears from behind the protection of that wall, hoping to blunt the force of the attack. The Iceni had faced the Romans before, however, and they were ready, having expected just such a move. Almost as one they bent low over their mounts, their heads sheltered by the animals’ long necks, and as a result the majority of them made it through the storm unscathed.
Mere yards separated the two forces and Myrddin felt his lips peel back from his teeth as he bared them at the enemy like a wild animal defending its den. Heart racing, blood pumping, he let out another shout of defiance and drove his horse right into the ranks of the enemy, smashing aside that wall of shields, trampling those foolish enough to stand firm in the face of the attack under the hooves of his battle-hardened mount. Beside him, his horse warriors did the same, smashing aside the Roman line, creating a breach for their foot soldiers to exploit as they caught up with the charging cavalry.
In seconds the orderly nature of the Roman defense had dissolved into chaos.
The air was full of the coppery scent of fresh blood, the smell of leather and sweat, the screams of the injured and the dying. Myrrdin slashed about him with his sword, hacking at anyone who got close enough, striking down as many of the enemy as he could, driving his horse relentlessly forward, doing all he could to widen the gap, to give his people a fighting chance at survival. If they could break through the other side of the Roman battle line, some of them might survive to fight another day.
A tall Roman rose up on his right side, his battle-ax already in motion, but Myrrdin took the blow on the buckler strapped to his left arm. The shield shattered, smashed to pieces by the force of the blow, but it served its purpose, giving Myrrdin time to thrust his sword deep into the other man’s chest, killing him where he stood. The Iceni chieftain turned in the saddle, searching for his next foe.
The spear came out of nowhere, whistling through the air with all the grace of a weapon of war doing just what it had been designed to do. It struck him high in the right side. As luck would have it, he’d been in the midst of turning and the projectile drove into the narrow gap his mail coat failed to cover at his armpit, burying itself deep in his chest.
It was like being buried in an avalanche of ice, his sword falling away from fingers gone suddenly numb, his grip on the saddle loosening as he lost the feeling in his legs, and he tumbled from his mount to lie in the mud of the battlefield as the fight raged on around him.
As his vision began to narrow and the darkness closed in, Myrrdin could have sworn he felt the torc about his neck pulse in time with his heartbeat.
2
Annja Creed studied the decapitated heads on the table in front of her.
Two of them had their eyes closed, as if they’d died peacefully in their sleep, but Annja knew better than to trust in simple appearances. There had been nothing peaceful about their passing; the fact that they were sitting on the table minus the rest of their bodies was proof of that, she thought wryly. The eyes of the third were open and surprisingly free of detritus from the bog. From her position in front of the table, the dead man’s eyes seemed to stare directly back into her own, as if he were as intently curious about her as she was about him. It would have given most people the creeps, but after all she’d been through over the past few years since inheriting Joan of Arc’s mystical sword, she barely even noticed.
The heads had been unearthed in an isolated peat bog several hours north of London in the West Midlands. She’d been invited to the site just over a week earlier by an old friend from the British Museum, Oxford University professor Craig Stevens.
From what he’d explained over the phone, a pair of farmers had reported seeing a head staring up at them out of the bog while they were out hunting. Further investigation revealed that the two men hadn’t been hunting at all, but rather running an industrious little business on the side selling cut peat for fuel. They hadn’t wanted the police to know that the section of the bog they were harvesting didn’t belong to either of them.
“Of course, when it comes to decapitated heads, the police tend to be a bit pushy,” Craig said with a laugh, something Annja didn’t have any trouble believing.
The detective in charge had seen enough bog mummies to know the difference between a recent murder and one that had happened a few centuries before. He dumped the head in Craig’s lap, given his specialty in Iron Age Celtic cultures, in an effort to avoid as much paperwork as possible. Craig was more than happy to take care of the problem.
It had only taken a few days at the site before a second head turned up and that had been enough to get Oxford University to fund a small dig to see what else might be present. Annja had worked with Craig on a previous dig in Wales and he’d called to let her know that he was looking for a few experienced hands to help him out. Did she think she could make it?
It had been a while since she’d had the chance to work an actual dig. The cable television show she cohosted, Chasing History’s Monsters, had kept her incredibly busy for the past few months, rushing around the world to highlight one legend after another. As had her unofficial role as protector of the innocent and the bearer of the mystical sword that once belonged to Joan of Arc. A week or two with her hands in the mud doing honest-to-goodness science was just what she needed.
But when she’d called her producer, Doug Morrell, in New York to get the time off, he’d gone ballistic.
“Are you insane?” he cried when she finished laying out her request. “We’re talking decapitations, human sacrifices and bog mummies here! How can you think of leaving us out of it?”
Quite easily, she’d thought at the time, but she knew if she stiffed Doug now he’d only get even with her later. He’d saddle her with hours of editing work or, even worse, handle it himself. And if he did that, who knew what would show up in the middle of one of her episodes? She still hadn’t forgotten the bloody mechanical shark incident….
In the end, they’d cut a deal. The show would pay for her airfare and her expenses while on-site and in return she’d deliver enough material to put together a special double feature on bog mummies, druids and ancient Celtic culture. It was as good as she was going to get and she quickly got Doug off the phone before he decided the episode wouldn’t be complete without a full-scale reenactment of a druidic ritual, preferably with plenty of special effects and a well-endowed blonde as the sacrificial centerpiece. If it drove ratings, Doug was all for it, science be damned.
She’d landed at Heathrow the day before, headed to a hotel and slept off the jet lag. This morning she rose early and set out for the dig site in a rented Land Rover. The dig was pretty remote; it took her until early afternoon to reach the landing stage where the rest of the vehicles were parked and then another hour of hiking up and down a series of hills thick with birch groves before finding the camp on the far side, down near the edge of the bog.
Annja bumped into one of Craig’s graduate students, a curly-headed guy named Zeke, just after arriving at the site and Zeke had been kind enough to offer to let “Dr. Stevens” know she was here. While waiting, she spotted the heads through the open flap of a large canvas tent, like those used by army encampments the world over. She wandered in to take a look.
Up close she could see that each head was held upright in a frame of clear polymer, designed no doubt to protect the artifact while at the same time allowing the scientists to study all three dimensions at once. It was a clever piece of equipment, one she hadn’t seen before, and she was moving in for a closer look when a cheerful voice boomed out from behind her.
“At last, she arrives!”
Annja jumped in surprise; she’d been so intent on her examination of the heads that she hadn’t heard him come up behind her. Working with bog mummies was an entirely new and exciting experience for her.
Craig looked much as he did the last time she’d seen him—a bear of a man with a thick beard and a mop of unruly hair the color of pine sap. He towered over her at six and a half feet and she could have easily hidden behind his nearly three-hundred-pound body if she’d ever had the need to, but his imposing size was a complete contrast to his open and general ebullient nature.
“Now we can do some real work!” he said, a twinkle in his eyes, before crossing the space between them in that smooth gliding gait that always looked so out of character on such a large man. He wrapped her in one of his trademark hugs.
When he finally released her, and she double-checked her ribs to be certain they were all still intact, she couldn’t help but smile at him in return. One thing about working with Craig: his good humor was infectious.
“You’ve got an interesting interior decorator,” she said, nodding at the heads on the table behind her.
Her fellow archaeologist beamed. “Marvelous, aren’t they?” he said, and then stepped around her to squat in front of the center head.
“This was the first,” he said, “the one the police sent over. Isn’t it beautiful?”
His voice held a note of awe, the kind reserved for those who’ve just had some kind of religious epiphany or incredibly mind-blowing experience, and Annja almost laughed in response. She wasn’t sure that beautiful was a word she would ever use to describe a decapitated and mummified head, but it was certainly striking, she’d give him that. The victim, if that was indeed what he was, appeared to have been a male in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, with sharp cheekbones and a prominent nose. His skin had the look and appearance of well-tanned leather. His hair, still held in a ponytail with a short piece of braided rope, was a fiery orange, just short of red.
“It’s certainly something,” she replied. “I’m amazed at the level of preservation. I thought bogs were basically swamps.”
Craig nodded. “Yes and no. It depends on where they are in their development.”
He stood and faced her, doing his best to explain. “When moss dominates a low-lying section of land, the soil becomes waterlogged and acidic. Since bacteria have a difficult time surviving in such conditions, it isn’t present to break down the dead moss and other vegetation. Instead, the stuff just piles up and eventually becomes peat.”
Annja got the implication right away. “So the acidic nature of the water itself actually protects the body rather than destroying it. No bacteria means no decomposition.”
“Right,” Craig said, smiling. “And the tannins produced by the moss add an extra level of preservation, turning the skin to something like leather and keeping it from tearing in response to the pressure from above as the peat grows deeper.”
“Is that why their skin is so dark, because of the tannin?”
Craig nodded. “And why their hair is red, too.”
“You mean that lovely color isn’t natural?” she asked curiously.
“Not even close. In fact, I’m pretty sure all three of them were Romans, which means their hair was probably darker than either of ours.”
“Romans? Seriously?” She’d never heard of Romans being uncovered in a peat bog before.
“Yeah, I know, it’s unusual to say the least. But it’s hard to argue with the evidence. Here, look.” Moving to the head on the right, he reached out and turned the frame around, pointing at something on the back of the man’s skull.
At first Annja couldn’t figure out what it was, but after staring at it for a minute and mentally smoothing out the skin while doing so, she finally got it.
“It’s a tattoo, isn’t it?”
Craig’s eyes twinkled. “Yes, but a tattoo of what?”
Annja leaned in closer, trying to puzzle it out. “It’s an animal of some kind, I think. A dog, maybe? Or a wolf?”
“Close,” he replied. “Look at its mouth. See anything unusual?”
She peered at it harder, trying to sort out the details of the tattoo from the natural lines of the aged flesh. It looked like…
“Is that a tusk?” she asked without looking up.
“Right! Which makes that,” he said, pointing at the tattoo, “a wild boar.”
He beamed at her, as if the presence of the boar explained everything. But Annja wasn’t seeing the connection.
“Okay, so it’s a boar and not a wolf. So what? I still don’t see why that makes him a Roman rather than a Celt.”
Craig led her across the tent to where another table held two laptop computers and a combination printer/scanner. He sorted through a stack of papers next to one of the laptops until he found the page he was looking for and then handed it to Annja without a word.
She found herself looking at a scanned image of a battle standard photographed from a museum collection somewhere. She could even see the edge of the glass box in which it was housed. But what really caught her eye was the image of the charging boar that dominated the center of the standard. It was the exact same design that was tattooed on the back of the bog mummy’s head.
“XIV Gemina, or the Fourteenth Legion,” Craig said. “Under the command of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, it was ordered back to Britannia by the emperor in A.D. 67 to quell the Boudican rebellion.”
Boudica was the warrior queen of the Iceni clan, Annja knew. She’d inspired and led one of the largest uprisings against Roman rule in the history of the empire. The Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that she was “most tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce”—a description that made Annja smile the first time she’d read it. Annja’d been called fierce once or twice in her day, too.
She had to give Craig credit; it was a nice piece of detective work. But it raised more than a question or two in her mind. “I thought Boudica made her stand near Mancetter?” That was at least fifty miles south of where they now stood.
“She did. And that’s where the story ends for most historians. But there’s a small group, myself included, that believe a portion of her army escaped the battle that day and tried to make it to Anglesey by cutting overland across the moors. If they had, and if Paulinus pursued them as I believe that he did, then it’s not inconceivable that they met again in battle and that we’ve stumbled on evidence of that very encounter. If you examine—”
Craig’s explanation was cut short by the sound of running feet. He and Annja turned to face the entrance just as the flap was thrown open and Zeke stuck his head in through the opening.
“Dr. Stevens!” he cried, his voice full of excitement. “We’ve got another one!”
3
After delivering his message, Zeke turned and took off at a run back across the camp. Annja made as if to follow, but then hesitated. Given his size, there was no way Craig would be able to match the younger man’s pace.
He must have guessed what she was thinking, for he waved a hand at her in dismissal. “Go on! Quickly, before he’s out of sight. I’ll meet you at the excavation,” he said with a chuckle.
That was all she needed to hear. Annja was five feet ten inches tall, with chestnut hair and amber-green eyes. She had an athlete’s build, with smooth, rounded muscles and curves in all the right places, and it took her only a moment or two to sprint along until she had the eager grad student back in her sights.
She kept her eye on Zeke as he left the camp behind and moved at a quick pace through the trees for about a hundred yards, following a path worn into the earth from the passage of the dig team over the past several days. Ten minutes later Anna emerged from the trees to find herself standing on the gentle slope of a small hill, the dig site laid out before her.
The site was roughly half the size of a football field and was located in a hollow between several small hills like the one she stood on. There were two significant features that set this particular valley off from dozens of others in the nearby area. The first was a large rock cairn that had been erected at the base of the slope on which she stood, its stone face now overgrown with moss and lichen but still recognizable for what it had once been. The second was the skeletal remains of an ancient oak tree standing near the middle of the site, a jagged black scar of a lightning strike clearly visible even from a distance.
Although Craig’s team had only been here a short while, Annja could see that they’d been busy. A grid had been laid out on the valley floor in colored string, dividing the space into individual sections that Annja knew from experience were roughly two feet square. Work had begun in several sections, with the top layer of the peat removed, revealing the rich substrata beneath. Sifting stations had been set up beneath canopies to the right of the grid and there was a plethora of shovels, rakes and handheld trowels scattered about.
Most of the team was clustered around a single grid square, obviously the location of their most recent find. Annja made her way down the hill and across the dig site to join them.
The smell hit her as she moved closer, the unmistakable scent of scorched earth that accompanied a peat bog of any decent age. She resisted the urge to cover her nose; the human body only recognized an odor in the first few minutes of contact, after that it was as if it didn’t exist.
Two grad students were on their hands and knees near the corner of the grid, using hand tools to clear the debris away from the blackened face that was peeking out of the peat. While this one wasn’t as well preserved as the others, the similarities were still obvious. It was clear that the four men had the same ethnic background; the prominent nose and high cheekbones were as easy to see in this specimen as they were in the others. And like the others, this head had been severed and lay by itself in the peat that preserved it.
Who were they? Annja found herself wondering. And what happened to their bodies?
It was mysteries like these that had helped her fall in love with archaeology in the first place. She couldn’t wait to get her hands dirty.
Craig finally caught up with them then, his face red and his chest heaving from his hike through the woods, but it did nothing to stem his enthusiasm for what they’d uncovered. Being the excellent teacher that he was, Craig let his people continue unearthing the find, guiding them with encouraging comments here and there rather than taking control of the process for himself as Annja knew others she’d worked with in the past would have done. It was what made Craig such a good student of archaeology; he cared more about the artifact and what it could tell them than the academic reputation associated with whoever unearthed it.
For the next two hours Annja lost herself in the simple joy of doing what she loved, helping Craig and his students excavate the mummified head from the peat surrounding it and then carefully packing it into a foam-lined carrying case for transport back to the campsite for further examination. Several of the students recognized her from Chasing History’s Monsters and it wasn’t long before she was surrounded by a small group of her own, dispensing advice and stories of former digs just as Craig was doing with the others a few yards away. It was such a welcome relief from the recent craziness in her life that Annja found herself relaxing for the first time in weeks and enjoying the simple pleasure that came from doing something you loved in the presence of others who felt the same way.
By the time dusk fell over the campsite, Annja felt like she’d been working with the team for weeks.
“Not a bad first day, huh?” Craig asked her as they helped the others cover the site with tarps to protect it in case of rain later that evening.
“It was wonderful, Craig. Truly,” she said with a smile. “Thanks for inviting me.”
He grinned. “Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t tasted what passes for cooking around here.”
Once they were finished at the dig site, Annja was introduced to Sheila James, a fellow American, who gave her a tour of the camp, showed her the tent she’d be using for the duration and introduced her to some more of the students over dinner that night.
Worn out from the hard work and the lingering effects of the jet lag, she thanked them all for their hospitality and headed off to bed.
Annja found herself walking in the woods beneath the silvery light of a full moon, though she knew she was not herself. The hand at the end of her arm was decidedly male. She was part of a group of four warriors carrying the body of a fifth on a funeral bier made of wood, fashioned together with rope and vines. Around her came a host of others, warriors mainly, but some women were scattered amid the company here and there, as well—all of them moving through the trees in a long, snaking procession. Torches threw flickering light across the scene, highlighting the faces of those around her, revealing the geometric designs painted on their faces in blue woad—whirls and spirals and circles that interlinked and crossed one another so that it was difficult to discern where one ended and the next began.
The body on the bier was that of a tall warrior with long red hair. He was dressed as he’d been when he’d fallen on the battlefield, his tunic and mail stained with blood, both his own and that of his enemies. His arms were folded across his chest, his hands grasping the hilt of the sword that he’d carried into battle, the blade broken off halfway down its length.
Annja’s eyes were drawn to the necklace of gleaming black the dead man wore around his neck. It was made from a substance that she couldn’t identify, at least not from this distance, and it reacted to the light the same way an oil spill does, reflecting myriad colors back at the viewer. She felt the need to reach out and touch it….
The moonlight suddenly grew brighter, breaking her reverie, and she looked up as the group emerged from the trees into the open. They stood upon the crest of a hill that sloped gently downward until it met the edge of a wide marshland. A spit of land jutted out into the bog for a short distance and a white robed druid stood upon it, waiting for them. Behind him a massive oak tree rose out of the depths of the bog, its branches spread wide, forming a living canopy over that part of the swamp.
The procession descended the hill. When they reached the narrow spit of land, the rest of the group came to a halt while Annja and the other pallbearers continued forward. The druid directed them to place the bier on the ground at his feet. They did so and then, as a group, stepped off to one side to wait for further instructions.
The druid raised his hands to the sky and began to chant in a deep voice, his words rolling out across the night air. The words were spoken in a language Annja didn’t understand—Welsh or Gaelic or some derivative thereof—but she was familiar enough with ancient burial ceremonies that she knew the general gist of it. The druid was asking for the blessing of the four elements and calling upon the gods to look with favor upon the one they were committing into their care that night.
When the chant was finished, four male prisoners were led forward from the rear of the procession. They were naked and bound at the wrists with thick hemp ropes. Their movements were sluggish, their expressions unfocused, and it was clear to Annja that they’d been drugged.
She understood why a moment later, when the first of them was made to kneel at the edge of the bog with his head resting sideways on the stump of a tree Annja hadn’t noticed before now. The man’s eyes roamed over them, seeing but not seeing, and the real Annja breathed a sigh of relief when it was clear that he didn’t understand what was to come. As if on cue, the druid approached the prisoner, a gleaming sickle-shaped blade in his hands. There was another chant, this one much shorter in length, and then that blade rose and fell in one swift, sure motion.
The druid turned to face the procession, the Roman’s severed head held aloft by the tangle of its own hair, and at the sight of it a shout went up from the rest of the onlookers. Inhabiting a body not her own, Annja found herself shouting along with the rest of them.
The cry was repeated three times—a ritual response, Annja realized—and then the druid turned to face the dark waters at his back. Another prayer flowed forth, a request to Arawn, god of the underworld, to accept the blood offering they were making on behalf of their slain chieftain, most likely, and then the slain prisoner’s head was flung outward into the night.
Annja heard the splash as it hit the water and watched as the bog swiftly sucked it out of sight.
The first prisoner’s body was dragged away and the second victim was brought forward. The ceremony was repeated, and then twice more with the final two victims. The stink of blood filled Annja’s nostrils by the time the druid was finished, so thick that she could almost taste it on the back of her tongue.
At a sign from the druid, she and the other pallbearers hefted the bier back up again. Following the druid, they marched out into the bog.
Much to her surprise the bog did not swallow them whole. Her feet instead found the hard surfaces of stones laid just beneath the waterline, a hidden walkway extending out across the marsh to the base of the sacred oak. They carefully placed the bier under the tree’s sheltering boughs and returned to the shoreline.
Annja and the rest of the pallbearers rejoined the main procession, leaving the druid standing alone on the small strip of land where the ceremony had taken place. As she watched, the high priest raised his arms toward the heavens and shouted in a voice full of power.
In the sky above him, thunder raged and lightning cracked, answering his call as the funeral bier of the last of the Iceni chieftains sank toward the bog’s heart.
ANNJA AWOKE WITH a start. Lightning flashed, lighting up the sides of her tent for a moment before the darkness returned to smother the camp in its embrace.
Just a dream, she told herself. Just a dream.
But dream or not, it took a long time for her to fall back to sleep.
4
Annja rose the next morning with the dream still fresh in her mind, which was unusual for her. More often than not, she forgot her dreams upon waking, but something about this one stuck in the forefront of her mind and wouldn’t leave her alone. All through breakfast her mind worried at it, the way your tongue will worry a loose tooth.
It was as if her subconscious was trying to tell her something.
While the others were still finishing their food, she excused herself and made her way through the trees and down to the excavation. Once there, it only took a few seconds for her to understand why the dream was bothering her so much.
The location of the ceremony in her dream matched the location of the dig.
The bog, the rock cairn, even the remains of the massive oak tree were right where they’d been in her dream. A glance at the excavation grid showed her that the four heads had all been found in the same general locations as she’d seen the High Druid toss them in the dream.
Her dream, it seemed, had come to life.
Now hang on a minute, she told herself. Don’t get carried away. You saw the site yesterday; you spent several hours working right in the middle of it all. Is it any wonder that you saw it again in your dream?
Of course not.
She’d taken her excitement about the day in the field, her first in weeks, and carried it with her in her dreams that night.
That was it; it had to be.
Still she lingered, her eyes going again and again to the shell of the ancient oak rising in the middle of the peat. In her dream, someone important had been buried nearby.
Ignoring the voice of reason that was quietly protesting in the back of her mind, she grabbed a shovel from the pile of tools nearby and headed for the oak.
That’s where Craig found her ten minutes later. She’d eyeballed the distance from the tree as best she remembered it from her dream, telling herself she was crazy all the while but unwilling, or unable, to give it up without at least looking first. After all, she told herself, what harm could it do?
Craig, however, had a different opinion.
“Annja! What on earth are you doing?” he shouted in dismay when he saw the trench she had begun digging into the peat. “I can’t believe that you, of all people, are ignoring procedure like this! We haven’t photographed or measured that section of the site, and we’re not even close to being ready to begin excavations….”
Craig’s tirade suddenly fell silent. Annja followed his gaze to where he was staring at the ground a few inches from her left foot. A shout of triumph almost passed her lips when she saw what he was staring at.
A hand was thrust upward through the peat, as if reaching for the light of the sky above.
THERE WAS ROOM for three of them to work the find so Craig brought in Paolo Novick, a professor from the University of Turin and an expert on pre-Roman Gallic cultures, to help them. Most of the rest of the team gathered about to watch. Little by little, the peat was peeled away, exposing another inch of the man’s remains.
It took them almost four hours to bring the chieftain’s body into the light of day for the first time in millenia. Unlike the remains they’d uncovered to date, this one was completely intact. Everything from the shoes on his feet to the tunic he wore beneath his long coat of mail was in excellent condition, seemingly none the worse for wear after their years of submersion in the bog. Even the small piece of twine that bound his long red hair in a ponytail had survived.
A quick measurement put his height at seventy-four inches, and that was after the bog’s natural preservation process had shrunk the body slightly. In life, he’d probably been closer to six and a half feet tall, which Annja knew was a literal giant for that day and age. His size, combined with the massive knot of red hair that still hung from his skull, quickly earned him the nickname Big Red.
Photographs were taken, covering Big Red from every angle possible so that a record would be preserved of how and where he had been found before the laborious process of removing him from the peat could begin. The previous night’s thunderstorm had Craig worried that the weather would take a turn for the worse soon, however, and he didn’t want the body left exposed to the elements. The decision was made to cut a block out of the peat, body and all, and move that back to the camp where it could be studied and worked on at leisure, away from the potential damage the elements could inflict.
As Craig sent several members of the team back to the camp to organize the tools they would need to pull off their plan, Annja bent over the body with a set of hand tools. She was still shocked that Big Red had been there at all; she’d almost convinced herself that everything she’d seen in her dream had been just that, a dream. Obviously it had been something more. She wondered just what part Joan’s sword had played in it all. It wouldn’t be the first time its powers had surprised her, that was for sure.
Using a miniature pick and a small brush, she began to work at the peat still covering the front of Big Red’s throat. She remembered the strange gleaming necklace the chieftain had worn around his throat during the burial ceremony and wondered if that, too, had been real.
A chunk of peat cracked and fell away from the rest, partially revealing the gleaming surface of the tribanded necklace Big Red was wearing around his throat.
“What have you got?” Professor Novick asked from his position at her side.
“Looks like a necklace, maybe a torc of some kind,” she said, and leaned back to let him take a look.
He whistled at the sight of it. “What is that? Obsidian?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. It looks metallic to me. It seems too shiny but maybe it’s iron. We’ll have to wait until we can get him into the lab to examine it more closely.”
As the day wore on and the hard work of removing Big Red from his resting place got under way, Annja was forced to forget about the necklace and concentrate on the task at hand.
The damage, however, had already been done, though Annja didn’t know it.
The block they cut out of the peat reminded Annja of one of the stones used in the building of the pyramids; it looked that big. It was also heavy enough that they had to use two different winches to get it up out of the earth and into the front of the Bobcat they’d had brought up from London to serve as their transport vehicle. Once the peat slab was secured in place, the Bobcat made its way up the hill and down the path through the woods to the camp that part of the team had spent the afternoon clearing.
A new tent had been erected in their absence—a thick tarp rolled out in the center of the floor—and it was on this that the peat block was finally placed. Seeing Big Red’s body partially protruding from its surface reminded Annja of Star Wars; Han Solo encased in carbonite was far less interesting to her than this ancient Gallic warrior, however.
She, Craig and Paolo worked through the afternoon, slowly chipping away at the heavy peat surrounding Big Red’s body, freeing him inch by inch from the preserving matter. By the time they called it a night, the sun had long since set and many of the camp’s other residents had gone to bed.
As they were leaving, Craig pulled her aside.
“How’d you know?” he asked. “How did you know to dig there, of all places?”
She answered him as honestly as she could. “I saw it all in a dream.”
He laughed. “Right,” he said. “And I suppose tomorrow you’ll wake up and tell me you’ve discovered the location of Genghis Khan’s long-lost tomb.”
Annja smiled. “Nah. Been there, done that.”
The look of shocked surprise on his face was the perfect end to a perfect day.
5
Shortly after midnight a man slipped out of a tent in the middle of the camp and quietly made his way across the clearing to the tree line just beyond. At the edge of the woods he stopped and turned, looking back the way he’d come. He waited, one long moment, then another, watching, listening, making certain that no one had followed him.
Assured that he was unobserved and alone, the man disappeared into the woods, following a faint path through the trees until he reached the deadfall he’d selected as a landmark. There he turned and traveled for another hundred yards before stopping beside a huge boulder that had probably been there since the last ice age.
Again he paused, listening, sweeping the path behind him with his peripheral vision, searching for anyone who might be on his tail. While it was unlikely, it never hurt to be careful, and with something like this he didn’t want to be wrong.
Finally satisfied, he reached into a cleft in the rock and pulled out a satellite phone. Switching it on, he waited for it to power up and then dialed a number. When it was picked up on the other end, he said, “It’s Novick. I need to speak to him.”
There was a pause. Novick figured the man on the other end of the line was considering the wisdom of waking their joint employer at this hour of the night, and so he said, “It’s about the torc.”
That seemed to convince the other man, for he said, “Just a moment,” and put the receiver down.
Several minutes passed.
Finally Novick heard the phone on the other end being picked up.
“You have something for me?”
Novick swallowed the sudden hesitation he felt at the sound of that voice and answered him. “Yes. At the new site in the West Midlands. We found a body in the bog this morning, an Iceni warrior.”
“And?”
“And he was wearing a torc that fits the description of the one you’ve been seeking for the past several years.”
“You’re certain?”
“Absolutely.”
“What about the test?”
Sneaking into the artifact tent with the device in hand had been easy. “It was positive.”
There was a long silence as the other man considered the implications, then he said, “Very good. I will dispatch someone to meet you tomorrow afternoon.”
With thoughts of the reward money he’d been promised for finding the torc dancing in his head, Novick said that he understood and ended the call.
6
David Shaw rose the next morning with anticipation thrumming through his veins. He’d been searching for the Tear of the Gods for more than a decade. Many had scoffed at his dedication and focus. It’s just a legend, they’d told him. Nothing more than a myth, like the Holy Grail or King Arthur’s Excalibur. You’ll never find it because it doesn’t actually exist. But Shaw had believed differently and now, in less than twenty-four hours, he was going to be holding that so-called myth in his own two hands.
Shaw was in his mid-forties, with brown eyes and a sharp nose set in a narrow, aquiline face. The combination of his facial features and his shoulder-length dirty-blond hair often resulted in others mistaking him for the actor Sean Bean, a suggestion that Shaw would publicly chuckle over but which infuriated him to no end. That he could be mistaken for an actor, of all things, was an insult to all he’d worked to achieve since graduating from Oxford at the top of his class and founding the Vanguard Group.
To say Shaw was driven would make one guilty of a gross understatement. He had ambitions and dreams the likes of which not even his board of directors were aware and obtaining the Tear of the Gods was just the first step in a process he’d been planning for years.
After a leisurely breakfast he had his driver take him to the Vanguard offices. Several men were seated outside his office waiting for him, as he had known they would be. His executive assistant had sent word to them all the night before, requesting their presence in the office by nine this morning, and if there was one thing his people knew, it was not to disobey his orders.
Shaw pointed to one of them, a man named Trevor Jackson, and the former SAS commando and current Red Hand Defenders strike team leader followed him into his inner office, shutting the door behind them.
“I’ve got a job for you,” Shaw began as he took his seat behind his desk and waved Jackson into the chair before him. “A particular artifact was uncovered at an archaeological dig in the West Midlands last night. I want it.”
He handed the other man a thin folder. Inside were an assortment of documents, including aerial photographs and topographical maps of the surrounding area, dossiers on Stevens, Novick and other personnel they could expect to encounter at the dig site, as well as a snapshot of the torc that looked like it had been taken quickly with a cell phone.
“The photo was taken by my source on the ground,” Shaw explained. “It’s not perfect, but it should be good enough to let you verify it when you arrive on-site.”
Jackson glanced through the materials, lingering on the photograph. “What kind of opposition can we expect?” he asked.
“Little to none,” Shaw replied. “They’re a bunch of academics. Somebody might have a gun with which to shoot snakes, but that would be about it, I’d think.”
“So we go in, recover the necklace and get out again. Sounds simple enough.”
But Shaw was already shaking his head. “You need to take any steps necessary to ensure that no one knows the artifact was recovered from the site.”
Jackson had worked with Shaw long enough to know what the other man was talking about. “And the bodies?”
Shaw shrugged. “Dump them in the bog, for all I care. Just be sure there aren’t any survivors. I don’t want someone turning up at a later date to counter the official report.”
“What about your man on the inside?”
Shaw didn’t hesitate. “Get rid of him, too.”
“Fair enough,” Jackson said with a smile. “Consider the problem solved.”
WITH THAT TASK behind him, Shaw could turn to the other major item he had on his agenda for the day—informing the Committee about the discovery of the torc.
The Committee was a group of wealthy collectors that he’d put together slowly and carefully over the past several years. Each of them was interested in the discovery and acquisition of ancient artifacts for one of two reasons—either to add to their own personal collections or to sell them on the black market to the highest bidder in order to fund some other project or ideology. Shaw didn’t care which it was, provided he was paid on time and in the proper currency as agreed. Whenever Shaw found an item worthy of their consideration, he called a meeting of the group and presented it to them. A bidding war would usually ensue, with Shaw taking ten percent of the asking price plus expenses to cover the costs of acquisition.
There were five members of the Committee—six, if he considered himself. Conrad Helmut was a German financier with a gift for the international commodities exchange who saw the artifacts solely for their monetary value. He had no interest in the past, whether it was yesterday, last year or last century. He treated artifacts recovered from tombs untouched by human hands for more than four thousand years the same way he’d treat something picked up at a rummage sale. It was all just merchandise to him—something to be bought and sold but never desired.
Allison Brennan was the opposite extreme—a fanatic who made no bones about her intention to craft a truly legendary collection. She was always trying to get a leg up on the others, beat them to the choicest prices. Standing in her way was the Frenchman, Roux. Just thinking of the man brought a scowl to Shaw’s face. The arrogant bastard didn’t use a first name; it was always just Roux. As much as he disliked him, Shaw had to admit that Roux had access to some first-rate intelligence and had helped them find some choice items over the years.
Sebastian Kincade had inherited his fortune at the ripe old age of nineteen, when his parents had died unexpectedly in a car crash. He’d added to it through a series of almost breathtakingly audacious financial moves in the decade since. He was as ruthless as Genghis Khan himself and twice as greedy. Rumor had it that the accident that killed his parents hadn’t been an accident at all; Sebastian had supposedly wanted access to his part of the family fortune before dear old mom and dad were ready to give it to him.
The fifth, and final member of the Committee, Saito Yamada, owned one of the largest telecommunications entities in the Asian market and, like the others, was regularly listed as one of the top fifty most wealthy individuals in the world. Shaw knew that Yamada’s legitimate fortune was dwarfed by his illegal one; as one of the major yakuza bosses in all of Japan, Yamada had his hands in a lot of different pies. He didn’t buy all that often but when he did it was usually for big money.
It was going to be an interesting morning.
Shaw stepped over to his desk and settled into the high-back leather chair behind it. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was time for the meeting to begin. He purposely waited several more minutes before activating the videoconferencing link.
When the link was established, four windows opened on his monitor, each one showing the video feed from the four committee members who were on the line. Brennan, Roux, Helmut and Kincade stared out at him. Only Yamada was absent.
Four out of five’s good enough, he thought. Something so European probably wouldn’t have appealed to the yakuza boss, anyway.
Shaw put a smile on his face, activated his own camera and said, “It’s a pleasure to see you all again.”
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, each of the Committee members could see and hear Shaw through the conferencing link. Their identities were kept secret from one another, however. They could hear when others chose to speak, but they didn’t have access to the video feeds and could never be certain just how many others were on the call with them.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt, Shaw thought. The key to any successful sale.
Since the Committee was well aware that Shaw only scheduled meetings when there was an item in play, he got right down to business.
“Near the end of the first century, Rome nearly lost control of Britannia when a warrior queen named Boudica staged a revolt,” Shaw began. “Despite being outnumbered and underequipped, Boudica’s forces overwhelmed the Roman legions.
“Some say it was because she caught the Romans napping. Others, that she was a military genius the likes of which the Romans hadn’t ever encountered among the tribal Celts before or since. But there are those who believe that Boudica’s power came from an external source, a strange and unusual necklace, or torc, that she wore about her neck at all times.”
The Committee members had long since learned how to keep their emotions off their faces, but Shaw had been studying them carefully over the past several years and thought he’d identified some of their tells, those non-verbal cues that they couldn’t control when they were excited about something. Like the way Helmut’s right index finger would tap on the arm of his chair a few times before settling down again. Or the way Brennan would cross her legs in one direction, then quickly switch them to another position, as she was doing now.
“The Tear of the Gods, as it is known in certain circles, has been lost to history for almost two thousand years. Lost, that is, until today.”
He tapped a key and the photograph Novick had sent to him last night appeared on the screen in front of each of the callers. He left it there for only a few seconds—just a short, tantalizing tease—then sat back and waited for a reaction, knowing that he who spoke first ultimately ceded power to the others.
Brennan was the first to break the silence, as Shaw knew she would be. The chance to add something actually carried by one of Boudica’s chieftains, perhaps even by Boudica herself, was a prize too good to pass up for a woman who considered herself a modern-day warrior queen.
“It looks just like every other torc I’ve ever seen,” she said derisively. “What makes you think this is the—what did you call it? The Tear of the Gods?”
Shaw smiled. Her interest was so obvious. Did she honestly think she was fooling anyone with her feigned disbelief?
“The torc was found around the throat of a Celtic warrior who’d been ceremonially buried in a bog in the West Midlands region,” he told the group. “Four sacrificial victims surrounded the body, proof that the warrior was more than just an ordinary soldier or low-ranking chieftain, for such sacrifices required the presence of a druid, perhaps the High Druid himself, and would not be wasted on anyone less than the royal family or their close companions.”
Brennan frowned, apparently uneasy with Shaw’s quick answer. “But that still doesn’t prove that this is the torc you are claiming it to be,” she said stubbornly.
Shaw surprised her a second time by agreeing. “You’re correct. That alone is not proof enough. Which is why we turn to more, shall we say, personal sources?”
He pulled a book off his desk and held it up to the camera. “A copy of Tacitus’s Agricola, which I’m sure we will all agree is a reasonable source.”
Turning to a marked page, he began reading. “‘This necklace, or torc as it is known among the Britons, was fashioned of the most unusual metal, unlike any other I have seen in all my years. It gleamed in the darkness, as if lit by an internal fire, and in the light it reflected the many hues of the rainbow. It was neither gold nor silver, copper nor bronze, iron nor cold hard steel, but something new and different under the sun. Three bands it was made of, twisted about one another like the coils of a snake, though no wider than a man’s first two fingers at its thickest point.’”
Shaw snapped the book closed and looked at the group with a triumphant smile. “Given what we’ve seen today, I’d say that’s pretty conclusive, wouldn’t you?”
Roux caught Shaw’s attention with a quick lift of his finger. “You have the artifact in hand?” he asked.
Shaw lied without missing a beat, the smile still plastered on his face. “Of course,” he said. “It is being packed up for transport to my offices as we speak.”
The Frenchman looked skeptical, but sat back as if satisfied enough by the answer.
“Bidding will commence within the next forty-eight hours through the usual methods, with a minimum starting bid of ten million dollars. You will be notified via cell phone five minutes before the auction begins and bids will be accepted for just seventy-two hours.”
Shaw looked at each of them in turn, trying to gauge their reactions, to figure out just who would bid and who would not. Helmut was listening to someone offscreen, so Shaw took that as a lack of interest in this particular piece, but he was pretty sure that both Brennan and Kincade were in. Brennan for sure, he thought. Roux, on the other hand, was as inscrutable as always.
It didn’t really matter, though. The auction was just a front to raise some extra cash for the final phase of his plan. He had no intention of turning over the torc; if the legends were right, it would be far more useful to the Red Hand Defenders and his ultimate cause if it remained in his possession. By the time the winning bidder realized that he, or she, had been had, he’d be long gone with both the money and the torc. Shortly after that, England, and the world itself, would have far more pressing issues to concern themselves with.
After reminding them that they’d only have seventy-two hours to cast their bids once the auction began, Shaw wrapped things up and ended the call, a smile of satisfaction on his face.
WITH THE CLICK of his mouse, Roux ended the videoconferencing session, but left the tunneling program he’d activated while in the middle of the call running in the background. That particular piece of software had cost him a small fortune, but it had been worth every penny he’d spent on it so far. By creating a virtual private network between the two computers via the videoconferencing link, it turned the other computer’s microphone into a two-way listening device. The connection would be severed when Shaw turned off his monitor, but until then, Roux was privy to everything being said inside Shaw’s London office.
He’d first begun spying on Shaw to get a leg up on the various artifacts and items of interest that he uncovered. The man was a cretin, no doubt about it, but he had an uncanny sense for locating some truly unique treasures and Roux wasn’t shy about using that to his advantage. Lately, however, he’d begun to suspect that Shaw was involved in something darker than illegal artifact smuggling. There was something there, just beneath the surface, like a shark in blood-infested waters, and Roux was determined to expose it to the light.
Hence, the eavesdropping worm.
So far, though, it had yielded little in the way of worthwhile results. He’d caught a few snatches of conversation here and there, but nothing that helped him narrow down what Shaw’s overall plans were or the true nature of whatever it was he was involved in. The minute Shaw shut down his monitor, the bug went inactive, so its use was by nature limited.
Today was one of those days. Roux could hear Shaw shuffling things around on his desk, heard the snap of a briefcase lid closing down and then nothing more as the monitor was switched off on the other side.
But after living through the centuries, Roux had learned to be patient. Shaw would let something slip one of these days, and when that happened Roux would be ready for it.
7
While Craig and Paolo got back to work the next morning excavating Big Red from the midst of the block of peat they’d cut from the bog, Annja turned her attention to the necklace that she’d removed from around the warrior’s neck the night before. The artifact had been soaking in a chemical bath overnight and she went directly to it after breakfast, removing it from the solution and washing it under a gentle flow of cold water. Slowly, bit by bit, the dirt, silt and hardened peat that had encrusted it began to fall away, revealing the artifact to the light of day for the first time in almost two thousand years.
It was a torc; she’d been right about that. The braided strands of metal were easy to see now that the gunk had been cleared away. What struck her as strange, however, was the fact that this one hadn’t been fashioned from gold, as almost every other one she’d ever seen had. Rather, this one was made from some kind of darker metal that threw off a scintillating array of colors when the light was shined on it just so. She’d thought it might be iron at first, but closer examination revealed that it was much too refined for that.
Perhaps a combination of various metals?
There really was no way to tell until they had a chance to get a sample of it into a gas spectrometer to analyze the component elements. And that wouldn’t happen until they got the necklace back to Craig’s lab at Oxford. For now, she’d just have to wonder.
Annja didn’t know all that much about torcs; Iron Age civilizations hadn’t ever really been her specialty. That was one of the reasons she was so excited to be taking part in this excavation. The chance to break ground, literally, on a new site coupled with the opportunity to learn more about a period of history she wasn’t all that familiar with was like winning the lottery for her. She did know that, in general, the wearing of a torc was usually a sign of nobility or high social status. The time and cost in creating them almost made it so by default. That fit with the events she’d witnessed, if she could call it that, in her dream from the other night. Big Red had clearly been a warrior of some renown; otherwise, they never would have had such an elaborate burial ceremony. But exactly who he was or why he’d been honored in such a fashion might never be known. It was up to Annja and the rest of the team to try to answer those questions, and others like them, as they worked with the body and the artifacts that had been buried with it.
As the cleaning continued, Annja noticed that each end of the torc was adorned with a small sculpture in the shape of an eagle’s head. The ornaments were made from a hard white substance, perhaps bone or even ivory, and it looked as if the beaks once fit together in a certain way to form a clasp that kept the torc secured around the wearer’s neck. Annja marveled at the design; it was quite ingenious.
They broke reluctantly for lunch and were back at it again within the hour. More artifacts were turning up as Craig and Paolo continued the slow but steady process of freeing Big Red’s earthly remains from the peat that surrounded them. A beaded necklace was first, followed by a pair of chain-mail gauntlets and an assortment of coins, their faces blackened from the tannic acid of the bog. As each one was unearthed, they were passed over to Annja for cataloging and cleaning.
Throughout it all, Craig and Paolo shared with Annja stories of prior digs they’d been on and she, in turn, told them about some of the remote places and legends the cable show had sent her to investigate. It was a companionable afternoon and Annja thoroughly enjoyed herself.
Late in the day they heard several shouts coming from the center of camp. The occasional raised voice was common in camp—friends shouting after friends, that kind of thing—but this went on for several minutes, which was unusual and caught their attention.
Craig frowned, then got up from his stool, setting the tools he’d been working with down on the table in front of him. “What’s the heck’s going on out there?” he said, though it was clear he wasn’t expecting an answer from either Paolo or Annja.
He crossed the tent and disappeared through the flap, apparently intent on finding out. Paolo followed him a moment later.
Annja ignored the interruption and kept working, at least for a few minutes. But when the others didn’t return, she began to get worried. The sense that something was seriously wrong stole over her, like a chill wind blowing through an open door, and she shivered in response. The shouting had stopped, but the silence that had replaced it only made her more concerned.
Something was clearly wrong.
She could feel it in her bones, like that sense of unease just before a sharp summer storm.
Annja stepped away from the worktable, intending to go and see what was happening for herself, when her gaze fell upon the torc. Something told her that leaving it behind would be asking for trouble, so she snatched it up and slipped it into her pocket before leaving the tent. On any other day she would have been appalled to treat an artifact so cavalierly, but she was somehow convinced that it was the right thing to do.
She could always put it back afterward, if it turned out to be nothing.
She drew back the flap of the tent, intending to step outside, but stopped short when a man with a pistol in hand stepped into view, leading two of the dig workers forward at gunpoint. They were headed for the center of camp, just as Craig and Paolo had done, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there was probably more than one of the intruders in camp at that very moment. That realization kept her from immediately going to her coworkers aid; she didn’t want to draw attention to herself until she knew exactly what was going on.
She waited for them to move out of sight, then slipped out and looked around. There didn’t seem to be anyone else about. Even if she hadn’t seen the gunman, that in itself would have been unusual. People were always moving about the camp. Now that she was outside and the tent walls were no longer acting as a sound baffle, she could hear several angry voices coming from the center of the camp. She cautiously made her way in that direction, slipping in and out between the tents rather than walking openly down the main path. As she drew closer to the center of camp, she crouched down beside one of the tents and peered around the corner.
From where she crouched she could see that most of the dig team had been herded into the open area in front of the mess tent. Craig stood alone in front of the group, facing a bearded man in dark fatigues who was pointing a pistol at Craig’s head. Behind the newcomer were several more men, all dressed the same way and all holding firearms of their own, pointing them indiscriminately at the rest of the dig team. Annja recognized the guns as MP-5s, the stubby machine pistols that in recent years had become the weapons of choice for more than a few special-operations units across the world. They were effective little things, capable of firing eight hundred rounds per minute on full auto.
If the armed men opened fire, the archaeologists would be cut down in seconds.
Craig glared at the men in front of him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
The leader looked past Craig as if he didn’t matter and addressed his words to the rest of the dig team huddled behind him. “I’m looking for a necklace. A black one. Surrender it now and there won’t be any trouble.”
Annja couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How did they know about the torc? Craig hadn’t even reported it to the trustees from Oxford overseeing the dig yet, never mind to anyone else.
Craig stepped forward, causing the gunman to turn his attention back to him rather than the others.
“I don’t know what anyone has told you, but we haven’t uncovered anything of value here. There’s no gold. No treasure. Certainly nothing to make you rich.”
The man laughed. “I want the torc,” he said. “We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way. I don’t really care. Now where is it?”
There was a look in the gunman’s eyes that Annja didn’t like. Almost as if he was eager for a confrontation.
Tell him, Craig, Annja thought. Tell him what he wants to know.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Craig replied.
The man shrugged. “That’s too bad,” he said.
Then he pulled the trigger.
The shot took Craig in the forehead, knocking him over backward to the ground. He was dead before the sound of the gunshot had finished echoing over the campsite.
Silence fell as the rest of the dig team stared in stunned horror at the body in front of them.
The gunman seemed to drink in their fear and terror like a fine wine. A slow smile spilled across his face as he watched them stare at the dead body in front of them and then, almost casually, he said, “Okay. Now that we’ve established that I’m not screwing around, I’ll ask again. Where is the torc?”
The need to charge out and avenge her friend screamed through Annja’s bones, but she fought the urge back down, knowing that to do so right now would be tantamount to suicide. Running out into the open and confronting the mercenary leader—for that is what she guessed them to be, mercenaries—would only get her killed. That would serve no one, least of all the people she needed to help. If she was going to get the rest of the team out of this alive, the next few minutes were crucial. She would need all her wits about her if she was going to succeed.
She slipped slowly backward until she was out of sight behind the nearest tent and then reached into the otherwhere, summoning her sword to hand. It slid smoothly into existence, appearing with the speed of thought, fully formed and ready for use, the hilt fitting her palm as if it had been made for her and her alone.
Sometimes she even thought that it had.
Her life hadn’t been the same since that fateful day when she’d brought the broken, scattered pieces of the sword together again for the first time since their original owner, Joan of Arc, had been burned at the stake centuries earlier. The sword had miraculously reformed in a flash of power right before her very eyes and, in some strange way she still didn’t quite understand, had chosen her to be its next bearer.
The role came with its own unique set of responsibilities, protecting the innocent seemingly first and foremost among them. Her own innate sense of justice seemed amplified when she carried the sword and she’d found herself forced into any number of situations that others would have simply walked away from as a result. Numbers didn’t matter, nor did the odds, only that she acted whenever possible to defend those who couldn’t defend themselves.
Like now.
Craig’s death made the intentions of the intruders quite clear. There was no way they were going to let the other dig workers live after witnessing Craig being killed in cold blood. That meant it was up to Annja to get them out of this alive.
Despite knowing that they would never get there in time, Annja pulled out her BlackBerry with her free hand and placed an emergency call to the regional police. She told the sergeant who answered her name and that the archaeological dig just north of Arkholme was under attack by armed insurgents. When he began to ask questions she hung up. She didn’t have time to sit there and chat with him; people’s lives hung in the balance.
As she slipped the phone back into her pocket, her fingers touched the torc. Something told her that it wouldn’t be safe there; if she was caught, her captors would find it in seconds. She took it out of her pocket and slipped it inside her sports bra instead. That way, at least it would pass a casual search.
Then she took a moment to consider her next move.
Clearly she couldn’t take them all on at once. But if she could even up the odds a bit, she’d have a better chance of succeeding in the end.
With that in mind, she faded back into the shadows, waiting for her chance at vengeance.
8
The gunman ordered his men to herd the rest of the dig workers into the mess tent behind them, and as they began doing so, Annja slipped around behind it and found a place to crouch down out of sight near one of the windows. From this position she could see and hear most of what was going on inside the tent, while potentially being ready to do something to help if an opportunity presented herself.
The lead mercenary stood facing the group, his gun still in hand.
“Where is Professor Novick?” he asked.
No one would look at one another, for fear of giving Novick away. They had seen what had happened to Dr. Stevens; it didn’t take too much imagination to figure out what was likely to happen to Paolo.
For a moment, Annja didn’t see him and she began to hope that he had slipped away in the initial confusion, but it was not to be.
“I am Novick,” a man said from the back of the crowd and Annja watched as Paolo stepped forward.
“You,” the man said, pointing at Novick, “come with me.” He turned and faced the two guards who had entered the tent with him. “If they try to escape,” he said, nodding back over his shoulder at the prisoners, “kill them.”
Paolo and the mercenary leader walked out of the tent, leaving the entire workforce guarded by only two men.
This was her chance.
Annja slipped over to the corner of the tent and peered around it. From where she crouched she could see other guards moving around the camp, hunting through the tents, apparently searching for the torc. She thanked her intuition for making her grab it at the last moment; at least that would keep it out of their hands for now.
If she didn’t call undue attention to herself, she should be able to make it to the entrance and slip inside the tent without anyone on the outside being any wiser.
Taking a deep breath to calm herself, she released her sword back into the otherwhere and did just that.
The guards had their backs to her as she strode inside. They were having too much fun terrorizing the dig crew, particularly the female students, and Annja was able to cross most of the distance to them before one of her fellow coworkers called out her name in surprise upon seeing her approach.
“Annja!”
The guards whirled around, reaching for the guns they’d let hang free on the straps around their necks, but Annja was much too fast for them.
Her right leg was already coming up in a perfectly executed crescent kick that caught the first guard across the side of the head, driving him to the floor.
She didn’t let that stop her, though, using the momentum of the kick to spin herself around one hundred and eighty degrees, delivering a stunning hammer fist to the other guard’s face and then, when the blow momentarily stunned him, grabbed either side of his head in her hands and pulled it down toward her rapidly rising knee.
As he fell Annja was already turning back in the other direction. She’d seen the first guard trying to get back on his feet and she lashed out with a powerful side kick that knocked him into unconsciousness like his partner.
The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.
Annja didn’t give the others time to think about what had just happened.
“Quickly, this way,” she said, rushing over to the rear wall of the tent. She snatched a knife off a nearby table and thrust it through the canvas, ripping downward with all her strength as she did so to create a big gash in the fabric.
“Run for the woods and get as far away as you can,” she said to the others.
“What about Dr. Novick?” one of the men asked.
“I’ll get him. Right now you have to get as far away from here as you possibly can. When you’re free, call the territorial police. Hurry now!”
As they began to file out one at a time into the growing darkness at the rear of the tent, Annja headed in the opposite direction. If they were going to have any chance of getting away, she had to create a diversion, something to keep the gunmen occupied. And she knew just how she was going to do it. She summoned her sword.
As she drew closer to the entrance to the tent, the flap was suddenly pulled back and Annja found herself staring down the barrel of the gun held in the lead mercenary’s hand.
She didn’t stop to think, didn’t look where she was going or what she might land on, just reacted on instinct and threw herself to the side.
He pulled the trigger.
The bullet that should have killed her merely grazed her instead.
It was enough to save her life, but not enough to keep her conscious.
The darkness claimed her before she even hit the ground.
9
Trevor Jackson was furious.
They’d been searching the camp for over fifteen minutes and still hadn’t located the necklace that he’d been sent to find. Perhaps he’d been a little too hasty in dealing with the prisoners, especially their inside guy, Novick.
The professor had led them to the tent containing the bog mummy and the artifacts that had been found alongside it, but the torc wasn’t there. Novick had sputtered in surprise, putting on a good act, but Jackson hadn’t believed a word he’d said. When the man wouldn’t reveal the location of the necklace, Jackson had grown impatient and put a bullet through his skull, figuring he didn’t need the man and that he’d simply find it himself.
Now he was starting to regret that decision.
With Novick dead, Jackson focused his attention on the other prisoners, fully expecting one of them to tell him what he wanted to know. It only took a few minutes for him to realize that there was a problem, however; they really didn’t know anything. The majority of them had spent the day down at the dig site and had only been rounded up when he and his men had shown up and forced them back to camp at gunpoint. Those who’d been in camp all morning said the same thing Novick had—the torc should be with the rest of the artifacts in the main tent.
Jackson had never been a patient man and at that point his day’s supply exhausted itself. “Get rid of them,” he’d told his men, and walked out of the tent where they were holding the prisoners just as the chorus of gunfire started at his back.
Now he stood in the center of camp, weighing his options. Shaw would be expecting him to report in shortly and Jackson didn’t want to do that without having the torc in hand. Shaw was a harsh taskmaster; admitting he’d failed to secure the necklace might have some unhealthy consequences. No, the best thing to do was to hold off on making the call until he had the stupid thing in hand.
That would be better for all involved.
“Sir, I think we’ve got a problem.”
The sound of the man’s voice pulled Jackson out of his reverie. He turned to find one of his men standing nearby, extending a cell phone toward him. He took it, noting as he did that it was a recent-model BlackBerry much like his own, and then glanced at the screen. The number displayed there, the last number the phone’s owner had apparently dialed, was the emergency line for the regional police.
His man was right; this complicated things considerably.
Jackson checked the phone’s log and noted that the call had gone through about twenty minutes earlier. He guessed the phone belonged to the chick with the sword; the call had been right before she’d done her best to throw a wrench in his entire operation and it made sense that she’d have tried to get help before moving to stop them on her own.
He wondered what she’d said. She hadn’t been on the phone very long; the call had lasted less than a minute according to the log. How much information could a person relay to another in less than a minute? Had she had time to give the police their descriptions? Had she told them what they were looking for?
He didn’t know. That meant he had to treat it like a worst-case scenario and go from there, hoping that he covered all the bases.
With that in mind, he considered what he knew about the regional police force’s procedures in a situation like this. Their most likely response would be to do a quick flyby, probably via helicopter, to determine the reliability of the report itself as well as to assess the situation on the ground. If the flight crew deemed it necessary, a ground team would be sent in to investigate further.
The nearest airfield was more than fifty miles away. The report would have taken time to filter up through the channels as the initial responder tried to decide if it was an actual call for help or some crazy teenagers trying to have some fun. Since the call had come in on the emergency line, the origin point would have been automatically plotted and logged on the response board. It wouldn’t have taken long for the duty officer to note that the call was coming from the middle of nowhere, increasing the likelihood that it was authentic. Their inability to get the caller back on the line would have tipped the scales that much further into the “believable” column and a response team would eventually have been dispatched to check things out.
From the time of the call to the point where the response team’s transportation went wheels-up at the airfield would probably be fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, at most. Flight time was roughly another fifteen minutes, depending on course and airspeed, Jackson reasoned, so call it a good half hour, maybe forty minutes before they’d be over the site.
That meant they had anywhere between ten and twenty minutes left before company arrived.
Plenty of time, he thought.
He ordered several of his men to gather up the bodies of those who’d been killed when they’d first arrived and to dump them in the mess tent with the others. Three men were stationed inside the tent with orders not to open fire, no matter what happened, unless it seemed evident that they had no other choice in order to avoid discovery. Others were told to spread themselves out about the camp and to look busy. When the first response team arrived, Jackson intended to pass them off as the camp’s legitimate personnel. All they had to do was convince the flyboys that everything was A-okay and they’d buy all the time they needed to finish up what they’d come here to accomplish. It was already late in the day; no one wanted to dispatch a ground team at night if they could help it and the recommendation would be to wait until morning if there wasn’t clear evidence of a problem on the ground.
Jackson had every intention of showing them that things were just fine and dandy.
No sooner had they finished policing the camp and making certain the bodies were all out of sight than the sound of the approaching helicopter echoed through the trees toward them. Jackson stepped out into the open space at the center of the camp and waited for them to come into sight.
It didn’t take long.
The chopper was a small, two-man unit, the kind of thing he could knock out of the sky with a few well-placed shots from the pistol he carried at his hip. He restrained himself from doing so, though, smiling up at them instead and waving with one hand as he used the other to shield his brow. They circled the camp once, then again, before coming back to hover a hundred yards or so above him.
The downdraft from their rotors was stirring up dust and starting to pull at the canvas of the nearby tents, so Jackson began waving them off, figuring that’s what any good camp administrator would do.
To his surprise, it worked. The pilot gave him a thumbs-up sign and then quickly gained altitude before heading back in the direction they had come.
Leaving the inmates in charge of the asylum, Jackson thought with a grin. With the immediate threat taken care of, he and his men would have all the time they needed to dispose of the bodies and find that damned necklace.
SEVERAL HOURS LATER Jackson found himself standing in the foyer of Shaw’s private estate, waiting for an audience with his employer. He’d been working for Shaw long enough to know that while he disliked incompetence, he hated those who shirked personal responsibility even more. Jackson stood a better chance of coming through this alive if he delivered his report in person, as backward as that might seem.
Surviving the next fifteen minutes was something he very much wanted to do.
Motion at the head of the stairs caught his attention and he stood straighter as he saw his employer come into sight. Shaw was still dressed; that was a good sign. That meant Jackson hadn’t had the misfortune of waking him from one of his infrequent periods of sleep. In the back of his head, Jackson rated his chances of getting through this five percent higher than he had a moment before.
But only five.
“Do you have my property, Mr. Jackson?” Shaw asked as he descended the stairs.
Nothing to do to play it straight.
“No, sir.”
That obviously wasn’t the answer Shaw had been expecting to hear. Jackson watched as a series of expressions crossed the other man’s face, everything from surprise to distaste, but thankfully outright anger wasn’t yet one of them.
Knock that percentage up a few more notches.
“Pray tell me why not,” Shaw said. His tone had gotten noticeably colder.
Like the good soldier that he was, Jackson laid out the events of earlier that evening in clear, concise sentences. Shaw didn’t say a word until Jackson got to the part about the woman and the sword.
“She actually attacked you with a sword?” he asked, though Jackson couldn’t tell if that was because Shaw didn’t believe him or if he found the whole situation as weird as it sounded.
Settling on the latter, Jackson replied. “Yes, sir. While I’m no expert on medieval weaponry, if I had to hazard a guess I’d say it was an English long sword. Perhaps something they uncovered in the dig?”
Shaw waved the question aside.
“What did you do with this woman?” Shaw asked.
“I shot her, sir.”
“Dead?”
Jackson thought about the way the woman’s body had flopped when they’d tossed it into the bog with the rest of them. “Yes, sir.” Though, now that he thought about it, he didn’t know what had happened to the sword.
“A pity. Might have been an interesting conversation there. Go on.”
Jackson explained how they’d tricked the team that had responded to the call for help, after which they searched both the camp and the bodies of the dead, but had been unable to find the torc anywhere. “Perhaps they packed it up and sent it back to Oxford before we arrived?” he ventured, looking for some reason, some excuse, why he was standing there empty-handed. He was not a man accustomed to failure and he particularly didn’t like the way that this assignment had turned out. It was always the easy ones….
“Give me your assessment of the police response,” Shaw ordered.
Jackson was prepared for the question and didn’t hesitate. “They have to send a team out to the site in the morning, sir. It’s standard operating procedure. They would have done so tonight if they’d had anyone reasonably close. The fact that the site is in the middle of nowhere played to our advantage.”
His employer considered his assessment for a moment and then nodded. “I want you on the ground with that regional police unit when it arrives in the morning. If the torc turns up, I expect you to do what is necessary to recover it. Are we clear?”
Jackson nodded. There was a reason he knew so much about the regional police; he’d been on the active duty roster for the past seven years, ever since mustering out of the regiment. He’d expected Shaw to give that very order and had already made sure that he’d be assigned to the duty in the morning. With dawn only a few hours away, it meant even less sleep than he’d expected to get, but beggars can’t be choosy. He was just happy to have escaped his employer’s wrath.
“I want that torc, Mr. Jackson.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Good enough.” Shaw turned and headed back up the stairs, but stopped before he’d gotten more than a few steps away. He turned to face Jackson once more.
“This woman, the one with the sword. Do we know who she was?”
Jackson nodded. “An American archaeologist named Annja Creed.” He took a photo out of the file folder in his hands and passed it to Shaw. The picture had been taken on-site and showed Annja’s still and bloody face.
The other man stared at it for a few seconds, then passed it back.
“She was a pretty thing, wasn’t she?”
10
Annja came to with a start.
She was on her back, staring up into the sky. Light was just starting to peek over the horizon, which meant she been out for several hours, maybe more. Her head hurt something fierce and when she tried to move it she was nearly overwhelmed with a wave of dizziness that threatened to return her to the darkness from which she’d just come. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and fought it off.
The ground beneath her rolled gently, reminding her of how it felt to drift on an inflatable raft in a swimming pool, but in her pain and confusion she didn’t pay it any mind.
Until she tried to sit up.
She put her hands down flat on either side, barely registering the cold, clammy feel of whatever she’d placed them upon, and tried to lever herself into an upright position. When she did, the surface she was laying on shifted dramatically beneath her, tilting to one side and dumping her face-first into a thick pool of muck.
In her surprise she panicked, flailing her limbs, feeling the muck pulling at her, dragging her down, but then her feet hit the bottom and she realized she wouldn’t drown if she could just get control of herself.
She stopped thrashing, planted her feet firmly beneath her and stood up straight, bringing her head back above the surface. She gasped in a lungful of air and then breathed a sigh of relief when she realized that the muck only came to her waist.
Her relief was short-lived, however.
As she looked around, the dim morning light revealed that she was standing in the middle of an active bog, surrounded by the partially submerged corpses of her former colleagues!
What had happened the night before came rushing back—the sudden appearance of armed intruders at the dig site, the demands to surrender the torc, the deadly gunfire when the archaeologists had refused to do as requested and her own struggle to get as many of her fellow scholars to safety in spite of it all.
The last thing she remembered was staring down the barrel of a gun and her last-ditch effort to get out of the way of the bullet….
Her head throbbed, a not-so-subtle reminder that she apparently hadn’t moved quickly enough.
She brought a hand up toward the side of her head, wanting to know just how bad the wound might be, but stopped herself when she saw the thick coating the peat bog had left on her limbs. There was already enough of it dripping from her head; rubbing it deeper into an open wound didn’t seem like a bright idea.
Despite the early hour, it was already light enough for Annja to see the bullet wounds and dark splotches of blood that stained the bodies around her. These weren’t strangers; she recognized several of them. She recognized Paolo Novick from his curly gray hair. The bright yellow of an NAU sweatshirt identified another body as that of Sheila James, one of the graduate students who’d come overseas just last week. There was Matthew Blake and Dalton Ribisi and… She turned away, shaking off the feeling of despair that threatened to overwhelm her. Several of the dead lay with their eyes open, staring into nothingness, and Annja had the sudden urge to reach out and close them, pulling the blinds on the windows of the souls that had long since fled.
Knowing how close she’d come to her own death, and seeing the deaths of others she cared about, set a red-hot fire burning in her veins.
A careful look around showed her that the shortest route to solid ground was directly behind her, where thick tufts of grass were growing along the bank. But when she tried to move in that direction, she discovered a new problem.
Her feet had sunk into the thicker silt at the bottom of the bog and were now trapped.
Visions of being sucked down beneath the surface swam in her mind and caused her to try pulling her feet free with brute force, yanking upward first on one and then the other. Rather than loosening the bog’s hold, however, all her actions managed to do was to get her feet to sink deeper.
She was stuck.
Annja opened her mouth, intending to call out, to see if there was anyone close enough to help. Surely someone else had survived the brutal attack. But then she thought better of it. While other survivors might be within earshot, so, too, might the very men who had slaughtered her friends. Calling attention to herself while she was trapped would just make her a target.
One that would be almost impossible to miss.
She was going to have to get out of this on her own.
Taking a deep breath to calm her already frayed nerves, Annja considered the situation. She knew she had to work with the bog’s natural qualities rather than against them, if she hoped to get out of this alive.
She slowly began to wiggle her left foot, gently rocking it back and forth. Each time she did so it let a little more of the water within the bog slide between her foot and the thicker particles of peat that kept it trapped. Gradually she was able to loosen the bog’s hold on her foot.
With one foot floating free she reached out and grabbed hold of the nearest corpse, using it to maintain her balance while she began to work on the other leg. The body was that of a blonde woman dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, though Annja made a point of avoiding looking at her face, afraid of seeing the face of another friend. Her efforts pushed the corpse a little deeper into the bog, but it maintained enough natural buoyancy that she could still use it to support herself despite that fact that it was now mostly underwater.
After several minutes she was able to work her other foot loose enough that she could lift it when the time came.
With her feet free, she had to fight the urge to lean forward, to power through the muck with big strokes of her strong arms, for she knew that doing so was exactly the wrong thing to do and would only leave her trapped again, perhaps in an even more precarious position. She knew the surface of the bog would support her if she let it; the corpses floating around her were proof of that. With that in mind she leaned backward instead of forward, letting her head and upper back come in contact with the surface of the bog. When she felt its chill wetness lapping at her skin, she lifted her legs and spread her arms wide, allowing the bog to bear her weight.
It worked!
She floated on the surface and if she’d held still an observer wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between her and any of the other dozen corpses surrounding her.
So far, so good. Now comes the hard part, she thought.
Solid ground was only fifteen, maybe twenty feet away, but if she moved too quickly she’d sink and wind up trapped all over again.
Slow and steady wins the race, she told herself.
Using the nearest corpse as a lever, she pushed it firmly toward her feet. The act sent her own body gliding across the surface of the water, taking her a foot or two closer to the bank and what she hoped was solid ground.
Little by little, she made her way to safety.
When the water beneath her grew so shallow that she was having a hard time keeping her feet up, she rolled over and discovered that the bank was less than an arm’s length away. Letting her feet down beneath her, she stood cautiously.
The bog immediately tried to tighten its grip.
This time she was ready for it. Rather than fight it, she simply let herself topple forward like a downed tree. Her upper body easily reached the bank. Sinking her fingers into the thick grass she found there, she pulled herself up onto firm ground and crawled away from the bog’s edge on hands and knees.
Once she had her heart rate under control, she sat back on her haunches and thought about her next move. The sun was up now, its thin light breaking through the trees around her, and by its height she estimated that it was somewhere around 6:00 or 7:00 a.m., which meant that it had been at least that many hours since the attack had occurred. She had no idea if the killers remained at the camp or if they had fled once their job here was done, but it didn’t matter either way. There were things she wanted at the camp and that was where she needed to go.
She stood and did what she could to wipe off the worst of the muck from the bog, which wasn’t much. She purposely left the wound on her head alone; no sense messing with it until she had some way of cleaning it properly.
When she finished, she reached inside her sports bra and retrieved the torc from where she’d stashed it the night before. She had a bit of a bruise from where it had pressed against her tender flesh, but the torc itself was no worse for the wear. Not that she’d expected it to be; it had already survived a couple of thousand years in the bog.
Still, she was relieved that the killers hadn’t found it. With it in hand, her chances of discovering what this was all about, as well as who was behind it all, went up considerably.
It also told her that the killers, whoever they’d been, made mistakes. The bodies should have been searched before being dumped into the bog. If they had been, those doing the searching hadn’t been very thorough at all.
Not that she was complaining. A proper search would have shown them that she was still alive, so their poor effort had actually saved her life.
She stuffed the torc back into its hiding place and spent a few minutes searching through the tall grass at the edge of the bog until she found the trail the killers had used to get there. The added weight of the bodies they’d carried had pushed their footsteps deep into the soil and it was an easy matter to follow them back through the woods in the direction of camp.
It was cold and she was wet—not a good combination. Her first order of business was going to be dry clothes. After that she would figure out a more solid game plan. The authorities had to be notified, the bodies recovered from the bog, but before any of that happened she wanted a few minutes alone with whatever evidence the killers had left behind at the scene. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the police to do their job; she did. This one just happened to be a bit more personal for her and she wasn’t going to leave justice in the hands of someone who might not care as strongly as she did about seeing it served up properly.
Craig’s smiling face flashed in her mind and she swore that she’d make those responsible pay for what they had done.
As the telltale flashes of color that marked the camp’s tents became visible through the trees, Annja slowed down. It wouldn’t do to just blunder into the middle of camp, particularly if the killers were still hanging about, so she stopped and listened instead.
Aside from the calls of a few morning birds, no other sound reached her ears. While that didn’t mean the perpetrators were gone, it was certainly a good sign.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to be armed.
She reached out with her right hand and plucked her sword from the otherwhere. It flashed into existence in a heartbeat as it always did and just having it in hand was reassuring.
Cautiously she continued forward.
11
The camp had been ransacked. Several of the tents had been torn down entirely, while the contents of the others were strewn about, left to lie where they had fallen during what Annja assumed was the search for the torc.
She slipped from one piece of cover to another for the first several minutes, leery of suddenly running into any of the men she’d encountered the night before, but eventually she realized that the camp was deserted and that let her move about more freely in the open.
The killers, whoever they had been, had fled.
Her free hand touched the torc through her shirt. What was so important about it that someone would kill to possess it? she wondered.
The entire attack just didn’t make sense. While she knew there was a burgeoning trade in black-market artifacts, she wouldn’t expect a piece like the one she currently carried to be of particular interest. They’d only dug it up yesterday, for heaven’s sake!
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Alex Archer
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фэнтези про драконов
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The legacy of a pagan king could unleash terror on the worldIt started as a dream–a redheaded warrior king fought and died for his men centuries ago. The dream would lead archaeologist Annja Creed to the king′s undisturbed corpse…and one of England′s greatest mythical artifacts.Deep in an archaeological dig in England′s Midlands, Annja locates a braided necklace around a mummified king′s neck. Made of an unusual material–not quite obsidian, but gleaming with multihued color–the torc is an astonishing find. But someone knows exactly what the torc means. And he will do anything to get his hands on the Tear of the Gods. When the dig is compromised and innocent archaeologists are slain, even Annja herself is left for dead. Now she is fleeing for her life, not knowing the terrifying truth about the relic she risks everything to protect–or the devastating consequences should it fall into the wrong hands….