The Dragon’s Mark (13 page)

Between the events in Dr. Laurent’s office and the encounter at the café, Annja had had enough excitement for one day. She caught a cab and headed home, but not until she’d had the driver make a few sudden turns and run a red light or two. At this point, it made sense to be cautious.

Just because you can’t see them, Annja thought, doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.

She had the cabbie drop her off a block from her loft and ducked into a local Chinese restaurant for some takeout. Once back at home, she sat down and looked at the drawings, trying to make some sense of them.

She stared again at the face of the swordsman, searching her memory for a familiar face, trying to determine if she had ever seen him before. With only the eyes and the upper half of the nose to work from, it was like trying to find a needle in a field of haystacks. It could be anybody, really.

She turned her attention to the images of Joan of Arc’s execution. Recalling her thought that she might have been reproducing a painting or an image she’d seen somewhere before, she turned to her laptop. A search turned up nearly ninety thousand images.

It would take days to go through them all.

Still, she glanced through the first few pages of images, looking for something that resembled her drawing. But, aside from the fact that they all showed a young woman being burned at the stake, none of them were a match.

The mystery remained and Annja decided to leave it that way.

Later that night, while she was trying to get organized for the work she needed to do in the studio the next day, her phone rang.

Answering it, Annja said, “Hello?”

Only silence greeted her.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” she asked.

Still nothing.

Assuming it was a wrong number, she hung up.

A few minutes later the phone rang again.

A feeling of unease swept over her as she stared at the receiver. It rang twice, and then a third time. On the fourth ring she overcame her reluctance and snatched it up.

“Hello?”

Silence greeted her a second time, but this time it was different. This time there was a depth to it, a sense that someone was there, even if they weren’t answering her.

That silence angered her.

“I know you can hear me. I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I’m not the type of person you want to mess around with. I suggest you leave me alone.”

When she still didn’t get an answer, Annja hung up the phone.

No sooner had she done so, then it rang again.

Grabbing the phone for the third time, she snarled, “Now you are asking for trouble.”

A man’s laugh echoed down the line. “And here I thought you just didn’t understand me, Annja.”

“Garin?” Finding him unexpectedly on the line startled her.

“I’m headed out of town for a week and thought I’d check in before I left. You returned to the U.S. rather abruptly, after all.”

It took Annja a moment to focus on what he was saying; the prior calls had unnerved her more than she had expected. Finally she said, “After your little altercation with Roux I saw no sense in staying, not when I had work that needed to be done here.”

“And does that work pertain to the information we discussed before you left?”

Annja was about to say yes, but bit her tongue at the last minute to keep from doing so. If there really was an international assassin after either her or Roux, she suddenly didn’t want Garin to know about it.

“No, nothing like that. Just some editing for the show that needed to be done.” She tried to change the subject. “So where did you say you were going?” she asked.

Garin answered with a laugh. “I didn’t say, actually, but if you must know I’m visiting some of my electronic plants in Japan for the next few days. No luck tracking down the Dragon, then?”

So much for her change of subject.

“I spent a day or two looking into it, but I haven’t found anything solid. Why? Have you learned something new?”

Garin shouted something unintelligible to someone on his end, then said to Annja, “No, nothing new. Just thought you might have. You’re so good at that kind of thing, after all.”

Another shout, though this time he covered the mouthpiece of his receiver so that it came out muffled.

“Sorry, Annja, gotta run. They’re holding the plane for me. Best of luck and let me know if you find anything.”

Before she had a chance to say anything back, he hung up.

She stared at the receiver in her hand for a minute, muttered, “Idiot,” and hung up.

Garin’s call made her uneasy for a reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and she lay in bed wondering about it long into the night.

T
HE NEXT MORNING SHE ROSE
early and prepared for her day at the studio. Doug Morrell was counting on her and the editing team to cut nineteen hours of video down to a thirty-minute segment, a task that was never easy for Annja. She wanted her viewers to get as much information as possible and there was only so much she could jam into a lousy half hour.

Still, it had to be done and she didn’t trust anyone else to work on her shows if she was available to do so. The few times she’d let Doug handle the chore, he’d stuffed so much garbage into the show that it had looked like one of Kristie’s episodes. And if there was one person in the world Annja couldn’t stand, it was her cohost, Kristie.

While she would just normally take the subway over to Manhattan, today she decided to splurge on a cab. Along the way she tried to shake any tail she might have picked up by having the cabbie make half a dozen turns at the last minute and double back a time or two down the same streets. When she was at last satisfied that no one was following them, she let him take her the rest of the way to her destination by a more direct route.

The editing team was already assembled in the cutting room when she arrived and for the rest of the day Annja threw herself into the work in front of her. She didn’t think about the Dragon. She didn’t think about a mystical sword, hers or anyone else’s. All she did was focus on making her next episode of
Chasing History’s Monsters
the best it could be. They had less than an hour of work to go when quitting time arrived, and Annja convinced the others to stay around and finish up so they wouldn’t have to come back in the next morning. To make the decision easier for them, she offered to have pizza and beer brought in for dinner.

That did the trick.

By seven o’clock they were finished. The video had been cut, the still shots selected and Annja had even recorded the necessary voice-overs that were needed to pull the whole thing together as a cohesive unit.

When Doug came into work the next morning, he’d find the entire package on his desk, ready to go down to production for the final assembly.

Not bad for a day’s work, Annja thought.

Perhaps more importantly, it left her next day free so she could look into a few of the details she’d uncovered earlier that morning, which had been the entire point of the exercise in the first place.

She said goodbye to the three technicians, grabbed her backpack and the precious drawings it contained and headed down the street toward the subway station where she intended to catch a train back to Brooklyn.

She had only walked a few blocks before she felt a stranger’s eyes upon her again, just as she had the other day. In the middle of the block she abruptly stopped and bent down to tie her shoe, glancing backward as she did so. Maybe it was because it was getting dark and they didn’t think they’d be seen or maybe they just didn’t expect her to be as aware of her surroundings as she was, Annja didn’t know, but whatever the reason, her little stunt worked.

About a block and a half back, two men abruptly stopped and turned away from her. One pretended to be examining a magazine stand and the other pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and acted as if he was answering a call.

Annja knew the truth, though. She’d seen how intent they were on watching her in those first few seconds before they’d turned away.

She was being followed. There was no doubt about it.

The man in front was short and thick, with shoulders that looked as if they belonged on an NFL linebacker. His shaved head gleamed in the streetlights. His partner was taller and thinner, with a thick head of wavy hair and a goatee. Both were dressed in dark pants, shirts and jackets.

Annja stood and continued walking, but this time she glanced back over her shoulder a few times, watching the men behind her.

They clearly weren’t from New York, as they hadn’t yet developed a New Yorker’s odd talent for moving through a crowded sidewalk without disturbing the slower pedestrian traffic moving around them. Where Annja slipped through the crowd, moving easily with the changing patterns of those around her, her pursuers plowed their own path and it was this disturbance in the natural flow that had caught her eye and let her know that they were still back there.

Even as she watched, the two men quickened their pace, obviously trying to close the distance between themselves and Annja.

She wasn’t about to let that happen.

Let’s see if I can flush the foxes out of the henhouse, she thought, and then broke into a run. Her sudden move caught them off guard and her long legs allowed her to widen the distance between them in those first few seconds, giving her some precious lead time.

She raced across the traffic against the light. Horns blared, people shouted, but she didn’t stop, counting on a little bit of luck and a lot of divine provenance to get her through. She barged through the crowd standing on the opposite corner and shot down the street perpendicular to the direction she’d been traveling in, headed for the subway station on Broadway a block and a half away.

By the time she reached it, she had widened her lead to almost two whole blocks. Unfortunately, her pursuers had doubled in number, as well, for as she stopped for a moment at the top of the steps leading down to the subway station, she could see four men shoving their way through the crowd toward her.

Time to go, she told herself, and raced down the steps two at a time.

At the bottom she caught sight of a couple of transit cops standing around chatting and she momentarily considered getting them involved, but decided against it at the last minute. If it was the Dragon’s men behind her—and really, who else could it be?—then she didn’t want to drag them into her mess.

Instead, she charged forward, vaulted the turnstile and dashed down the steps in front of her, headed for the center platform. The station serviced four different sets of tracks, two northbound and two southbound. The center platform would give her access to one of each, which seemed her best bet at the moment. When she had managed to lose her pursuers, she could always get off at another stop, cross over to the opposite platform and head back the other way, if necessary.

Once on the platform she slowed her pace and began to mix in with the crowd around her. The little magazine-and-snack stand was selling Mets caps for fifteen bucks, so she hurriedly bought one and, stuffing her hair up underneath it, jammed it on her head. She thought about grabbing a pair of sunglasses while she was at it, but decided against it. She didn’t want anything to hinder her vision of the people around her.

There was a commotion on the stairs and Annja turned away, not wanting to be caught gawking and give herself away. She moved down the platform and then looked back the way she had come.

Her original pursuers were coming down the stairs, shoving people out of the way when they didn’t move fast enough. As she watched, a young college student angrily tried to push back and ended up being tossed down the stairs for his trouble.

That got people’s attention and they cleared a path, allowing her pursuers to descend that much faster.

A glance to her right to the northbound platform showed that her other two pursuers were already amid the crowd over there, searching for her.

Where the heck was the train?

She looked down the tracks, hoping to see the telltale glow of the oncoming light, but only the darkness stared back at her.

For a second she thought about jumping off the platform and disappearing into the tunnels, but she wasn’t desperate enough yet to take a chance of getting caught on the tracks with an inbound train.

When she turned back toward the crowd, she saw that her pursuers had reached the bottom of the steps and were on the platform itself. They stopped for a moment, talking it over, and then one headed her way while one went the other.

If she was going to reach the stairs, she was going to have to confront at least one of them.

Annja knew she couldn’t count on the crowd to keep her hidden forever. Sooner or later one of them was going to catch a glimpse of her and then she’d have to deal with all four of them together. Going on the offensive, while they were still separated from each other, seemed like a smart move and it didn’t take her long to decide to do just that.

She began to work her way through the crowd back in the direction that she’d come from, keeping her face averted as much as possible. As she drew closer to where the bald man stood searching for her, she gradually drifted in his direction. When she was only a few feet away she stopped and waited for him to close the distance.

He was trying to see over the heads of the people around them when Annja stepped up beside him.

“Looking for me?” she asked.

As he spun to face her, Annja delivered a massive punch to his right temple, stunning him. She followed it with a left cross that started somewhere around her waist and ended up catching him right beneath the chin, slamming his head back.

He dropped to the ground like a felled tree.

The crowd around them suddenly backed away, the typical New York response to trouble—stay out of it. Annja was ready to deliver another blow but realized she didn’t need to; he was out cold, at least for the time being.

Her frontal assault had an unintended consequence, however. From the platform across the way she could see a number of commuters gesticulating in her direction. Aware of the movement of the crowd, her pursuers glanced in the direction the commuters were pointing.