The Mortality Principle (15 page)

Annja was sure the killer was traveling on foot.

An hour ago he had been here. Even if he could move fast, he could be no more than a couple of miles away and tiring.

“Where does this road lead to?” she asked Turek when the policeman was out of earshot.

The journalist shrugged and reeled off a list of towns that meant nothing to her. “After that you reach the border with Poland.”

Poland?

Would the killer try to leave the country?

Did he even think in terms of geographic borders?

She stared down the road, but there was no movement save the wind through the treetops.

The Villa Diodati was on the shore of Lake Geneva, hundreds of miles away across the breadth of Germany. The killer, assuming he was Roux's killer, was a long way from home, but Poland was in the wrong direction to suggest that was where he was heading.

If he managed to escape them here, there was no telling where or when he might resurface to begin killing again.

She couldn't allow that to happen.

Annja already blamed herself for the homeless men who had died since she had first heard that scream from her window. This was at her door. The man on the road up ahead was dead because she had failed to stop the killer when she had the chance. His blood was on her hands. Whatever guilt Roux felt for failing to stop the killer all those years ago was nothing compared to the swelling grief and rage Annja felt at her own culpability now. The baton had passed between them. Now it was up to her to stop the killer.

Whatever it was.

Roux had been prowling the streets for an hour before he caught the whisper of gossip: another body had been found.

At first he'd dismissed it, thinking the street people were still learning about the death that had landed Annja in the hospital, but he quickly realized he was wrong when they started talking about a location on the outskirts of the city.

He had almost gone in search of the dead, but stopped himself. The trail of bodies wasn't about to go cold, but Garin was most certainly up to something and that was what he should be following. He was absolutely sure of it. Roux had almost lost Garin a couple of times, as there was no seeming pattern to his movements as he tracked from main plaza to narrow alley from narrow alley to tourist trap to seedy side street and back again, checking the twists and folds of the Old Town in search of the killer.

These were the places the killer knew.

Roux knew that because they were the same places that he and Garin had trod long ago, too.

Eventually something about the elaborate pattern
changed—and it changed so quickly Roux was almost cornered and caught as Garin doubled back on himself.

He ducked into a deeply recessed doorway, under the shelter of gargoyles, and hoped that scant cover would be enough.

He watched and waited, listening to the soft footfalls as they faded, until he was absolutely sure Garin had kept walking and it was safe to emerge from his hiding place.

Luckily for him, Garin had been concentrating on his cell phone as he had walked, oblivious to anything else going on around him. His stare had been obsessive. He didn't look up from the screen once. It took Roux a minute to realize what was going on: Garin was using the phone's GPS to track someone. Or some
thing
.

He watched from fifty yards behind as Garin entered the hotel's underground parking lot, glad that he had moved his own vehicle, parking it on the street.

The game was changing, but how, exactly, and why? There was every chance the sudden change of plans was due to a woman, but Roux had a sneaking suspicion that wasn't the case—and it wasn't just because he trusted Garin about as far as he could throw him, either. Garin was up to something. His intent focus on the phone pretty much guaranteed it.

Roux barely managed to slip behind the wheel of his rented four-by-four, only moments before Garin roared out of the parking lot in a flame-red Ferrari. There was no way Roux was going to be able to keep up with the Ferrari as it peeled away from the standing start, laying a thick strip of rubber on the blacktop. He instinctively lowered his head as Garin thundered by, but he
shouldn't have worried; Garin had eyes only for the road in front of him.

Roux watched the taillights flare and gunned his own car into life, setting off after Garin. It took everything the four-by-four's engine had to keep up with Garin's labyrinthine chase through the canyons of the city.

As he drove out of the city, Roux turned on the radio.

Once he had been fluent, but the years hadn't been kind to the old man in that regard. The language had mutated and now he was reduced to speaking a smattering of Czech rather than claiming any sort of fluency. He understood enough, though, to follow the report that there had been another killing. Talk now was of a serial killer stalking the city's homeless.

Roux didn't like what he was thinking, but that didn't mean he could stop himself from thinking it: Garin was fleeing the city. That he was here and not on the outskirts where the latest murder had occurred might prove his innocence in one regard, making Roux his alibi, but his actions now surely damned him in so many others. There was a connection here, whatever it might be, and Roux was determined to get to the truth before the night was over. The city stank of betrayal. Again. How many times would he fall for Garin's repentance and contrition? How many times would he allow himself to think, right up until that crippling moment of realization, that things could ever be the way they once were between him and Garin? Fool me once, Roux thought, shaking his head. He didn't need to finish the rest of the aphorism.

The only small mercy was that Annja would not be there to witness the confrontation.

Garin drove aggressively, pushing the sports car into
gaps that didn't appear to be there. Its engine roar was like a dragon's claiming the night for its own. It was all Roux could do to keep him in sight as Garin overtook another slow-moving vehicle.

Four seconds later Roux was behind it, trying to find a route through with his wider four-by-four. He counted the seconds, willing the driver in front to pull over to let him through, but without the flashing light of an ambulance or cop car, that wasn't happening. Frustrated, Roux rode hard on the vehicle's fender, tailgating it. Some bland late-night lonely-hearts music came on the radio. He reached down and killed it, then took a gamble, changed up and mounted the sidewalk, forcing the car in front to pull out into the center of the road as he bullied his way through. A couple of pedestrians scattered, terrified as the madman drove on the sidewalk for fifty yards before dropping back onto the road proper. Horns blared in protest. Roux ignored them, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

Garin was way off in the distance.

He had to hope Garin was still fixated on the road and hadn't seen his stupid maneuver in the rearview mirror.

He didn't seem to have seen him.

Roux followed him, keeping his distance, until they were well out of the city.

Garin gave no indication that he knew he was being followed.

That was the one benefit of a rental car—anonymity, even if Roux had a penchant for big bulky four-by-fours with off-road capabilities. One set of headlights at night was much like any other set of headlights at night. Now it was so dark that even he was riding Garin's tail hard,
and there was no way he'd be able to see the face of the driver in the car behind him.

On the road ahead the blue flashing lights of a police car bit into the night.

Roux understood their destination now. They were heading out to the site of the latest murder.

But Garin showed no sign of slowing.

Maybe he was wrong about the lights. It seemed unlikely, but Prague was a big city. That murder wouldn't be the only crime committed tonight. But as long as he followed Garin he'd get to the truth eventually, even if it was only a confirmation of what he already knew: that thing was killing again.

The Ferrari accelerated once they were clear of the police cordon and started to pull away with serious intent, Garin opening up the engine, its roar filling the night. It didn't sound like a dragon at all, Roux realized. It sounded like a banshee's wail.

His headlights picked out a road sign. Roux saw a name he hadn't thought about in a long time. It conjured a memory that he had worked so hard to bury.

Roux had found the tracks within an hour of seeing the bodies laid out in the church.

The incessant rain had left the ground sodden and slippery.

He crouched over the oversize prints of a shoeless foot in the mud. They were filled with rainwater.

“As ever with you it comes to either/or, doesn't it, old man? This time it's love or adventure. It's not much of a choice, is it?” Garin asked, no anger in his voice, just a kind of resigned amusement. Roux already knew his answer from the tone of his voice. It wasn't love. Garin didn't have any conception of what love actually was. His definition focused purely on the physical side of things and kept the spiritual as far from the relationship as possible. The cook—Roux didn't even recall her name, so transitory were these kinds of relationships for his young squire—had done well to capture his attention and hold it for this long, but the first flush of passion was already gone and the novelty of waking up beside her was wearing thin.

Their mistake was delaying their departure. They should have left the village immediately, not returned to the villa to gather their belongings, and for Garin to
disappear for ten minutes while Roux hunted high and low for him. He knew exactly what Garin was doing in those ten minutes, too. Kissing the cook farewell across every inch of her buttermilk skin. She'd forget him soon enough, unless, of course, he'd left a seed in her that would grow. They needed to move on, be gone and forgotten.

So they followed the tracks around the lake, thankful that the storms had made their task so much simpler. More than once they were treated with suspicion. News of the killings had spread like wildfire, outpacing them. Boatmen out on the water shared the story until it became the only talking point. Stranger was shunned and sent on their way without ceremony.

Their biggest problem, though, was that as the weather continued to improve, the tracks began to fade.

For days they followed those footprints as they set firm in the ground. But they never seemed to gain even an hour on the killer, arriving in villages two days after another spate of killings had taken place. Always two days behind the murderer. They needed horses if they were going to stand any chance of closing in on him. It was Garin's task to locate a pair and liberate them, knowing that the men would be long gone before their crime was discovered. They rode as if the devil himself was at their back, driving their heels into the flanks of their horses, hanging on with hands tangled in their mounts' manes for want of a bridle and tack. It was a wild ride like none Roux had known before, a race and a chase, filled with an exhilaration that made his heart pound. They were the hunters, their quarry a merciless killer who had racked up more than twenty corpses to
his name in the month since he had stared in through the villa's window.

But somehow they lost him.

Despite everything, the trail grew cold.

They were forced to move from village to village, hoping to hear news of another killing, knowing how sick that hope made them, but without it they would never find the right path again. Someone had to die. They sought out any hint of death, relishing each report as they gleaned what little information they could before setting off on their journey again, no closer to catching up with the killer than they had been that first night as lightning tore the sky asunder. So close and yet so far away.

They had to rest from time to time, their mounts able to take them only so far in a single day before exhaustion claimed them. To push them harder risked running the horses into the ground. Yet the killer never seemed to tire. His endurance was inhuman. He could outrun the horses, pushing himself faster and farther.

“There must be a way to anticipate his destination,” Garin said one night as they warmed themselves over a makeshift fire pit. “We've traveled this world a dozen times. There isn't an inch of ground we haven't covered. If we knew, then we could find a shorter route, travel smarter not faster. We could take a coach, travel through the night instead of sleeping. Change the horses every few hours through the daylight ride.”

Roux knew that it made sense.

They would need to change horses regularly. Though that was not impossible, there was nothing to say their fresh mounts would be Thoroughbreds capable of matching the punishing pace the chase demanded. They
had plenty of coin between them to purchase passage and to have bought the horses ten times over and then some. Work was something Roux chose to do, rarely something that he needed to do. He said it kept him honest. That was the beauty of having lived so long. Their wealth, secreted at different establishments throughout the nations under different names, may have been accumulated as the spoils of war but that didn't make it any less valuable. Some of the treasures he had hoarded would be worth a great deal in years to come—fortunes beyond imagining—and he was determined to enjoy that money when he was ready. But for now, adventure and excitement held more value than any currency or trove of gold.

He lived by challenges.

He lived for a different kind of worth.

His single purpose was to find the shards of Saint Joan's shattered blade and reunite them so that the curse may be lifted. He had no hankering to live forever. He was tired. He had been tired for years. That was why he hunted this killer. Perhaps it might bring about an end for Roux and his apprentice.

A name on a road sign rang a bell somewhere deep inside her mind.

A mile or so ahead there was a fork in the road, and to the left a place called Benátky. She'd heard that name not so long ago, but couldn't remember quite where or in relation to what. It was unlike Annja to not be able to place something to do with a story. Maybe there was something important there, some piece of history in relation to her segment and what was supposed to be the live show going out in a couple of days.