The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (14 page)

“The kind of thing a person would enlist you to steal—we’re not talking a car or a laptop, are we?”

“I rather think not.”

She closed her eyes and leaned on the headrest, exhausted. “You can leave me at an airport, or a train station or a hotel. Anywhere. Just drop me off. I’ll get myself back to the U.S. and deal with Bodeby’s from home, like you suggested, and I won’t say anything about you or this Ivar or—”

“Not yet.”

“What?” She didn’t understand.

“I feel like working with a partner, and you’ve demonstrated a wide variety of talents.”

“Seriously?” Something was wrong with her if the biggest emotion she could conjure over being kidnapped, yet again, was disbelief, but her primary reaction was that he couldn’t possibly think she would help him if he kept her captive. “Look, I’m willing to deal with getting the fake wines out of the auction myself. I’ll make it my problem, not yours, now that we’re out of England and we got rid of those two guys. All you have to do is drop me off at an airport.”

“We both know you have bigger problems than mislabeled wine, so I don’t think you can force me to do anything.” He didn’t look away from the road.

“Mislabeled, that’s what you call it? Less than an hour ago you told me exactly how you faked them all!”

“Isn’t that what you’d claim?” He pitched his voice higher. “I’m sorry, Officer, I must have picked up a mislabeled passport.”

“You’re the one who gave me that fake passport!”

There was a long pause, and her intuition warned her the next sentence was going to be worse than anything that had come before. Maybe it was the sudden drop in his breathing, or the shift of his shoulders, who knew, but this was it.

“I wasn’t referring to the Spanish one.”

She fumbled for her purse, nerveless fingers taking long seconds to unhook the clasp of the evening bag she’d carried since Bodeby’s. And then she couldn’t feel the stiff document inside, couldn’t find the corner of the flat rectangle that should have been there, so she pressed her legs together to make her lap like a table and dumped the whole damn purse on her legs. Lipstick, tissues, corkscrew, wallet, random bits of paper.

No passport.

“Fuck you.” If he’d taken Angelina’s passport from the purse, he must have guessed that she didn’t have American citizenship. Now he thought he could exploit her to do whatever he wanted the same way street pimps exploited immigrant girls or employers ignored work laws, because undocumented employees couldn’t complain. “That’s low.”

“That’s who I am. Remember it.”

Suddenly cold, she wrapped her arms around herself and leaned her shoulder on the car window.

His voice came from the dark next to her, pushing on the invisible bruises that seemed to cover her chest and hurt when she inhaled, but she didn’t turn to look at him. “I’m not a good man. Don’t make the mistake of caring about me.”

“Don’t worry.” That was rich, rich, that he thought he should warn her, as if his actions hadn’t ripped any tiny bit of connection they might have been making to shreds. “That’s one mistake I certainly won’t make.”

“Buggeration.” He swerved the car into the far left lane.

Her head bounced on the window glass. “What?” She peered through the windshield for a deer or a police car.

“That’s my car. Behind us.”

* * *

Pounding his fist on the steering wheel wasn’t going to get them out of here, but it might keep him from letting out a string of gutter profanity in front of Christina. “Who are those guys?”

“How should I know?” She twisted to try to look out the rear windshield. “You’re the fugitive. They have to be following you.”

If the men from the train had followed them out of Calais, there must be a tracking device. He wasn’t carrying a phone, and Skafe had taken Christina’s at Bodeby’s, so it wasn’t mobile phone signals. The car was a random choice, too down-market for fancy factory locating devices, thus it should be clean. “Get the black duffel.”

She struggled to reach between the seats and yank the bag forward while he monitored the other car. It stayed back, but he was certain the circular headlights were his and the silhouette fit. The even distance between the two cars didn’t alter as he lowered the passenger side’s electric window. Freezing wind emphasized how screwed they were. He had to yell to be heard. “Anything that’s not from my flat or your personal items, throw it out.”

“What?” she yelled back.

Ivar, Wend and Skafe were known quantities, but he didn’t like having players he couldn’t identify moving around the board. “They’re tracking us, so get rid of their shit. All of it. Including the bag.”

It went. Random toiletries, a pair of black socks, a paperback book. And then the bag. She was left with the purple dress, the blond wig, her purse and his old fire medic pouch in a heap on her lap.

“Now you can add littering to the tally of my transgressions I know you’re keeping.”

“Do you joke about everything?” Her hands clutched her purse and his old satchel, even though it no longer held the bottle of Perlus.

“If you’d lived as long as I have, you’d realize humor is the only way to get through your five hundred thousandth day.” Even dark humor beat despair over the isolation forced on him by eternal life.

She sighed. “Trying to distract me with your immortal story? I was hoping for a better one, or, heaven forbid, a plan.”

“We could assume they’re tracking the car and steal a fourth one.”

“Isn’t crazy defined as doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different result?”

“That’s me. Crazy.” Clearly he could recount the complete story of Beowulf’s crew, shoot himself a couple more times for emphasis and receive no more than a few tuts and raised eyebrows. Rarely had honesty had such a complete lack of success. It goaded him. “We could go to a hotel, strip search each other for tracking chips and do a full body scan to find the implants aliens put on us while we were unconscious. What do you say to that idea?”

“The hotel part sounds good, because I really need to shower and sleep, but the search for tracking chips part reminds me of gorilla grooming.”

He gripped the wheel hard with both hands before making his real suggestion, risky only to her, a plan he couldn’t implement unless she agreed. “What if we ram them off the road into a ditch?”

She didn’t contradict the idea.

“You bloodthirsty darling.”

“Gently, right? This isn’t Hollywood.”

“Of course, gently. I’ll hit the brakes, they’ll overshoot, and then it will be a little tap. My old car hasn’t got much in her, and she has completely slick tires.”

Instead of saying yes, she pushed her seat as far back from the dash as she could and tightened the lap and shoulder belts. Seeing her calmly prepare for a deliberate road accident made a surge of wanting her as a real partner flow through him, stronger even than the feelings he’d had when he’d watched her competently and perfectly demonstrate her skill decanting wine. Christina was a woman who acted, and reacted, at his pace. She could understand him. They would be a formidable team.

“Ready,” she said.

“Relax. I’ll take it slowly.”

She snorted. “I’ve recently seen your version of slow.”

“And I believe you liked it.”

Chapter Fourteen

The doorbell was as much a surprise for his backgammon partner as it was for the man who’d trained himself to answer to the name Thomas Locke. Bells didn’t ring at midnight without a reason.

“Shall I?” Thomas offered to the ninety-four-year-old Belgian who rented him a cottage at the back of the rural property.

“Eh.” His host shrugged as he levered out of his leather chair. “I need to piss anyway.” Luc spoke English well because for decades he’d supplemented his income by providing tours of Ardennes Forest battle sites, so Thomas hadn’t disclosed his own ease with French.

He watched Luc shuffle across the room. His landlord’s daughter-in-law came between three and five to leave out dinner and swap laundry baskets, and the son of one of Luc’s old drinking buddies sometimes showed up in the early evening with a bottle of brandy, but this was four hours too late for any of the regulars.

As soon as the older man left the living room, Thomas rose, pushed the door ninety percent closed and flattened himself to the wall on the side where he’d be concealed behind it. Without conscious direction, his fingers slipped under his cardigan and unsnapped the thumb break over the butt of his holstered Heckler and Koch P7M8 revolver. Six weeks of backgammon and winding drives across the border to Luxembourg couldn’t erase forty years of habit. To the euro, he knew how much currency he’d bundled under the floor of the rented cottage and in a damp-proof box in the property’s limestone cavern. No one else needed to know.

The door chain rattled before the dead bolts clicked. Thomas’s eyesight and hair had divorced him about the same time as the merger of West and East Germany caused cutbacks in his original profession, but his hearing hadn’t degenerated.

Using French, Luc was unusually loud as he greeted whoever had rung the bell. “Back in the night are you, lad? You’re sixty-eight years too late to stop the wedding.”

There was the sound of people entering the house, greetings and back slapping and the rustle of coats.

“My grandfather often talked about you.” The speaker was a man who spoke French with an excellent blend of British twang and rhythm. To most listeners it probably conveyed a well-educated chap, good enough when he was in school and with a bit of traveling since, but not a man enamored of anything but the English way of life. “This is my girlfriend.” He switched to English. “Christina, let me introduce you to Monsieur Luc Demotte. Christina and I are driving through to Frankfurt and thought we’d stop in for a hallo.”

Luc’s snort of disbelief was followed immediately by a coughing fit and the concerned murmur of a woman’s voice.

Perhaps because of her American accent, Thomas pictured a decorative blond on the arm of the well-educated British liar. Because yes, the guest was lying to Luc. The highways went north and south of these forested hills. No one had stopped in this part of the Ardennes en route to Frankfurt since the last German divisions had pulled out in ‘44.

“You look so much like that dumb pisser who used to follow me around trying to learn to rig fuses, you could be the same man.”

You could be the same man.

Those words couldn’t mean what they’d meant last year. The person in the hall was not the Special Forces soldier known as Wulf Wardsen, who Thomas had encountered in Afghanistan. He closed his eyes to concentrate on hearing nuances that visual stimuli might mask, but he already knew the voices didn’t match. Accents could change, but voices were hard to alter.

The man talking to Luc wasn’t Thomas’s former boss or either of the two men who’d worked with the Director. Just because one elderly Belgian mistook a young visitor for his grandfather and claimed the man hadn’t grown older didn’t mean one of the unaging, undying men who’d destroyed Thomas’s life had arrived here. The sudden pain in his stomach was nothing but an overreaction to an old man’s ramblings, or perhaps spoiled mussels.

Luc coughed, the sound of decades of cigarettes mixed with excitement. “Come in. Straight to the kitchen.”

Three distinct gaits passed the door. Luc’s shuffle, the slaps of a small person wearing flat leather-soled shoes that didn’t fit well and the light tread of a man who walked with alert steps. Not like a casual British tourist.

As soon as the kitchen’s swinging door finished its squeal and stayed closed, Thomas slipped silently out the front. Luc had obligingly left it unlocked. He had a discreet listening post in the cabin and a wide selection of teas to fit Thomas Locke’s retired English personality. Hopefully Luc’s guests wouldn’t stay awake too long, however, because he’d planned an early start tomorrow. One more Luxembourg bank remained.

* * *

During the war, Luc had been the same height as Stig, and farm labor had made the Belgian’s shoulders and back broader. The man holding a kitchen chair for support was a gnome. Now he’d forever remember Luc like this, the fighter reduced to using furniture to navigate his own home.

He shouldn’t have knocked, but there had been a light and Christina had been so hard to wake up in the car. She deserved ten uninterrupted hours in a bed.

“I’d offer a hot drink, but my daughter-in-law won’t let me touch the stove,” Luc said with one gnarled fist resting on the tabletop.

“I can make tea or coffee,” Christina offered, shaking her head as if clearing sleep fog. “What would you like?”

He was grateful she stepped into the gap, because he suspected if he tried to speak his voice would crack. He wished he could keep the other memories, Luc in the twilight filling empty brandy bottles with kerosene and rags, waiting for dark to make a distraction that would allow them to hijack a load of German explosives. The Luc he wanted to remember could haul fifty pounds on his back and still think about returning from a raid early enough to woo a girl whose arms milked goats and made cheese all day.

“Coffee. Can in the freezer.”

“Coming right up.” She dumped a half-empty glass carafe into the sink and turned on water to rinse it.

A second after the stream of water hit the pot, glass exploded.

Stig leaped and had her whirled away from the window over the sink, sheltered between his body and the wall, before her scream stopped.

“It’s okay. I’m okay.” Her words and the firm patting of her free hand on his arm finally penetrated. “It was the coffee pot. Cold water cracked it.”

He stepped away, scanning the room, but the windows were intact and the glass was limited to the sink. It wasn’t a bullet.

“I’m sorry, Monsieur Demotte, I didn’t realize it was hot.” She lifted the orange plastic handle out of the sink. The upper portion of the pot ended in jagged edges where the hot glass had exploded under the assault of the well-water from Luc’s pipes.

Luc shrugged. “I saw some action in this old kitchen. It’s good.”

Hot.
The burnt scent of strong coffee hung faintly in the air, and two of the four hooks on the underside of the cabinet were empty. Luc had lied to him.

There were still three doors into the kitchen. He knew where they all went. One to the back porch, one to the front hall, and a narrow panel that could have been mistaken for a cupboard led down steep steps to the cold storage area.

“Are you alone?” Maybe coming to his old partner had been another mistake.

Luc ignored the question, looking from him to where Christina was wrapping the broken glass in a section of newsprint. “You can’t fool me, saying you’re his grandson. You even jump like him, like one of the forest wild cats.” Luc squinted until his eyes nearly closed and lowered his voice to a whisper. “You always came back. Even if we saw you hit. We knew you were different.”

“No need to be hush-hush.” Stig flicked his eyes at Christina’s back, then spread his hands in defeat. “She won’t believe me or you.”

“I can hear you even if you whisper. The immortality thing was a funny joke the first time, but it’s getting old.” She leaned on the counter, arms crossed as she faced the two of them. “And please, don’t say not as old as you are. I can’t figure out how Stig roped you into this, and right now I don’t care because I’m too tired to deal.” The dark circles under her eyes betrayed her exhaustion.

“She needs a place to sleep. I have a meeting tomorrow night—actually tonight—at the Greek’s.”

“Stavros’s grandson sold to a Pole and moved to London.”

“He can join the crowd.” Stig shrugged. “We also need to hide a car in the barn.”

“Not the barn.”

He knew Luc’s voice, having spent too many dark nights with nothing but that voice. “What are you already hiding?”

“
Rien,
nothing.”

“Liar. Fifteen minutes, and I’ve already lost track of how many you’ve told.”

“You want to stay in my home, hide a car on my property and insult me, all before you even pour the first drink? Ha. Always were a demanding little ferret.” The speech seemed to have exhausted Luc. They waited while he wheezed, and finally he continued, “Upstairs bedroom. I can’t make the steps anymore, so my bed’s in the dining room. You have to make your own bed.”

“Thank you,” Christina said. “We’re sorry to inconvenience you.”

Luc blew air out the side of his mouth. “Urologist is inconvenient. A beautiful woman sleeping in my bed, even if I can’t get there—heh, heh—it’s a party.”

Stig pushed the door to the hall open. “Come on, ignore him. I’ll show you the room.”

The house looked the same. Maybe the runner in the upstairs hall had been replaced after the war, but it had become old again, so the effect was still the timelessly shabby house he remembered. Dust was thick up here, but he knew the exact shelf where he’d find the sheets and pillows for the narrow bed.

The bathroom had received an update. In the seventies, based on the pink tile and sink. Stig had the sheets and blankets tucked and smoothed before Christina emerged.

She hovered in the door, looking at the single made bed.

“I’ll go back to talk with Luc.”

“He seems happy to see you.” Her voice rose at the end of her statement, as if she were fishing for information about his relationship with their host.

Fine, he’d be honest. “I knew him when we were in the Resistance together.”

Her lips flattened into a thin line, as he’d expected. “Don’t you think I’ve earned the truth?”

“Indeed I do. But don’t you think I’ve earned
your
trust?” He reached the doorway. “Sleep.” He was quick enough with the brush of lips across her forehead that she didn’t move away, and then he was gone, leaving her and her skepticism to keep each other company.

In the kitchen, Luc had two bottles of strong brown Belgian dubbel ale on the table. “None of this tea.” His hand made a loose fist, the swollen knuckles unable to bend tightly, and he popped Stig’s fist in slow motion. “You shouldn’t have stayed away.”

A shrug seemed an appropriately noncommittal response while Stig opened his own bottle.

Luc lifted his beer to his mouth. “We had a good marriage.”

No beating around from his friend, so none from him either. “She loved you.”

He’d known since the moment he’d crossed the threshold and saw the dust that Berthilde was gone. She would have been ninety-six, two years older than the man she’d chosen at the end of the war, so her absence didn’t surprise him. But he wasn’t ready to discuss the farm-girl who’d wanted to stay in her town and wear rubber boots and raise babies and goats. She hadn’t wanted the life of European capitals and nights at the opera and strolling boulevards. She’d been grounded, unlike him, so she’d chosen Luc.

“Not the same way.” There wasn’t a hint of jealousy in the old man’s voice, more like nostalgia.

“Better, I imagine. I was a passing fancy.” He waved off any more discussion in that direction. “Enough. Shall we plan the destruction of my car? I stole it in France, but it has German tags.”

“Like old times, eh, you English ghost.” Luc slugged another gulp of beer, and burped. “Missed you, my old friend.”

Stig lifted his own glass and stared into the amber liquid instead of Luc’s watery eyes. “Missed you too.”

This was why he never went back. Never.