Tear Of The Gods

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.