Grendel's Curse

“Rubbish. You’re up to something, aren’t you, Annja? Micke’s warned me about you.”

“Busted,” she said.

“It’ll cost you breakfast,” Johan said.

Breakfast, it seemed, was the global currency of early-morning wake-up calls.

7

Johan stood on the street corner, beneath the hotel’s awning.

She pulled up at the curb.

A couple of times on the walk to the underground parking lot Annja had caught herself looking back over her shoulder. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. She knew it was down to the car that had cruised by the café earlier. Some would have called it paranoia, but for Annja—after everything she’d been through since Roux and Garin came into her life and she first put Joan of Arc’s sword into the otherwhere—there’d been no such thing. It was like it had become a finely honed survival instinct. She knew when to act. And when something bad was happening, she wasn’t going to sit around and wait to find out what, or just how bad, it was.

She had two options. One, drive out to the dig and start looking for Lars. Someone ought to know where he was. Two, call the police and find out why they’d called her on his phone—if they had.

“So what’s the panic?” the cameraman asked as he climbed into the passenger seat. He’d stowed his gear in the trunk.

She pulled away from the curb. “I want to check up on Mortensen now,” she said. “Something’s not right.”

“Color me intrigued. Love at first sight? A tender moment shared across some decaying old bones?”

“He rang me this morning, early.”

“A booty call? I like it. The boy’s got style.”

“That he might have—but he stood me up for breakfast.”

“Ah, a woman scorned, I get it.”

“Nothing so clandestine. He said that he had found something, and then he doesn’t show up? Seems odd to me.”

Winding their way toward Skalunda, Annja saw the glow of red taillights as cars braked and slowed. Odd. She craned her neck and saw a plume of black smoke in the distance followed by a flame that rose high above the roofs of the cars in front of them.

Nothing was going to be moving for a while.

“Keep an eye out,” Annja said. “I’m going to take a look at what’s going on up there. Slide over. If the traffic starts to move, pick me up as you drive by.” She slid out of the car, but before she closed the door she added, “I’ll even let you put the radio on if you like.”

“Too kind,” Johan said, with just the slightest trace of sarcasm in his voice.

She smiled sweetly at him.

Almost every car in the lineup in front of her had the driver’s side window wound down, the drivers craning their necks to try and see what the holdup was. A few of them spoke to her as she walked past, not that she understood what they were saying.

It was only as she rounded a bend that had been obscured by thick foliage that she saw the burning car.

Firemen were battling the blaze, struggling to bring it under control before it spread to the vegetation and flamed into a full forest fire. Branches all around the verge had been doused with water but they were still blackened and shriveled from the heat.

A shift in the blaze revealed that the car on fire was a Volvo. There was something familiar about it; but just about eighty percent of cars in this country seemed to be Volvos. Next she noticed a bumper sticker on the back fender proclaiming Archaeologists Do It Down and Dirty. She quickened her pace, reluctant to break into a run, but dreading what she already knew deep down was the truth. An accident would explain so many things, including why the police would call her on his cell phone.

A policeman barked at her, waving her back.

She feigned ignorance, and continued to approach the scene.

He repeated his warning. She reached inside her back pocket for her press pass to offer as some kind of identification, not that she expected it to grant her access to the scene, but it was worth a shot. She held it out like a shield until she was close enough for him to see what it was, hoping he’d think she was a cop.

“Anyone hurt?” she asked, still moving toward the car. She looked around, hoping she’d see Lars wrapped in a blanket, being attended by a paramedic. There was no one.

“The car was already on fire when we got here. Anyone inside didn’t get out. We couldn’t get near it until the fire crews arrived a few minutes ago.”

“But an officer...” She was about to say called me, but then decided against it. There was only one car here, and his partner—another statuesque blonde woman—was working with the firefighters against the blaze. She couldn’t see into the smoking car, but it was obvious that if it was already on fire when they’d rolled up, there was no way they could have got Lars’s phone out of there. It would have melted in the fireball.

That meant that the call hadn’t come from the police, and she’d been right to get the hell out of that café.

A gust of wind took hold of the fire, bringing it roaring back to life. As the flames shifted she caught a glimpse of the windshield. It had shattered, but she saw the shape of a man behind the wheel.

“There’s someone in there!” Annja cried, running toward the car.