Day Of Atonement

On her mark, she waited for the thumbs-up to say that she was good to go.

She took a deep breath, letting it leak out slowly in a mist that wafted up across her face and earning her a scowl from her cameraman. His thumb went up. Annja started talking to the camera as if she hadn’t taken a three-hour break waiting for the worst of the storm to pass. An observant viewer might spot that the snow on the hillside was deeper, but their brains would quickly fill in the gaps and gloss over that inconsistency.

She knew that chunks of the footage would be cut, with other images overlaid on the soundtrack. They’d gathered plenty of fantastic material over the past couple of days. And honestly, once she was back in the studio, a fair amount of the commentary would end up being rerecorded because she was a perfectionist and couldn’t stand to watch a segment that was any less than that. So yes, you put in the work on location, but you did it knowing that, when it was all edited together, some of it would end up on the cutting room floor. Subzero conditions or no.

“Overlooked by the medieval fortress, the Cité de Carcassonne, the land behind me, has been the site of a settlement since Neolithic times. The Romans were among the first to really capitalize on its strategic position, and occupied the same hilltop until the fall of the Western Empire and the incursion of the Visigoths.” She missed a beat as the red light went off, and the cameraman lowered his lens.

“Something wrong, Philippe?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but don’t you think it’s all a bit…” He shrugged.

“Weak?” Annja suggested. “Sloppy?” She inclined her head. “How about dull? Or, heaven forbid, boring?” She folded her arms in front of her and shifted her weight, waiting to hear what he had to say.

“Wordy,” Philippe said eventually, making it sound like one of the greatest crimes that could possibly be perpetrated on TV.

She grinned. “Wordy?” Wordy she could cope with. Wordy was just another way of saying that she was talking too much and using long words. Sometimes long words were just fine. It wasn’t like she was about to parade around in a bikini trying to sex-up history in the snow.

“Want to change places?” Her grin was sly. “I’m happy to have a go behind the camera. I’m sure Doug would approve.” Doug Morrell was Annja’s producer.

“Well, my mom always said I had a face for television.” He grinned right back. “You know, what with the whole sun shining out of my ass thing, I’m definitely special.”

“No arguments from me.”

She held out her hand for the camera.

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? Consider it your audition tape.”

“More like the Christmas gag reel.”

Even so, Philippe handed over the camera and waited on the mark while Annja got the camera on her shoulder and started recording.

“Over my shoulder,” he said, waving vaguely in the direction of the fortress, “you can see a prime example of intimidation architecture. The people who built this place really didn’t like visitors, and wanted to make them work for it, giving them a long, steep hill to climb when they wanted to drop by for a friendly croissant.” He grinned. “Unsurprisingly, baguette wielders who made it that far almost certainly ended up with a pot of black coffee poured on their heads from the handy murder holes.” He bowed to Annja. “See? Food and murder. That’s what people want.”

She shook her head. “Okay, okay, I get the point. You’re hungry. Let’s wrap it up for today and go get something to eat.”

“And there was me thinking subtlety was dead.” Philippe took the camera from her.

“My treat. Go take a dip in the pool first. Warm up and work the kinks out of your muscles and concentrate on making yourself look pretty. I want to go for a drive.”

Philippe raised an expressive eyebrow.

“I feel the need for speed,” she said with a grin.

He didn’t need telling twice.

Five minutes later the tent was broken down, the gear stashed in its flight case and loaded into the trunk of their rental car.

The banter didn’t slow down during the drive back to the hotel. One thing this local hire was good at was talking. Flirting, really. Philippe had that roguish charm that all Frenchmen seemed to have, and an accent to die for. Of course she was going to buy dinner. She was a modern woman laying down a flirtatious gauntlet of her own. All work and no play makes Annja a dull girl, she said to herself, sweeping down the narrow road into the town proper.

The snow had gathered on the surface, reducing traction.

Annja drove carefully, enjoying the process of driving stick on a road that really wanted her to work for the privilege of driving down it.

She parked outside the hotel, and made a promise to meet Philippe in an hour. He double tapped on the roof to let her know he’d gotten the gear out of the trunk. She caught a glimpse of him looking at her—trying not to be seen to be looking—as he went inside.

France certainly had its plus points.

Annja turned up the music, pushed herself farther into the driver’s seat and opened up the engine.

She would have killed to be on a motorcycle instead of cooped up in a car, icy wind in her hair, red-lining it around the country roads… There was nothing like the freedom of a bike on open road, but for now the car would have to suffice. The local radio station was running an eighties marathon, which helped, offering up cheesy driving tunes. An hour in her own company would do her the world of good. Jane Weidlin sang about driving in the rush hour. The juxtaposition was brilliant. Snowcapped hills and empty roads couldn’t have been farther from the choking urban slow-death that was Manhattan’s rush hour.

She drove with only the vaguest idea of where she was heading, but it wasn’t as if it would be difficult to find her way back to the town. It was pretty much a case of all roads lead to Carcassonne around here. Worst case, she had the satnav app on her phone to fall back on, assuming she could get a signal in the mountains with the snow worsening again.

Twenty minutes from the hotel, she’d passed a grand total of four cars on the road, and seen the same number coming the other way.

That had changed less than a minute later.

A glance in her rearview mirror offered the glint of a silver car—a Mercedes—half a mile or so behind her. The driver didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but the power of the big car was deceptive, the distance between them closing fast.

A signpost on the hard shoulder promised a right-hand fork that would work its way back around to Carcassonne, so she took it. It wasn’t exactly hot-date territory, but tall, dark and brooding was better than room service for one.

The side road led her onto a second, narrower lane that hadn’t been plowed, forcing her to slow down to stop the rear wheels fishtailing on the icy surface. Snow topped the old stone walls and high hedges lining the road. Annja dropped her speed again, down to thirty, tapping her fingers on the wheel in time with the beat of Simon Le Bon’s vocal promising he was on the hunt, after her.

She joined in with the chorus, remembering another time in France, another wolf. The Beast of Gévaudan, right at the beginning of this whole mad life she was now living.

The road curved up ahead. There were no tracks in the virgin snow. The sound of it crunching under her tires was a constant undertone beneath the music.

The snow-laden trees dumped their burden in a whisper ahead of her, and as the fine dusting settled, she saw a battered red tractor lumber across her line of sight. Even though her vehicle was going slowly, the sheet of ice under the snow meant that Annja wasn’t going to be able to stop in time. She felt the wheels lose their grip and the car start to slide. Thinking fast, she turned into the slide, pushing the rental up onto the grass at the edge of the road, the passenger’s side scraping through the leaves of the hedge, barely inches from the unforgiving impact of the wall.

Even so, there was precious little room to spare, and if the driver of the tractor didn’t do likewise she’d end up forced into the wall.

Annja gritted her teeth, wrestling with the wheel as it wanted to turn relentlessly back toward the oncoming tractor.

The music cut out as she lost the signal.

The only sound inside the car was the scrape of leaves against the fender.

The tractor moved over to the side, leaving Annja just enough room to squeeze through without wrecking the rental. The hood shivered under the impact of another snow dump from overhanging trees. She nearly jumped out of her skin. Her reactions were good. Better than good. She had an almost preternatural control of her body, and even in the unfamiliar car, driving an unfamiliar stick shift, she was able to ramp it up less than an inch from the wall, and scrape along the hedge lining it, without totaling the car, and come out on the other side.

That was close, she thought.

Too close.

She eased on the brakes and came to gradual stop twenty feet down the road, and turned in her seat to see if the farmer was okay. He seemed to have taken the near-collision in his stride, not that she could see his face.

Maybe it was an everyday occurrence? After all, the tractor looked plenty beat-up.