The Dragon's Mark

Roux stared at her. “Why on earth would I want to do something so…counterproductive?”

Annja was almost certain that the word on his lips had been stupid, not counterproductive, but she let it go in order to deal with the issue at hand. “Your estate has been attacked. People have died. How can you not call the police?”

“Quite simply, really. We’ll deal with this internally, just as we always do.”

“But—”

He cut her off. “I said no police, Annja. I don’t need incompetent idiots poking around my house, touching my things, when my staff is perfectly capable of handling this on their own.”

At that moment Henshaw stuck his head in the door. “The room’s been cleared, sir. The cleaning crew will be in first thing in the morning to scrub the blood off the floor and to patch the bullet holes by the window.

“Very good, Henshaw. Thank you.”

Annja was aghast. “You can’t just destroy evidence like that!”

Roux laughed and this time it was an ugly sound. “This is my home, Annja. I can do whatever I want in it, including shooting armed intruders foolish enough to enter it. You and your friend Garin would do well to remember that I am not the feeble old man you appear to think I am.”

With that he got up and left the room, leaving Annja staring openmouthed in amazement that he had felt the need to threaten her, of all people. Just what had this night come to?

Deciding she’d had her share of five-hundred-year-old egos for the evening, she strode through the house and back to the second floor, intending to collect her backpack from the room she’d stored it in and get the heck out of there before she said something she would regret later.

But once on the second floor, she felt herself drawn back to the room where she’d come close to losing her life, as if called there by the secrets they were trying so hard to figure out.

5

Annja Creed stood inside the doorway and let her gaze just wander about, without focusing on anything in particular. Her thoughts kept returning to those few moments just before the fight, when she’d first entered the room. She could still see them in her mind’s eyes, the first five men arranged in two precise rows, their swords out and ready, providing the most protection possible for their leader. They had all been standing still, eyes forward, almost as if they had been…

Waiting.

That was what was bothering her.

They hadn’t been moving throughout the room. They hadn’t been actively looking through the artifacts on the walls or heading toward the door to join their colleagues at the front of the house.

They’d been standing still.

Waiting.

But for what?

She didn’t have a clue.

She looked past the bloodstains on the floor and the pile of extra sheets that had been set there in case more were needed to transport the bodies out of the house, and tried to see the place through fresh eyes.

She was missing something and she knew it. It hovered there, on the edge of her mind, like a presence felt but not seen, a watcher in the darkness. There was something here for her to find, something important, but all she could see was row upon row of swords and the fragments of the window scattered across the floor thanks to the combination of Garin’s bullets and the concussion wave of the grenade.

Finally, frustrated and more than a bit annoyed at everyone involved, she turned away, intending to arrange a ride back to her hotel and call it a night.

That was when her eye caught something out of place, a slight anomaly in the otherwise orderly arrangement of the collection.

She turned back and began going over the rows of weapons again, one item at a time, piece by piece, until she could rule each out.

There!

Standing on the hilt of a broadsword that was remarkably similar to the one that had come to her through the centuries was a small figure. When she stepped closer to get a better look, she discovered that it was made from paper. The origami figure was in the shape of a dragon, with swept back wings and a long winding tail.

She stared at it, trying to figure out how it had gotten there.

Annja had been around Henshaw enough times to know that he ruled the cleaning staff with an iron hand. None of them would have dared leave something like the origami dragon behind, no matter how innocuous it seemed. Certainly Henshaw would never do such a thing himself.

The lack of dust on the weapons meant that the display had been cleaned recently, probably in the past day or two. In turn, logic dictated that the paper figurine could only be that old, as well; after all, had the cleaning crew found it they would have thrown it away, if only to save themselves from Henshaw’s ire if he found it himself.

While there was certainly nothing innately threatening about a small piece of paper folded into the shape of a mythical creature, something about this one made Annja distinctly uncomfortable.

It was so unexpected and so out of place that it made her skin crawl, the same way hearing a voice in a darkened room when you think you are alone will.

It was almost as if it had been purposely left behind. A small token to remind them that someone other than themselves had been here, in this place, where no outsider should be.

She reached out to pick it up and then thought better of it and swiftly withdrew her hand. If it had been left by the intruders, then she needed to take care to preserve whatever evidence might have been left behind.

She needed to treat it as carefully as she might a thousand-year-old artifact just recently exposed to the light.

Annja left the display room and walked down the hall to the room, where she’d left her backpack. Retrieving her digital camera, she returned to the display room.

She half expected the origami dragon to be gone when she got back—having it disappear would be about par for the course that evening—but it was still there, right where she left it. She turned on her camera and went to work. She took close-up pictures of the figure from as many angles as possible and then made certain to get some positioning shots, as well, to illustrate just where on the wall the sword on which it stood was hung.

When she was finished, she used a pair of tweezers to lift the paper sculpture off the shelf.

Now it was time to do some serious research.

Roux had already refused to bring the intrusion to the attention of the Paris police, but that didn’t mean that Annja was out of options.

Far from it, in fact.

FROM A PUBLIC PAY phone in Paris the call was routed through a number of middlemen and cutouts, designed to hide the origin of the contact should anyone be listening in, until it was at last picked up via cell phone in the back of a limousine.

“Yes?”

“She’s an interesting opponent. Perhaps even a worthy one.”

“I didn’t hire you to evaluate her abilities. Can you carry out the task we discussed or not?”

There was a soft, mocking laugh. “Of course I can. Am I not the Dragon, myth incarnate and legend made flesh?”

“Don’t be overconfident. She’s survived far too often when the odds were arrayed against her. You’d do well to remember that.”

Again the laugh. “Let me worry about the odds. You just be sure the money is in the account as agreed. You have the hotel information?”

“Yes. She’s staying at the Four Seasons.”