Alex Archer - God Of Thunder

The driver eyed her a little more deliberately. “You’re fit. Young. Obviously aggressive or you wouldn’t have me chasing after your client right now. But you’re not dressed like a stockbroker.”

“I’m not a stockbroker. That’s close, though.”

“How close?”

“I work for a guy who’s in business putting talent together.”

“Like rock bands?”

“Not that kind of talent. He’s a corporate headhunter. Raids other companies of their employees. If they’re good enough.”

“So the guy you’re after…”

“Wrote some kind of computer application my boss thinks is mind-blowing. Now he’s not going to rest until I manage to put the two of them together in the same room and he has a chance to pitch him.” The story sounded good to Annja. She’d watched something like it on the Discovery Channel while she’d been in Florida. “If we land him, I get a vacation.”

“Cool.” The driver smiled and nodded.

By the time they’d finished the discussion, the cab rolled to a stop in front of the Sentry Continental Hotel.

“This is it,” the driver said.

Annja peered up at the eight-story structure as a uniformed bellman advanced on the cab.

“You’re sure?” Annja asked.

“Yeah.”

Annja paid him and allowed the bellman to help her out. Settling her backpack straps onto her shoulders, she walked into the hotel, wondering how she was going to find the two men she’d come there looking for. While her mind was occupied with that, her phone rang.

Caller ID showed a number that she was all too familiar with. The number belonged to Doug Morrell.

Annja chose to ignore the call as she entered the hotel’s lobby. The decor was marble the color of old bone and had brass ornamentation. Brass planters held arboricola trees, triangle palms and philodendron plants.

The guest registry was tucked away to the right, quietly blending into the wall. A young woman stood at the desk and watched the action at the bar area a little farther back into the hotel.

Annja’s phone rang again, but this time it was a text message.

Hey Annja.

Some guy named Marty Fenelli keeps calling. If you ask me, the guy sounds desperate. Maybe he’s just a rabid fan?

Anyway, give me a call when you get this.

Doug

Crossing over to the hotel bar, Annja slid the backpack off and sat at a table obscured by a palm tree. The bartender’s attention was focused more on the television in the corner than on his clientele. It was almost spring and baseball was starting up again.

Annja gazed at the screen wistfully and wished she was home instead of in a hotel she had no business being in. A cup of hot chocolate, made from real chocolate and scalded in a pan, sounded like heaven.

Her stomach rumbled at the thought. Some kind of lunch wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. Breakfast had been consumed on the run, a biscuit in the Miami airport that she hadn’t bothered to finish.

She read the text message again, then settled back behind the big plant and called Doug Morrell.

“Annja!” Morrell greeted on the first ring. “What a pleasant surprise!”

Annja shook her head. Morrell was in his early-twenties, working at the first job he’d gotten after graduating college. He’d told her on several occasions that all he’d ever dreamed of was working in television. Annja had asked him once how he felt about producing a syndicated show devoted to legends and lore that were often misrepresented. He’d claimed it was the greatest job in the world, and she hadn’t been able to doubt his sincerity.

The false representation wasn’t done by Annja. She kept her stories concrete, rooted in the bedrock of history and the facts as she found them. Thankfully, the audience for Chasing History’s Monsters seemed devoted as much to real archaeological work as they were to the fantastic.

The fact that Kristie Chatham wore skimpy and tight clothes, then climbed out of them at every opportunity, probably bought a lot of indulgence on the part of the viewer. Although Doug had told Annja on more than one occasion that if she didn’t look the way she did the audience wouldn’t have fallen in love with her, either.

“You’re not surprised,” Annja accused. “You sent that text message knowing I’d call you back.”

“Hoping,” Doug admitted. “I didn’t know. What I do know is that when you choose to ignore your phone, it gets ignored big-time. But I am curious about what Marty Fenelli has that I don’t.”

“Mario Fellini,” Annja said.

“Marty has Mario? Now I’m not so sure I want to hear about this.”

“His name is Mario. Mario Fellini.”

“Great. So what’s he to you?”

“Someone I knew a long time ago.” Annja dug out her camera and notebook computer, placing both on the table. “Did you talk to him?”

“A couple of times, yeah. Seems like a nice guy.”

“He is.” Was, Annja reminded herself. Whatever Mario was, he now had dangerous men after him. “What did he want?”

“To talk to you.”

“Did he offer any hints about what?”

“Not a word.”

Annja connected the camera to the computer by USB cable and uploaded the pictures to the hard drive. “And you didn’t press him for answers? That’s not like you.”

Doug, like Annja, had an insatiable curiosity, but he had no desire to go out into the world beyond New York in general and Manhattan in particular. He claimed that everything he needed was there in the city.

“This guy is good, Annja,” Doug said. “I questioned. He avoided. It’s like he had some fantastic mutant ability.”

Great. The Mario Annja had known hadn’t been secretive. Archaeology was all about getting information and spreading it around. Mario loved sharing theories. “Did he leave a message?”

“Yep.”

Annja flipped through the photos until she found the best shot of the two men she was following.

“I need to talk to you about your last story,” Doug said. “The phantom shark.”

“We can do the postmortem on that one tomorrow morning like we have scheduled.”

Doug hesitated, then cleared his throat. “We’re going to need more than a postmortem on that one. There are some problems.”

That temporarily took Annja’s mind off Mario Fellini and the gun-toting goons. The mystery she was currently tracking could take time to solve, but the piece submitted was going to be put into production in a couple of days. Once it was, she couldn’t touch it.

She was proud of the work she’d done on the Calusa Indians segment. Their history had been relatively new to her and she’d enjoyed exploring it.

“That was a good piece,” she said.

“Sure,” Doug agreed. “The Indian stuff was great. Really interesting. And your presentation was awesome.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“The phantom shark looks fake.”

Annja sighed in exasperation. “The phantom shark was fake. That was mentioned in the piece.”

“I feel like maybe we need to fix the shark.”

“Fix the shark?”

“Yeah. You know. Make it look better. More—I don’t know—sharky?”

“That’s how the shark looked, Doug.” Annja couldn’t believe it. “The shark looked fake. It looked fake because it was fake,” she repeated.

“Fake’s not gonna cut it in the ratings.”

“Like I said in the piece, the phantom shark is a local legend. A lot of people treat it like a joke. It’s there to draw the tourists. The guy who built the shark told me he started pulling the shark around as a prank, and to give the tourists a little excitement. He said not even kids are scared. They know it’s fake, but it’s all done in fun.”

“Our show isn’t about fun,” Doug said. “It’s about creepy. The creepier the better. Marketing loves creepy. And scary is even better.”