Alex Archer - The Dragon's Mark

Roux’s house was huge, so huge that the word home just didn’t seem to do it justice. Palace might have been better. Ivy clung to the stone walls and helped the structure blend into the trees that surrounded it. It butted up against a hill and the overall effect was as if the house itself were a part of the natural environment around it, and from past experience Annja knew that the design was deliberate. Roux was a man who liked his privacy and went to some lengths to see that it remained protected.

The driver must have called ahead, as Garin was waiting for her on the front steps when they pulled up. Standing with him was Henshaw.

“Welcome back, Ms. Creed,” Henshaw said, giving her a small nod of welcome as she stepped from the car.

She grinned. That was Henshaw, positively overwhelming with his emotional displays, she thought.

“Good to see you,” she told him. She turned her attention to his companion. “Hello, Garin.”

“Annja,” he answered just as solemnly, but his eyes twinkled with mischief behind his unruffled exterior.

With her ever-present backpack slung over her shoulder, Annja entered the house with Garin while Henshaw got her overnight bag from the trunk. She could already imagine his scowl as he saw the size of her suitcase. She wasn’t the type to travel with more than the few basic items she needed, while he was a firm believer in a woman’s right to be prepared for anything and to travel with a wardrobe large enough to let her do so, especially a woman as attractive as Annja. He’d never come right out and said so—the sun would stop revolving around the earth when that happened—but she’d managed to piece together the gist of his viewpoint from the few comments and frowns he’d made to her over the years.

The knowledge that he’d scowl all the more should he discover that she intentionally packed as light as she could just to tease him when coming here made her laugh aloud.

Maybe this was going to be a fun three days, after all.

Annja stepped into the foyer, with its vaulted ceiling and Italian marble floors. No matter how many time she visited, it never ceased to amaze her at the luxury Roux had surrounded himself with over the years. He seemed to be trying to forget the long, hard years he’d served in the field with nothing more than his arms and armor for material possessions and she had to admit he was doing an excellent job of it.

Garin led her through the lower floor to Roux’s personal study, one of the largest rooms in the entire house. It was two stories tall and stuffed to the gills with shelves full of books, artifacts and artwork. Stacks of paper streamers rested on a nearby table, along with a pile of balloons. A tank of helium gas stood beside it.

“Roux is out at a high-stakes poker game for the afternoon,” Garin told her. “Henshaw will be picking him up around dinnertime, which means we only have a couple of hours to get the place decorated and…”

He trailed off at seeing her expression. “What?” he growled.

Annja laughed; she couldn’t help it. Imagining him with those blue and yellow streamers in his huge hands was just too much. It was so not Garin. From cold-blooded killer to interior decorator—would wonders never cease?

When at last she could find her voice again, she said, “I’m sorry, Garin, really, I am. I just never expected you to go to so much trouble for Roux and the change is a bit, um, unexpected. Nice, but unexpected.”

He accepted her apology with a shrug and the two of them got to work. By the time Henshaw came in an hour later to check on them, they had finished strewing paper streamers throughout the room, even draping them on the massive stone sarcophagus that occupied one corner and wrapping them around the stuffed and mounted corpse of an Old West gunfighter that stood in the other, turning him from a cigar-store Indian-style display to a blue-and-yellow mummy. They were getting started on tying the balloons together into bunches.

Henshaw gave the room a once-over, his only discernible reaction the slight raising of an eyebrow as he took in the steamerwrapped gunfighter in the corner. Turning back to his partners in crime, he said, “I’m off to get Mr. Roux. I shall return in approximately one hour. We shall dine shortly after that.”

Garin had several phone calls to make so Annja spent the time wandering through Roux’s house, looking at the variety of artifacts that he had on display. While she might not agree with his methods of acquisition, since he had several items that were on current lists of objects either stolen or banned from being removed from their countries of origin, she could appreciate the beauty of the collection itself. She was examining a vase that had apparently been discovered in the remains of Knossos, the king’s palace on the island of Crete, when her phone chirped. Pulling it out of her pocket, she saw that she had a text message from Garin.

They’re here, was all it said.

She dashed back through the halls, slipping through the main foyer only seconds before Henshaw and Roux entered the house, and joined Garin in the study. There they waited for the guest of honor.

“Surprise!” they shouted when Henshaw led Roux into the room.

The older man started, then scowled first at the two of them and then back over his shoulder at Henshaw.

“Traitor!” he said, “I suppose you’re in on this, too, then? What are they doing here?”

Henshaw gave one of his rare smiles. “Celebrating your birthday, of course, sir.”

Garin smiled easily, ignoring Roux’s brusque manner. “Did you think we’d forget?”

“It’s not a question of forgetting. You’ve never bothered with my birthday before. What’s so different this year?”

But he accepted the surprise good-naturedly and even began to enjoy himself as the evening wore on. They ate together in the dining room down the hall—braised duck in a pear chutney, which Annja thought was exquisite—then returned to the study for drinks and conversation.

Garin and Roux had lived so long and seen so much that Annja could listen to them for hours. Roux was entertaining them all with a tale of the time he’d slipped inside a royal palace for a rendezvous with a visiting princess when what sounded like gunfire split the night air outside.

“Did you hear that?” Annja asked.

The other three had for they were already in motion. A lifetime spent in dangerous situations had fine-tuned their senses, including Henshaw’s, and they all recognized the sound of guns when they heard them. Annja did, too; she was just surprised to be hearing them at Roux’s secluded estate.

Henshaw went straight to the computer sitting on a nearby desk. As he settled into the seat in front of it an alarm began to sound throughout the house. He silenced it with the touch of a button and then pressed another. A section of the wall to the left of where he sat split apart as a result, revealing sixteen security monitors in four rows of four. Each of them showed a different part of the manor grounds and on several of them Annja saw gray shapes racing across the lawn, firing at the hired security force as they came.

The hiss of hydraulics captured Annja’s attention and she turned away from the monitors to see both Roux and Garin waiting impatiently for the vault at the back of the room to finish opening. Annja hadn’t been inside that room since her first visit to the estate but remembered the treasure trove of multiple currencies and weapons it contained.

Roux could have armed and financed a small private army with what was in room.

It was the weapons stored in the vault that her two companions were going for. Garin armed himself with a pair of heavy pistols while Roux took a rifle for himself and then carried another over to Henshaw.