скачать книгу бесплатно
“I am sorry, my lord.” The innkeeper wrung his hands, then lurched forward as a blade burst through his chest. Blood spilled down his quivering lips as he struggled to stand. Then the soldier behind the dead man kicked the corpse forward, freeing his blade.
A dozen armored men swarmed into the dining hall. Their drawn blades flashed in the firelight.
Pepin heaved himself from his seat and freed his sword from the scabbard beside the table. He was not a gifted fighting man, but his father had trained him in the way of the sword.
Steel shrieked and bit, and the screams of dying men filled the dining hall. In mere moments, blood covered the stone floor and made footing treacherous. The attackers fought with skill and fury, but Pepin had chosen some of his best warriors to accompany him on his journey with the deposed king and the prince.
With his back nearly to the wall, Pepin blocked another swing, then reached to his waist for the long knife he carried there. He fisted it and turned aside another blow, then slid beneath the bigger man’s right arm as the heavy sword cut the air over his head. Before the man could turn, Pepin thrust his knife between the man’s ribs in the chain mail opening under his arm.
Even though the man was already dying, Pepin shoved the knife into the man’s throat and robbed him of the last few seconds of his life. Breathing hard, Pepin studied the room. Though his men had been surprised, they had recovered quickly. Corpses now littered the dining hall, and only a few of them were his soldiers.
Childeric knelt on the floor and bled profusely from his nose while two soldiers with drawn blades flanked him. The soon-to-be-deposed king swayed unsteadily and looked disoriented. Theuderic lay on the floor nearby with a sword to his throat, his eyes round with fear.
“Do you see?” Childeric gazed balefully at Pepin. “My people will never accept you as their king. They will fight for me. This night or some day later, they will kill you.”
“These men?” Pepin spit on the corpse nearest him. “These are not warriors who sought to aid you. These men were brigands hoping only to loot who they presumed to be only wealthy travelers, not soldiers. You cling to false hopes, Childeric, and it does not become you.”
“Liar!”
Pepin strode over to Childeric. The king struggled to get to his feet, but the soldiers beside him held him in check.
Pepin sheathed his sword and the clang of metal against metal suddenly filled the hall. “I grow weary of your lack of acceptance of reality.” He held the bloody knife before his prisoner. Pepin knotted a fist in Childeric’s hair. “Tell me what I want to know and I will suffer you to live.”
Childeric glared up at him. “Never. You will live in fear of the Merovingian power coming back to strike you down.”
“Father!” Theuderic tried to push away the sword holding him in place. Instead, the blade bit into his unprotected chest and he lay there helplessly.
“I will not live in fear. And I will have your secrets. If they exist.”
Childeric locked his eyes on Pepin’s. “For everything, runt, there is a time. God made this so. You will regret everything you have done.”
For just a moment as he looked into the other man’s gaze, Pepin felt the cold breath of fear.
1
Present day
Annja Creed sat braced in the passenger seat of the burnt-orange Lamborghini and tried to divide her attention between the GPS screen on the dashboard and the late-afternoon traffic in West Los Angeles as they peeled around yet another corner. Traffic flashed by, though the number of cars was sparser than she had thought it would be. Los Angeles gridlocked a lot, and the streets were often choked with stalled vehicles.
Of course, their luck could end around the next corner, which was coming up much too quickly. She pulled her chestnut hair back and tied it in a ponytail. Dressed in charcoal pants, a dark green pullover and a short-waisted jacket, Annja had been prepared to spend the day at the Hollywood lot where she was currently consulting on a movie.
Riding kamikaze through LA traffic hadn’t been on her itinerary.
The voice streaming from the GPS was a steamy contralto Annja hadn’t heard before, but it sounded familiar and comforting.
“Steven, you need to make a right turn in one hundred feet.”
The voice had to be a custom package. That was something Steven Krauzer would want as a member of Hollywood’s elite director-producers.
“Turn now, Steven.” The car slung around the corner and the tires shrieked and slipped wildly before grabbing traction again. Annja’s seat belt tightened around her. She was safe, for the moment, but certainly not comfortable. Especially with an insane person behind the wheel.
On his best days, Steven Krauzer was believed to be not quite in touch with the real world. This wasn’t a good day at all.
Several more car horns blared in protest as the Lamborghini powered through the turn, holding contact with the street through what had to be the thinnest layer of rubber. A cab loomed before them, growing larger as they approached. For a moment Annja saw the Lamborghini’s volatile color reflected in the shiny chrome bumper, but Krauzer yanked the wheel to the right, went up on the cracked sidewalk momentarily, then pressed harder on the accelerator. “Did anyone ever tell you that I trained to race at NASCAR?” Krauzer sat grinning confidently in the driver’s seat, belted in by a five-point system.
“No.” Annja caught herself lifting her foot for a brake pedal that wasn’t there. With effort, she put her foot back on the floor.
In his early thirties, and one of Hollywood’s wunderkinder as a child of famous parents—his father a powerful producer of movies and his mother an international film star—Steven Krauzer never really had time for anyone else in his life. He was lean and muscular, and he trained in a gym with near-fanatical devotion. He wore Chrome Hearts Kufannaw II sunglasses over dark eyes, and his black chinstrap beard matched his short-cropped hair. His jeans were custom-made and full of holes, and the tailored beige Carhartt men’s work shirt gave him that everyman look he cultivated. He was egocentric, prideful and a prima donna, but he tried to put himself out there as just one of the guys. Krauzer’s image was as much a production as any movie he’d ever directed.
“In one hundred twenty feet, turn left onto West Pico Boulevard, Steven.”
Krauzer was already sailing through the intersection. He missed colliding with a city bus by inches. “You know,” Annja said, “there’s really no rush to find Melanie.”
For a moment, the cool, cocky composure Krauzer displayed evaporated. He curled his left hand into a fist and banged it on the steering wheel.
“Melanie Harp stole from me! She took that scrying crystal because she knew I was going to need it for the scenes today. She’s trying to destroy my film.”
“She probably doesn’t even know the theft has been discovered.” The realization that the scrying crystal was missing had occurred only a little over twenty minutes ago. Since Annja had been hired as an expert on the authenticity of the props, Krauzer had demanded she come with him to find the woman he believed had taken the scrying crystal.
“Ha!” Krauzer reached down and flicked the gearshift, skidding through another corner and nearly locking bumpers with a delivery truck that pulled hastily to the side. “That just goes to show that you might know a lot about anthropology, but you don’t know squat about Hollywood.”
Archaeology.
But she didn’t press the issue, because it would only serve to distract the director. Since she’d been in LA serving as a consultant on his movie, Krauzer hadn’t paid attention to her anyway.
Krauzer hadn’t even known about her show, Chasing History’s Monsters. She’d been requested as a consultant on the film by one of the producers. When Krauzer had discovered she was something of a celebrity herself, he hadn’t been happy. He’d warned her about becoming a distraction to the filming. What he had meant was she shouldn’t steal any of the the director’s thunder.
Chasing History’s Monsters had a large international fan base, and Annja enjoyed doing the show. She strove for actual historical authenticity and audiences responded well to her stories. An elf witch’s scrying stone, however, was off the beaten path for an archaeologist.
“If you check social media,” Krauzer went on, “I’m sure someone has posted about the theft of the elf witch’s scrying crystal. Five minutes after Melanie Harp took that thing, you can bet the whole world knew. No. We’re going to be lucky if she hasn’t left town and gone back to wherever it is she’s from.” He looked at Annja. “Do you know where she’s from?”
“No.”
Krauzer returned his attention to the streets. “I thought you might have known.”
“Why would I know?”
Krauzer shrugged. “She’s a girl. You’re a girl. Girls talk.”
Annja struggled not to take offense at the offhand summation, but it was difficult. She took out her smartphone, entered the security code and studied the viewscreen when it opened up the websites she’d been inspecting.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“When we found out the scrying crystal was missing, I programmed in some online movie memorabilia sites to see if the prop showed up there. In case Melanie is trying to sell it.”
“The prop? Seriously? Just yesterday you were telling me that we might have a real artifact on our hands. You were begging me for a chance to examine it. Now the elf witch’s scrying crystal is a prop?”
Begging was a strong word. After seeing the crystal briefly in one of the scenes Krauzer had shot the previous day, Annja had been curious about the piece. She wasn’t all that invested in the crystal. She’d wanted to see it, but Krauzer had refused, insisting that the crystal had to be locked up when the filming had finally finished. She’d known the director was deliberately throwing his weight around.
Annja hadn’t lost any sleep over not getting to see the crystal—even if that seriously hampered the job she’d been paid to come here and do!—but the possibility that it might be authentic kept scratching at her mind. Los Angeles—California in general—was a melting pot of the world’s history.
Annja had planned on taking advantage of the movie deal to pursue research into Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the Portuguese explorer who had sailed under a Spanish flag to explore the West Coast of North America. Annja had turned up some rumors on the alt.history and alt.archaeology sites she’d wanted to check out while she was in town. And Doug Morrell, her producer on the television show, had wanted her to investigate sightings of “ghost pirates” he’d heard about on some late-night radio show.
The research she’d done on Cabrillo had actually led to her interest in Krauzer’s so-called prop, but she hadn’t told him that.
And now the scrying crystal had been stolen and might disappear before she got to find out.
“If Melanie took the scrying crystal—” Annja began.
“Which she did!”
“—then she might think of selling it on one of those sites. How much do you think it’s worth?”
Krauzer cursed. “Fans are idiots! Do you remember when that comic-book artist, the guy who drew Spider-Man or something, paid over $3 million for a baseball?”
“That was Mark McGwire’s seventieth home run in the 1998 season.”
“You’re a baseball fan?”
Annja shrugged. “I live in Brooklyn.”
“Baseball. Bunch of guys standing around waiting for stuff to happen.” Krauzer blew a raspberry. “My point is, this comic-book-sketch guy blew the prices for collectible baseballs for a long time. And they’re baseballs! They sell those everywhere. You can write anybody’s name on them. But that scrying crystal? That’s one of a kind. I made sure of that.”
Annja believed it was one of a kind, too. She needed to study it. “If she was smart, she’d sell the crystal back to you.”
“Me?”
“You’d pay for it if you had to, and you’d pay a lot. You’ve got it insured, right?”
“Of course I’ve got it insured. Do you think I’m some kind of idiot?” Annja ignored the question, certain Krauzer really didn’t want to hear her answer.
“Insurance companies routinely pay off on buyback situations.”
“This is something you know about?”
“Yes.”
“How?” Behind the sunglasses, Krauzer’s features knotted up in suspicion.
“Insurance companies have sometimes hired me to verify a certificate of authenticity on objects that were stolen and bought back. Sometimes thieves have created copies of the stolen items and attempt to sell those to insurance companies, doubling down on the original theft.”
“That cannot happen. I cannot shoot this movie with a counterfeit. Do you know what would happen to my reputation if I did something like that? When fans go to see a Steven Krauzer picture, they see a genuine Steven Krauzer picture. There’s nothing fake about it!”
Krauzer slammed on the brake hard enough that the seat belt cut into Annja as it held her to the seat. The tortured shriek of shredding rubber echoed through the neighborhood, and the Lamborghini came to a stop half on the street and half on the sidewalk.
Leaning over, Krauzer popped open the glove compartment and took out a nickel-plated revolver with a six-inch barrel. “Let’s go.”
He opened the car door and got out.
2 (#ulink_cbdb4f6c-6ff4-507f-a57f-a327918e1a56)
Shocked at the sight of the gun and the director’s apparent willingness to use it, Annja was a step behind Krauzer as he strode toward the building. She caught up to him as he slid the big pistol in his waistband at his back and covered it up with his shirttail.
“A gun?” Annja asked. “Seriously?”
“Having a gun makes people listen to you.”
“Do you even know how to use it?”
“Of course I do.” Krauzer shook his head. “I cut my teeth on guns-and-ammo movies. Action stuff. Science fiction. I had to know how to use guns so I could film actors using them. You wouldn’t believe how many times directors get it wrong because they don’t know how to use a gun and the actors don’t know, either. Big case of the blind leading the blind.”
“This isn’t ‘Grand Theft Auto.’”
“That woman stole my scrying crystal and she’s delaying my film! She’s not smart enough to do that on her own. She has partners. Trust me.”
Annja was beginning to think Steven Krauzer lived inside a movie in his head. “Melanie Harp is not a master criminal.”
“Exactly my point. She couldn’t have thought of this on her own. She had help.”
“I don’t think she knows any master criminals, either.”
“Do you know that for a fact? Because I don’t.”
Annja didn’t bother to argue, because she knew she wouldn’t win. She just hoped no one got hurt.
A green awning covered the double-door entrance, which had seen better days. Gold lettering on the door announced The Wickersham Apartments. The red carpet leading up to the doors was thin and worn.
There was no guard on the door, but another sign promised Security.
An older woman wearing a sundress, a floppy hat and big sunglasses and holding a small dog came through the doors. She wrapped her arms protectively around her pet as Krauzer barreled toward her.
“Don’t shut that door,” Krauzer barked.
The woman blocked the closing door with her sandaled foot.
Krauzer caught the door, pulled it wide and entered the apartment building.
“Thank you,” Annja told the woman.
The woman looked at her conspiratorially and leaned in to whisper, “Is he somebody?”
“He likes to think he is,” Annja replied.
Shaking her head, the woman said, “So many people in this town think that. They do one cat-food commercial and they think they’re stars.” She waved dismissively and continued her walk.
She smiled at the woman, then hurried after Krauzer.
Annja reached the landing with Krauzer and went up the next flight. “Do you know which floor Melanie lives on?”
