Rogue Angel - The Lost Scrolls Part 8

Sulin shrugged. "We all must have standards, I suppose," he said. "And I suppose we agree that those standards must be enforced."

"Yeah. Otherwise, we got anarchy."

"And speaking of standards." Sulin turned to look at Jadzia. "You smell revolting. Have you not been permitted to use the showers? We have given explicit orders you are to be allowed privacy."

She scowled. He was being so stupid. It was very disenchanting. "Why should I bother with such trivial details?"

"Because other people got noses, sweetie," Marshall said.

"Go and clean yourself, or I shall scrub you myself," Sulin said.

She rallied to show him a big smile. "I might like that."

His violet eyes narrowed. "Then perhaps Marshall should scrub you instead."

Marshall guffawed. "That'd be fun," he said. "For me."

She spun on him. "You wouldn't "

"Rape you? Naw. Not technically. But there are plenty of things I could do that wouldn't leave a mark. At least, not that anybody could see."

Jadzia got very quiet. This is real, This is real, she thought. They might actually hurt me. The thought made her spirit shrivel. she thought. They might actually hurt me. The thought made her spirit shrivel.

"And remember," Marshall said, "we're on the clock, here. It's just ticking away. And once it runs out, all bets are off."

"Unless Annja Creed really is your friend, and seeks to help you," Sulin said. He smiled.

How did I ever think he was pretty? Jadzia wondered.

"In which case," he said, "we shall destroy her."

Chapter 12.

Annja and Tex were now Canadian citizens, complete with new pa.s.sports and credit cards. Liviu had had some surprising equipment tucked into a closet of his crowded flat. She guessed that forgery had a lot more to do with the young Romanian's actual business model than systems invasion.

"Whose ident.i.ties are we stealing?" Annja had asked after the boy snapped their pictures with a digital camera and went to work with a small scanner.

He laughed as if she had said something absurd. He reminded her of Jadzia half poignantly, half annoyingly.

"n.o.body's," he said. "Welcome to virtual reality, complete with virtual people."

"But I thought it is supposed to be impossible to fake IDs."

"That shows what mundanes know," Liviu said, stabbing at his keyboard with two blindingly fast if slightly grubby fingers. "They really believe that s.h.i.t. Making everything digital makes it so much easier. n.o.body has to break in anywhere and change old high-school yearbooks now."

He studied the mug shot he had taken of Annja on his screen. After a quick glance she looked quickly elsewhere. The photo made her look bad enough to be official.

"But if it is in database, it must be true, yes? So now you are Alice Chapman and Matthew Wachowski of Toronto. You are schoolteacher and ministry of health investigator, respectively. You have lived together for three years. At end of questions remember to say, 'eh,'eh? Matthew has appendectomy scar from emergency surgery when he was seventeen."

"Hmm." Tex made a little quizzical noise. "I actually did have an emergency appendectomy. Real pain. Kind of an interesting coincidence that you "

Liviu had turned his chair around and dropped his head to regard him from beneath arched brows.

"You're kidding," Tex said weakly.

"When you come to Liviu, you come to the best!"

They had spent the night in neighboring rooms at the ultraposh Westin Grand Berlin, under the Canadian ident.i.ties Liviu had provided. Annja still felt vaguely guilty about who was being charged for their tickets and accommodations. Liviu had only laughed when she rather tentatively asked the question. She intuited it was some official agency he didn't like. That was probably most of them. Everywhere.

Tex had wakened her bright and early, looking eager, as if he had slept for fourteen hours, run ten miles and had himself a shower, a ma.s.sage and a pot of coffee. She decided she hated him.

She reminded herself he was sparing no effort, nor any of that rumored and now seemingly substantiated resourcefulness, to help a couple of strangers. And he seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself.

"You really were a cowboy?"

He shrugged. "Grew up on a ranch in Idaho. My parents both worked for the Forest Service. Ran cattle on the side. I was born in Ma.s.sachusetts, though. They named me Mark. And I never set foot in Texas until I joined the Army and got sent to FortBliss."

The quickest route to their destination Tex had been able to work out on short notice entailed a plane trip from Templehof to Edinburgh and then a train ride to John o' Groat's on the extreme northern end of the island.

Annja chafed at every second it cost them. Jadzia was in deadly danger. She had received a second message from the kidnappers, likewise disguised as a 419 scam, this one supposedly from the daughter of dead Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloevic, of all people. Its return path showed it "originated" from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. It gave an address for Annja to return an e-mail telling when and where she'd turn over the scrolls.

"Ask for more time," Tex had advised her. "It's pretty standard for negotiations like this." She had. Although neither one of them was a professional negotiator, she understood the mechanics of hostage taking you kill your hostage, you're out of leverage.

Her face twisted before she could stop it. "Thinkin' about her?" Tex asked softly.

She nodded. Though she knew intellectually she had done the right thing, her guts knotted every time she did so. There were so many horrible things they could do to her, she knew.

"Don't."

She looked at nothing for a moment, then nodded.

"Where'd you get the nickname Tex?" she asked, making herself sound cheerful. She hoped it didn't sound as brittle to him as it did to her.

He winced. "In the Army. Most of my squaddies in basic were Easterners. To them anybody from west of the Mississippi was Texan. Especially someone who was indiscreet enough to admit he'd been a cowboy. I hate that name, but it's stuck like a bad debt."

"Why?"

"Because I hated it. The Army's like that. And of course the network publicists had to run with it."

Annja laughed. "You were really a Ranger?"

His expression didn't exactly harden. Maybe set a bit. After a moment, he sighed. "Yeah. It's public record. But don't go believing everything you hear about me. Especially around the network."

She pursed her lips. "Okay. Were you really an adventure outfitter in Alaska and Africa?"

"Yes."

"Survival instructor?"

"Uh-huh."

"Medical bush pilot in Central and South America?"

He sighed. "Yup."

"You've been busy."

"Ran away from home when I was fourteen. Worked in oil fields for a while, then as a hunting guide. Wasn't hard to pa.s.s for older I've been this size since eighth grade."

"Were you abused as a child?" Annja asked with genuine concern.

He laughed. It was a rich laugh. It did not strike her as a laugh with much to hide. "Oh, heck no. The opposite, if anything. My parents were nice as they come. Maybe too nice. They converted to Buddhism when I was thirteen."

"Seriously?"

"Cross my heart. What really did it was the veganism." He shuddered theatrically. "If I never see another tofu, it'll be twenty years too soon."

"You ran away from veganism?"

"Can you think of a better reason? That, and the ch.o.r.es got boring. It was a real working ranch, cattle and horses, not some rich folks' fancy. Not sure how my folks rationalize raising beef cattle as vegetarians they still do it, by the way. Being a cowboy ain't as romantic as the movies make out. So mainly I ran away to have adventures." He laughed. "Of all the reasons to run away, that's probably about the worst."

"But haven't you, well, had had adventures?" adventures?"

He looked at her with level blue eyes. "Yeah. And that's the problem. You've You've had adventures, Annja. What'd they feel like?" had adventures, Annja. What'd they feel like?"

She thought for a moment. "Miserable. Mostly uncomfortable, inconvenient and scary."

"Me, too. Face it adventure sucks."

She thought about that and found nothing to contradict. "Ever thought about quitting?"

"Oh, h.e.l.l no. It's an addiction. I never tried crack, never even smoked cigarettes after my first one made me throw up. But I'm pretty sure the adventurous life hooks you worse. But what the hey it's not like anyone gets out of this life alive, is it?"

His eyes danced. Annja laughed again. "No," she said. "I guess not."

John O'Groats was everything her heart could possibly have dreamed. Damp, gray, windswept and dismal. With sheep. Had the sun continued to shine, the land would have been dazzling green, between the boulders, anyway. But the sun refused to cooperate.

But outside was brilliant in comparison to the inside of the pub called the Jolly Wrecker. Especially the back room, with the sweating ancient wooden barrels and dust-coated bottles stacked around the sod walls. Despite the fact it was half-dug into a hillock, the wind whistled in the rafters and occasionally down the back of Annja's neck where she sat in a chair that seemed to possess no two legs of equal length. The pub had gra.s.s on the roof and a weathered sign with the image of a jolly-looking sport with a peg leg and a grappling anchor, dressed in a yellow rain slicker and what she would have called a sou' wester. She suspected the place had started life as a shepherd's hut.

Some places reeked of quaintness, others of atmosphere. The Jolly Wrecker mostly reeked of lanolin, although stale alcohol, mildew and faint but persistent hints of decay played their little parts. Even with the dim bare bulb, which must have pulled all of five watts, hanging far enough from the already low wood-beamed ceiling on its frayed cord to threaten Annja's cranium, it was like being inside a ship's hold.

"So," said the fat man with the greasy gray-and-brown locks spilling down around the shoulders of the dark blue rainslicker he wore over a dark pullover, "what can we do you for?"

Stop with the lame eighties one-liners, Annja had to forcibly restrain herself from answering.

Tex leaned forward and rested a forearm on the moist round table. Although his chair was as functionally unstable as hers, she noticed it didn't rock. Whereas every time she breathed one of her chair legs thumped accusingly on the warped plank floor.

"Information," Tex said, smiling. "We want information."

"You won't get it," the man across from him said promptly.

Tex's eyebrows shot up. Annja almost felt relief at seeing him nonplussed for once.

"It's a quote from The Prisoner, The Prisoner," said the woman who sat beside the fat man. "An old series on the telly." She reached over to pat a pudgy hand almost as burdensomely beringed as her own. "Be a dear, Phil, and show our guests a little consideration. They've had a long journey."

"Sorry, luv. Can't help me'self. I can resist anything but temptation, you know."

"That and bad jokes," the woman replied.

The man looked back to Tex with dark eyes that danced despite the gloom. He had a keg head on a barrel body, a beard and a mustache with turned-up tips and in general a strong resemblance to dead British actor Oliver Reed, who had always been a favorite of Annja's, clandestinely watching movies in the TV room after the sisters had gone to bed. He called himself Phil Dirt. He looked like an old mod pa.s.sed through a life of extreme ups and downs and going at last to seed, albeit not without a fight.

"Magic words?" he said.

"Huh?" Tex said. He blinked. He was still adrift at the stout man's earlier response. This abrupt but not unfriendly question pushed him further out to sea. "Please?"

"We'll pay," Annja said hastily.

Phil brightened visibly. "The very ones!"

The woman who sat beside him shook her head without looking up from her knitting. She had been introduced as Vicious Suze. What she looked like was a youngish Italian grandmother, or an aging Gypsy aunt. She had a big nose and dark eyes in a well-upholstered olive face, framed by long raven'swing hair with dramatic silver streaks that flowed down her shoulders over the shawl with which she wrapped her generous form. Her dress seemed to have been made of myriad brightly colored scarves. The name was clearly ironic, Annja thought. She showed an abundance of bustling motherly energy and cheer.

"Phil," Suze said with a tut-tut for punctuation, "the e-mail said they would. And anyway, dear Tex is family."

"It's always good to hear," Phil said with an expansive gesture. "Always make things explicit, say I."

"That's the law of good old B6," rasped the man who loomed over his right shoulder like a skeleton at a feast.

"The sequel to Babylon 5? Babylon 5?" Annja asked, bewildered. She had gone into TV-trivia mode, having at last recognized The Prisoner The Prisoner as the sixties cult show starring Patrick McGoohan. as the sixties cult show starring Patrick McGoohan.

"Black Bart's b.l.o.o.d.y b.u.g.g.e.rin' Broadcastin' Brood," said what appeared to be a vaguely conical ma.s.s of abandoned brush standing by the barrels over Phil Dirt's left shoulder. Surrept.i.tiously Annja counted the B B s on her fingers. Closer inspection through the gloom, conducted earlier when the leader of the crew had introduced the man by the unlikely moniker of Ob Noxious, showed him to be an enormous fat guy with a nose like a large-pored potato and two murky green eyes squinting out from more graying blond hair and beard than seemed humanly possible. He looked to Annja as if, should you toss a bucket or two of green paint over him, he could play the Swamp Thing in a movie without recourse to special effects. Or even makeup. s on her fingers. Closer inspection through the gloom, conducted earlier when the leader of the crew had introduced the man by the unlikely moniker of Ob Noxious, showed him to be an enormous fat guy with a nose like a large-pored potato and two murky green eyes squinting out from more graying blond hair and beard than seemed humanly possible. He looked to Annja as if, should you toss a bucket or two of green paint over him, he could play the Swamp Thing in a movie without recourse to special effects. Or even makeup.

"So you call yourselves Black Bart's b.l.o.o.d.y b.u.g.g.e.rin' Broadcastin' Brood," Annja repeated, trying desperately to understand why Tex had brought her here.

"Right," said the man to Phil's right. "One of the last free-range pirate radio crews in the British Isles, we are." He was called Lightnin' Rod, and seemed to be the station's power-plant guy. He was tall and cadaverous, with long lank black hair just touched with gray, a long, droopy black handlebar mustache and black eyes.

Annja sneaked a sidewise glance at Tex. She didn't believe in ESP, but all the same she beamed a thought at him: I hope you know what you're doing.

He winked at her.

"Since the music-hall routine will never end, otherwise," Vicious Suze said, her plump fingers moving like hummingbirds around a b.u.t.terfly bush at her knitting, "what sort of information did you have in mind, ducks?"