“Yep, that’s it. A katana.Can you imagine getting close enough to a major political figure to try and take him out with a freakin’ sword? When everybody else has guns? What a maniac!”
This was getting worse by the minute.
“Did they ever catch him?”
“Of course they did. Why do you think I’m not worried about you, given the kind of trouble you get yourself into?”
She had to admit he was right; ever since taking possession of the sword, she had a knack for getting herself into the biggest messes possible.
Like now.
“So what happened to him?”
Bart snorted. “Got blown up when he tried to take out the British prime minister at a summit in Madrid back in 2003. There wasn’t enough left of him to fill a Baggie.”
Just when she started to feel better about the situation Bart had go and ruin things again.
“So they never found a body?”
“What did I just say? There wasn’t anything left of him to bury, Annja. But trust me, you and your friend can rest easy. Whoever it was that broke into your friend’s flat was probably just trying to be funny.”
“Some sense of humor,” she said, and laughed along with him while inside she was getting more and more nervous by the minute.
She made small talk for a couple of moments more, thanked Bart for what he had dug up and then got off the phone as quickly and as gracefully as she could without raising his suspicions.
As soon as she had, she headed for her laptop.
A quick search online turned up a decent number of feature stories and news reports from the eighties through the nineties that talked about the mysterious Dragon. All of them told the same basic story Bart had—assassin for hire, no one knew his background or what he looked like, or even if the Dragon was a man or a woman, only that he always killed with his weapon of choice, a katana,and would leave a piece of rice paper folded into the shape of a dragon at the scene of every killing. The press had given him the moniker “the Dragon” when word of the origami figures leaked out, and to this day it was the only name they had for him. The Dragon’s identity vanished in the same explosion that had claimed his physical body.
She sat back, staring off into space, as she pondered the similarities. An international assassin who killed with a Japanese katanaand left origami figures in his wake, and an unknown intruder who broke into a rich man’s home, carried a katanaand left an origami figure in his wake. They were too alike to be just a coincidence. Either someone had decided to take up the killer’s mantle or the killer himself had never actually died.
After all, there hadn’t been a body, she reminded herself.
Maybe the Dragon had spent the past few years in hiding, recovering from injuries sustained from his last assassination attempt, and had only recently chosen to come out of hiding.
But why would a political assassin be after Roux? she wondered.
The most logical answer would be that he wasn’t. After all, Roux took considerable effort to stay out of the limelight and something like politics was anathema to a man like him. But what if the Dragon had decided to forgo political assassinations in favor of a mercenary lifestyle? Killing for hire, perhaps? That was a different story entirely.
Garin had been right; Roux had angered enough people over the years that a list of those who held a grudge strong enough to try and kill him would be very long indeed.
More than a few of them had the means to do it, too.
This was not good—not good at all.
8
Given that she was starting to suspect the attack on the estate might actually have been an attempt to assassinate Roux, Annja decided that she was going to take another stab at discussing it with him and see if she could learn anything further that might help her fend off what she was beginning to see as a growing threat to his life.
But when she called the estate, she was informed by Henshaw that Roux was out and wouldn’t return until evening. Annja explained that she needed to talk with him, but the majordomo guarded his boss’s whereabouts like a mother grizzly guards her cubs and wouldn’t tell her where he had gone or exactly when he was expected to return. Rather than spend any time arguing with him, she simply made an appointment to see Roux that evening and that was that.
She spent the next hour pacing back and forth in her hotel room, watching the minute hand creep around the clock and wishing it would go faster. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she decided to get out of the hotel and play tourist for a bit—try to take her mind off her pending meeting with Roux. It had been some time since she’d had the opportunity to wander through the city at her leisure and she vowed that she’d make good use of what little time she had; after all, who knew when she’d be back this way again?
After a quick shower she threw on a pair of khaki shorts, a deep blue T-shirt and her usual pair of low-rise hiking boots, grabbed an apple out of the fruit basket on the table and headed for the concierge’s desk in the lobby. Arranging for a rental car to be available upon her return took only a few minutes thanks to the concierge’s help, and with that taken care of, she was ready to enjoy the day.
Her first stop, she decided, was going to be Sainte-Chapelle, the palatine chapel in the courtyard of the royal palace on the Île de la Cité. Originally built by Louis IX to store the many holy relics he had purchased from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, Baldwin II, including the supposed Crown of Thorns worn by Christ during his crucifixion, the chapel was best known for its fifteen stained-glass windows, each one nearly fifty feet high and picturing Biblical stories from Genesis to Revelation. Annja was as interested in the architecture of the restored chapel—the original having been heavily damaged during the French Revolution—as she was in the artifacts it had once contained. She had always wanted to visit, but had never found the time.
Annja was thankful that the cab ride was reasonably short, for the traffic was terrible and terrifying. When the driver announced that they had arrived, she practically leaped out of the cab and had to suppress a smile at his bewildered expression. She thanked him for the speedy arrival and paid the fare, then turned her attention to the ominous-looking building behind her, with its dark stone towers and conical roofs circa the thirteenth century, known as the Palais de Justice. Now housing several French courts, this wing of the building had once been home to the Conciergerie, the oldest prison in Paris, and had held such infamous prisoners as Robespierre and Marie Antoinette. It was now a museum, but that didn’t do much to change the vibe that Annja picked up off the place. Just looking at it made her shiver, as she imagined what it must have been like to be a prisoner there, locked away in a cold, dark, vermin-infested cell.
She walked down the street until she came to the entrance that served the majority of the complex. After buying an admission ticket, she slipped through the gates and made her way in the direction of the chapel.
The royal palace had once stood on the spot the Palais de Justice now occupied and Annja knew it had connected directly to the chapel via a narrow corridor. It was designed that way to allow King Louis IX to pass directly into it without leaving the palace, in much the same way the Holy Roman Emperor in Constantinople had been able to enter the Hagia Sophia from his own residence. The king, who had died of a plague while on crusade, had been canonized by the pope and was now known as Saint Louis. The palace itself had disappeared ages ago, leaving the two-level church on its own, surrounded by the less sophisticated buildings of the Palais de Justice.