“Following me? Why would you do that?”

Henshaw didn’t say anything.

It didn’t take her long to figure out what his silence meant. Henshaw would be acting on orders and those orders came from one person only. “Roux,” she said.

But why?

Henshaw didn’t know. Or if he did, he wasn’t saying. When she asked, he simply shrugged his shoulders.

“Was it your people in the subway the other night?”

Again the shrug.

“Fine,” she said, and she let the heat show in her voice. If Henshaw wouldn’t tell her, she’d just have to ask Roux himself. “Give me your phone and I’ll speak to Roux myself.”

He handed it over without objection and perhaps the slightest trace of relief.

She hit the redial button, figuring that Henshaw would have been in constant contact with Roux as he followed her through the city streets. She waited for her mentor to answer.

The phone rang several times.

She began to get an uneasy feeling as it went on and on. If Roux had said he would wait for Henshaw’s call, then that was what he would do.

She hung up and handed the cell phone back to Henshaw. “No answer,” she told him. “Are you sure he’s waiting for your call?”

Henshaw looked concerned. He immediately pressed Redial and waited through a set of rings. The longer it went on without an answer the more concerned Annja became.

Something wasn’t right, an inner voice told her.

The longer she watched Henshaw waiting for Roux to answer the phone, the more certain of it she became.

Something had happened to Roux.

“Come on,” she said, and headed for the exit to the park. Once on Fifth Avenue she flagged down a passing cab, waited for it to come to a stop and then climbed inside with Henshaw at her heels.

“Waldorf-Astoria,” Henshaw said as the cab pulled away from the curb and headed into traffic. “Please hurry.”

Annja’s anxiety ratcheted up a notch. She’d never seen Henshaw in a hurry, not even when under fire. Apparently his inner alarms were going off, too.

The cabbie got them through the city streets in record time. Henshaw shoved a handful of bills through the slot and the two of them were out the door and rushing into the hotel before the doorman could even get out his usual “Good evening.”

The elevator seemed to take forever and Annja was grateful that no one else tried to get on board with them. Henshaw was practically vibrating with tension and she didn’t think listening to the prattle of civilians, for lack of a better word, was going to do him any favors.

When they hit the eighth floor, Henshaw drew a gun from his jacket and led the way down the hall, toward the suite at the other end where Roux was staying for the duration of his visit to New York.

They were still a half dozen rooms away when they saw that the door to the suite was partially open.

Annja called her sword to her, getting a firm grip on the hilt with two hands, ready to deal with whatever might be waiting for them inside.

Henshaw glanced back, saw that she was ready for a confrontation if it came to that and crept down the corridor to the room itself. Reaching out with his free hand, he silently pushed the door the rest of the way open.

There was a short corridor between the front door and the living area and this naturally limited what they could see from outside in the hall, but even from there they could tell that a struggle had taken place inside the room. Cushions had been pulled off the coach and a chair had been knocked to the ground.

Cautiously they stepped forward.

The living room looked as though it had been the scene of a fight. In addition to the furniture that had been knocked over, the glass top of the coffee table had a starred crack in the center, as if someone had driven the heel of their foot into it, and the television had been knocked out of the entertainment cabinet to lay shattered in a heap on the floor.

Seeing the damage, they quickly checked the rest of the suite, doing it as a team so that they could provide cover for each other if they found someone or something unexpected.

In the end, they didn’t find anything more.

The suite was empty.

Roux was gone.

“Maybe he wasn’t here,” Annja suggested, trying to see the bright side. “Maybe he’s down in the bar or in the dining room right now.”

She could tell by his face that Henshaw didn’t think it was very likely, but he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and called down to the front desk where he asked to speak to the manager. They spoke for a few minutes and then Henshaw thanked the man and hung up.

He did not look happy with what he had learned.

“Roux left the restaurant in the company of a young Asian woman around nine. The manager says he’d never seen her before, so that reduces the possibility she was one of the professionals that they’re used to seeing who use the hotel as a meeting place. They tend to be known quantities in a place like this. Then he checked with room service and they confirmed that they delivered a bottle of brandy to an older gentleman and a younger woman here in this room about an hour ago.”

Annja’s mind went immediately to her encounter at the café with the mysterious Shizu. Was that who Roux had been seen with? If so, how had she found him? Had the Dragon had them all under surveillance without their knowing it? Could they be under observation even now?

She was just about to say something along those lines to Henshaw when she was startled into silence by the ringing of a telephone.

The two of them immediately checked their individual cells, but neither one was receiving a call, which left the hotel phone somewhere beneath all the debris. Luckily the caller just let the phone ring until, at last, Annja was able to locate it.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Creed. What a surprise to find you there.”

The voice seemed to be older, deeper, but Annja recognized it nonetheless.

Shizu.

“You’re not surprised and you know it. Where’s Roux?”

At the mention of his employer’s name, Henshaw walked into the bedroom next door and Annja soon heard him searching around in the debris, looking for another extension to listen in on.

“The old goat is fine. For now,” Shizu said.

Annja heard a gentle click and knew Henshaw had found the other phone.

“Whether or not he remains that way depends on you, however.”

Annja frowned. “What do you want?”

“I thought that would have been obvious by now. I want the sword.”

The bold statement left her at a momentary loss for words.

Shizu laughed. “My, my, my. Has the proverbial cat got your tongue?”

At last Annja found her voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What sword?”

Shizu said something to someone else in Japanese and in the background there came a sudden wail of pain. When silence returned she said to Annja, “I can do this all night, if you’d like, but I don’t think your friend Roux is up to it. Are you sure you want to play it this way?”

Annja bit down on her lip, fighting for control. “I told you, I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said again, trying to stall for time as she fought to figure out just what to do.

This time Roux let out a long mewling cry of such pain and terror that it didn’t even sound human. Annja felt her stomach churn at the thought of what they had to do to a man, particularly one as tough as Roux, to get him to make a sound like that, never mind keep it going for several very long minutes. In the other room, she thought she could hear Henshaw retching.

Yeah, you and me both, buddy.

To Shizu, she said sharply, “All right. Lay off. I know what sword you mean.”

“Of course you do. Seems you’re not so tough, after all, Ms. Creed.”

We’ll see about that, she thought.

“Bring the sword with you to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden tomorrow at sunset. Come alone. Walk to the viewing pavilion inside the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden. I will meet you there with the old man and we’ll do an exchange, your sword for your friend’s life. Understood?”