“Not at all.”

The photo was tossed back down on the table. “Okay, this I gotta hear. You wanna hire around-the-clock surveillance and executive protection for an archaeologist? What’d she do, piss off the Vatican by discovering the tomb of Jesus or something?”

Nothing like that, Henshaw thought. She’s just the current bearer of a mystical sword that once belonged to Joan of Arc and is now being pursued by one of the world’s most dangerous assassins.

But he couldn’t say that.

Instead, he explained that Annja’s work had made certain terrorist groups aware of her as a potential target of opportunity and that his employer was interested in protecting the investment he had made in her work without her knowing the extent of the danger she was in. As stories went, it was a decent one, and certainly good enough to pull Marco and his team into the mix. Henshaw felt bad about deceiving his old friend, but what else could he do? It wasn’t as though he could just come out and tell the man the truth.

They spent a few minutes discussing terms and pay rates and concluded the deal over a handshake. Both men knew the other was good for it.

When they were finished with their beers, Marco said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the team.”

The left the pub, climbed into Marco’s old sedan and drove a few blocks deeper into the warehouse district, stopping at a small nondescript building to the west of the pub. Marco pulled out a set of keys, unlocked the door and ushered Henshaw inside.

This was where the rest of the team waited for them.

There were three women and four men. Marco introduced them to Henshaw one at a time—Dave, a cheery, good-natured sort who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five; Olivia, a dark-haired beauty with a background in demolitions; Jessi, a former SAS commando; Arthur, a quiet, unassuming man who was the group’s electronics expert; Clive, a former U.S. Marine who had turned his skills to the private sector; Glen, the team’s covert infiltration expert; and last, but not least, Sara, a short, pudgy woman who could shoot the cap off of a soda bottle at four hundred yards.

They looked like a good, solid unit. Henshaw was pleased. After Marco introduced him, Henshaw laid out the requirements and expectations of the job in a clear, concise manner. There were a few questions, but none that he couldn’t answer and certainly none that might have brought his explanation into question. Not surprisingly, none of the team members recognized Annja. Chasing History’s Monstersjust wasn’t their cup of tea.

From inside his briefcase Henshaw produced a thick dossier of information on Annja, including her usual habits and preferences, the hotel she was currently staying in, address and layout of her loft in Brooklyn. Essentially anything he could think of that might help them do their job. After all, Annja’s life was possibly at stake and he wasn’t going to cut any corners. He informed them of her prowess in martial arts and commented that she often practiced with various types of weaponry, just in case they witnessed her with sword in hand.

When he was finished, he left them to their perusal of the documents and joined Marco off to the side, where he passed him an envelope.

“My employer will spare no expense,” Henshaw told him. “Inside the envelope you’ll find the access information for a bank account you can use for expenditures. Do whatever you need to in order to keep her alive.”

Marco looked at him for a long moment. “This isn’t a hypothetical, is it? You really think someone is going to make a go at her.”

Henshaw nodded. “I do. And I’m counting on you to stop them from succeeding.”

Marco smiled. “That’s what they pay me the big bucks for, mate. Don’t you worry. We’ve got it handled.”

11

After her lunch with Garin, Annja decided to walk back to her hotel rather than catch another cab. It would give her some time to digest what she had just learned and she could do with some fresh air and a bit of thought.

She suspected that the individual she’d fought the other night was, indeed, the Dragon. When you combined the stealth with which they had infiltrated Roux’s estate, the skill the swordsman had displayed when wielding his weapon and the presence of the origami dragon left behind at the scene of the attack, there weren’t too many other conclusions that made sense. She’d been so focused on figuring out why an international assassin was after her mentor and friend that she never stopped to consider the other possible targets in the picture, namely herself and Garin.

If what Garin was telling her was true, then she had reason enough to be concerned.

She’d been hunted before. That was nothing new. Since taking up the sword it seemed that everywhere she went she ran into some psycho with an ego the size of California who saw her as an obstacle to their plans for world domination or whatever this week’s fiendish plot might be. She fought back against them, each and every time, and had always managed to come out on top.

This time, though, she wasn’t so sure.

She’d never faced off against an international assassin for hire before.

And to make matters worse, he’d already beaten her once.

Her thoughts turned to the rest of what Garin had said. Rumors about a mystical sword were all well and good, but she was probably one of the few people on earth who had the personal experience to actually take them seriously. The very idea that there might be another sword with powers similar to her own was extremely unsettling to her. Where had it come from? What was its purpose? How had the Dragon gained possession of it?

Garin had once told her that her discovery of the last piece of the sword that had been missing for so long was nothing short of a miracle. At first she had believed it to be the fortune of fate, the result of a chance earthquake that occurred while she was in the vicinity. Later, after hearing the stories related to her by Garin and Roux about the long search for the pieces of the sword, she began to question the validity of her early theory.

Maybe the sword had recognized something in her and had done what it needed to do to bring them together. Could the same thing have happened to the Dragon?

Not knowing was going to drive her crazy; she knew herself well enough to see that coming from a mile away.

Since she didn’t have enough information yet to come up with a decent answer for the questions that were bothering her about the sword, she decided to try to focus on the Dragon himself. What did he want with her? And how did he know about her in the first place?

She had to admit that she’d had a few close calls; she’d been forced to use her sword now and then when other people were nearby. But she’d always thought she’d done a good job of keeping it out of sight. People had seen her with it—there was no doubt about that—but she’d been confident that no one had ever seen her draw the sword out of the otherwhere. Or, at least, no one had seen her draw it and lived to tell the tale.

So how had the Dragon known to come looking for her? Did his sword act like her own, providing the occasional flash of intuition or gentle nudge in the right direction? Had the Dragon come to Roux’s estate for some other reason, only to turn his attention to her after he recognized a kindred spirit?

She had too many questions without answers.

Annja had only walked a few blocks when the feeling of being watched fell over her. She recognized it right away, that creeping sensation at the base of her spine that let her know she was under someone else’s scrutiny.