Free Rogue Angel 54: Day of Atonement by Alex Archer Page B

the world who could confide in each other as the world aged around them, leaving them untouched. And yet he had chosen to take them? To break in here in the middle of the night and disappear before dawn, trying to cover his tracks?
    It couldn’t be good.
    He knew Garin better than he knew himself; there was only ever one motive for him to do something like this, to betray the pair of them so completely: money.
    He had a buyer, almost certainly, but for what?
    And just how much damage could the papers do out in the world once they were sold?
    Without knowing exactly what was missing, it was difficult to tell, but most of the material in here was primary source research. Handwritten notes of scribes and eyewitnesses to incredible moments of history—like the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake in Rouen.
    He felt foolish. Garin was a scorpion. It was in his nature to sting, no matter how much love there was between them. He took what he wanted without giving a second thought to anyone else. If it meant so much to Garin to risk their often-strained relationship, then there was nothing he could have done to stop him short of handing the papers over himself, with his blessing. And that would have taken the fun out of it for Garin. That was just who he was. No, what hurt was that he had used Annja and his concern for her as a cover for his crime.
    As always it was only ever about what Garin wanted.
    And what Garin wanted, Garin took.
    He took the opened bundle of papers and cradled themcarefully in his hands, intending to check them off against the inventory, but once in the study the first thing he did was call Annja.
    The call went straight to voice mail.
    That only made him all the more nervous.
    He needed to know she was safe, primarily, but he wanted to know if she’d seen anything, marked anyone taking an unnatural interest in her beyond the usual autograph hunters. That meant that he was looking for one single piece of information: Had the anonymous caller made contact?
    He’d only kept the call from Annja because it had felt like the right thing to do the previous night. Now, in the cold light of day, he was starting to doubt his own judgment.
    “It’s Roux,” he said. “Please call me when you get this. I’m on my way to join you. I’ll be there in a few hours.”
    Using the intercom on the main phone, he summoned Henshaw. The man appeared in a matter of seconds, as though materializing from thin air. “Henshaw, is there a way we can redirect calls from the line in the study to my cell phone while I am on the road?”
    “Yes,” was the man’s reply, taking the phone from the cradle and punching in a code.
    It took him all of three seconds.
    “It is done, sir.”
    “Excellent. Please prepare an overnight bag. I shall be leaving the chateau soon. Call ahead to make sure my plane is ready, would you?”
    “Yes, sir.” The faithful servant nodded.
    “That will be all.”
    “Very well, sir. Safe travels.”
    “We can but hope, but they rarely ever are,” Roux said.

15
    The sun had barely kissed the horizon when Garin reached his plane. It was a short return hop. Let Roux go chasing after Annja and meddle in her life. Besides, she was a big girl. And he had another, more pressing engagement with a buyer who was about to pay an awful lot of money for the papers he’d liberated from Roux’s vault. An obscene amount of money, really, given what they actually were, which only made the deal sweeter.
    Before he ran through safety procedures, he made a call to the interested party, assuring him that he had come into possession of the merchandise, and that he was ready to make the trade. The price had just gone up, however, by another mil, for expenses incurred, which was a fat lie, but the kind of fat lie a person could get away with when he held all the cards. Unsurprisingly, given the hour, no one was there to take the call.
    “I’ve got what you were looking for, but now that I have, we need to revisit the