Library Of Gold. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ last time she’d worn it, which said something entirely too depressing about her social life. She brought it to the bathroom with her, showered, dried off and put it on, pleased that the dress still fit.

      The limo arrived promptly at six, as expected. Annja had seen it coming down the street and was just stepping out of her building as it rolled to a stop outside. The driver, a large man in a chauffeur’s uniform, held the door for her while she slipped inside, smoothing her dress over her legs.

      Gascogne, the restaurant Sir Charles had chosen for their meeting, was on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan’s Chelsea District. Normally the traffic on a Friday night would make it next to impossible to get from her flat in Brooklyn and into the city in anything less than an hour, but the driver knew his job and he maneuvered the limo through the crush of traffic like a shark through a school of tuna. He had her at the door of the restaurant with ten minutes to spare.

      There was a small line outside waiting for tables and Annja drew more than a few admiring stares as she emerged from the limousine. She was escorted inside by the waiting maître d’.

      The restaurant had the ambience of a French bistro, with cream-colored walls, white linen tablecloths and muted lighting. It was artfully done and Annja knew that what looked effortless had probably been damned difficult to pull off.

      Transferred to a waiter, she was led across the room toward a table in the back corner where Sir Charles—she recognized him from all the media coverage—sat waiting for her. He was alone, which surprised her. She’d expected either a private dining room or bodyguards. He was, after all, one of the richest men in the world, which would make him a target nine ways from Sunday.

      She was getting closer to the table, and still puzzling it over, when she noticed a couple seated at a nearby table. The woman wore a finely tailored suit and Annja might not have seen the telltale bulge of what could only be a gun holstered beneath the woman’s arm if she hadn’t stretched to reach the saltshaker.

      And just like that it was easy to pick out Sir Charles’s crew from the rest of the restaurant patrons. A pair of men in business suits a few tables over kept looking around the room a little too regularly, and a slightly older man drinking at the bar had been watching her in the mirror ever since she’d entered.

      That Sir Charles wasn’t alone was oddly reassuring and she relaxed as she joined him at the table.

      He greeted her warmly, extending his hand across the table for her to shake rather than getting up out of his chair. Annja wasn’t surprised or offended; an auto accident had robbed him of the use of his lower body more than two decades before. And if she hadn’t known, his wheelchair would have been a dead giveaway. He’d been a tall, broad-shouldered man before the accident and had managed to retain much of his physique in the years since. He had a crushing grip and a wide smile.

      “Ah, Miss Creed. Wonderful to see you!”

      As the waiter held her chair for her, Davies paused to let her settle in.

      “Something to drink, mademoiselle?” the waiter asked in French, and was nonplussed when she immediately responded in the same language, selecting a glass of pinot grigio. It had been some time since she’d been out for a nice dinner. She was going to take advantage of the situation and enjoy herself.

      Davies’s blue eyes were sparkling. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice. I’m only in the city for the evening and didn’t want to miss the opportunity.”

      Despite her earlier thoughts, Annja felt herself swayed by his charm. “It’s my pleasure, Sir Charles.”

      The elderly man waved his hand as if shooing away a bad odor. “Please. Charles is fine. I reserve that Sir Charles stuff for those I don’t particularly care for all that much.”

      Annja laughed. “I think I like you already. Okay, Charles it is.”

      The waiter brought their drinks—the wine for Annja and a refill of what looked like Scotch for Charles. He waited until the server was out of earshot before continuing.

      “A mutual friend of ours in Paris said you might be able to help with a particular problem I’d like to solve.”

      Annja only had one friend in Paris who could possibly run in the same social circles as Davies and that was Roux. Incredibly wealthy in his own right, perhaps even more wealthy than Charles Davies, Roux was unlike any other man she’d ever met. Save one.

      He’d lived for more than five hundred years, which probably had something to do with that, she thought.

      Roux had been an instrumental force in her life for years now. She had been with him when she’d discovered the final missing piece to the shattered sword that had once been wielded by Joan of Arc. Annja had been in Roux’s study with him when the blade had mystically reforged itself right before their very eyes and, by Annja’s way of thinking, had chosen her to be its next bearer. Since then Roux had become a kind of mentor to her, sharing what he knew of the blade and its purpose.

      Which made sense given that the blade had had a significant impact on his life, as well.

      He’d been Joan’s protector, charged with delivering her safely back behind French lines, a job he’d ultimately failed to do. Joan had been captured and, vastly outnumbered, he and his young apprentice, Garin Braden, had been unable to do anything but stand and watch as the English soldiers burned her at the stake for witchcraft and heresy. Joan’s sword had been shattered by the commander in charge of the execution detail, the pieces quickly gathered up by onlookers as souvenirs. It was only later that Roux discovered how his failure to live up to his vow to protect the young maiden had changed him and, by extension, his apprentice, as well. The two men stopped aging, appearing today just as they did five centuries before. Determined to be the master of his own fate, Roux had set out on a quest to reunite the shattered pieces of Joan’s sword, thinking that restoring the weapon might somehow end the curse.

      Unfortunately, this brought him into rivalry with his former apprentice, Garin, who decided that he was quite happy living forever and didn’t see it as a curse at all. Because he saw the restoration of the blade as an attempt to undo the very act that had granted them an ageless life in the first place, Garin spent the next couple hundred years trying to kill Roux whenever he got the chance. It was only recently, when the blade had been reformed without any harm coming to them, that the two men had put aside their conflict and begun to cooperate.

      Roux had sent customers her way on several occasions and so Annja wasn’t exactly surprised to hear of his recommendation.

      “And how is the stubborn old goat?” she asked.

      “As willful as ever,” Davis replied, “and determined to make everyone around him well aware of it.”

      Their meal came, sea bass for Charles and a sirloin for Annja, and they spent the next thirty minutes enjoying the food and talking about inconsequential things. Once the table had been cleared and coffee ordered, Charles finally got down to business.

      “What can you tell me about the Library of Gold?” he asked.

      Annja didn’t even need to think about it. The library was one of the great unsolved mysteries of the archaeological world and she was well-versed in its history.

      “It’s a collection of ancient books gathered over several hundred years by the Byzantine Empire and collected in the library at Constantinople. It supposedly included roughly eight hundred books written in Greek, Latin, Hebrew СКАЧАТЬ