The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) by Anna Richland

Author:Anna Richland [Richland, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carina Press
Published: 2015-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The doorbell was as much a surprise for his backgammon partner as it was for the man who’d trained himself to answer to the name Thomas Locke. Bells didn’t ring at midnight without a reason.

“Shall I?” Thomas offered to the ninety-four-year-old Belgian who rented him a cottage at the back of the rural property.

“Eh.” His host shrugged as he levered out of his leather chair. “I need to piss anyway.” Luc spoke English well because for decades he’d supplemented his income by providing tours of Ardennes Forest battle sites, so Thomas hadn’t disclosed his own ease with French.

He watched Luc shuffle across the room. His landlord’s daughter-in-law came between three and five to leave out dinner and swap laundry baskets, and the son of one of Luc’s old drinking buddies sometimes showed up in the early evening with a bottle of brandy, but this was four hours too late for any of the regulars.

As soon as the older man left the living room, Thomas rose, pushed the door ninety percent closed and flattened himself to the wall on the side where he’d be concealed behind it. Without conscious direction, his fingers slipped under his cardigan and unsnapped the thumb break over the butt of his holstered Heckler and Koch P7M8 revolver. Six weeks of backgammon and winding drives across the border to Luxembourg couldn’t erase forty years of habit. To the euro, he knew how much currency he’d bundled under the floor of the rented cottage and in a damp-proof box in the property’s limestone cavern. No one else needed to know.

The door chain rattled before the dead bolts clicked. Thomas’s eyesight and hair had divorced him about the same time as the merger of West and East Germany caused cutbacks in his original profession, but his hearing hadn’t degenerated.

Using French, Luc was unusually loud as he greeted whoever had rung the bell. “Back in the night are you, lad? You’re sixty-eight years too late to stop the wedding.”

There was the sound of people entering the house, greetings and back slapping and the rustle of coats.

“My grandfather often talked about you.” The speaker was a man who spoke French with an excellent blend of British twang and rhythm. To most listeners it probably conveyed a well-educated chap, good enough when he was in school and with a bit of traveling since, but not a man enamored of anything but the English way of life. “This is my girlfriend.” He switched to English. “Christina, let me introduce you to Monsieur Luc Demotte. Christina and I are driving through to Frankfurt and thought we’d stop in for a hallo.”

Luc’s snort of disbelief was followed immediately by a coughing fit and the concerned murmur of a woman’s voice.

Perhaps because of her American accent, Thomas pictured a decorative blond on the arm of the well-educated British liar. Because yes, the guest was lying to Luc. The highways went north and south of these forested hills. No one had stopped in this part of the Ardennes en route to Frankfurt since the last German divisions had pulled out in ‘44.

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