getting close enough to a major political figure to try and take him out with a freakin’ sword? When everybody else has guns? What a maniac!”
This was getting worse by the minute.
“Did they ever catch him?”
“Of course they did. Why do you think I’m not worried about you, given the kind of trouble you get yourself into?”
She had to admit he was right; ever since taking possession of the sword, she had a knack for getting herself into the biggest messes possible.
Like now.
“So what happened to him?”
Bart snorted. “Got blown up when he tried to take out the British prime minister at a summit in Madrid back in 2003. There wasn’t enough left of him to fill a Baggie.”
Just when she started to feel better about the situation Bart had go and ruin things again.
“So they never found a body?”
“What did I just say? There wasn’t anything left of him to bury, Annja. But trust me, you and your friend can rest easy. Whoever it was that broke into your friend’s flat was probably just trying to be funny.”
“Some sense of humor,” she said, and laughed along with him while inside she was getting more and more nervous by the minute.
She made small talk for a couple of moments more, thanked Bart for what he had dug up and then got off the phone as quickly and as gracefully as she could without raising his suspicions.
As soon as she had, she headed for her laptop.
A quick search online turned up a decent number of feature stories and news reports from the eighties through the nineties that talked about the mysterious Dragon. All of them told the same basic story Bart had—assassin for hire, no one knew his background or what he looked like, or even if the Dragon was a man or a woman, only that he always killed with his weapon of choice, a katana, and would leave a piece of rice paper folded into the shape of a dragon at the scene of every killing. The press had given him the moniker “the Dragon” when word of the origami figures leaked out, and to this day it was the only name they had for him. The Dragon’s identity vanished in the same explosion that had claimed his physical body.
She sat back, staring off into space, as she pondered the similarities. An international assassin who killed with a Japanese katana and left origami figures in his wake, and an unknown intruder who broke into a rich man’s home, carried a katana and left an origami figure in his wake. They were too alike to be just a coincidence. Either someone had decided to take up the killer’s mantle or the killer himself had never actually died.
After all, there hadn’t been a body, she reminded herself.
Maybe the Dragon had spent the past few years in hiding, recovering from injuries sustained from his last assassination attempt, and had only recently chosen to come out of hiding.
But why would a political assassin be after Roux? she wondered.
The most logical answer would be that he wasn’t. After all, Roux took considerable effort to stay out of the limelight and something like politics was anathema to a man like him. But what if the Dragon had decided to forgo political assassinations in favor of a mercenary lifestyle? Killing for hire, perhaps? That was a different story entirely.
Garin had been right; Roux had angered enough people over the years that a list of those who held a grudge strong enough to try and kill him would be very long indeed.
More than a few of them had the means to do it, too.
This was not good—not good at all.
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