Celtic Fire. Alex Archer

       Chapter 39

       Chapter 40

       Chapter 41

       Chapter 42

       Chapter 43

       Chapter 44

       Chapter 45

       Chapter 46

       Chapter 47

       Chapter 48

       Chapter 49

       Chapter 50

       Copyright

       Chapter 1

      Clouds covered the moon. The garden was in near-perfect darkness but for the ambient orange glow of the streetlights pushing at the edges of the shrubbery. Deep among the medicinal herbs there was nothing but shadow. A short distance away two cats fought, hissing and squealing as they duked it out over territorial rights for a scrap of land not worth the urine it took to mark it. And among those deep shadows in the darkest part of the garden, the woman in black let out an almost-silent breath she’d held a second longer than was comfortable.

      Awena had walked the narrow paths between the flower beds every day that week, admiring them, passing comment to the gardeners and tourists as she went, making sure that she knew every inch of them. There was no way she was going to stumble into a replica urn or turn her ankle on a shallow border or do anything else to cause undue commotion. A certain amount of noise would get put down to badgers and foxes and other nocturnal scavengers, but a woman crying out—no matter how strangled her cry—only ever sounded like a woman crying out. It was the kind of sound hardwired deep into the human psyche to draw the attention of heroes, especially after the sun went down.

      The last thing she needed was any heroes.

      The garden was only a brisk five-minute walk from the police station, though through a geographical and town planning quirk it was longer if a car was sent thanks to the twisting one-way streets.

      She was playing the law of averages. First responders would instinctively check the front of the building before making sure the perimeter was secure, then eventually make their way over the wall she had climbed and into the garden at the rear. Each action bought her a few precious extra seconds to do what she’d broken into the garden to do.

      Lights still burned at the front of the museum, small halogen spotlights meant to entice casual passersby visiting the town in the evening, their glow saying Stop, look around, marvel at the glass display of the frontage and the great pillars of the portico, imagine what it’s like inside. A notice promised free entry, with opening times from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, Monday to Saturday, and from two on Sunday afternoons. It was an imposing building, even in the dark. More so in the dark. It was a mixture of classical Roman and modern architecture. At the rear of the main building stood the Roman garden and a smaller entrance that was invisible to casual prying eyes.

      She moved silently, feet ghosting across the ground with the lightest of steps, her black trainers, black jeans and sweatshirt making her almost invisible in the darkness. A navy blue woolen hat kept her hair tucked out of sight and gloves ensured that there would be no fingerprints to give her away. It was all in the planning. Be methodical. Take no unnecessary risks. Idiots took risks. Idiots thought it was cool to make stuff up on the fly and improvise. Awena was not an idiot. The lock wasn’t going to be a challenge. As far as the world was concerned there was nothing in there worth stealing. She knew different.

      It was a calculated risk: trying to avoid setting off the alarm would only slow her. It would also make the job exponentially more difficult. She knew exactly how long she had from the moment she deliberately tripped the alarm to the second she disappeared into the night, knew exactly what she was looking for, where it would be and how to get out of there before the first responders were even in their cars.

      She broke it down into segments.

      Ninety seconds to break the lock—it was fractionally longer than it had taken for her to crack an identical one at home, but then that hadn’t been in the dark. Pressure situations added a few seconds. The risk came as those seconds added up.

      One hundred and twenty seconds from opening the door to be in and out before anyone came running. Another sixty seconds to get her treasure to the car—which was parked on the other side of the wall—and a final seventy-five seconds to move the car to a carefully chosen parking bay where no one would notice it.

      Two hundred and fifty-five seconds.

      There were few houses close by. None overlooked the garden. It was unlikely that even the nosiest of parkers would be out of their beds and twitching their curtains because of the commotion, but even if they did all they’d see would be a car driving away. In the middle of the night a car was a car was a car, almost impossible to differentiate a Volvo from a Ford from a Volkswagen. That was what she was banking on.

      Awena took a deep breath and opened the door, starting the stopwatch on her wrist, and stepped inside.

      Immediately inside she heard the high-pitched whine indicating the alarm had been triggered.

      These systems were set up with a sixty-second grace period for people to enter the code into the alarm box. That meant she only risked one hundred and ninety-five seconds with the escalating shriek of the alarm. One hundred and ninety-five seconds was a lifetime in the silence of a little town in the middle of the night but there was nothing she could do about that. She didn’t have the code. Once the tone changed that signified an alert had been sent to a private alarm company, the alarm company would try to ascertain if it was a genuine alarm call or a mistake, which would eat up a few more precious seconds before they contacted the police. There could be delays at any link along the chain, but she couldn’t rely on that. One hundred and ninety-five seconds, in and out. That was all she had.

      Awena moved quickly, making her way into the main exhibits room. The faint glow of the streetlight outside leached through the window, bathing everything inside in its curiously otherworldly orange glow. She pulled the jeweler’s hammer from where she’d carried it tucked into her jeans. As the tone of the alarm changed to an escalating shriek, she delivered a single swing of the hammer, shattering the display case’s glass top into a million orange-filled fragments.

      She ignored the cache of denarii in the broken pot and reached inside for her prize.

      It was the only thing in the whole museum that held any value as far as Awena was concerned.

      She lifted it out of the case.

      It was heavier than she’d expected, needing two hands to carry.

      When the two-minute timer she’d set on her stopwatch beeped before she was halfway across the floor she realized she wouldn’t be able to get out in time and felt a rising panic as each step seemed to take a little longer than the last. She’d planned this meticulously, down to the second, but the reality of the break-in defied all of her best-laid plans. She