The sun was behind her and the steady flow of traffic away from London moved at an even pace with vehicles peeling off and others joining at every junction.
In an ideal world she would have made the journey a little more slowly, but her speed was dictated by the cars and lorries around her. Annja was caught in a stream where each vehicle moved at the same speed as the one in front so she cranked the radio up, choosing volume over taste, and wound the window down. It was summer, after all.
Eventually the discomfort of sitting still for so long after the flight left her with no choice but to pull off at a motorway services area and go in search of coffee and the chance to stretch her legs. The decor was bad, the coffee was worse. She wound up getting back in the car and heading toward the motorway less than fifteen minutes after she’d pulled into the rest stop. The next signpost promised that Cardiff was less than fifty miles away. The turnoff for Caerleon would come some time before that.
An engine fired up beside her, gunned quickly into life and was followed by the crunch of tires on gravel as the car pulled away. Awena knew that it was safe to move at last. She’d lain still and silent, listening to the wail of the museum alarm as it carried on into the night air, and then drifted off after it fell silent, one hand on the stone artifact she had liberated from the glass case. She liked to think that she’d saved it from being transferred to some dusty old vault somewhere where it would have been hidden away until doomsday, completely forgotten about. That would have been a bigger crime than anything she’d done.
She hadn’t realized what she’d been looking at the first time she’d laid eyes on the exhibit—why would she have?—but there was something about it that had brought her back to it again and again, until she was finally convinced that it was mislabeled. The card had described it as a quern—a hand-grinding stone for grain—but it clearly wasn’t; it was too large and too heavy to be one of those. Once upon a time she might have pointed the mistake out to one of the staff to let them know how clever she was and basically how stupid they were for screwing it up. She’d grown up a lot since the days wasted in museums with her easily embarrassed twin, Geraint, who frequently turned a darker shade of red than their flame-red hair while he tried to pretend he had no idea who she was. It never worked. Now, thankfully, she was comfortable with the idea that she was the sharpest person in any given room she walked into. It wasn’t arrogance; it was just a fact. It didn’t matter who else was there, Awena was ferociously intelligent.
Once the sounds of the car had faded into the distance she eased herself up a little to scope out the lane. A glance through the rear window revealed a blanket of mist across the rugby field, shrouding it with a soft white in the early-morning sun. There was no sign of anyone else around. She’d reached the point of no return. If she waited too much longer to make her move, traffic to the heritage site would increase and it’d be difficult to slip out of the car to stretch the kinks out before getting back into the driver’s seat without anyone noticing.
She opened the door.
The air was colder than she’d expected. She used the discarded blanket to cover the stone. A dog came bounding toward her along the lane, its owner calling after it, but it wasn’t slowing down. It raced with its tongue lolling between open jaws, full of excitement. Awena wasn’t afraid of dogs, but it was the kind of encounter the mutt’s owner would remember, and the last thing she wanted was to be memorable. With the dog still thirty feet away, she slipped back behind the wheel and slammed the door. The confused animal stopped dead in its tracks and stared at her for a moment, wounded, like it couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to stop and play with it, then looked back in the direction it had come from before it took off into the mist-shrouded field.
Awena waited a moment before starting the car, watching the dog’s owner shrug helplessly and follow after it into the field, then pulled away.
The streets were dead. She reached the end of the lane, putting on the blinkers to indicate she was turning right. She couldn’t see any policemen outside the museum, though she had half expected a guard to have been posted.
Alongside the building where her Land Rover had parked she saw a white van.
She pulled out into the road, driving slowly and straining to catch a glimpse of the writing on the side of the van: a twenty-four-hour locksmith. She smiled. Typical—shut the stable door after the horse has well and truly bolted.
She followed the road as it arced right, curving around a big old Gothic school building, and took her beyond the police station. There was no sign of anyone coming or going. Any panic or rush of excitement at the break-in and the resultant flurry of activity had died down and life had settled back into the normality of its daily routine.
Awena turned left at the end of the street and followed the road through a series of villages that fed one into the next. Eventually, she picked up a faster road and was able to put her foot down on the gas.
She allowed herself to laugh as she felt the rush of speed and the excitement of her plan falling into place. She’d done it. Simple as that. She’d won. She couldn’t wait to show Geraint her trophy, even if he still had doubts about what it was that she had stolen. She’d just have to convince him. Awena desperately wanted to call her brother, even though the digits on the dashboard reminded her that it was barely 7:00 a.m. He wasn’t an early riser.
She’d almost forgotten that he’d stayed the night in London.
She was going to enjoy the look on his face when he laid his eyes on the treasure.
Like the old commercial said...priceless.
The Welsh seemed intent on charging Annja to enter their country—or was it the English charging her for the luxury of leaving theirs? She wasn’t entirely sure, but it was the first time she could remember being charged to cross a border. Signs at the side of the sweeping bridge that carried traffic over the River Severn warned that tollbooths lay ahead, clearly marked with the cost for each type of vehicle. It’s highway robbery, she thought, and grinned at her own dumb joke.
Brake lights glowed in the distance; there was a long queue to the control booths taking the money.
Annja reached for her purse as she joined the back of one of several snakes of cars that had formed and pulled out a crisp ten-pound note fresh from the currency exchange office.
A quick glance to the left confirmed she was already on the far side of the river. To her right she could see the supports of a second, older-looking bridge.
Cars edged forward slowly, and as was the way with queues, some moved faster than others—which really meant all of them seemed to be moving faster than hers. As she neared the front, she realized that some of the booths were actually automated, self-service barriers while the queue that she was in relied on someone giving change.
The guy in the next car flashed a smile across the lanes to her, but Annja was more interested in the car ahead. It wasn’t that she didn’t like drawing grins from strangers; just like everyone else she found them flattering, and his smile did draw a smile from her, but she didn’t want him to see it and think he’d somehow made her day. She was contrary like that. Plus, his queue was moving faster than hers. He’d have another driver to flirt with in a moment.
Eventually her turn came. She smiled to the tired-looking teller, trading money for less money, and he raised the barrier with a snatch of something she didn’t understand but assumed was the Welsh equivalent of Have a nice day or Drive safe.
She pulled away as cars raced into the bottleneck of decreasing lanes, each driver looking to secure one of the three