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The Lost Scrolls
Alex Archer
Ancient papyrus scrolls recovered among the charred ruins of the Library of Alexandria reveal astonishing texts that detail the wonders of Atlantis–knowledge that could shatter the blueprint of world energy.Archaeologist Annja Creed confronts shadow figures determined to preserve empires built on power, greed and global manipulation, finding unlikely allies in a mysterious American with connections in high places, and a young linguistics prodigy with attitude. Dodging a petroleum conglomerate and their pet killers on a high-speed chase that leads from Egypt to the North Sea oil fields to the urban battlegrounds of China, Annja becomes an unwilling conspirator in a bid for power to control the beating heart of the world's energy.
Rogue Angel
The Lost Scrolls
Alex Archer
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
CONTENTS
THE LEGEND
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
THE
LEGEND
…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK
JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.
The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade.
The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.
Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.
Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn…
1
“I thought Julius Caesar burned down the Great Library,” Annja Creed said. She picked her way gingerly across a small lot of churned-up dust with chunks of yellow-brick rubble in it, glad for the durability of her hiking boots. She was sheltered from the already intense morning Mediterranean sun by the floppy straw hat she wore over her yellow T-shirt and khaki cargo pants.
“He did, Ms. Creed,” her handsome young Egyptian archaeologist escort said, turning to smile at her. He had a narrow, dark hawk’s face and flashing eyes. His white lab smock hung from wide shoulders and flapped around the backs of his long skinny legs in the sea breeze snaking around the close-set buildings. “Among others.”
“Call me Annja, please,” she said.
He laughed. His teeth were as perfect as his English. His trace of accent made young Dr. Ismail al-Maghrabi seem that much more exotic. I love my job, she thought.
“If you will call me Ismail,” he said.
“Done,” she replied with a laugh.
Ahead of them stood a ten-foot-high loaf-shaped translucent plastic bubble. The rumbling of generators forced them to raise their voices as they approached. Some kind of structure had recently been demolished here, hard by the Alexandrian waterfront in the old Greek quarter. Big grimy warehouses and blocks of shops with cracked-stucco fronts crowded together on all sides. Although Alexandria was a major tourist destination the rumble and stink of buses and trucks through the narrow streets suggested little of charm and less of antiquity. Still, Annja’s heart thumped in her throat with anticipation.
“For one thing,” al-Maghrabi said, “the library was very extensive indeed. Also parts of it appear to have been scattered across the Greek quarter. As you probably know, in 2004 a team of Egyptian and Polish archaeologists uncovered a series of what appear to be lecture halls a few blocks from here.”
She nodded. “I read about it on the BBC Web site at the time. A very exciting development.”
“Most. The library was a most remarkable facility, as much a great university and research center as anything else. Along with the famous book collections, and of course reading rooms and auditoria, it offered dormitories for its visitors, lush gardens, even gymnasia with swimming pools.”
“Really? I had no idea.”
He stopped to open the latch to a door in a wooden frame set into the inflated tent. “The envelope is for climate control,” he explained, opening the door for her. “Positive air pressure allows us to keep humidity and pollution at bay. Our treasures are probably not exceptionally vulnerable to such influences, considering their condition, but why take chances?”
The interior seemed gloomy after the brilliant daylight. Annja paused to let her eyes adjust as he resecured the door. There was little to see but a hole cut into the ground. “You seem to enjoy some pretty enviable resources here, if you don’t mind my saying so, Ismail.”
“Not at all! Our discoveries here have attracted worldwide attention, which in turn helps to secure the resources to develop and conserve them properly. For that I believe we have to thank the Internet—and of course your own television network, which provides a share of our funding.”
“Yes. I am thrilled they allowed me to come here,” Annja said.
“I’m told the scrolls contain revelations about the lost civilization of Atlantis.” Annja couldn’t mask the skepticism in her voice.
“Come with me. I trust you don’t mind a certain amount of sliding into holes in the ground?”
Annja laughed. “I am a real archaeologist, Ismail. I don’t just play one on TV.”
She didn’t actually have to slide. A slanting tunnel about three feet wide and five feet high had been dug down to a subterranean chamber perhaps a dozen feet below ground level. Hunched over, they followed thick yellow electrical cords down the shallow ramp.
“As you no doubt know,” her guide said, “the library is believed to have been built early in the third century B.C. by Ptolemy II, around the temple to the Muses built by his father, the first Ptolemy.”
“That’s the Mouseion, isn’t it?” she said. “Origin of our word museum? ”
“Yes. It was also said that Ptolemy III decreed that all travelers arriving in Alexandria had to surrender any books or scrolls in their possession to be copied by official scribes before being returned to them. While we don’t know for certain if that is true, the library’s collection swiftly grew to be the grandest in the Mediterranean world.”
They reached a level floor of stone polished slick by many feet over many years. Banks of yellowish floodlights lit a chamber perhaps ten by twenty feet. Three people were crowded inside, two on hands and knees rooting in what appeared to be some kind of lumpy mound. One was bending over a modern table. The air was cool and smelled of soil and mildew.
The person at the table straightened and turned toward them, beaming. He was a tall, pot-bellied young man with crew-cut blond hair and an almost invisible goatee on the uppermost of his several chins. “Greetings! You must be Annja Creed.”
He held out a big hand. Annja knew at once he was a working archaeologist. He looked soft and pale overall, but his hand was callused and cracked like a stonemason’s, from digging, lifting and the painstaking work of chipping artifacts from a stony matrix with a dentist’s steel pick.
“This is Dr. Szczepan Pilitowski,” Ismail said. He struggled with the first name—it came out sounding close enough to Stepan. “He’s our expert in extracting the scrolls safely from the ground.”
“We all do what we can,” Pilitowski said in a cheerful tone. “There is much to be done.”
The other two, a man and a woman, turned around and picked themselves up from the floor. They wore kneepads, Annja noticed. One was a man, the other a woman. Both were thin and dark, and she took them for Egyptians.
“This is Ali Mansur and Maria Frodyma,” Ismail said. The man just bobbed his head and grinned shyly.
The woman stuck out her hand. She wore her black hair in a bun, and had a bright, birdlike air to her. “Please call me Maria,” she said in a Polish accent as Annja shook her hand.
“Annja.”
“This was a library storeroom,” Ismail said. “Most of the scrolls were kept in locked cabinets, in chambers such as this. Only the most popular items, or those specifically requested by scholars, were stored in the reading rooms.”
“So that heap…?” Annja said, nodding toward the rubble mound where Maria and Ali had been working.
“The remains of a cabinet,” Pilitowski said. “Damaged by the fire, it collapsed and mostly decomposed, leaving the burned scrolls behind.”
“How many scrolls did the library possess?” Annja asked. “Or does anyone really know?”
“Not precisely,” Maria said, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. She seemed to show a quick smile to the bulky and jovial Pilitowski, whose own smile broadened briefly. “Some have hypothesized it held as few as forty thousand scrolls. Others suggest the founding Ptolemy set a goal of half a million. On the basis of what we have found, we feel confident conjecturing the former limit is far too low. As to the upper—” She shrugged expressively.
“This isn’t my time period,” Annja confessed, believing as she did in professional full disclosure. “But I can certainly see how the recovery of any number of scrolls at all from the ancient world is a terrific thing.”
“Oh, yes,” Maria replied.
“And here you see three of them,” Pilitowski boomed. A vast callused paw swept dramatically toward the table.
They looked like three forearm-sized chunks of wood fished out of a campfire, Annja thought. They lay on a sheet of white plastic.
“These are actual scrolls?”
“Yes, yes,” Pilitowski said. “My friends and I extracted them this morning.”
Annja felt a thrill. She’d seen older artifacts—she’d seen Egyptian papyri a thousand years older in the British Museum. But there was something about these scrolls, the thrill of something lost for two thousand years and believed to be indecipherable even if found. Yet modern technology was about to restore the contents of these lumps of char to the world.
“Even if they’re just grocery lists,” she said a little breathlessly, “this is just so exciting.”
The others just smiled at her. They knew.
“Who really burned the library, anyway?” she asked Ismail. “Was it Julius Caesar?”
The others looked to Ismail. Ali was still grinning but had yet to utter a syllable. Annja’s first thought had been that he didn’t speak English. But that appeared to be the common language on the multinational dig. She began to suspect he was just shy.
“Caesar was one of the culprits,” her guide said.
“One of them?”
“And not the first,” Maria said. The archaeologists seemed glad of the break. Annja understood that. They loved their work, she could tell, as she loved the work when she was engaged in it. But it could be brutally arduous, and breaks were welcome.
“The first major fire damage occurred around 88 B.C.,” the woman said, “when much of Alexandria burned down during civil disorders. This may have been the greatest destruction. Then during the Roman civil wars in 47 B.C., Julius Caesar chased his rival, Pompey, into the city. When Egyptian forces attacked him, Caesar set fire to the dockyards and the Egyptian fleet. The fire probably spread through trade goods piled on the docks waiting to be loaded on ships. The library lay near the waterfront, like now. Many scrolls were lost in the conflagration. Also it appears Roman soldiers stole many scrolls and sent them to Rome.”
“But that wasn’t the end of the library?” Annja asked.
Smiling, Ismail shook his head. “Oh, no. Only a fraction of the scrolls were lost at that time. Although we believe that this site burned then. And finally, Emperor Aurelian burned the Greek quarter in 273, when the Romans made war upon the Palmyran Queen Zenobia. That destroyed more of the library.”
“So what happened to the rest of the library,” Annja asked, “if fire didn’t destroy it?”
“Time,” Maria said.
Annja looked at the dark, diminutive archaeologist. Maria shrugged again. “Egypt’s rulers lost interest in maintaining the library. Much of it simply fell into disuse. Here, as elsewhere, people reused the scrolls, or even burned them for fuel. But most simply rotted away in the heat and humidity.”
“All except the ones neatly protected by a thick coating of carbonization,” Ali said suddenly in a deep baritone and beautiful British accent.
Annja stared at him. He smiled but said nothing more. She suspected he’d used up his allotment of spoken words for the day.
“Ali has a second degree in biochemistry, you see,” Pilitowski explained.
“Ah,” Annja said.
“WELL, YOU KNOW, Annja,” the young Egyptian archaeologist said as he walked with her into the huge old brick building next to the dig where the team had set up headquarters, “we make no claims concerning the veracity of the scrolls. We only recover them. And are thrilled to do it, if I may say so.”
“As well you should be,” she said. “It’s just that Atlantis is a hot button for archaeologists in the U.S., Ismail.”
Their voices echoed slightly in the enormous space. Wooden partitions had been set up to delineate work areas and offices.
“It is for all of us,” he said. “We are, after all, on a quest for the truth, are we not?”
“Oh, yes,” she agreed.
“And should we not follow the truth wherever it might lead us?”
“All right. I see where you’re headed with this, Ismail. And you’re right. If I’m going to be a serious scientist, then evidence needs to outweigh my preconceptions.”
He smiled and nodded with boyishly visible relief.
“Now,” she said, “let’s go see this evidence.”
The headquarters appeared to have spent much of its career as a warehouse, with high walls of yellowish brick, steel struts for rafters and grimy skylights admitting brownish morning light. It smelled more than slightly of fish. Annja presumed it must be their proximity to the waterfront. The smell couldn’t last decades, could it?
They walked down an aisle to an open doorway. From inside came a blast of raucous feminine laughter. Ismail’s fine features tightened briefly.
He ushered Annja into a wide room, well lit by banks of standing lights. Several people worked at a row of computers. Others examined blackened-log-like scrolls on a big table.
“You might find this interesting,” Ismail said, leading her toward a table. On it stood a curious device like a bundle of upright rods worked through one of the burned scrolls. “It’s based on a machine invented in the eighteenth century to unroll burned papyri.”
The two technicians operating it had teased out several inches of scroll. It resembled charred bark being peeled from a log. They paused to smile and nod at Annja as Ismail introduced them.
“We mostly make use of magnetic-resonance imaging to take pictures of the scrolls, layer by layer, without unrolling them,” he said. “But we explore every means of recovering their content. And over here—” he turned to a wide white table where bright white underlighting illuminated the faces of the Egyptian-looking man and European-looking woman bending over it “—we have our apparatus for photographing fragments of broken scrolls we find.”
What sounded like a great gong tolled. Everybody stiffened. The woman from the scroll unroller, whom Ismail introduced as Bogumila, exclaimed, “Aleksy, call Ali and Szczepan and Maria. Tell them to come quickly!”
One of the pair at the photo table took out a cell phone and whipped it open. He spoke quickly in Polish.
Others were beginning to arrive on the run from the other cubicles. Apparently the gong, which she guessed was a recording, was turned up high to let everyone in the converted warehouse know there was news.
Everyone crowded before a large flat-screen monitor. An image had appeared, a ragged off-white oblong, with spidery dark gray markings on it that Annja guessed might be ancient Greek. “ Da! ” somebody exclaimed.
A young woman sat perched on a stool by the photographic table, at the other end from the bulky camera itself, which was mounted on a heavy mobile stand. Now she pushed off and came sauntering over. She was strikingly pretty, with pale blond hair done in pigtails that made her round-cheeked face look even younger than it probably was. Her eyes were big and blue, if currently half-lidded as if with contemptuous disinterest. She wore a tight black-and-red top that showed off her healthy figure and an extremely short skirt with horizontal stripes in red and black. For all the horizontal stripes and harsh colors she was stunning looking; Annja fought down an inclination to hate her.
As she approached the flat-screen monitor Annja felt uneasy. China-doll perfect the young woman’s appearance may have been, but she gave a strong impression of negativity.
Excited as they were, the other team members moved back from the screen as she approached. The young woman leaned in, jaw working on a wad of gum.
“Not too close, Jadzia,” the man at the keyboard said. “You are the anticomputer geek.”
She gave him a baleful squint and snapped her gum at him. She stuck a finger toward the screen. The guy at the keyboard seemed to wind up tighter and tighter the closer her fingertip, the nail painted black, got. She read in a bored voice:
“—had in their possession most marvelous stones, like unto gemstones, such as rubies or emeralds, but the size of goose’s eggs, wherein they stored a force as potent as the lightnings. Perhaps this blasphemy, this stealing of the very thunder of mighty Zeus, evoked his wrath and caused him to cast down that which belonged by right to Poseidon.”
She shrugged, popped her gum, straightened up with a little headflip. “That’s it for this page. The break was a physical one. Nothing to translate.”
Everybody cheered and hugged each other and exchanged high fives. Annja noticed nobody tried to embrace the pigtailed blond girl.
“Can she really just read it like that?” Annja asked the air.
She didn’t expect to be answered in the hubbub. But beside her boomed the ever-cheerful voice of Dr. Pilitowski. “Ah, yes, she can. This is the noted Jadzia Arkadczyk. She holds degrees in cryptology and linguistics. She has a remarkable gift for languages. She is, quite simply, beyond genius.”
Annja studied the young woman, who seemed content to stand looking offhandedly at the screen, soaking up the arm’s-length adulation of her comrades. Annja had her own gift for languages. It had formed a key part of her love for travel and adventure.
“I’m impressed,” she said.
Maria was speaking to the girl and nodding at Annja. Jadzia turned and looked at the visitor for the first time. Her blue eyes flew wide.
“I know you!” she exclaimed. “I have seen you on Chasing History’s Monsters .”
“Well, yes, I appear on the show from time to time,” Annja said with authentic modesty. She did not want to be known primarily for her association with the program. Especially among peers as distinguished as these.
“You are the woman they bring on when they wish to cover something up,” the girl went on, voice rising accusatorily, “and undo all the good work done by poor Kristie Chatham!”
2
“They despised everything but virtue,” Annja read, the bubbly water, still hot, gurgling to the slight motions of her body as she kept the book braced open against her drawn-up knees.
Photographic specialist Rahim al-Haj had lent her a copy of Plato’s Dialogues, well grimed and dog-eared by the team, as she took her leave of the recovery site late that afternoon. Unwinding in her hotel room after dinner in one of her favorite fashions, she was reading what Plato had written about Atlantis.
The legend claimed there had been an island outside the Pillars of Heracles, “larger than Libya and Asia put together.” Whatever Plato meant by Asia. A big island, to be sure.
The Atlanteans, the story said, made war on Europe. The Athenians, eventually standing alone, had defeated them. Then violent earthquakes had occurred, followed by floods. In a single day and night the island of Atlantis and all its people disappeared in the depths of the sea. That sounded pretty final to Annja. It did intrigue her that the Athenians apparently suffered greatly from the same catastrophe.
“You never hear that part of the myth when people talk about Atlantis,” she said aloud.
There was a lot of discussion about the founding of Athens. It intrigued Annja to read of what seemed to her to be an equality of men and women in ancient Athens, including in warfare. She was also struck by the claim that Greece had once been a wonderfully green and fertile peninsula that had suffered sorely from millennia of soil erosion. She wondered if there might be something to that part, anyway.
At last the narrative wandered around to Atlantis. It had been built by the sea god Poseidon to impress his human love, Cleito. It was a land of fertile fields, concentric circles of canals, elephants, that sort of thing. She made note of several details to take up with her hosts in the morning.
What made the biggest impression on her was the interval of nine thousand years since the supposed fall of Atlantis. She put her book up on the rim of the sink and closed her eyes and tried to wrap her mind around it.
As someone who had studied geology, and a bit of paleontology, as part of her formal education, she had little trouble coping with nine millennia. In geologic terms it was a fraction of a second.
But for a coherent account of events to survive for nine thousand years—for any kind of knowledge to be transmitted over such a yawning gulf of time—that just made her jaw sag in disbelief.
She was well aware that archeology, especially the relatively new but fruitful practice of applying modern forensic techniques to archeological evidence, was showing that as often as not the written histories bore only a passing resemblance to what could be physically demonstrated to have really happened. History was perhaps not bunk—not altogether. But to say it was inexact was like saying it snows at the North Pole.
Could any meaningful, let alone accurate, information be transmitted over nine thousand years? She doubted it.
And yet…the legend of Atlantis had persisted all that time. It had exercised a fascination on the human imagination continuously since Plato had recorded it. Does that count for something?
She shook her head. Weariness was getting the better of her. She’d been going pretty hard of late, to say the least. She stood up with a slog of water and a cascade of soapy foam down her long smooth body and legs, and drew the curtain around the tub to shower off before heading to bed.
IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT. Annja had spent the day down in the excavation itself, painstakingly helping to extract burned scrolls from the rubble of the burned cabinets. She was exhausted and felt sticky from sweat, although here in the main lab inside the old warehouse it was quite cool. Apparently the Supreme Council on Antiquities was willing to spring for air-conditioning. Or maybe the television network was springing for it—she was grateful to whomever.
She noticed Jadzia lurking off to one side. The girl was fanning herself with a sheaf of fanfolded paper and trying to chat up a handsome young Egyptian technician working on a computer near her. Either he was shy or deliberately ignoring her. She caught Annja’s attention, glared and looked away.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Annja said, propping her rump on a table. “Wasn’t the Minoan civilization destroyed by a great big volcanic eruption around 1500 B.C.?”
“Yes,” Pilitowski said. “The catastrophic eruption of Thera. It is now estimated to have been at least ten times as powerful as Krakatau in 1883.”
“Although geologists tend to date the eruption from about 1600 B.C.,” Aleksy Fabiszak, the team’s geology specialist, said. “That volume of ejecta would be the same magnitude as the terrible Tambora eruption of 1815, the most violent of recorded history.”
“One point on the volcanic explosivity scale beneath supervolcano,” Maria said.
“So it would have made a royal mess of much of the Aegean,” Annja said. “I mean, the way the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis is supposed to have?”
“Well, if what you’re getting at is that perhaps Atlantis and the Minoan culture of Crete were the same,” Pilitowski said, “a lot of people have come to suspect that.”
Jadzia snapped her gum loudly. “ Somebody should tell her,” she said brassily, as if Annja were not in the room, “that we have found many references on the scrolls that make it impossible the writer was talking about the Minoans.”
Burly, good-natured Dr. Pilitowski looked to the slight, dark Maria, who shrugged. Annja got the impression she wasn’t the only one who found the brilliant language expert a problem child.
“From contextual evidence in what we have translated of these Atlantis scrolls,” Maria said, “it is clear they were written about half a century after Solon. That would make them a century older than Plato’s writing.”
“So far we are not finding any reference to Solon at all,” Naser said. He was a plump, pallid man in his thirties with a neat beard, who spoke with a Lower East Side New York accent. “We suspect that somewhere along the line different end-of-the-world stories got mixed together.”
“Hmm,” Annja said. She was still having trouble dealing with serious archaeologists taking Atlantis seriously. Although she had to admit none of them actually seemed to be vested in the truth of the scrolls, even if they did call them the Atlantis scrolls. But there was no mistaking the excitement that ran through the site whenever the gong went off to announce that they had images of more restored fragments.
“One thing I’m puzzled by,” she said, “is that reading Plato, I didn’t really see any talk about advanced technology. Not like what people always talk about, with flying machines and artificial light and all that.”
“That actually seems to have first appeared in a book called A Dweller on Two Planets, which came out late in the nineteenth century,” Pilitowski said. “Its author claimed to have received the information in dreams.”
Annja raised an eyebrow.
“Well, channeled it, actually.” He shrugged. “What can I say? He was from California.”
“Somebody ought to tell her the new scrolls substantiate much of what Frederick Oliver wrote in that book,” Jadzia said hotly.
Annja looked to Pilitowski, who shrugged. “I do not know that I would go so far as to say �substantiate,’” he said. “Nonetheless, we must admit we find certain correspondences.”
“We began to wonder if some alternate account of Atlantis might have surfaced sporadically throughout history,” Naser said, “without impinging on academic scholarship. And that Oliver got hold of it somehow.”
“With all respect,” Annja said, “that seems to be reaching a bit far.”
“Not so far as believing in channeling,” Naser said.
“True,” Annja said with a laugh.
Annja looked sidelong at Jadzia. The young woman—she just acts like a girl, Annja thought—posed a conundrum. For one thing, Annja wasn’t used to evoking knee-jerk hostility in people she hadn’t met. It bothered her. She led an isolated enough existence that she felt threatened when somebody reacted to her with such vehement negativity, as if perhaps she had at last been found out as invalid and unworthy for human companionship.
For all her rigorous training in cryptology, which Annja knew was no soft science, involving some of the most abstruse and demanding maths around, Jadzia clung to the role of true believer in Atlantis mysteries and doubtless a thousand other conspiracy theories. She wasn’t the first person Annja had bumped up against who harbored both serious scientific credentials and crackpot beliefs. She sometimes suspected that really high-level scientists could only be expected to be sane and knowledgeable in their own field of expertise, and anything else was fair game.
So maybe Jadzia’s hostility arose from antipathy toward the role Annja played, authentically enough, of house skeptic and counterpoint to Kristie Chatham, who believed in everything.
Annja had certainly suffered many flame attacks from such antifans before she quit visiting the show’s message boards, despite the insistent entreaties of her producer, Doug Morrell, that she do so. But that virulence didn’t spill out of cyberspace into her lap.
She suddenly remembered something odd said in passing the day before. “Why do they call Jadzia the anticomputer geek?” she asked Maria. Very softly, she thought.
But apparently among Jadzia’s attributes was a very keen sense of hearing. “I kill computers,” she announced proudly, her voice sharp edged.
“How?” Annja asked. “With a sledgehammer?”
She hadn’t meant to say that—really. But instead of flaring up at the comment, or the laughter it evoked from the eight or so other team members in the large room, Jadzia laughed louder and more brazenly than the others.
“Just by touching,” she said proudly.
Annja cocked an eyebrow at Pilitowski, who shrugged a big sloped shoulder. “It is true,” he said. “We cannot let her handle anything electronic. In seconds—” he snapped his fingers “—pfft!”
“It has to do with my personal magnetic field,” Jadzia said. She wore schoolgirl blue and white, with knee-high white stockings instead of the thigh-highs she’d had on the day before. Her skirt wasn’t any longer. “It disrupts electronic devices.”
“I don’t buy that,” Annja said. “Things like that don’t happen in the real world.”
“Lend me your cell phone?” the blond woman purred.
The gong sounded so loudly Annja jumped.
ONLY TWO OF THE team members were on duty down in the current excavation—a short, stocky Polish man named Tadeusz and a willowy Egyptian woman a head taller named Haditha, who wore what looked like a ruby in her pierced left nostril. The pair had trouble communicating verbally, since neither’s English was the strongest. Haditha spoke beautiful French. Tadeusz was a bit hard of hearing into the bargain. Yet they worked well together, seeming to have evolved some brand of nonverbal communication.
Everyone tacitly assumed they were sleeping together, although they never seemed to seek each other out off-hours. The consensus held that this was a cunning pose. Annja, knowing what a hotbed of intrigue and gossip the best-ordered dig could turn into after only a couple of weeks, reserved judgment. Like everyone else archaeologists loved a good story, and were reluctant to let facts spoil it—outside their chosen area of expertise, of course.
They came out of the bubble tent on the run. A few bright lights shone randomly from the nearby buildings, casting jagged patterns of light and shadow across the demolition rubble. As they went in the door of the former warehouse, Haditha heard a peculiar double cough from behind. The noises had an edge, reminiscent of knuckles on hardwood.
Tadeusz pitched forward on his face on the floor beside her. She stared at him in astonishment. The back of his pale head was stained dark and wet.
3
A sound behind Haditha made her turn. She gasped at a black insectile figure looming over her.
The man in the night-vision goggles and blackout gear stuck the thick muzzle of his sound-suppressed machine pistol against her sternum and fired the same precise 2-round burst his partner had used on the Polish archaeologist an instant before. Haditha recoiled, then simply collapsed, her dark almond eyes rolling up in her head.
From high above and in front of the black-clad pair came small muffled crashes, themselves hardly louder than coughs. Shards of glass descended from above, swooping like falling leaves, breaking to smaller pieces on the black rubber runner that ran along the central aisle. More black-clad figures rappelled from the broken skylights.
WITH A FROWN Annja snapped her head up from where she leaned close to the big flat-screen monitor. “What was that noise?”
Most of the team members ignored her. A number of new images were coming in from scrolls shipped intact to the jet propulsion laboratory, where layered MRI scans were used to extract the writing from within the rolled papyri.
A couple of the Egyptian team members murmured briefly in Arabic.
“Probably just some homeless,” Naser said.
However, Ismail, who had just come in, turned and started back out the door into the darkened aisle.
“Wait!” Annja heard him cry in English. “You cannot come in here!”
She heard two sounds like blows of a distant tack hammer.
THROUGH THE USE of handheld terahertz radar units, which enabled them to see right through walls, the raiders knew precisely where every member of the Polish-Egyptian dig team was located.
As more of their fellows dropped in, the pair who had taken down the first two targets spread out to secure the entryway. The rest slipped in quick, silent pairs into the side cubicles. More double thumps sounded as they cleared them.
The Nomex-clad raiders in their goggles and face masks knew there was no escape from the large room at the end of the aisle. The big windows throughout the structure had all been bricked shut long ago.
It would be the perfect killing floor.
“GET DOWN!” Annja shouted.
Recent experience had brought her to the conclusion that people dressed in black Nomex and masks and carrying automatic weapons were not in a state of mind to be reasoned with.
Jadzia was already in motion, grabbing the blackened-log papyri from the table and stuffing them in a large lime-green-and-purple gym bag that was used to ferry bagged artifacts.
Ismail staggered a step back into the lab. Then he rallied and lurched forward to stand with arms braced in the door. He called something defiant sounding in Arabic that ended in an agonized cough.
Annja circled rapidly to her right. She knew they were trapped. Her only hope of saving any of the team from the attack she already knew was in progress was to get out of the immediate line of fire and hope to ambush intruders as they entered.
They were too far ahead of her.
Ismail reeled into a table and spun, the front of his shirt and white coat seemingly tie-dyed in florets of red. He pitched onto his face as a pair of men in black stepped through the door and then to opposite sides. They held 2-round machine pistols to their shoulders.
The one to Annja’s left fired a two-shot burst into Szczepan Pilitowski from six feet away. The big archaeologist fell heavily. The other aimed at Annja. She had already reversed and was racing toward the far end of the room. Bullets knocked masonry dust from the raw wall behind her. The ricochets moaned like restless ghosts.
Another black-clad killer appeared firing in the doorway as Annja, taking and holding a deep breath, hit Jadzia in a flying tackle and knocked her beyond the end of the long table on which the computers sat. The girl yelped in surprise but had the presence of mind to keep clutching the satchel of scrolls with both hands.
Annja heard bullets punching into computer cases with an almost musical rhythm. The team members screamed or called out hoarsely as they died. There was no chance. The killers were professional enough to ensure that. They had no means of fighting back and nowhere to flee.
Leaving Jadzia sprawled in the relative shelter between the end of the computer table and a round-topped, bricked-up window in the end wall, Annja sprang up onto the table. The killers were moving into the room, fanning out to hunt down team members trying to hide behind filing cabinets and under tables.
An intruder raised his weapon to Annja. She threw the nearest computer case at him. Power and video cables ripped noisily out from the rear. It struck him in the goggles and knocked him backward against the wall.
Bullets struck the wall near her. She hoisted the accompanying computer monitor end over end at the shooter.
The monitor was not a flat-screen. It was an old-fashioned model and weighed a good forty-five pounds. The man gave up on shooting to raise his hands defensively. Annja heard his ulna snap. The shooter went over backward with a crash.
The other three men opened up on her. Annja dived off the table toward the side wall. Her foot came down on some kind of power converter or adaptor and flew right out from under her. Her head cracked into the wall. Her teeth clacked painfully. Red sparks flew behind her eyes.
“I got her,” she heard a man say, his voice muffled by his mask. Head spinning, she found herself on all fours, too dizzy to rise. She raised her head at the man in black aiming the machine pistol at her. The hole in the end looked big enough to swallow her whole.
A figure loomed up behind the black-clad killer. Before the gunman could fire, Szczepan Pilitowski, his wide pale face streaming blood, struck him from behind with a chair.
The two intruders still on their feet opened fire from the far side of the room. Though the suppressed shots sounded relatively loud in the enclosed space, they were not loud enough to mask the hard thumps of the bullets hitting the big archaeologist’s soft body. He roared in defiance, turning toward them. Then his legs gave way. He fell to the floor with a slapping sound.
The man Pilitowski clubbed lay sprawled on his face with a pool of dark red spreading out from his head.
Annja yanked loose his MP-5. Shouldering it, she came up to a crouch. The weapon had open battle sights.
The killers had lost track of her when she jumped off the table. They were making plenty of noise and she could actually differentiate where both men were. When she popped up from behind the table, the MP-5’s ghost-ring sights were lined up almost perfectly on the shooter to her left.
She aimed for the man’s head and fired. The night-vision goggles shattered. The killer let his weapon drop on its long sling, covered his face with his hands and fell onto the photography table. It upset, spilling priceless blackened chunks of ancient lore to the floor.
Annja ducked as the other man blazed away at her. More computer cases crashed as bullets punched through them, scrambling the delicate circuit boards inside.
She rose up on all fours, still clutching the machine pistol, scrabbled forward like a monkey across the prone body of the man Pilitowski had hit. She turned around the long computer table and launched herself in a forward slide on her left side across the center aisle.
She held the pistol grip tight. She figured the gunman’s torso was encased in some kind of body armor so she chopped his legs out from under him. He fell screaming and kicking, spraying blood.
The machine pistol’s charging handle locked back. Empty. Annja slid into the collapsed photo table and stopped.
From the darkened corridor outside she heard shouts. Bullets glanced off the concrete floor near her outspread legs and ricocheted around the room. Their tumbling made them scream.
She heard a shrill yowl of fury from the back of the lab.
She jumped up, risked gunfire in a dash back across the aisle, and vaulted the computer table. The man she had thrown the computer into had found his feet if not his firearm. He was staggering toward Jadzia, who had her back against the wall and the satchel clutched protectively to her breasts. The intruder held a big black saw-backed knife in his hand.
He heardAnnja land behind him, and spun. His hand lashed out horizontally with the combat knife.
He was way short. Annja didn’t even have to dodge. Before he could recover with a back stroke she sprang like an angry leopard and closed with him. She grabbed him by the biceps of his knife arm and his left shoulder.
Something came skittering down the aisle into the middle of the lab.
Grenade . Annja was out of time, with nowhere to go.
In fear and frustrated anger, Annja stepped past the black-clad assassin like a dancer leading her partner, and threw him toward the back of the room with all her strength. He hit the sealed-off window with a crunch. The bricks exploded outward into the humid Alexandrian night.
Grabbing the motionless Jadzia around her narrow waist, Annja dragged the young woman to the window and leaped out through the hole in the wall.
The grenade exploded behind her, filling the lab with smoke and tear gas.
Annja landed hard in the alley behind the building. Her right ankle buckled, not quite far enough to sprain. Her knee slammed against something hard—a bottle or stone.
“What are you doing?” Jadzia screamed from under arm. “Put me down!”
Annja dropped her, eliciting a fresh squall of fury. They were in a space ten feet wide between the warehouse and the next building. Lights shone from a crane out by the docks a long block away. A fast glance over her shoulder showed only dark the other way.
The hunters had night-vision equipment. Light gave her at least equal vision and the possibility, however slight, of witnesses.
A slim edge was an edge.
“Come on,” she said to Jadzia, who was sitting up rubbing grit out of her hair and cursing in several languages Annja didn’t recognize.
Jadzia opened her mouth to say something, probably a snotty protest. Annja grabbed her arm and started running. With a squawk the young woman found herself dragged to her feet and scrambling, still clutching the satchel.
As Annja reached the alley’s end a figure loomed before her. The bizarre shape of the head silhouetted against the silvery glare told her all she needed to know.
Letting go of Jadzia’s wrist, she sprinted the last few yards at full speed and leaped in the air as the inevitable machine pistol came up. Her right leg pistoned out in a flying side kick. It telescoped the single objective tube of the night-vision goggles and snapped the gunman’s neck as if he’d been hit in the face with a pile driver. In a sense he had.
Annja landed beyond the body, out on the rubble field. The inflatable tent over the excavation was ahead and to her right. She did a quick scan of the area. She seemed to be alone. The intruders, knowing there were no exits from the converted warehouse but the front way in, apparently and logically hadn’t bothered leaving more than one man on guard outside. Annja stood drawing in huge breaths of thick Mediterranean air flavored with cooking spices and motor oil.
A crunch of shoes on the loose, gritty earth behind brought her around. Jadzia was teetering toward her with blue eyes wide.
“What the hell?” she said.
“I’m scared, pissed off and alive,” Annja said. “And damned determined to stay that way. If you want to do the same, come with me. And don’t ask questions till later!”
4
Jadzia swiveled her pigtailed head from side to side as the two women walked down a street full of hulking trucks. The narrow lane ran between big dark warehouse walls near the Western Harbor wharves. It smelled strongly of seawater and sea-life uncomfortably past its sell-by date. Water sloshed along the rough surface underfoot. Not even her college geology courses enabled Annja Creed to know whether the street was actual cobblestone or just really decrepit pavement.
They passed through a spill of light from the rectangular opening into an amber-lit cavern of a warehouse. Rough-looking men in badly stained coveralls stood around the entrance smoking and talking in guttural Arabic while a skinny young man, probably just a boy, dressed in a black T-shirt and baggy cotton shorts reeled in a big hose. The smell of fish was very strong.
The conversation stream trickled to a stop as the men saw the pair of Western women, one dressed skimpily enough to be considered more than a little risquГ© even in cosmopolitan Alexandria.
Annja smiled widely and nodded at the startled male faces as they passed through the island of light. Nothing to see here, she thought, trying hard to broadcast it despite her devoted disbelief in psychic powers. Mess with us and you’ll be trying to digest your teeth. Have a nice night!
She had to tug extra hard at Jadzia’s wrist to tow her the rest of the way out of the light.
Jadzia followed her none-too-gentle insistence. The young language prodigy continued to maintain the shocked silence that had settled over her after Annja had killed the final attacker standing between them and escape. Fortunately, Jadzia showed little difficulty with the hike. Either she wasn’t one of those nerds who was totally opposed to any physical activity greater than teetering to the bathroom or the fridge to get another can of Red Bull, or adrenaline was working its magic. As aggravatingly lean as she was, Annja suspected the former.
Annja led them west for about a mile, following the waterfront, through the Greek quarter and into the city’s west side. She stayed alert but saw no sign they were being tailed. At length she circled back toward her own hotel.
“Why are we here?” Jadzia asked, looking up at the front of the hotel.
It was a modest three-star kind of place in the Greek quarter, big enough to have an elevator, a bar and even pretty decent bathrooms in all the rooms, but without being part of a big chain.
“I thought I’d grab my gear,” Annja said.
Jadzia hung back. Somewhere among the nighttime streets Annja had quit having to pull her along by the wrist. She had followed on her own, and now reminded Annja uncomfortably of a lost puppy.
“But won’t they know to look for us here?”
“Watch a lot of spy movies, do you?” Annja said. She instantly regretted the snide tone.
But Jadzia, while she had a flash-fire temper for perceived slights, proved to be dense as one of the city’s ancient stone Sphinxes when a real one hit her. She smiled happily.
“Of course!” Her pigtails bobbed as she nodded enthusiastically. “I know all about these things.”
What have I gotten myself into now? Annja wondered. “I’m betting they either aren’t aware of my existence or haven’t identified me yet,” she said. “Your team roster is available on the Web for all to see. My name’s not on it.”
She knew it was thin, as she watched a cab pull under the portico. The uniformed doorman bowed as a silk-suited Sikh with silver in his beard, and his shorter companion, voluptuous in an emerald-green dress, exited the vehicle and entered the hotel. She wondered briefly what the story was. The couple dressed nicely enough to afford a much pricier place.
Annja wanted to get in and out before much could go wrong even if the night’s assassins were watching for her. They might have spotted her while surveilling the dig—probably had, she had to admit to herself as she formed her plan. She would gather her things, then duck out of the hotel, shake anybody trying to tail them and head for a new place to hole up for the night.
She wasn’t that attached to the belongings she had brought. She traveled light, and nowadays always packed with the expectation she might have to leave anything behind and walk away for survival’s sake. Even her laptop was relatively cheap and contained no information that could easily be used against her.
But it would be convenient to have her stuff. And she reckoned that if she threw some of her own clothes on Jadzia, no matter how bad they fit her coltish form, they would be a lot less conspicuous than having the girl wandering around dressed in such a look-at-me manner.
“Tell you what,” Annja said to Jadzia, who was rocking back and forth on her heels and chewing on her lower lip. “You keep an eye out for anybody suspicious. Okay?”
Jadzia’s eyes lit up. “Okay!”
“TWO MEN in the lobby,” Jadzia said. “They sit on the far side with their backs to the door and pretend to read newspapers.”
“You’re kidding,” Annja said. She fought her irritation with the girl in the close confines of the stairway.
Jadzia’s pigtails swung from side to side beneath the backward Tulane Green Wave ball cap she had stuffed down over them as she shook her head emphatically. She wore an outsized windbreaker that covered her hands, and running pants cinched as tight around her waist as they could be. They resembled a pair of gray terry-cloth sandbags.
At least playing spy got Jadzia too excited either for panic or to take potshots at Annja. Annja opened her mouth to question her further, unsure as to whether to trust the young woman’s judgment. Clearly she had a taste for melodrama. Would she see danger where it wasn’t?
Annja shut her mouth. Belatedly it hit her that a degreed cryptologist might actually have a certain bent for spying.
“Right,” she said. “We’ll go out the back.”
So I was wrong, she thought, frowning at the back of her own windbreaker as Jadzia pushed through swinging utility doors. I guess they did make me. I still have a lot to learn about this whole intrigue thing.
Little wiry Egyptian men and women looked at the brisk Western women as they passed through the hotel’s service areas. Jadzia swung along like the health department inspector. Annja followed down the corridor, which smelled of steam and fresh laundry and cooking food, smiling in what she hoped was a friendly rather than nervous manner.
No one challenged them until a door flew open just in front of Annja. A man in a sort of iridescent brown suit tumbled out right in front of her wearing sunglasses and—
“A fez?” Annja said aloud.
The man’s hand dived into his suit coat, which looked as if it had been intentionally made to look slightly greasy. That was all Annja needed. She acted instinctively and grabbed the upper biceps of what she figured had to be his gun arm to control it. She used the leverage to drive a forward elbow-smash into his face with her right arm. She felt impact that jarred clear down to her tailbone, and felt a sharp pain in her own arm.
The man gave up doing whatever he was doing to clutch his face. He fell straight on the floor, bleeding, to the accompaniment of thrashing and mewling noises, she thought.
“Damn,” Annja said, inspecting her right elbow. A tooth had gouged her, drawing blood. She was mighty glad of her strong immune system. Human bites are nasty, she thought.
Jadzia faced Annja across the man’s kicking form, eyes big. “It’s Egypt,” she said. “They wear fezzes. Get over it. Watch out!”
Somebody grabbed Annja from behind in a bear hug that pinned her upper arms to her rib cage. He felt big and smelled of sweat and garlic.
“I got her,” he said in thickly accented English.
He hoisted her feet clear off the cracked linoleum. She felt hot breath on the back of her head, snapped it back hard. She felt, as well as heard, the cartilage of his nose shift. He grunted and his grip on her rib cage slackened.
She thrust her arms forcefully out before her, busting the rest of the way loose. As the corrugated soles of her trusty hiking boots touched down she braced, covered her right fist with her left palm and, spinning clockwise, pile-drove an elbow into a big soft belly.
The elbow was working for her. Her attacker doubled over with a great expulsion of hot, foul-smelling air. Annja took a step to her left and side-kicked the big Egyptian. The force propelled him into a dumbwaiter that stood open in the cracked pink stucco wall to his right. The door dropped on him.
She turned around quickly to see if anybody else wanted to play. She and Jadzia had the corridor to themselves. The hotel maintenance staff did not get paid to intervene heroically in these little disputes among the guests.
She turned back.
The first man she had dropped lay on the floor moaning. His face was covered with blood. He had his hand in his jacket again.
Annja did not think he was scratching an itch. Irritably she kicked him on the point of his chin. His head, which still had the fez crammed on top of it, snapped into the wall beside him. The fez fell off. He slumped.
Annja crouched quickly, reached a bit tentatively into the clamminess of the inside of his biliously colored jacket and fished out a Beretta. Straightening, she dried the grips off with two quick swipes across the rump of her jeans. Then she pulled the slide back far enough for a flash of yellow brass to confirm he had a round chambered.
“Insurance,” she said to Jadzia, whose eyes had gotten even bigger. It was true. She knew that it would be a lot easier to explain shooting an assailant to the local authorities than carving him up with a sword.
“What’s wrong with a fez?” Jadzia asked.
Annja blinked and shook her head once, violently, as if trying to shed water. “It was just way too Casablanca ,” she said. “Let’s just get out of here, okay?”
5
“I think it was the Muslim Brotherhood,” Annja said.
“Nonsense,” Jadzia replied. Beyond her, cars swished up and down the boulevard. Across the street tourists sauntered down a broad walkway that ran along the Alexandrian waterfront. “I heard one of the men shout at you in French.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Annja said. “Plenty of Muslims speak French.”
It was late morning. They had survived the night, at least, in a small, somewhat seedy hotel. Fortunately Annja had spent enough time knocking around the world from undergrad days onward to appreciate the fact that it was still pretty plush by Third World standards.
Jadzia had recovered from her shock—or perhaps the thrill of playing adventure spy girl—enough to gripe about the surroundings, from the mildewy smells to the stains on the bedspread.
But once she had slurped down her first mug of strong coffee well charged with sugar, and chomped her way through her first flaky pastry at the sidewalk cafГ© on the Corniche, Jadzia found something that appealed to her even more than pouting. Arguing.
Her pretty lips were twisted in a sneer as if she’d forgotten Annja had repeatedly saved her life the night before.
“They were assassins sent by the big oil companies,” Jadzia said in a tone that clearly declared Annja was a moron not to recognize the facts. “They sent them to keep the knowledge of Atlantean energy secrets covered up from the world.”
Annja didn’t react for a moment. She was struck by the fact that the lips sneering at her were covered in a carefully applied layer of lipstick. And as far as Annja knew, Jadzia had no personal effects except her wallet, some credit cards, identification and her passport.
Do I have lipstick that shade? she wondered. The truth was she seldom bothered with it, or makeup in general, except for special events. She realized belatedly she had with her a sort of premade kit—the Mr. Right Emergency Kit—provided to her by her female cronies from Chasing History’s Monsters . She had never, so far as she could recall, used it. Or so much as opened it.
I hope there weren’t condoms in it, she thought.
“Wait,” she said. Jadzia’s last statement had finally penetrated her protective shields of puzzlement. “You’re blaming the oil companies?”
Jadzia nodded.
“Isn’t that a conspiracy theory?”
“Aren’t we victims of a conspiracy?” Jadzia said in infuriatingly superior tones. “Or do you really think that those men all just independently decided to attack us last night, and wound up doing so all at the same time by coincidence? That’s just stupid.”
Annja frowned. It made the snottiness immeasurably worse, somehow, when the brat being snotty was right. At least about that angle of conspiracy. Obviously someone had conspired to hit the Polish-Egyptian dig team last night. And they’d done a hell of a job. Had it not been for the fact that she was getting used to coming under attack, they would have made a clean sweep.
Annja’s fork halted halfway to her mouth. She lowered the chunk of fluffy French pastry with frosting just melting off in the Alexandrian morning heat back to her plate. She felt her stomach do a slow roll. So many, she thought desolately.
She saw the faces of the dead. The beatnik-looking Naser, darkly pretty Maria, cheerful Szczepan Pilitowski, who had died giving Annja a chance to save Jadzia, the scrolls and herself. Ismail—Dr. Maghrabi—who had tried to shield them all with his body, and had been ruthlessly gunned down.
Is this what it means to carry the sword? a lonely child’s voice asked from the wilderness of Annja’s mind. She already knew the answer.
She could hear the gruff voice of her sometime mentor, Roux’s, trying to encompass cynicism and compassion at once, saying, “You cannot save the whole world, child.” And she knew that was true, too.
But can’t I even save those within reach of my arm?
“See?” Jadzia crowed, sipping at her coffee. “You have no answers for me.”
Anger spiked in Annja. She held her body as still as if it were encased in concrete, did not allow the anger to travel so far as her eyes. Jadzia’s malice was the petty malice of a spoiled child, she reminded herself. Innocent malice, if there was such a thing.
And surely there was. By no stretch of her vivid imagination could Annja see Jadzia setting about the callous murder of a dozen helpless, harmless men and women. Her petty rudeness belonged in a different universe from such an act.
Oddly, the very act of restraining herself from lashing back at Jadzia made Annja feel better. “I still think it was most likely Muslim fanatics,” she said in an only slightly constricted voice.
“Why would they attack our dig? Why would they care?” Jadzia asked. “We’ve never heard a peep from Islamists. No threats, not anything. And the Muslim Brotherhood has very much to do already.”
Such as waging an increasingly successful campaign to dislodge the fairly secular Egyptian government, Annja thought. She already saw the sand leaking out of her theory anyway. She had knocked around, and been knocked around of late, enough to have uncomfortably firsthand knowledge of Western special-operations gear. The attackers had worn Western-style blackout dress and night-vision goggles, and carried the generic Western counterterrorism weapon, the MP-5. Presumably the Muslim Brotherhood could buy that stuff and learn to use it. Even at Western expense, given the enormous amounts of military aid and training the U.S. gave Egypt. But for a group as determinedly old-fashioned as the Brotherhood, it seemed distinctly out of character.
Annja took a last sip of her mostly cooled coffee and stood up. “I need to move,” she said. “Getting the blood flowing will help me think.”
“THEY CONSPIRED against us,” Jadzia said again. She dangled her long legs over a parapet of rough dressed stone. Several stories below lay a little shelf of rubble at the base of the citadel wall, and then the water of the Eastern Harbor, slogging and frothing.
Annja paced the terrace behind the Polish girl. White gravel crunched beneath her soles, and she could practically feel the afternoon sun beating on the wide brim of her hat with angry fists. She tried not to think of the risks Jadzia was subjecting herself to. While signs in various languages placed at intervals warned against precisely what the girl was doing, enforcement of safety rules did not seem to constitute a priority for whatever agency had charge of the big, blocky, fifteenth-century fortress of Qait-Bey. Nobody had yelled at her to get down. As for Annja, she already understood that the only way to get Jadzia to stop doing what she was doing was to try to physically prevent her. And the last thing they needed was to draw attention to themselves by getting into a fight.
Actually, the very last thing they needed was for them both to get arrested for causing a public disturbance at a national monument. Her estimate of the Alexandrian police was such that she expected it might take them only seconds to sell the young women to whoever it was who wanted them so dead.
“Why do you blame the oil companies?” Annja asked. She hated to feed Jadzia’s probable paranoia. But she was out of other answers, and a brisk walk through winding streets and out to the tip of the peninsula through growing morning heat hadn’t done a damned thing to replenish her stock. Although Jadzia’s constant whining was at least a bit of a distraction, she had to admit.
“They have the most to lose from what we might discover,” the young Polish woman said.
Annja stopped and looked at her. “What did you find in those scrolls, anyway?”
Jadzia shrugged and kicked the heels of her tennis shoes against the yellow sandstone. They were the only part of her ensemble of the night before Annja had let her keep. “You were there for one of the most tantalizing parts.”
“That bit about the crystals? That just sounded like New Age craziness warmed over.”
Jadzia laughed. “Right. Twenty-five hundred years old is very new.”
“But, I mean, that charging-crystals stuff—”
“We found more earlier. It spoke of all those things you found so funny—flying chariots, artificial lights, lances of light. The ancient Greek who wrote those scrolls, who somewhere got a much purer version of the story than Solon passed down to Critias, he did not have the language of technology to describe an artificial power source. He probably didn’t understand it. Some kind of divine gift, like Zeus’s lightnings chained, would be the closest he could come to expressing it.”
“But using gemstones for batteries,” Annja said. “I’m no physicist, but that sounds pretty implausible.”
An Air France Airbus climbed past them from its takeoff roll, momentarily blanking out the conversation in the scream of its engines. “What?” Annja shouted.
“I said, how would that airplane strike an ancient Greek? Implausible, yes? Everything is impossible until someone does it.”
Annja sought an answer to that and could find none that didn’t ring as hollow as a pewter doubloon. Come on , she told herself. Is she really that much smarter than I am? Or am I letting myself get intimidated, just because everyone told me what a supergenius she was?
Annja had been arguably the brightest girl in the orphanage where she was raised. It had gotten her knuckles rapped by the nuns for being a smart aleck, and had seen her shunned sometimes by girls who thought she was too smart for her own good.
But she thought she had gotten over the expectation of being the smartest person in the room by about the middle of her first semester as a college freshman. So even if Jadzia was smarter than her by some great yawning gap, it did not follow she had to think herself stupid.
“How would something like that work?” she asked. “Storing energy that way.”
Jadzia shrugged. “I am no physicist or engineer, either. But perhaps in some way involving the molecular bonds of the crystalline structure itself?”
That brought Annja up short. That did sound plausible. At least close enough, given she was so ignorant of what she’d really need to know to evaluate the possibility that she didn’t even feel bad about it. She had her own abstruse specialties, she reminded herself, and if crystallography wasn’t among them, that was just okay.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll grant the possibility. On a purely hypothetical basis. But so what?”
“The scrolls could prove alternate energy sources were available,” Jadzia said, “without the inefficiencies of wind or solar power, or the risks of nuclear.”
Annja shook her head and laughed. “It’s not as if they contain a set of blueprints for harnessing that power.”
Jadzia’s smile widened until she reminded Annja forcibly of a cat who’d just discovered how to work the catch on the birdcage. “But maybe that’s—” she patted the green-and-purple synthetic bag plumped beside her on the wall “—still in here.”
“SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” the young woman asked.
Jadzia sat on a wall again, drumming her heels against it. This time it was a short retaining wall high up on the town’s ancient acropolis, looking out over the strip of city lights running along the darkness of the Mediterranean. Above her left shoulder, illuminated by floodlights at the base, rose the shiny red granite obelisk miscalled Pompey’s Pillar. Annja knew it was actually built by Diocletian on the ruins of the Temple of Serapis in 297 A.D. Off to her right a smallish sort of Sphinx lay pensive on its pedestal.
Annja paced downslope of her this time, without great energy but still driven. Reaction had set in. They had passed the afternoon wandering in and out of shops in a daze. Annja could remember nothing specific of what they had seen.
They had dinner at a couscous restaurant. Even with ample doses of hot sauce it tasted like wood chips to Annja. They had talked some, sporadically, in muted voices. That was how shock-fatigued they had become. Jadzia was too wasted to be either loud or nasty.
She had told Annja some of her story. She proudly claimed descent from Mozart, which struck Annja as implausible. To Annja’s surprise the girl had been born in the United States, eighteen years before, meaning she carried dual citizenship. Her father, a mathematics professor at the University of Krakow, had been a vocal supporter of the Solidarity labor-union movement. When the Soviet-backed Polish regime had cracked down on Solidarity and arrested its leader, Lech Walesa, Jadzia’s father had fled to the U.S. Sobieslaw Arkadczyk moved in with cousins in Chicago and took a job as a plumber.
While there he had met, through friends, a young Polish woman finishing her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago. They had fallen in love and married.
After political reform brought an effective end to the Communist regime, the couple returned to their homeland. With them went their two-year-old daughter, Jadzia. They were soon both teaching at Krakow University. Sobieslaw’s having been exiled for supporting Walesa, who became the nation’s president in 1990, probably hadn’t hurt their opportunities.
Jadzia had shown signs of extraordinary gifts at a young age. Annja got the impression Sobieslaw and Roksana, Jadzia’s mother, were probably looking pretty hard. Parents did that, Annja knew from observing her contemporaries who had produced offspring. She had no direct experience with parents of her own that she could remember.
In Jadzia’s case, genius wasn’t all in her parents’ eyes, it seemed. Tests demonstrated that she had an astonishing facility for languages, as well as a talent for mathematics.
She was, perhaps inevitably, relentlessly indulged from a very early age.
Jadzia learned to read at the advanced age of three. She did so voraciously. As Annja had, she quickly fell in love with the intrigue and adventure and romance of history. That led to a near obsession with ancient languages.
Oddly, she chose not to study specific languages at school. “Why?” Annja asked.
“I learn them perfectly well by myself,” she replied matter-of-factly.
Instead she studied linguistics and cryptology, the better to decipher unknown languages and tantalizing fragments.
As the sun set and Jadzia finished her story, they had drifted up the hill. Wandering the tourist attractions had kept them masked by crowds during the day. They had already checked out of the hotel where they had spent half of last night, and locked their baggage, except for the scrolls, in lockers at the train station. Tonight they would check into a new hotel as late as possible. Hostelries had to report all foreign guests to the police. The later the pair showed their passports, though, the more likely the hotel staff was to wait until morning to pass the information along to the police. And the less likely the police were to actually notice them at all. Just because their pursuers could readily bribe the Alexandrian police didn’t mean they could make them efficient.
And now at last Jadzia had asked the question, literally, of life and death: What do we do now?
“We have to find a way to get whoever is hunting us off our backs,” Annja answered.
“How can we do that?”
“We could give them what they want.”
“Sure,” Jadzia sneered. “And then they kill us anyway.”
She had gotten so lethargic Annja was almost relieved to see her get snotty again. Almost.
“That’s true,” she said.
“What? You aren’t going to accuse me of conspiracy theories?”
Annja laughed without a lot of humor. “As you pointed out, somebody really is conspiring against us. But what if we were to negate the value of what you’re carrying?”
The girl’s eyes turned to blue slits of suspicion. “What do you mean?”
“Release the information the scrolls contain,” Annja said. “If whoever’s after us is willing to kill to keep the information secret, and I confess I can’t think of any other reason they attacked you, then it stands to reason that if we make the information public, they’ll have no more incentive to kill us. Doesn’t it?”
“What if they still want to kill us for revenge?”
Annja shrugged. “It’s possible. But murder is an expensive proposition, even for the rich and well-connected. Continuing a vendetta against a couple of young women—who have incidentally become world-famous figures—might not make a whole lot of sense when vast profit or power no longer lie at stake. Whoever ordered the hit on your dig team, whether it was a corporate executive or government minister, probably has powerful rivals who aren’t any more scrupulous than he is. Wasting resources closing the barn door after the horse has escaped might be all the pretext such rivals might need to make a move against him.”
She held her breath then, uncertain of whether the girl was going to go off on her or not. She was like nitroglycerin.
But Jadzia smiled, then laughed. “Twisted,” she said. “I like the way you think.”
And what would worldwide notoriety do for my career? Annja wondered. As an archaeologist, as a consultant for Chasing History’s Monsters , as champion of good?
She shrugged. A lot less harm than getting abruptly dead in the next few days, she conceded to herself.
“But what about revenge? ” Jadzia asked.
Annja did not particularly care for the gleam she saw in the young Polish linguist’s eyes. In part that was because she wasn’t so sure it wasn’t shining from her own.
She found herself smiling. “Can you think of anything better,” she asked, “than revealing the secret they want so very badly to keep?”
6
“We’re still waiting,” the fresh-faced Mormon guy said. Although his hair didn’t seem to be receding he managed to show a lot of forehead in the late-morning sunlight. His forehead bulged, somehow.
“For what?” Jadzia asked.
Seagulls wheeled over the Bay of Naples in the bright blue morning sky, complaining of fate. The Mediterranean wind stirred the scrubby pines dotted across the hillside and rattled dust and small porous pebbles against larger rocks and randomly rearranged them in clumps at the bases of the wiry plants. The square smelled of dust and ancient dressed stone and not-so-ancient hot asphalt from the parking lot. Annja felt the weight of time and mortality as she and Jadzia walked with their attentive guides through the ruins of Herculaneum.
Which was a familiar and pleasant feeling for the archaeologist.
The two women were being escorted through a ghost town of pallid stone by several researchers from Brigham Young University and a few employees of the small Herculaneum museum, which, like the site as a whole, was closed to the public at the moment. Annja and Jadzia were getting a personal tour as a professional courtesy.
The researchers seemed excited to meet Annja, a genuine television celebrity, and one from their field—one moreover who might somehow be able to bring the manna of airtime or even coveted television-network dollars to their project. But Jadzia they actually seemed to regard with awe. It was as if a rising baseball superstar were visiting another team’s locker room.
“For the permission by the Italian government,” said Pellegrino. In his early thirties, he was the oldest of the museum crew. He was short and wiry, if a bit bandy-legged. He wore a horizontally striped red-and-blue jersey over shorts. “Further excavation has been held up until the ministry decides whether to give priority to a conservation strategy first.”
“Or until the Americans come up with a bigger bribe,” said Tancredo, a tall young man with a shock of straw blond hair, blue eyes and a Lombard accent.
The volcano-doomed Roman village perched on the warty flank of the mountain that killed it, alongside the modern village of Ercole. This part of the Bay of Naples was postcard-pretty, and seemingly placid despite the volcano’s vast gray dome hulking overhead. But it sported a history almost as long and dense as the land Annja and Jadzia had just left on the other side of the Mediterranean.
“There are legitimate issues at stake!” yelped Tammaro, the third and youngest of the museum crew, who was very short indeed and looked as if he hadn’t shaved in three days. The locals had all been speaking Italian. Now Tammaro, stung by the blond northerner’s suggestion, bubbled into expostulating in the local dialect, quite different from standard Italian. Annja could barely follow.
The Mormon, whose name was Tom Ross, shrugged. He spoke in English. Still, from his body language Annja guessed he had followed the Italian conversation about as far as she had. He had told the visitors he had done his mission in Italy before returning to Brigham Young University, where he was a graduate student.
“A few of us keep on keeping on here,” he said, causing Annja to wonder if this cheerful straight-arrow had any inkling of the phrase’s origin in the drug-happy sixties. “The ministry’s been promising to get us word �any time now’ since about February.” BYU, it seemed, wasn’t wasting any full professors on a prospect as tenuous as an Italian ministry doing its job.
Pellegrino scowled and said a word Annja was unfamiliar with. She guessed it was a curse of some sort. Her guess seemed confirmed when Jadzia burst into loud high-pitched giggles. Tammaro hunched his head between his shoulders like a startled turtle and scowled ferociously, an effect somewhat spoiled by the fact that he also turned beet-red.
They walked through a broad courtyard or smallish plaza between the stone faces of excavated buildings, some two stories tall. A palm tree waved badly weathered fronds, half of them dead and brown, in the insistent breeze. The empty doorways and windows looked like openings into skulls, and the sense of desolation was palpable despite the fact they walked through what amounted to a very vital modern city. Maybe it was the sudden and horrid fashion in which so many lives had been snuffed at once by one of Mother Nature’s better-known disasters.
Or perhaps it was the brooding presence of the mountain itself, the two-humped saddle shape, taller Vesuvius separated from ancient Somma by the Valley of the Giant. The old killer lay dormant now, although it had smoldered some a few decades ago.
Annja had studied enough geology to know that a sleeping volcano could wake quickly. It had been realized in her own lifetime that extinction wasn’t necessarily forever, where volcanoes were concerned. And over four hundred thousand people lay in harm’s immediate way if Vesuvius should suddenly take a mind to take up his bad old ways.
“What about equipment to read the scrolls?” Jadzia asked, yanking Annja somewhat guiltily back to the subject pressingly at hand. Merely our own survival, she reflected glumly. “I understood you were going to obtain the equipment to read the carbonized scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri.”
“You mean the machines necessary to perform multispectral imaging and CT scans?” Tancredo asked. “Sorry. Hasn’t happened yet.”
Tom shrugged. “We have an American patron bankrolling much of this operation,” he said. “He’s real generous. But his generosity sort of hits Pause when it comes to shelling out millions of dollars for an undertaking that might take years before it can actually get started. If ever.”
Annja’s lips peeled back from her teeth in a grimace. She could feel Jadzia approaching a boil. But neither said anything.
“But it is a most important question,” Tammaro said, back to speaking intelligible Italian again, “whether to concentrate our efforts on preserving the ancient treasures of Herculaneum and Lucius Piso’s villa, or exploit them for the curiosity and profit of soulless—”
“Oh, put a sock in it, do,” Tancredo said in startling English. “It’s all about the bribes our wealthy patron can be held up for, and the whole bloody world knows it!’
Pellegrino showed a wavery smile to Annja and Jadzia. “Welcome to Italy,” he said.
“WAIT,” Annja said, as the taxi rattled down a fairly rural road carved into the cold lava skirts of Vesuvius, where the picturesque gnarled evergreens and palms of the southeastern, seaward side of the mountain gave slow way to stands of alders and birch trees. Their driver, a stout, sweating man with a mustache and a touring cap, had informed them before lapsing into silence that they must detour to avoid some kind of traffic lockup on the main road that ran along the curve of the bay. “You’re telling me if I don’t believe aliens are visiting the Earth in flying saucers then I’m buying into a conspiracy theory?”
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