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“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 risqué 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.