by Jay Stringer
“You’re so full of shit,” she said aloud, smiling.
She was wrapped up in her bedsheets, with the only light coming from the tablet resting on her knees. Each time she moved, there was in instant reminder of the kick she’d taken. Her head hurt only if she touched it, so a process of scientific study had convinced her to stop doing that.
Chase had booked a flight that gave her just enough time, in theory, for six hours of sleep and the commute out to JFK. She’d used the airline that Lauren Stanford owned, and found, when it came time to enter her credit card and complete the booking, that the system didn’t charge her for the flights. She guessed Lauren must have put her name on a list. Normally, Chase would push back against that. She liked to be in total control of who had her details and what they were used for. But it was late, she was tired, and she didn’t want to argue over free travel.
She used the tablet’s web browser to search for Ashley Eades. Her website was still up but hadn’t been updated in a long time. Her Patreon was still live, too, but the subscriptions seemed to have dwindled down to the few people who probably didn’t even cancel their gym memberships when they stopped going. All the same news stories were still available. Chase ran through the ones she remembered, the profiles and interviews that involved her. Eades cast herself as the voice of the reader, discovering this whole new world for the first time. Smugglers. Relic runners. Counterfeiters. Spies for hire. She told people that all of this was going on, right beneath the surface of every city. There was an undertone to the work Chase hadn’t noticed before. In the heat of the moment, all she’d seen were the personal connections, her life exposed, her community under scrutiny. She’d pegged Eades as an attention seeker, bent on being the one to tell every truth. But now, with distance, she could see fear. A conservative edge to the narrative, warning people that they were not as safe as they thought, that all this lawbreaking was carrying on unchecked. Eades had been a darling of the liberal media. Had these conservative tendencies always been there, or were they a sign of the shock and grief everyone in London had been feeling since the terror attack?
There were other stories Chase hadn’t read before. Eades cozying up with the new right, attending their conferences and going on tour with some of their leaders. The articles were always written from the liberal point of view, framed as needing to understand how these young men could drift so far from the mainstream. Chase wondered, for the first time, if this was how Eades had seen her. Were her journeys into the dark trades another step in Eades trying to understand extremism and violence?
“If you play with fire…,” she said to nobody. There was no need to finish the sentence, as the only person listening already knew what she meant.
She got out of bed, wincing at the stabbing sensation on her side, and walked out to the kitchen area on bare feet. She pulled her water filter out of the refrigerator, poured a glass, and downed it. She poured a second and took it with her. Pausing at the sofa, she looked at the cycling gloves. Or rather, in the dark, she looked at the small shape on the larger shape, which she knew were the gloves. Then cursed herself again for slipping so easily into overthinking. The gloves made her think of Dani. Should she call her? Chase loved her own company, and the idea of living with someone broke her out in a mild panic. But sometimes, in her darker moments, she could get trapped in her own head. Sometimes being around people was the best way for a solitary person to be alone. Bouncing her thoughts off another person could be better than having them running around in her mind. And sex was her own personal form of meditation, the only way to really be in the moment. Then thinking of Dani led to thinking of Mason. Her very own Jane Bond. Had that sex purely been meditation? Or had they both felt something deeper and run away from it?
“Just read the damn thing.”
She headed back to bed and loaded the files back up on the tablet. Before switching over to Ashley Eades’s website, Chase had already read two short reports. Now she dived into the larger ones.
First, she found the medical records for the old guy who claimed to be James Gilmore. Like most people his age, he hadn’t really died of the thing that killed him. The death certificate reported it as a stroke, but his NHS papers showed he’d been living with cancer, had suffered a long bout of pneumonia, and had long since lost himself to an aggressive form of dementia. He’d already shown signs of it when the BBC crew found him in Ethiopia. Most likely, somewhere along the line he’d found details of the real James Gilmore, and as his own identity started to slip, his brain had filled it with that one. But why that identity? And how did he remember details about the soldier’s life and childhood?
And why mention Macrobia?
The answer Chase had given to Lauren was the best thing she could think of on the spot. And it had sounded convincing in the moment. But the more she thought about it, the more doubt crept in.
A lost civilization in Africa, or the Arabian Peninsula, wasn’t so farfetched. Countries on both sides of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden had laid claim to being the biblical Sheba, and it was well accepted that one of them was right. Ethiopia’s claim had been strengthened by Chase finding the Ark. The local legends held that the Queen of Sheba had a son with King Solomon, and it was the son, Melenik, who stole the Ark and took it to his homeland. And if Chase could be so certain that she’d found Sheba, why would she shut down the idea of Macrobia?
Both Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, two of the oldest known civilizations, were known to have had a third, unidentified trading partner. And ancient Egypt had close diplomatic ties with a nation somewhere to the south, known as the Land of Punt. In fact, many Egyptian legends held that they were descended from the people of Punt.
Her thoughts went back to the Ark.
And then to the cave she’d found two years before, beneath Alexandria.
The matching faces, in the cave and on the Ark.
And Ethiopia…
Life always had a way of circling back. She got off the bed again and walked into the living room, lifting her laptop and taking it back to bed with her. She rested the computer on her knees and logged in, loading up Talaria, a secure phone and messenger app with end-to-end encryption. It had been developed especially for people on the black market, with loads of customizable features aimed at smugglers and relic runners. She could see a little green light next to Hass’s name, telling her he was online, and she pressed dial before thinking to check the time. It would be around 7:00 AM there. But hell, it was his choice; if he didn’t want to pick up, he wouldn’t.
The call was accepted, and the screen went black for a second, taking time for the pixels to form into the image of the video call. Hass was in sweat-stained workout gear, breathing heavily, his thin clothes stretched tight across his muscles. He was drinking from a large flask of water and waved rather than saying hello.
“Hey, Doc.”
He set down the flask and leaned in closer to the screen. He was looking down at the image on his own laptop, rather than the camera, which gave the disconcerting impression that he was staring at Chase’s chest rather than meeting her eyes. Video calls had changed all the social cues.
“Make it home safe?”
“Yeah.” Chase touched her side, out of shot of the camera. “Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“Nothing important. The usual.”
He grinned as if reading her thoughts and added, “I got a couple calls from Chuy Guerrero after you left. Wanted to know if you’d crashed okay. You should call him.”
“Good point.” Chase was annoyed at herself. Chuy was her friend; she shouldn’t need to be told to call him. “Have you heard of Macrobia?”
Hass had been halfway through another long sip of water but almost did a spit take. He wiped his mouth, shook his head, and shot Chase a bitch, please look. “Have you heard of Washington, D.C.?”
Chase shook her head. “I don’t—”
“I’m Somali, and you’re going to ask if I’ve heard of Macrobia?”
Chase felt herself getting defensive and pushed it away. There was something here she didn’t know. Ignorance is only a problem if you let it persist. She nodded at the screen, to say, Okay, I’m listening.
“Macrobia was in Somalia.”
“I’m sorry, I always thought it was a myth.”
Hass laughed. “You people.”
Chase feigned offense, smiled. “You people?”
“Americans. Europeans. You always talk about history like you didn’t arrive five minutes ago. You say the gorilla wasn’t discovered until the nineteenth century, because that’s when you found them. And then it’s lost cities, lost countries, lost people. Most of the time, it’s not lost at all; you’re just not listening to the people who can tell you where it is.” His voice had risen into a rant, but he was playing a role. His anger came wrapped in a smile. “You’re the proof of that. People in Ethiopia have been saying the Ark was there for a thousand years. You come along and look in the exact place they’ve been saying. And you get to be the one who found it.”
Chase saw the gold chest again. Felt the impulse she’d had to lift the lid and look inside, as well as the near-certainty that she shouldn’t. And then the crate, being loaded into the van. The dull ache in her gut ever since. The feeling she couldn’t put a name to.
Hass was still going, but she could tell from the pitch of his voice he was near the end, aiming to hit some killer note. “You’re going to ask me about the Land of Punt next. All you academics, you write whole books asking where Punt went to and whether it was real. We have Puntland on our maps. On our maps. We can point to it. You go running off to solve a mystery and we’re standing right behind you saying, It’s here.”
But if Macrobia was in Somalia, that would have been a hell of a long walk for James Gilmore to wind up in northern Ethiopia. Especially during a drought. And how would he…?
No. This was just a rescue mission. She wasn’t going off in search of…
She leaned closer to the screen. “Are there ruins? Records?”
“Most of the connections are cultural. We have legends, traditions. Stories of our friendship with Egypt, of visits from their kings.”
Find Eades, make sure she’s okay. That was the mission.
You’re not interested in the Fountain.
You’re not interested in the Fountain.
“Do you know anything about the Fountain of Youth?”
Hass cocked his head. “Okay. Now you’re talking myth.”
“Someone tried to hire me to look for it.”
Hass pretended to spit-take again, but it lacked the spontaneity of the first one. “Tried? As in you said no?”
Chase nodded. She forgot the laptop was resting on her knees and had to steady it. The movement caused more pain in her side. “Of course.”
“Someone wants to give you money to find a thing that can’t be found, and you say no?”
You’re not interested in the Fountain.
You’re not interested in…
The old excitement was coming back. The rush. The thrill of the hunt.
“I might have something, Doc. Fancy a trip to London?”
SEVENTEEN
Police sirens wailed past, filling the car with sound, lights, and fury. Nash watched the cops disappear in the rearview. They weren’t looking for him. Some other fool was on the wrong side of the law tonight. The people hunting for Nash and Lenny were unlikely to advertise themselves, and they were already a hundred miles to the north, coming up on the coastal city of Alexandria.
Getting here had always been the goal. But the route he’d taken was plan C. Plan A had been blown the minute he resorted to shooting at the hotel. It had been a best-case scenario, which involved getting straight in, getting the name, getting straight out again, without raising an alarm. In his entire career, that same Plan A had only ever worked five times, but he still went into every job hoping for it. If it had gone smoothly, he’d be at the airport by now, waiting to board a commercial flight. Plan B had burned while he stood talking to Lenny, those precious few seconds wasted letting the gunrunner slip into his usual banter. But he’d learned long ago never to enter the field without at least three exits lined up. Basic CIA training. It was the reason he’d lasted so long as a relic runner, always having more options than the competition. He’d taken his eye off the ball in Ethiopia. The prize had blinded him to the basics of the job. But it wasn’t going to happen here.
So, he was on to plan C, a series of cars waiting for him at strategic points.
The first was one they’d dumped while still in Cairo, letting the authorities build up a profile around a blue Renault before changing over to a yellow Volkswagen. Hardly the type of car anyone would expect for a pursuit, and something so noticeable that it blended into the background. This was now the third vehicle, a red Chevrolet. From here, they would head to the port, where one of the many smuggler-friendly boats would take them across to Malta or Catania. From there, it would be easy to get a small charter plane as far north as France, or across into Portugal. Nash had contacts in both places.
On the drive so far, Lenny had managed to talk about everything except Lothar Caliburn. He’d brought Nash up-to-date on the Star Wars movies, which he had very strong opinions about, and thrown out some free information about the current state of play between the Russian money launderers operating out of New Jersey and the American authorities. Nash knew each and every word was a distraction, buying time and distance between Lenny and the people who’d arrested him, but he didn’t mind. Those first two hours had been crucial to getting out, and he’d needed to concentrate. Being able to block out whatever Lenny was saying had been a bonus.
But things would be much easier from here. The run to the port was simple, and he knew the city well enough to take quiet roads. He could afford to focus more energy on the guy next to him.
“Okay, Lenny, time to talk.”
“What I been doing for the past hour?”
“Time to talk.”
“What you wanna know?”
“Caliburn.”
“So he’s this old legend—”
“I know the stories.” Nash shot the arms dealer a look. “I don’t want any of your games; don’t give me your lawyer tricks or stalling. I want a name.”
“We have a problem there. So, I don’t actually know it.”
Lenny threw his hands up to say, What you gonna do?
Nash slammed on the brakes. They both lurched forward into their seat belts.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I never knew. It’s just a thing I made up.”
Nash hissed through gritted teeth. “Lenny…”
He noticed a cop car turning on to the road behind them from a junction. No lights, no sirens. This one wasn’t on a call. Nash eased on the gas, got them moving again, before coming to a stop at a red light. The cop came to a stop behind them. Nash checked him in the rearview mirror. A uniformed officer wearing a bored expression, staring off into space.
Just play it cool, he’s not after you.
“Hear me out,” Lenny said, oblivious to the threat behind them. “I was at the Con.”
The Con was the nickname given to an annual gathering of people in the dark trades. Every profession has its convention circuit, organized events where attendees can assemble at hotel bars and exhibition halls to get drunk and pretend to talk shop. The black market was no exception. A different host city was chosen each year, and a large assortment of smugglers, hackers, thieves, counterfeiters, and arms dealers would descend on the location and drink it dry. For a raven like Lenny, this was a golden opportunity to loiter in the bars and collect information.
Lenny continued. “You weren’t there. I looked for you.”
“I was working.”
“Well, I was there. And this guy approaches me. About weapons at first, naturally. I find out he’s from R18. He’s saying they’re recruiting again. And he’s talking real money. More than I thought they
had. So I keep him talking because, you know, I’m not an idiot. If there’s money, I want to find the angle for me to get some of it. Then he mentions they want to hire Lothar Caliburn.”
“And you said you knew him.”
“I said I knew him.”
The light went green. Nash eased gently down on the accelerator, hitting the perfect balance between not being fast enough to draw the cop’s attention or slow enough to raise his frustration. Nash took a left. It was a slight detour, but he wanted the blue off his back. He pulled onto the side of the road and let the engine idle.
“Don’t take me back,” Lenny whispered.
“Take you back? I take you back, I’m handing myself in. I take you with me, you’re excess baggage. I’m just going to kill you. You saw all that desert back there?”
Lenny’s eyes went wide at that. “Okay. Okay. Look. I’m a salesman, right? Lying’s my whole brand. Someone tells me they need a thing, I’ll tell them I can get the best version of that thing. Someone tells me they’re looking for the guy, I tell them I can introduce them to the guy. And in this case, I’ve been hearing for ten years that the guy they’re after is dead. Hell, I heard you killed him. What’s the harm in me stringing them along, trying to get some money? I went to a couple meetings in London, but then they figured out I was bullshitting, and they got mad. So I went to ground in France.”
“Getting arrested doesn’t count as going to ground.”
“No, well. That wasn’t part of the plan. Those charges were trumped up, believe you me. Then they tell me the Egyptians want me, and the French owe the Egyptians a favor, and no, I can’t call the American consulate, because the Americans have already told them they want nothing to do with me. You believe that?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll be writing to the president. You’ll see. Get it all straightened out.”
“That’s how it works.”
“The Egyptians had gotten wind I knew who Caliburn was. And they’re pissed at him, because apparently he’s very much not dead, and he killed one of their agents. So they hauled me in to Cairo, strung me up, and…” He waved. “Now we’re here.”