by Dan Abnett
“It’s a lie,” he said.
Lara put the milk carton on the table and sat down again.
“Carter, you’ve got to get your head straight. If you’re contaminated, I have a number to call. I can get you some help and—”
“What about the obelisk?” he asked.
Lara looked at him.
“The obelisk?”
“In the cyst chamber,” he said.
“That was a hallucination,” she replied. “I saw an obelisk and a cyst chamber, but—”
“So did I,” he said. “I didn’t just see it. I worked in it for several weeks. Hallucinations are personal, Lara. Individual minds project individual things in relation to personal psychologies. We wouldn’t hallucinate the same thing.”
“We don’t know what we saw,” she said. “There could be—”
“We do, actually,” Bell interrupted. He stood up. “And I can prove it.”
He went to the kitchen doors, slid them open, and disappeared into the garden. Rain pelted in through the open door, making a puddle on the tiles.
“I believe you, Carter. What are you doing?” Lara called after him.
Carter reappeared after a couple of minutes, empty-handed. He closed the garden door and sat down again.
“I stashed my rucksack before hitting your gates,” he said. “In case...”
“In case?”
“In case you weren’t alone.”
“Okay,” said Lara, “but you don’t need to prove anything to me.”
“No,” said Carter, “but I think you should see what I’ve got. I just need to fetch the rucksack.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Lara, picking up the gun.
Carter eyed it for a moment, and then smiled at Lara.
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
Back in the kitchen, Carter produced a compact DSLR from the soaking-wet rucksack. He switched it on, opened the stored image file, and fast-clicked through images on the LCD screen. He found the image he was looking for and turned the camera to show it to Lara.
It was a high-resolution shot of the cyst chamber and the obelisk, almost exactly as she remembered it.
“Are we still both hallucinating?” he asked.
They sat in her lounge, the curtains closed. While he had showered, she’d run his wet clothes through the tumble dryer.
“So this is why they shut down the site?” Lara asked. She was working through the images stored on Bell’s camera, one by one.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why? I mean, this...this rewrites British history pretty fundamentally. Indigenous contact in the Bronze Age with New Kingdom Egypt. It rewrites Egyptian history, too. But in this day and age? This is...a fabulous exhibition at the British Museum and the cover story for a National Geographic special, not the trigger for a classified cover-up.”
“I don’t think it’s the historical implications they’re really worried about,” he said.
“Meaning?”
“Annie Hawkes called me in after they found the obelisk,” Carter said. “They needed an Egyptologist fast, and at that stage, she wanted to keep everything on the down low. She was worried about the media fuss—the historical implications, ironically—and she knew everything would turn into a circus if it got out. There were so many ways the establishment could fault her discovery. They could claim she faked it, or misinterpreted the find, or botched it, or that she’d been hoaxed.”
“She wanted it properly reviewed and inspected before she went live with it,” said Lara. “She needed context.”
“Exactly. So I started work. It’s an amazing thing, Lara. The crypt, the obelisk, and the altar are late Neolithic, or early British Bronze Age. They’re on the cusp. The stone is local, quarried in Wales, I think. My assessment of the workmanship is that it’s indigenous, too. But there’s the design, the inscriptions. It’s New Kingdom. It was either made by artisans who had been to Egypt and made a careful study of the monuments there, or by craftsmen supervised and instructed by Egyptian builders. Either way, the cultural contact is startling and revolutionary. It proves a cultural link, or something rather more than that, between two ancient societies that were never thought to have made contact. One is influencing the other. In fact, we hadn’t got far, so it’s hard to say at this point which is the real influencing party. My guess is that Egyptian visitors—traders, ambassadors—reached the British Isles and interacted with the local culture. But it’s even possible it’s the other way around.”
“That an indigenous British culture, one we know virtually nothing about, existed in the early Bronze Age and had such significance, on an almost global scale, it influenced the development of the Egyptian civilisation?” Lara asked.
Bell smiled at the look on her face.
“I know. Blows the mind, doesn’t it?”
“I think I preferred it when it was a hallucination,” Lara said.
“There’s very little to go on,” he said. “I mean, so very little context. If we could find some other sites to make comparisons, that would be great. But we know a few simple facts. The cartouche on the obelisk, for example. It’s very recognisable.”
Bell took the camera from Lara and found a close-up of the inscription.
“The name of the pharaoh the obelisk is honouring, or who ordered its construction, or who it was dedicated to.”
“Akhenaten,” Lara said.
“Yup,” he said. “AKA Amenhotep: the rogue, the renegade, the mystery. He’s the one pharaoh whose reign no one has ever properly explained. He changed, overnight, an Egyptian society and religion that had existed for centuries and preserved that new belief system throughout his lifetime.”
“And then it was violently revised after his death,” Lara said. “Everything was put back the way it had been before.”
“And no one has ever successfully explained it,” Carter said. “There are plenty of theories, of course, some of them pretty far out there. So here’s a new one. Amenhotep, a very singular individual, was radically influenced by contact with a powerful pre-existing British culture. Through his contact with them, and his fascination with their worldview, he threw out Egyptian pantheism almost overnight, and revolutionised Egyptian culture into a new, monotheistic system.”
Lara’s mind was spinning fast.
“There are other inscriptions here,” she said. Not hieroglyphs. They look almost Celtic.”
“That’s as good a word as any for now, but it’s not precise enough. Maybe ‘Megalithic’ is better? I think that script is the writing of the local culture, inscribed in support of the Egyptian text. It shows the cooperation. We hadn’t got far translating it. It seems to include a dedication to a local queen, a Bronze Age British leader. Her name is Gwynnever.”
“As in...?” said Lara.
“Yes.”
“Oh, come on!”
“It says it right there.”
“Come on!”
“Look,” said Carter, “all this, weirdly enough, is unimportant right now. What’s important is that strange things started to happen at the site. They began before I arrived, but they got worse.”
“What sort of things?” Lara asked.
Carter shrugged. “Well, haunting. People started to feel uncomfortable, especially when they were left alone at the excavation. People saw things, figures. They heard voices, sounds. It’s as if the dig had woken something up that didn’t want to be woken. All the aberrant behaviour that Division Eleven blames on Nazi nerve agents...it was some kind of a freaky resonance that disturbed everyone on-site. People left. People quit. People went into therapy. There was some odd behaviour, arguments, even a fist-fight, and there were rumours of a curse.”
“Of course.”
“Right. That’s when I called you. I needed help. The situation needed expert help. It was kicki
ng off. Annie had to let one guy go, a grad student called Strand. He was causing too much trouble. It had all really got to him. I think it was him who went to the authorities and reported what was going on. He broke her blackout, and that brought Division Eleven in.”
“And they closed everything down.”
“But they didn’t get everything,” said Carter. “When we found the altar, there were objects placed on it, votive offerings: glass bottles, bowls, small inscribed stones. And a sword.”
“A sword?”
“A sword. It was made of obsidian and inscribed. An indigenous Bronze Age design, not Egyptian. We called it the ‘Blade of Gwynnever.’ It was a royal object. We thought it might be the ceremonial weapon of the warrior queen who ruled the Megalithic culture. It was the most valuable find of all...a massively important object.”
“What was its situation?”
“On the altar, the stone plinth in front of the obelisk. It was recessed into that long, shallow groove, which had clearly been cut into the stone to fit it. It was on display, very deliberately and ritually. My working theory is that the cyst chamber is the burial site for Gwynnever, either literally or symbolically, and her sword was placed there as part of the rites.”
“A symbol of power?” Lara asked. “A...sword in a stone?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I want to hear you say it, Carter.”
“A sword in a stone.”
“My God,” Lara whispered. “So...what happened to it? Where is it? Please tell me it’s behind the same rhododendron bushes where you hid your rucksack.”
“Sadly, no,” Carter said. “Division Eleven marched in one morning without any notice. They just took the place over and bundled everyone away.”
“Not you?”
“Would you believe it, I had just stepped out for some air and to grab a coffee? Talk about timing. I came back, saw what was happening, and got the hell out. But staff had been leaving before that, like I said. In the week leading up to the takeover, people had quit or been fired or just stopped showing up for work.”
“Because of the...curse, the haunting.”
“The morning Division Eleven barged in, we’d got to the site and found that the sword and some of the other votive items were missing. Someone had already taken them. At that point, it had to be an inside job. It was crisis time. There was a lot of arguing, and accusations were flying. The overall paranoia made things worse. Poor Annie was so worked up, she actually accused me of taking the sword. Said I was trying to break the news, steal her thunder, take the credit. She didn’t mean it, I know. But that’s why I’d stepped out. I was angry. I wanted to walk it off. Thanks to that, thanks to her, I wasn’t there when the M.O.D. seized the site.”
“And neither was the sword?”
“No,” he said.
“And you didn’t take it?”
“No,” Carter replied more emphatically.
“Okay, okay. But someone did. And Division Eleven doesn’t have it.”
“No, they don’t.”
“But they know about it?” Lara asked.
“I would imagine so,” he replied. “They took everybody, probably grilled them pretty thoroughly. And the finds were all documented in the site records. I suppose they might have managed to track down all the people who left before they busted in, which might include the person who took it. So they might have recovered it after the raid.”
“I sense a ‘but’...”
Carter leant forwards on the couch and picked up Lara’s laptop. He typed something into the search engine, scrolled through the results, and then opened a site to show her.
Lara studied the page on the screen.
“Wow,” she said. “Okay, that’s... Wow. This is either an incredibly lucky break, or spectacularly dumb.”
“Can’t it be both?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Absolutely,” she said.
“When you say ‘lucky break,’” Carter asked, “are you saying...?”
“That sword,” said Lara, “is the key to understanding the whole thing. It’s also a priceless artefact that needs to be studied and cared for and evaluated by the major institutions. The precision of that obsidian blade, and the quality of the carving and decoration in the hilt and guard make this one of the most significant objects in world archaeology, even without the possible connections. So we need to get it back. We need to find this idiot and get the sword away from him before he does something even more stupid with it, something we can’t undo.”
“And when you say ‘we’?” he asked.
Lara grinned at him.
“Oh, God, Carter, I’m in this now, all the way.”
“So you can find this guy and the sword?” asked Carter.
“You bet your life,” said Lara. “Just give me a couple of hours on the computer.”
“Good, that’s what I was hoping for,” said Carter. “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think the guy holding the sword is our man Strand.”
“That helps,” said Lara.
“So, one last question,” said Carter. “That Sig you’ve been carrying around all afternoon? You got another one like it?”
“You know I do,” she replied.
The website with the picture wasn’t spectacularly dumb; it was specialist and clever. It was, however, the lucky break that Lara needed, and with her specialist tech knowledge, she was soon able to unravel the links and hack a password.
“We’re going to Turkey,” she finally said, “to an underground antiquities auction run by none other than the infamous Zizek.”
“This just got interesting,” said Carter.
“More interesting,” said Lara.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
BLACK MARKET
Kurkarob
“I suggest,” said the man with the AK47, “that you leave the city.”
He helped himself to the bowl of dates on the table beside Lara.
“Or,” he added, munching, “we could kill you.”
Lara sat back. She wasn’t going to be intimidated. There were four keepers in the room with her, and they were blocking the only exit to the stairs. There was the window, of course, but they were two floors up, and she very much doubted the awning shading the street below would stand being used as a trampoline.
“I admire your approach,” she replied in conversational Turkish. “Often, threats are so indirect. Plain speaking is good.”
The man spat a date stone into his palm and flicked it out of the window into the sunlight. It was clear he didn’t know what to make of her.
The keepers were a private army, the city’s unregulated security force. They wore shabby, mismatched army fatigues that had been borrowed or looted from several different regional militaries. Their only insignia was an early-Roman coin. The coins had holes punched through them so they could be sewn onto the fronts of their tunics.
“You have an insolent mouth, American,” the man said. He leered at her. His teeth were gappy.
“I’m not American,” she replied.
“She’s not,” a voice agreed. The four keepers turned and came to some kind of attention. A man had entered the hotel room. He was short but heavyset, and his bald head and clean chin were the work of a skilled barber. He wore an expensive three-piece suit.
“I am Zizek,” he said.
“Master of the keepers,” Lara noted. “This is an honour.”
“It is,” he agreed. “You are Lara Croft. The famous thief of antiquities.”
“I am an archaeologist.”
Zizek shrugged, as if such a difference was merely pedantry.
“What are you doing in Kurkarob?” he asked.
“I am here for the weekly market,” said Lara. “I didn’t know there was a law against that.”
“There are no la
ws against anything, madame,” said Zizek. “This is just a city. It is not Turkey; it is not Syria. It is a demilitarised zone. No nation holds sway here. No laws...”
He looked at her.
“...except for the ones I make.”
“I applied to your office for a permit to attend the market.”
“Sadly, that has been denied,” he said. “I have a difficult job, you know? Antiquities come from all places to be traded here.”
“Looted antiquities,” Lara said.
He did not react.
“I do not ask where they come from. Looted goods. Trophies. Spoils of war sold to the highest bidder. Artefacts offered by terror groups to finance their campaigns. I do not ask for provenance.”
“Maybe you should.”
“I think it would be unwise,” Zizek replied. “The market here survives...and my administration survives...through one factor. The keepers maintain peace inside the city walls. With high-value items coming and going, madame, there is a great potential for disruption. Brigandry. Killing. This cannot be allowed. People would not bring their traffic here to sell if it was not a secure place. So I maintain security. Rivals may fight out their differences with money at the auction, then take their goods and leave the city. Nothing else is permitted.”
Lara folded her arms and looked at him.
“The market survives because it’s the only place in the region where illegal trade of antiquities can take place. Anywhere else would be subject to international law.”
“It’s not a perfect world,” said Zizek, “but it is a system that works here. I will not permit disruption. Since your arrival, you have been asking too many questions. I think you are trouble. I think you will flout my laws if you get the chance. So you will not be granted a permit for the market. And I suggest you leave.”
“I didn’t think you were choosy about where the money came from as long as it came. Who’s applied pressure on you, sir?”
Zizek’s face darkened.
“I am my own man,” he said. “Pack your things. The climate in this city is not conducive to your health.”
He made a gesture. The men filed out after him. Lara listened to their boots going down the stairs.