The Spider Stone

by Alex Archer

  "No."

  "Bandits. Oil thieves. They've got them all over those countries. As Mauritania was getting ready to enter the oil market, the army pushed out the president, broke off relations with the Americans and went into business with an Australian firm. Nigeria has been conducting sporadic warfare over oil for years. Tanker trucks are stolen from those fields all the time."

  "That's going on in the Middle East, too," Annja said.

  "Everyone's watching the Middle East," Garin said. He shook his head. "Childress is setting himself up well. He can deal with the bandits in all those countries to subsidize his legitimate business, and have an oil refinery that can sell gasoline right back to the locals, as well as ship it out to the rest of Africa and even Europe. It's a sweet setup. But do you know what he needs?"

  Annja didn't like where her mind automatically went because it left Tanisha and her children exposed. "A local warlord to handle all the strong-arm work," she said.

  "You know," Garin said, "you don't think like an archaeologist."

  "To the contrary," Annja said, "if you study history, you'll see that every culture, nation or people that existed or exists was influenced by what they had or what they wanted or needed. If they had something, they lived a life of other people trying to take it away from them. If they wanted or needed something, they lived a life struggling to get it." She sighed.

  She looked at Garin. "So we can't trust Childress."

  "No." Garin grinned. "But we let him think we do."

  "You think he's going to sell us out to Tafari?"

  "I think he already has. Once you find Anansi's treasure, the jaws of the trap will close."

  "Then it makes no sense to try to find it," Annja said.

  "Now you disappoint me. If we try to leave, deviate from our mission of trying to find the treasure, the jaws of the trap will close anyway. We'll have to fight and maybe lose a lot of people. But if we find the treasure, Tafari and Childress should at least be distracted. Then we'll act to do what we can."

  "We could try to slip away. Choose the path of least resistance." Annja didn't want to chance getting McIntosh, Hallinger or Ganesvoort hurt. It was her fault that they'd come this far.

  "What about the woman? The engineer and her kids? The other innocent people who are part of this operation? Do you want to just leave them out here?" Garin asked.

  Annja knew she was tired because she hadn't thought far enough. She'd been using all her energy to try to find a match on the maps. She shook her head.

  "I'd be willing to bet that Tafari or Childress will use your connection to them against you," Garin continued. "After you had the little boy on your knee for most of the night, you've left yourself – and them – open to that." He paused. "If it was me, I would use them against you."

  Annja knew he told her that honestly, even though it would remind her of the reasons not to like or trust him. But he knows I don't have a choice now, she thought. I have to trust him. And maybe, if he wants to find Anansi's treasure, he has to trust me.

  She took a deep breath and let it out. "What do we do?"

  In the darkness of the tent, Garin's lips curled back in a wolfish smile. "When the time is right, we'll act."

  Annja nodded.

  "I'm going to have to come see you more often, little angel," Garin said in a light tone. "You do lead an interesting life." He turned and crawled back through the tent flaps. "I just hope the cursed luck of that sword doesn't get you killed." He tossed her a smile over his shoulder as he disappeared into the night lying in wait outside.

  ****

  The caravan started out early the next morning. In spite of all he'd drunk and the lateness of his evening, Victor Childress was one of the first to be ready. He wore safari clothes and carried a big-game hunting rifle slung over his shoulder.

  "Since I seem to be having trouble with the local toughs," he said, "what with the equipment sabotage and the train wreck, I thought I'd get better equipped."

  Annja looked at him, wondering if what Garin had told her the previous night was really true. Childress seemed amiable and harmless, actually enthusiastic about helping. But she couldn't shake the feeling that Garin was right.

  It takes a villain to know a villain, she told herself. She wondered again about Garin's own motivations, and whether he was the villain she'd thought him to be. Here he was, laying his life on the line. But for what?

  "You don't have to come," Annja told Childress. "I think we've got enough people to handle everything."

  "Nonsense." Childress sipped gourmet coffee from a stainless-steel mug. "If you and your group hadn't run off those sods that ambushed the train, they might well have made off with all of my equipment. I'm certain that's what they were after."

  Annja wondered if he was attempting to allay any suspicions about Tafari.

  "While we're waiting on replacement equipment," Childress said, "I can spare Tanisha and a few of my men to help you out for a few days. Once the new equipment gets here, we'll have to tend to our own kettle of fish."

  Annja made herself smile and thank him.

  The group set out across the savanna, following the course she'd developed from the map on the Spider Stone.

  ****

  By midday, everyone was hot and tired. They followed trails made by wagons and carts when they could, picked up fragments of footpaths and game trails when they couldn't and blazed new paths when they couldn't do anything else. One of the Land Rovers went down with a flat tire, bringing the caravan to a halt.

  Annja stood in the shade of the vehicle she rode in and compared the terrain to what she understood from the Spider Stone. Either it's starting to look familiar because I've been looking at it too long, or we're getting close.

  As she opened a bottle of water, McIntosh joined her. His shirt was dark with sweat and a film of dust that stuck to the moisture. She tossed him a bottle of water from the cooler in the back of the Land Rover. His men and Garin's had set up a defensive perimeter around the vehicles.

  "I keep getting this feeling we're being followed," McIntosh said as he opened the water and drank.

  "We are." Annja nodded upward at the large birds that floated gracefully in the still sky. They were two feet long with a wingspan nearly three times that. Brown feathers covered their plump, ungainly bodies, and their heads were a pinkish bald knob.

  McIntosh shaded his eyes and looked up. "What are those?"

  "Hooded vultures. You'll find them in the wild, as well as around towns."

  "I thought I saw some like them in Kidira."

  Annja nodded. "They feed near slaughterhouses more often than they feed out in the wilderness. They're the smallest of the African vultures, but the swiftest. Generally they're the first to find a carcass, but they're so much weaker that everything else drives them away."

  "They've spotted us and think we're going to croak, huh?" McIntosh said.

  Despite her misgivings, Annja smiled. "I hope not."

  McIntosh spoke without looking at her. "I think you're right about Childress."

  She'd gone to McIntosh's tent after Garin had left hers, and told him what Garin suspected. McIntosh had said he doubted that Garin knew what he was talking about.

  "Why the change of heart?" Annja asked.

  "Do you know many millionaires who figure they have time in their day to intentionally go out and try to get themselves killed?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  McIntosh looked at her. "I don't think Childress would be out here beating the bush with us unless he thought he had a lock on things." He nodded toward the man, who was conferring with some of his own men. "Whatever's going on in his mind, he thinks he has a free pass."

  Annja agreed.

  "I think we need to drop this," McIntosh went on. "Just tell Childress that you were wrong, that Anansi's treasure is a big hoax – "

  "He's not going to believe that if Tafari doesn't believe that."

  "Tell him the treasure isn't located anywhe
re around here."

  Annja was quiet for a moment. The men had finished replacing the tire on the Land Rover, and everyone was preparing to continue.

  "It is, though," Annja said. "And I'll bet Tafari knows it is, too." She took out the Spider Stone and looked at the map etched on its surface. She knew every line of it by now. "Leaving isn't the answer. We're too deep into it now. The only way out is to go through with this."

  Chapter 26

  "You haven't asked me why."

  Looking up from the maps they were studying as they ate, Annja studied Tanisha Diouf. "Asked you why what?"

  "Why I'm out here."

  Annja didn't understand.

  "In the savanna," Tanisha said. "When I could be home in London with my kids." She glanced at Kamil and Bashir. The boys played in the nearby scrub, going deeper and deeper into the wilderness as they got braver. "To hear my mother tell it, where I should be with my kids." She sighed. "There's nothing worse than a mom call."

  Annja had seen Tanisha talking on the satellite phone earlier.

  "Does your mom call to give you grief over what you do?" Tanisha asked.

  "I kind of missed out on that," Annja said.

  "You lost your mom?" Tanisha looked stricken. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up anything that would – "

  "Actually, I was raised in an orphanage."

  "I've seen you on that show – "

  "Chasing History's Monsters," Annja said.

  " – and no one ever mentioned it."

  "Not exactly something you want advertised on a television show like that," Annja said. She waited a beat. "So why are you?"

  "Why am I what?" Tanisha asked.

  "Out here. In the wilds of West Africa. With your boys."

  "I was working for Childress in London. Operating some of the drilling platforms he's working in the North Sea. I had a deal set up with him where I was two weeks on-site and two weeks home with my kids. Still available for calls, though." Tanisha ate another peach slice. "Then he approached me about this." She waved her fork around to take in the savanna.

  "Was the offer too good to turn down?"

  "It was good. Don't get me wrong there. But it was something else that made me come here."

  Annja waited.

  "I grew up in London," Tanisha said. "But my grandparents grew up in the United States. In Georgia. Near Atlanta. Before that, according to my father and grandfather, my people were here."

  "West Africa?"

  Tanisha nodded. "They were from the Hausa." She looked at Annja. "The same people who made that Spider Stone." She shrugged. "So, in a way, taking this job meant that I could see my homeland. I didn't know if it would make a difference."

  "Does it?"

  Tanisha hesitated. "I don't know. The job and the boys have been keeping me frantic. The sabotage and destruction of the equipment has been the worst. That always causes a drain on time and energy." She took a deep breath and let it out. "But sometimes, when I'm alone or it's really late at night, or when I'm talking to Jaineba, this place just feels like home." Shaking her head, she looked at Annja. "Isn't that weird?"

  Annja thought about the sword she carried, the one Joan had carried into battle. I've seen stuff a lot weirder than that, she thought.

  ****

  An hour later, they came to a rise and Annja looked down into the slight valley below. A small stream, nothing like the Senegal River or any of the other three that fed the country, wound through the valley and – for a time, just as the Spider Stone map showed – became two streams.

  There was something about the land that drew Annja's attention. Pieces of the Spider Stone's map and the topography files she'd been studying fit together inside her head.

  She had the driver stop and she got out at the top of the hill.

  Garin, noticing that she had stopped, ordered his vehicle to a halt also. He clambered out with his assault rifle in hand.

  "What is it?" he asked.

  "We're here," Annja said, controlling the excitement that filled her. "This is the Brothers of Water."

  Garin looked around at the area. "You're sure?"

  Annja nodded. She saw the landmarks she'd been searching for – the hills that formed a bowl-shaped depression and the two streams that made a wishbone only a little to the right of her position. There, like the Senegal River was formed by the mixing of the Semefé and Bafing Rivers, the two streams came from one, then pooled into a depression at the bottom of the valley.

  "It's here," she said. "Or it doesn't exist at all."

  ****

  They began in the center of the valley. Annja marked off sections by natural landforms. The hunt kicked off in earnest.

  "What are we looking for exactly?" McIntosh asked.

  "A door," Annja said. "At least, that's what I think it is. On the map on the Spider Stone, it shows a rectangle that I think is a door."

  "But you might be wrong," he said.

  "Archaeology isn't as exact a science as mathematics or physics," Annja said. "There's a lot of guesswork involved, conclusions that you draw that may never be proved."

  "The rectangle could just as easily be an unmarked grave," he said.

  Annja replied grudgingly, "Yes. But that's not what the stone says."

  ****

  Tafari watched the woman search the valley. Hours passed and the sun settled over the western horizon. Still, she didn't give up.

  Nor did he.

  He lay on his chest on another hill and held a pair of binoculars to his eyes as the woman continued her quest. Eventually, some of those hunting in the area were pulled off the search to set up camp.

  Zifa crawled up to him and handed him a satellite phone. "Childress," Zifa said.

  Taking the phone, Tafari cradled it to his face and said, "Yes?"

  "I think this is a waste of time," Childress complained. "Whatever she thinks she has, whatever you think she has, she doesn't have it."

  Tafari said nothing. He kept watch through the binoculars. Below, the searchers were starting to use flashlights, not even giving up to the night.

  "Did you hear me?" Childress demanded.

  "I did," Tafari replied.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Be patient."

  "It's just a superstition," Childress argued. "If there was anything to find here, it would have been found by now."

  "Sometimes," Tafari said, "secrets don't come out so easily. What you're talking about in this place, the gods have hidden."

  "In the morning," Childress said, "I'm leaving. This has ceased to be amusing."

  "You would never make a good hunter," Tafari told the man. "And if you leave now, you can consider our partnership in the matter of this treasure at an end."

  "Why?"

  "If you're not here to labor for the fruits, you won't be allowed to partake in the banquet."

  Childress sounded upset. "I did my part. I delivered the woman."

  "But now you've become a part of it. If you leave this expedition early, that could warn her. She already senses that she's being followed."

  "If she does, I haven't seen any sign of it," Childress said.

  "You're a civilized predator," Tafari said. "You don't know what to look for out here. The woman does. If you leave tomorrow, you will end our agreement because your departure will jeopardize my effectiveness in trailing her."

  "All right," Childress grumbled. "I'll be here for a few more days. No more than that." He broke the connection.

  Tafari handed the phone back to Zifa.

  "There is a problem if the woman continues in the direction she's headed," Zifa said.

  "What?"

  "The village we destroyed a few days ago lies less than two miles farther in the direction she's going."

  Tafari had almost forgotten about the Hausa village they'd eliminated. "Maybe it would be good if she and her friends see that place," he told Zifa. "That way she'll know what I'm capable of."

  ****

  Fr
ustration chafed at Annja as she stared through the darkness. But the feeling that she was at the edge of discovery wouldn't go away.

  Moving slowly through the brush, her eyes burning, she searched for anything that might suggest a hidden place. Graves could often be found by earth that sank in after them. So could collapsed buildings and remnants of cities. Refuse built up over time, and she had no way of knowing how long ago Anansi's treasure had been hidden.

  "Annja."

  She ignored McIntosh's call, knowing he would only want to try to talk her into giving up the search for the night.

  "Hey." McIntosh caught up to her, flashlight bobbing through the scrub brush. He took her by the elbow.

  "Let go," she said.

  He took his hand back. "I'm not asking you to give up," he said. "Just to wait. It's dark out here. Somebody's going to get hurt. Come eat. Get some rest. Then start again in the morning when it's light. Everything will look different then."

  He's right, she thought. She forced herself to take a deep breath. One of the most important things she'd learned while on digs was that the expectations of the leader tempered those of the people working the site. Pour on the expectation too early, keep them working too long and too hard, and there would be less to work with.

  "You're right," she said.

  ****

  "Annja," Tanisha called.

  Groggy from being sound asleep, her dreams filled with spiders, maps and murderous men, Annja blinked her eyes and focused on Tanisha Diouf as the woman unzipped the tent and climbed in.

  "What's wrong?" Annja asked.

  "Bashir's missing," Tanisha replied. "I looked for him, but I can't find him anywhere."

  Fear tightened Annja's stomach, and she felt a chill against the back of her neck. Rain slapped against the tent, and from the sound of it she knew the ground outside was soaked.

  "How long has he been missing?" Annja dressed quickly.

  "Five, maybe ten minutes. I went looking for him, but I couldn't find him." Panic ate at the edges of Tanisha's words.

  Annja pulled on her hiking boots and laced them up. A glance at her watch showed her it was just after 6:00 a.m. It didn't sound as though anyone else was up. "We'll find him. Are Garin and his men up?"