by Alex Archer
The lobby was like the inside of a cave, cool and dark—at least after hours of the dazzle of South Sea sun on white sand. Annja had returned the chair at the rental kiosk outside by the pool.
“Ms. Creed?” a male voice said.
The voice sounded unfamiliar. Warily she turned.
“Yes?”
Two men stood in the lobby among the potted palms. One was a handsome young blond guy, built like a linebacker, with a fresh gray-eyed face and short blond hair. The other was heavyset, but in a way suggesting more muscle than body fat, with gray-shot dark-blond hair and beard cropped close to square head and jaw. His eyes were brilliant blue. Both wore standard tropical tourist drag—T-shirts, shorts, sandals.
Annja’s eyes narrowed. To her recollection she had never seen either man’s face before. Yet both seemed somehow familiar.
“May I help you?” she said in neutral tones.
“We need to speak with you confidentially, concerning a highly urgent matter,” said the older man. He had a European accent—Dutch, she thought.
“With all respect, I’m not sure what that could possibly be. I don’t know either of you gentlemen.”
“You did know our associate, Mr. Cedric Millstone, though, didn’t you?” the young man asked.
“Our late associate,” his partner added.
She looked from one to the other. The young man seemed to be trying hard to keep his dead-serious manner. The older man seemed quietly amused.
She didn’t bother asking how they’d found her. If they’d been able to punch through Garin Braden’s wall of obfuscation and mount an operation to crash through her skylight in Brooklyn inside of forty-eight hours, tracking her to Tahiti’s capital Papeete in a similar period of time was no great stretch.
Especially when those people had resources sufficient for little errands like capturing ships in the mid-Pacific, and dispatching small armies to distant Polynesian islands.
“My room,” she said. “Five minutes.”
She was amused to see the younger man give a look to the elder that was nearly panic-stricken. She had little concern about her physical safety, and if possible less about what an island of total strangers would think of her. Besides, it amused her to fantasize what would happen if word ever filtered back to the television studio in Manhattan that she’d entertained two men in her hotel room in Tahiti. Clarice and Mindy would crack open a bottle of champagne and exchange high fives.
Annja firmly dislodged the speculation from her mind. It reminded her all too acutely of what she was missing.
SHE WAS DRESSED conservatively, long khaki pants and cream cotton blouse, when the brief authoritative knock sounded on her door five minutes later. She admitted the pair.
“I am Hevelin,” the burly, bearded man told her when she had shut the door behind them. “My associate is Mr. Sharshak. It is good of you to consent to meet with us like this, Ms. Creed.”
“You might as well call me Annja,” she said, walking back to sit on the orange bedspread with its white tropical-flower designs. She intended to make herself as comfortable as possible physically, no matter how uncomfortable the interview turned out to be otherwise.
She looked challengingly up at them. “So. Are you going to report me to the French authorities?” If they were going to try strong-arming her, she wanted those cards on the table right away.
Young Sharshak looked positively pained. “By no means, Ms. Creed,” Hevelin said. “Your secret is safe with us. And we ask you, if we may, please, for similar discretion.”
“Fair enough. How did you boys get out of that metal hut, anyway?”
“It wasn’t easy,” Sharshak said with a grin.
She smiled and nodded appreciatively. She had him pegged for a terribly earnest young warrior-hero-jock type. It was nice to see him flash a little humor.
Hevelin took the easy chair by the window. Sharshak sat in the wooden chair at the desk. The floor-to-ceiling curtain stood open next to the Dutchman. For once Annja had lucked in to a great view—over the beach and the lagoon, with Moorea green and black in the background. As opposed to the usual view she got, of the restaurant roof and the garbage containers.
“Ms. Creed,” Hevelin said, “we belong to an ancient order of knights—the Knights of the Risen Savior, founded in Jerusalem in 1228 by the Emperor Frederick the Second.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of any order called the Knights of the Risen Savior,” she said. “And I find it hard to believe the man they called stupor mundi, the Wonder of the World, would found any such order. He had far more of a reputation as a patron of the arts and sciences, and a humanist for the time, than for his piety. That’s putting it mildly, given what a major thorn he was in the Vatican’s side.”
“You know your history, I see,” Hevelin said.
“I’m a professional. The Middle Ages and Renaissance are my specialty.”
“The Emperor, if the accounts of our Brotherhood are to be believed, was a complex man. He did found a new militant knightly order—a secret order. At the risk of sounding disrespectful of our patron, I suspect the prospect amused him. He would have his very own equivalents to the Templars and the Hospitallers. He was, as you must know, an avid collector of curiosities.”
“It wasn’t so much what he founded,” Sharshak said, all earnestness again, “but what we found.”
“The coffin,” Annja said.
The young man blinked blankly. Hevelin smiled. “You describe the container. We are accustomed to thinking in terms of the contents.”
“I’ve no idea what the contents are,” Annja said, “although Millstone suggested it was the bones of a very holy man. Whoever that might be. I blew him off at the time. Which, yes, I regret very much.”
“You mean you spent all that time on the island with the holy relic and never got a look at it?” Sharshak asked.
Annja sighed deeply. “I hope the French colonial police aren’t as efficient as you are. Or worse yet, the DGSE.”
“Neither the police nor La Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure has the motivation we do,” Hevelin said. “Indeed it’s in their interests if this whole matter simply goes away. No one likes doing unnecessary paperwork. Even intelligence agents. Perhaps especially them.”
“Anyway, the answer’s no. I only got a peek inside the crate. I didn’t see much but packing material,” Annja admitted.
“You would have seen little in any event,” Hevelin said. “We resealed the coffin itself, as you call it, after we recovered it. We try to keep moisture from damaging the contents, which are very precious.”
He leaned forward, knitting his big square hands together between his hairy knees. “What our order found in Jerusalem had an enormous effect on the Emperor. Whether it produced some intense religious reaction within him, only he and our Lord can know. But his actions indicated he took the discovery most seriously indeed.
“He charged us with guarding the relic. And preserving thereby the order of the world.”
She raised a skeptical brow. “The order—”
“Of the world, yes. The sealed metal coffin, or rather its contents, were believed to threaten the very fabric of society in some way. Despite, or perhaps because of, its holiness.”
“Hoo,” Annja said.
“Among other things the Emperor Frederick richly endowed us with funds and properties.” Hevelin shrugged his massive shoulders. “Over the centuries we have added to that initial endowment, amassing substantial financial holdings over eight centuries.”
“So how did you avoid the fate of the Knights Templar?”
“Well, as you point out, Ms. Creed,” Sharshak said, “you’ve never heard of us, have you? Our Elder Brothers saw early on how the Templars’ wealth and prominence earned them as much resentment as admiration. And we didn’t lend money to princes.”
“Prudent of you. So. What’s really in the coffin?” Annja asked.
The men looked at each other. Heveli
n’s lips were rather thick within his beard. He moistened them with his tongue before he spoke.
“It is a very powerful relic,” he said.
“Powerful how?” she asked. “In the sense of the ability to perform miracles?”
“Maybe it can,” Sharshak said, eyes shining.
“And maybe I don’t buy any such mystical explanation,” she said.
“It must have some power,” the young man insisted. “To have made that kind of impression on a man with a temperament like the Emperor Frederick’s.”
“All of us make mistakes,” she said. “Even old Fritz. And I doubt I need to remind you how big a cathedral you might have built out of all the fragments of the ‘True Cross’s cattered through churches all over Europe.”
“Let us say, at the least,” Hevelin said, “that the contents possess enormous symbolic significance. Their mere possession confers great status and propaganda value. Such that, in the wrong hands, they could cause irreparable harm. One might almost say, unimaginable.”
She frowned. “I am still having a hard time fitting my mind around concepts like an eight-hundred-year-old secret somehow threatening the modern world. Such an item causing unimaginable harm strikes me as well, unimaginable.”
“We’re in a race with evil Muslim fanatics for possession of the holy relic,” Sharshak said. “That must tell you how important it is.”
She sighed. “Well, a lot of people have been willing to die for it, and a whole lot more to kill for it. So thinking about it I’d have to say it’s having a pretty malign influence on the world.”
“That has much to do with why we were conveying it to our newly built chapter house in North America,” Hevelin said, “where it could be kept safe from the eyes of the world. And the hands of profaners.”
“Speaking of profaners—if you mean those men you fought on Le Rêve, they sure didn’t act like Muslim fanatics. They fought as if they knew what they were doing—both sides did. But after they got the drop on you, they seemed to treat you pretty well.”
“That’s the honor of fighting men,” Sharshak said. “We’d’ve done the same for them.”
“Maybe. Okay, forgive that—I’m sure you would. But when I think evil religious fanatics, I think, burning people at the stake, flying airliners into buildings full of people, that sort of thing. Not this chivalrous treatment of defeated enemies. That wasn’t even common in Medieval times, as you’ve got to know. Chivalry was more a creation of popular culture than any widespread reality.”
“Yet the Saracen king Saladin was noted for treating his defeated foes decently,” Hevelin said.
A lot better than the Crusaders treated Jerusalem’s Muslims and Jews, Annja thought, not to mention Greek Christians when they sacked Byzantium.
She shook her head. “Well, maybe we’ll have to disagree on the nature of fanaticism. Who were they, anyway? The same people you took the relic back from in midocean? A pretty slick trick, by the way.”
Sharshak grinned. “Thanks.”
“They were not,” Hevelin said.
“So who were they? People who would arrange the hijacking of a cruise liner full of innocents just to cover a theft—and then turn around and murder the thieves they hired to pull off the heist—” She didn’t know for sure that was what happened, but it fit the evidence better than any other explanation she could think of. “Well, I’ve got no trouble calling people like that evil. No trouble at all.”
“Let us say this is a multisided struggle,” Hevelin said. “There are evil men who will stop at nothing to get their hands on this most holy artifact. We are its rightful guardians.”
Sharshak leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “We’d like you to help us recover it, Ms. Creed.”
“Well, here’s the problem,” Annja said. “Whatever the details, we’re dealing with a priceless archaeological artifact that should go back to its rightful owners.”
“That’s us,” Sharshak said.
“That’s not really clear to me,” she said. She passed her hands over her face and smoothed back her hair. “It seems to me the proper authorities should decide.”
Hevelin laughed. “And who might they be, in this instance, Ms. Creed?”
“I don’t really know,” she said. “Okay? I admit it. I’m pretty sure these Muslim commando-types aren’t the rightful owners. Maybe if they were Arabs, but they clearly aren’t. But until I have a better idea of the real rights and wrongs of the situation, I can’t help you.”
Sharshak looked as if he wanted to argue. Actually, he looked as if he wanted to cry. But Hevelin stood up.
“Very well, Ms. Creed,” he said. “We respect your reservations. However, I urge you to consider carefully that others will not.”
“Are you threatening me, Mr. Hevelin?”
“You have nothing to fear from us. You have my word on that. But I cannot speak for the other parties involved in this affair. Good afternoon, Ms. Creed.”
16
Night was falling on the harbor of Mati with its usual abruptness. Annja tried to focus her compact binoculars on the freighter before the light failed her completely.
Mati, on the southerly Philippine island of Mindanao, was to her possibly jaundiced perception a typical depressing tropical tramp-steamer port. It had scraggly palm trees, ugly urbo-mechanical encrustations around the waterfront, all scented with untreated sewage, dead fish and spilled diesel fuel.
Aside from a few lights burning in the superstructure, the Ozymandias was blacked out. The dry-cargo tramp ship was registered in Denmark, of all places. Her dark-painted hull rode high in the water, indicating she wasn’t carrying much cargo.
But what she did carry was extremely valuable.
For several minutes Annja stood in what she hoped was the shelter of a cargo container on the dock. The area she had chosen for her lookout was apparently little used, and poorly lit at night. Of course, if anyone on the ship used night-vision equipment, they’d spot her the instant they glanced her way.
If this ship was what she thought it was—and the GPS transmitter assured her that it was—those aboard no doubt possessed night-vision goggles and were quite proficient in their use. What she gambled was that they had no particular reason to be sweeping the dock with them right at that moment.
Dockside idlers, most of whom spoke English and if not, Spanish, had told her the vessel had put in for engine repairs. Annja had even talked to a boatman who had ferried engine-repair parts out to the stumpy little freighter. She suspected that was true, not just a cover. Why else put in here? she thought. They haven’t transferred the coffin. Evidently, the commando-types who had most recently seized the artifact valued stealth over speed.
She lowered the binoculars and sighed. It had taken her two days to get to the somewhat grungy seaport, on the southerly coast of Mindanao. The whole time she feared she wouldn’t arrive in time.
Now here she was. Here was her quarry. Where it would go next she had no clue. But she had the strong impression it would only get harder for her from here on in even to get close to her objective.
“When there are no more good alternatives,” she said softly to herself, “sometimes the only thing to do is pick something full-on crazy and just go with it.”
ROWING WAS HARDER WORK than it looked.
The little two-stroke engine on the craft she’d rented that afternoon had gotten her within a couple hundred yards of the anchored freighter’s stern. There she killed it. She didn’t want to risk alerting the ship’s occupants by making a noisy approach to their craft.
Muscles on fire she felt the small boat’s sharp bow bump gently against the ship’s stern, beside the rudder. “Finally,” she said under her breath.
She laid the oars down and glanced up. No faces peered over the aft rail down at her. Of course, there was no way for her to know if the commandos aboard were lined up clean across the stern like an outsized firing squad, just waiting for her to clamber up over the railing and into their sights. B
ut then, if that was the case, there was nothing she could do about it.
It had taken the good offices of Federal Express to get the special set of climbing magnets. It had also required her to enter the Philippines as herself, Annja Creed. She’d been reluctant to do so because the last time she visited the islands terrorists had blown up the cab she was riding in. It had killed her hapless and blameless cabby, for which she still felt responsible. The authorities had accepted it as a case of wrong-place/wrong-time. It wasn’t as if such attacks were rare in the Philippines, unfortunately.
She knew she was running the risk of being found in the proximity of dead bodies yet again by Philippine cops. If that happened, they were liable to ask her a lot more pointed questions, and keep asking them until she gave answers she really didn’t want to.
She reckoned, however, that should some alert customs official notice what was being delivered to her, and local security types decided to ask her why she wanted electromagnetic climbing-grippers, she’d have a much easier time convincing them she didn’t intend anything too controversial as Annja Creed, the globally if not exactly well-known archaeological consultant on Chasing History’s Monsters. The show was known, after all, for its somewhat showboating explorations all over the world.
She wasn’t sure what lie she’d tell that would explain why climbing sheer ferrous surfaces might further the pursuit of monsters. But she felt a lot more confident of coming up with an explanation that might conceivably be swallowed than if she traveled under the guise, of, say, a vacationing Realtor from Poughkeepsie.
And now, barring the inopportune arrival of a random harbor patrol boat, the Philippine officials were officially the least of her worries.
Before setting out she had strapped the two larger disks to her knees. She wanted to do the least possible thrashing and contorting in the boat, not to mention spend the least possible amount of time sitting there right under the stern of the ship. Now she quickly strapped the smaller magnets to her hands. Then with the slosh of the water against the hull in her ears and her nose full of the smells of salt water and rusting metal she peered up at the ship’s stern.