by Alex Archer
“The first time I met you people you kicked in my skylight and dropped through it shooting at me,” she raged. “I’m way past caring about your means of ingress. It’s your egress I’m interested in seeing right now. Out. Out!”
“But won’t you at least tell us why you’ve betrayed us to the Sultan?” Sharshak almost wailed.
Annja glared at him through slitted eyes. Then she crossed to a leather-covered chair and fell into it with the grace of a sandbag.
“Let’s get some things straight,” she said, glowering at each man in turn. “First, I don’t owe you anything. Nothing. I refused Cedric Millstone’s attempts to hire me. I turned away yours.”
Hevelin rubbed his bristly cheek. “Still,” he said in his deep voice, “you did assure us you would not help our enemies to take possession of the relic.”
“And I’m not doing that,” Annja stated clearly.
“But aren’t you working with the Sultan?” Sharshak asked.
“I’ve agreed to help him recover the coffin from the pirates who stole it most recently,” she said. “They murdered two dozen of his men for it. They almost murdered one other commando. And me. They’ve murdered hundreds if not thousands of people over the years.”
She smiled unpleasantly. “Surely you don’t think it should be left in their hands, gentlemen,” she said. “Nor disagree with the idea of visiting a little old-fashioned retribution on them in the process. Unless you believe that vengeance belongs solely to the Lord?”
“We’d make a poor military order if we did, Ms. Creed,” Hevelin said, sitting back down and clasping his hands over his knees.
“What about these reports in the media,” Sharshak said, his voice high and agitated, “that you’re—that you’re dating the Sultan?”
Annja raised an eyebrow.
Hevelin flapped a hand at his young partner, who was practically vibrating. “Sit. You make me nervous. You generate more heat than light, like that.”
Sharshak sat.
“Listen to me,” Annja said. “I am becoming friends with Sultan Wira. Nothing more than that, no matter what the gossip columnists say. I’m just an archaeologist, a minor cable TV celebrity, if you can even call me that. He’s a Sultan, for goodness’ sake. Nothing’s going to develop between us. Things like that don’t happen in the real world.”
“And the fact that you are an extremely attractive young woman doesn’t enter into it, I suppose?” Hevelin said.
“Right,” Annja said sarcastically. “Like the Sultan can’t have supermodels throwing themselves at him anytime he cares to snap his fingers. They can’t all be dating ballplayers and drug-addled rock stars. And even if we are friendly that doesn’t mean I’ve agreed to let him keep the coffin once it’s recovered from the pirates.”
“You think he’ll hand it over to you,” Sharshak asked in apparent disbelief, “just like that?”
“He’s agreed to,” she said. “Yes.”
“And you believe he will honor such an undertaking?” Hevelin asked, arching a skeptical eyebrow of his own.
“I do. He appears to take honor as painfully seriously as—as you people do. As his commandos do, those who died facing you on that island, and who died—except for one man, badly wounded, whom I more or less kidnapped—to protect the relic.”
“Is that honor or fanaticism?” Hevelin asked.
“Where’s the fanaticism? The Sword of the Faith killed Wira’s father. They’ve spent the last ten years trying to kill him. It’s precisely because he won’t agree to turn the Sultanate over to them—especially with all this oil money pouring in.
“Meanwhile he had this equally silly notion of you as Christian nuts who want to help bring Jesus back to judge the world in fire.”
“Us?” Hevelin laughed. “Frederick the Second was our founder and patron. What would he have said to such a project?”
“He probably wouldn’t care for it any more than I do,” Annja said.
“He charged us with preserving the order of the world,” Sharshak said. “Isn’t that the opposite of bringing on a new Crusade? Much less Armageddon.”
“We are men of faith,” Hevelin said. “We are also men of science, and the modern world, after the spirit of our founder.”
“And that description perfectly fits what I’ve seen of the Sultan,” Annja informed them.
“And whom do you believe then, Ms. Creed?”
She rose. “Both of you. You boys need to get together and talk. What could be more in the spirit of your founder? He was best buds with the Sultan of Egypt.”
“Be that as it may,” Hevelin said, pushing himself to his feet, “we must regain possession of the relic. It is our holy quest. It is our penance for our sins.”
“When we have the coffin back,” she said, “I will arrange to have appropriate archaeological authorities adjudicate its proper ownership. The Sultan has already agreed to this. When that happens, you can put forward your claims. I’ll ensure they receive a fair hearing.”
“But—” Sharshak began.
“Peace, boy,” Hevelin said. “We are dealing with a woman of principle and of character. Contrary character, perhaps, but character. Hectoring her will only make matters worse.”
“Thank you,” Annja said.
“I only hope your judgment is the equal of your resolution,” Hevelin said. “The fate of the whole world could ride upon it.”
23
“We’ve received a communication from the Red Hand,” Lestari said. They walked together through darkened palace corridors. Lamps at the bases of the walls cast amber fans of light upward, past the plants in their copper pots and shadowed niches. Tonight the Sufi woman wore royal-blue, with a sapphire in her navel.
“What did they say?” Annja asked.
“I’ll leave that for His Majesty to tell you,” the woman said in her usual manner, which somehow contrived to be at once sultry and deadpan. Annja could never shake the impression the woman was laughing at her on the inside. She felt a strange, nerdish urge to find some way to let her know she was in on the joke. But she could not. Especially since she wasn’t.
At the foot of the stairs Lestari paused and draped a bare arm over a banister. Everything she did looked as if she was posing for a classic Greek sculpture. Her ability to exude sexiness without apparently trying, like her air of superiority, infuriated Annja.
“You’ll find the Sultan awaiting you in his study,” Lestari said in her throaty contralto. “It’s to your left at the top of the stairs, down two doors. I leave you here. But before I do, I have a question. What do you intend in regard to the Sultan?”
Annja felt her stomach lurch. Her nostrils flared like an angry horse’s. “I really don’t see what business that is of yours,” she said.
“It may be, and it may not,” the woman said with a smile. “That remains to be seen. I did not ask the question in order for you to answer it to me. I asked it in order for you to answer it for yourself. Good evening.”
She turned and glided past Annja, back along the amber-lit hallway. She moved silently, as if her slippered feet did not touch the floor tiles.
Shaking her head, Annja trotted up the stairs. “The worst thing,” she muttered under her breath, “is that she’s right. I need to ask myself that.”
She had spent a lot of time in the Sultan’s company the last few days. Even if most of it entailed little more than sitting in his office, leafing fruitlessly through volumes from the palace’s vast libraries, or flipping through endless pages of Internet printouts while he read reports off the thin plasma screen that rose up out of his desktop on his command. He also muttered earnestly on his phone, issuing the occasional command, questioning constantly.
She could never help feeling his presence, like a warm stove in a cold room. Even away from the palace, walking clean streets between whitewashed downtown walls, past construction sites where the last of the tsunami damage was being repaired, or sitting in her room reading her e-mail, she kept seei
ng his face. Even doing her workouts his face or voice popped into her mind, to her aggravation.
I’m just a commoner, she reminded herself sternly as she set off down the second-floor corridor. She hated thinking of herself in those terms. Yet like most Americans she found herself fascinated by the concept of royalty and nobility, even though as an antiquarian she knew better than most the foibles of the high-born. Why would he be interested in me?
She blushed, slightly embarrassed by her own thought.
“Ms. Creed!” the Sultan exclaimed. “What a pleasure to see you.”
She looked around. She saw no one.
“Up here,” he called. She had stepped into a room with a high-domed ceiling, patterned with intricate looping knots and interlocked rectangles, like the floor tiles. The walls were lined with bookshelves. An old-fashioned mobile ladder on casters stood to her right, attached to a rail that ran around the top of the wall. Wira, dressed in green trousers and a loose white shirt with the sleeves rolled up his hard brown forearms, perched at the top of it.
He climbed down. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Your cheeks—you aren’t feverish, are you?”
She shook her head quickly. “Just a touch of sun. That’s all.”
He gave her a stern look. “Be careful,” he said. “Our tropical sun can be hard on fair skin such as yours.”
Then he laughed. “Listen to me! I sound like Krisna. Who sounds just like Polonius, most of the time. As if you, the globe-trotting adventurer, needs me to warn you about the sun!”
“Your concern is always appreciated, Your Majesty.”
He came toward her holding out both hands. “There’s a time for formality, I know,” he said. “But I hope that time has passed for us. I dare to think we have become colleagues, and may be on our way to becoming friends. I’d be honored if you’d simply call me Wira. Except when Krisna is around—it’ll make him crazy.”
She laughed. “You? Honored? The honor’s mine—Wira.” She took his hands. “But please call me Annja, your—Wira.”
He smiled and squeezed her hand. For a wild heart-pounding moment she was sure he was about to lean forward and kiss her.
Instead he let go of her hands and raised his head. “Gentlemen,” he said in a sharper tone. “Our guest has arrived. Please join me in the study.”
She looked at him, puzzled. Inside she was trying to sort out whether she was disappointed or relieved. Or maybe why she was both.
He caught her eye, grinned and shrugged.
“Your people bug your own quarters?” she asked.
“Palace security,” he said. “They’ll do it no matter how sternly I order them not to. So I make use of it. It’s handier than an intercom, and I hate walking around with a headset on all the time, or something stuck in my ear.”
Purnoma and Colonel Singh came in, the Sikh looking tall and grave and splendid as always, with his beard oiled and up-curled at the bottom, and Purnoma dressed as if he was either a cat burglar or heading out for a little midnight basketball when they were done. She wouldn’t put either past him.
They returned her greeting in their usual ways, Singh nodding gravely and Purnoma with his usual grin. Whereas Wira looked and acted, when he wasn’t being prematurely middle-aged and serious and head-of-state, like a young man scarcely past adolescence, Purnoma looked and moved like a fifty-year-old kid. He seemed genuinely likable. At the same time Annja suspected that the flashing grin and those glittering obsidian eyes, if he was seriously interrogating you, would be far more terrifying than any bellowing or bluster.
I’m glad he’s on my side. For now, she thought.
“We’ve heard from the pirates,” Wira said. “Through an intermediary. The usual channels through which ransom demands are delivered, you understand.”
Annja nodded. “I have some idea of how business is done in such cases.”
Singh’s stern expression, which usually looked chiseled in place, actually hardened. “Everyone speaks of never negotiating with these pirate scum,” he said. “But everyone does it. Even ourselves.”
“Speaking of terrorists,” Annja said, “I’ve been wondering—could the pirates be working with the Sword of the Faith?”
Wira shook his head. “If anything, they hate each other more than they hate us,” he said. “Like any purists, Sword of the Faith are prudes, deeply conservative. And like many terrorist movements around the world they try to gain popular support by crushing more conventional criminals.”
“So the pirates want to sell the relic to you?” Annja asked.
Wira nodded. “They’re giving us an exclusive opportunity to bid before they put it up for open auction.”
“Including to Sword of the Faith,” Purnoma said. “Greed makes strange bedfellows. Just like fanaticism.”
“Where are the pirates now?” Annja asked. For some inexplicable reason she was starting to get a cold, creeping sensation in the muscles of her cheeks and down her lower spine.
The domed room was dominated by a large, low table with eight sides. Its top surface gleamed like polished mahogany, causing Annja to suspect it was a reading table, or perhaps for gaming. Wira did something with his right hand. The tabletop revealed itself as a circular high-definition screen showing a map.
“Nice techno-toy,” Annja said.
“Useful, too,” Wira said. He was a bit of gadget geek, she had noticed. Still, if you were as rich as Croesus and had high-tech haven Singapore as a near neighbor and patron, why not? He did seem to make good use of his toys.
“Thanks to your giving us the frequency for your GPS tracker, Ms. Creed,” Purnoma said, “we’ve located them in the Sulu Sea. Overhead imaging shows a substantial junk fleet gathered there at anchor.”
“Aren’t they making a conspicuous target of themselves?” Annja asked.
“They are, unfortunately, in Philippine territorial waters,” Singh said.
“And you can’t strike at them without causing a nasty international incident,” she said.
“And there you have it,” Wira said.
Annja frowned down at the map. A set of little red ship figures showed the pirate fleet’s location. “I don’t suppose you could get the Philippine government’s permission to hit them?”
The Sultan’s young cheeks bunched in a grimace. “We don’t dare,” he said.
“Eddie Cao Cao would get the request before the Philippine Foreign Minister did,” Purnoma said, “courtesy of his paid traitors.”
“Who plague us in abundance,” Singh rumbled.
“Minister Purnoma is highly effective at rooting them out,” Wira said quickly.
“And it does precisely no good,” the boyish internal-security chief said. “They’re like roaches. They just keep breeding, in dark, moist, smelly places.” He shrugged. “Maybe I’m just confessing to my own incompetence.”
“Not at all,” Wira said. “We have to face reality, no matter how unpleasant.”
Annja looked from face to face. “That’s my cue,” she said deliberately, “to ask why you gentlemen have invited me here to tell me this. I don’t have such an exalted opinion of myself to think you’d seriously consult me concerning Rimba Perak affairs of state.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Annja,” Wira said earnestly. “You’ve displayed remarkable gifts.”
“Listen, Ms. Creed,” Purnoma said, “speaking of roaches, you seem to have a gift for turning up whether you’re wanted or not, and being pretty hard to kill. Apologies for implicitly comparing you to pirates. What I’m saying is, if you’re not an operator, you should be. I’d offer you a job.” His eyes crinkled in amusement. “Consider it done.”
“I’m flattered, Mr. Purnoma,” she said. “But surely you don’t believe I’m somebody’s intelligence agent?” If he does, she thought, I’ll be leaving in a van with no windows. If at all.
“I don’t,” Wira said hurriedly.
Purnoma was looking at her with his head tipped to one side like a curious bird. “
I don’t know what you are, exactly,” he said. “But I don’t think you’re a threat to the Sultan or the State. And everything else is just idle curiosity.”
“I don’t want to be rude,” Annja said, “but I still wonder why you took the trouble to call me here tonight. I have a feeling it’s important.”
The three men traded glances. She had the impression they were uneasy in her presence. That was odd, for three such powerful men—and in this small nation, their power was functionally absolute. As warmly friendly as Wira was, as cheerful as Purnoma was, as unfailingly polite as Singh was, the Sultan was an absolute ruler, and the others were his left hand and his right. They were hard hands indeed, Annja had no doubt.
Wira actually cleared his throat like a schoolboy admitting he put the frog in the teacher’s desk. “I have come to a decision,” he said. “It pertains to your area of expertise, and your own involvement in this affair. My advisers concur.”
“What’s the bad news, then? You don’t mean—”
“Whatever the nature of this relic the Red Hand’s stolen,” Wira said, “we all agree it has enormous potential to do harm—as a symbol of enormous power, if nothing else. Even your Knights admitted it could contain a secret that might conceivably overturn the order of the world.”
“That’s highly speculative—” Annja began.
“Yes,” Wira said, nodding. He was all elder statesmen now, old beyond his years. “But the order of the world, such as it is, is already balanced on a dagger’s tip. Tensions run high. Rivalries between great powers, that once seemed extinguished forever, are now at least flickering alight again. And no one knows for sure who might have nuclear weapons, nor where. We cannot afford to let the coffin fall into the wrong hands. Nor, for that matter, to permit it to stay long in the hands of Eddie Cao Cao.”
She gasped. “You can’t!”
“We hope not to,” Wira said.
“As a last resort, Ms. Creed,” Singh said, making things explicit, “we are prepared to sink the entire pirate fleet, and send the relic to the bottom of the sea. If not blow it to pieces.”