by Alex Archer
She turned away. “I can’t believe you’re even thinking of this.”
She felt Wira approach. Sensed a hand reach for her shoulder then stop short.
“We only consider it,” he said softly, “because the alternative might be even more unthinkable.”
“Relax, Ms. Creed,” Purnoma said, with a little laugh. “We’re not launching yet. You were about to remind us we couldn’t attack the pirates in Philippine waters anyway, am I right? And as the Colonel says, it’s a last resort. Somebody as clever as you are ought to be able to help us find a way to avoid it coming to that.”
She turned. “You really think so?”
“We do,” Wira said. “You not only got onto one of my ships, you got off it again, bringing with you a badly wounded man, in the midst of a pirate attack. That was quite an achievement.”
She still wanted to rage, to demand, to plead, to force them to promise to preserve the coffin at all costs. She knew how much good it would do. Her shoulders rose and fell as she drew in a deep breath and let it go.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll come up with something. Thanks for giving me the chance.” She turned to go.
“Ah—one more thing,” Wira said. He actually sounded embarrassed.
She turned back.
“In light of the fact that the Red Hand have made their first move,” Wira went on, “and in light of the two attempts on your life—”
“You know about both? The drive-by, too?”
Purnoma laughed. This time it grated a bit. “Give me some credit, Ms. Creed,” he said. “Maybe terrorist attacks in the city are more common than we like, but people don’t blow out the windows of our finer boutiques in the shopping district with machine guns every day. It’d play hell on tourism. And we did scrape that one shooter off the sidewalk by that café. Allah knows who he was working for, because I sure don’t.”
“But why didn’t you—”
Purnoma laughed. “What? Bring you in after the first attempt? Question you? What were you going to tell us we didn’t know? Somebody tried to kill you? Noticed that, check. You have a pretty good idea why people might want to? So do we.” He smiled wider. “I hope that if you have any possibly pertinent information, you’d make sure to share it with us.”
So you let bad guys take a couple of cracks at me, she thought, to make sure I was telling you everything. You cagey little son of a—
She shook her head. “You’re thorough at your job, Mr. Purnoma.”
For the first time since she’d met him he looked something other than cheerful. His youthful face suddenly looked its age and more with obvious worry. “I hope I’m thorough enough, Ms. Creed.”
“With those attempts on your life in mind,” Wira said, with what she thought was a reproachful glance at his security chief, “I have decided to move you into the palace for the duration of our contract. I’ve taken the liberty of having your possessions transferred from your hotel. I trust you’ll find your quarters here satisfactory. If not I’m sure we can find a way to accommodate you.”
Why, you arrogant, high-handed…Sultan, she thought. She forced a smile.
“I’m sure I’ve been in worse places,” she said brittlely. “Thanks for your concern, Your Majesty.”
24
“You’re still mad at me,” the Sultan said. He raised a glass pitcher half-full of orange liquid. “More juice?”
“No thank you,” Annja said. “And only a bit.”
Wira shrugged and poured himself another glass. “I admit it was a bit high-handed arbitrarily transferring you here to the palace,” he said. “Are you comfortable here, by the way?”
“Yes,” she said, a little curtly. A gilded cage is still a cage, she thought. It reminded her uncomfortably of the last time she felt that way. This whole bizarre adventure had started then, in the ballroom aboard the Ocean Venture.
She made herself smile. She didn’t want to get on bad terms with Wira this morning. Aside from the fact it could have unpleasant side effects, she had thought of something during the night that might help get them the coffin back. But she was none too sure how it would be received, coming from a mere woman, and a foreigner at that. Wira didn’t seem to have any trouble taking her seriously—but that was in her own area of expertise. This suggestion came from far afield.
“Your majordomo, Krisna, keeps fluttering around like a mother bird, making sure my every wish is tended to,” she said. “He really is a sweet man.”
Wira smiled. “He does worry,” he said. “But really, Annja, it was much too risky to leave you at large in the capital. You obviously have a gift for survival, but there is such a thing as pressing one’s luck.”
“I suppose it’s a good thing you’re so solicitous of your contractors’ welfare,” she said. She didn’t want him to dwell too long on her peculiar “gift of survival.” He was right—there was such a thing as pressing one’s luck.
He looked at her intently. “I hope you don’t think it’s only that, Annja,” he said. This time his earnestness made him seem about seventeen. “I have come to be very fond of you, these last few days. I hope that’s not too forward of me.”
“Forward?”
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Oh—fine, fine,” she said, dabbing her lips with her napkin. The fact was she’d aspirated some of her coffee in astonishment. “Just—that is, I think I breathed in a gnat.”
“Have some more water,” Wira said, refilling the glass for her. He didn’t seem to mind having servants bring them food and drink, out here on this shaded veranda where the salt-tinged sea breeze blew cool. But he seemed impatient with the formality of waiting for someone else to pour for him when he could have the pitcher on the table and pour for himself whenever he wanted.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling weakly.
He looked at her anxiously. She drank some water to reassure him.
“I have to go soon,” he said. “There’s training with my commandos, then buckling down to work.” He genuinely seemed to find sitting at his desk handling the affairs of state more arduous than running ten miles in the tropical heat followed by two hours of intense combat training.
“I thought of something,” she said. “Last night.”
He cocked his head. “Yes?”
“About our problem with the pirate fleet, I mean.”
“Oh,” the Sultan said. He sounded disappointed.
“I don’t pretend to be any kind of military or intelligence expert. But couldn’t you try making the Philippines too hot for the Red Hand?”
“I take it you’re not talking about climate change?”
“Only figuratively.” She sipped at her coffee. “We need to get the Red Hand junks into international waters. Right?”
“Quite.”
“And they’re not likely to fall for an offer to make a swap on the open sea. But it strikes me, everybody’s pretty keyed-up about terrorism these days. And the Philippines have a real, live, active insurgency going on.”
“More than one,” Wira said.
“You told me the Rimba Perak terrorists hate the Red Hand and have fought battles with them. I don’t know if Eddie Cao Cao’s gang gets on any better with the Philippine terror groups. But as Purnoma says, terror makes for some pretty strange bedfellows.”
Why did I have to go and choose that figure of speech? she thought at once with an inward groan. But the glitter in the Sultan’s dark eyes seemed to be purely professional keenness.
“So it does,” he said.
“I won’t ask if you have intelligence operators in the Philippines, because I know it’s a friendly nation and everything,” she said. “But maybe you have contacts who could pass word to the Philippine government that the Red Hand is running guns to their own Muslim separatist guerrillas. And then maybe you could use a different third party to tip the pirates that the Filipinos are about to hit them on suspicion of terrorism. That should flush them right out into the open sea. Uh, so to s
peak.”
“Frame them, you mean,” Wira said thoughtfully.
“That’s one way to put it. Yes. Frame them it is.”
He slapped his hand on the table, making the orange juice and water slosh precariously in their respective pitchers. “Capital idea! Worthy of Lestari herself.”
“Hmmph,” Annja said.
He stood. “If you’ll forgive me, I’ll rush off. I want to get Purnoma started on this scheme before I head out to train.” He grinned. “I think you’ve solved our dilemma, Annja. I could hug you!”
Instead he almost raced into the palace. She sat looking after him.
“Yes,” she said a little wanly, “you could.”
ANNJA SPENT THE DAY in fruitless research. She’d started receiving answers on the queries she had sent out to various associates by e-mail, concerning any mysterious discoveries made during the Sixth Crusade. They weren’t much help.
She found hundreds of Web pages making reference to the alleged event she had read about. Almost all were worded precisely the same, down to gaffes in punctuation and spelling. Meaning all were copied from a single none-too-informative original.
Common as that was on the Web, analogue-world libraries yielded similar results. Various entries in the religious-conspiracy genre detailed the same story in about the same words. One referred as a source to an eccentric history of the Crusades published in French in the 1920s, a copy of which actually existed in the Meriahpuri University library. It was delivered to Annja by courier, since she was not permitted to leave the palace without an escort. The book added elaboration without illumination.
Two of her contacts e-mailed her a reference to an English book from 1841. When, late in the afternoon, she got hold of scans of that account, it turned out the French one was an almost word-for-word translation of it. Cut-and-paste historiography was not an invention of the Internet age. She already knew that too well.
A query on alt.archaeology.com evoked a tidal wave of responses. Wild speculations and flames for her being so stupid as to waste everybody’s time asking about such a self-evident fairy tale came out about fifty-fifty. The speculation ranged from the coffin containing the bones of Jesus, to the corpse of an alien from a flying saucer that crashed in Syria in the eleventh century and was recovered by the legendary Saladin. The latter account was almost a thousand words long and filled with remarkably authentic-seeming detail, not a word of which Annja found remotely credible. She admired the feat of fiction-writing.
Most of the small percentage of actual discussion revolved around the likelihood of Frederick II actually founding a militant order of knights—or at least of religious knights. That produced some fascinating details concerning his passion for astronomy, and his extensive menagerie. The closest to a consensus—that was anywhere near relevant to Annja’s inquiry, anyway—was that of course he wouldn’t. Unless something had turned up on his watch that actually challenged his irreverent outlook….
The rest of the posts once again went to confirm Annja’s hypothesis that no discussion-thread remained on-topic for more than four layers of nested replies.
Annja ate dinner in her room as she waded through the thousand-odd replies in the newsgroups. She emerged into late twilight to learn from a passing aide that the Sultan had not yet returned to the palace. She headed downstairs to stretch her legs.
As she reached the foot of the broad stairs the Grand Vizier came up to her with his robes flapping like the wings of an agitated bird.
“Ms. Creed?” Krisna’s ageless face looked more worried than usual. “You have a visitor.”
“A visitor?”
The shaved head bobbed. “Out in the garden. If you please.”
Frowning slightly, Annja followed Krisna out into the night. When she left the air-conditioned interior the garden air hit her like a wet perfumed blanket. “Who is it?” she asked.
“Someone to see you,” was all he replied.
She frowned. For a wild moment she wondered if Hevelin and Sharshak had actually sought her out there. They were certainly bold enough to enter the very lion’s den. She had a harder time imagining it would occur to them to do so. It wasn’t that they struck her as unintelligent; they just seemed remarkably set in their ways of thought.
“Who is it?” she asked again.
“Please come,” Krisna said, and despite her longer legs she found herself having to hurry, down the steps of a broad terrace and into the vast labyrinthine gardens.
Swarms of tiny insects instantly surrounded her, brushing her face, buzzing, biting, trying to invade her nose, mouth and eyes. They took her mind off wondering who her mystery visitor might be. Big moths with pale wings fluttered about the edges of perception; bats swooped past like animated shadows, slashing through the insect clouds.
Some places Annja had been were so polluted the residents joked about air you could see. Here, as so often in the tropics, you got air you could chew. With high-protein density, no less.
Something that chittered shrilly brushed her head. She flapped a hand at it, after the fact. She wasn’t squeamish, especially about bats—which was a good thing, since she gathered these islands boasted some the size of winged poodles. But she drew the line at getting them tangled in her hair.
The hedges and vine-twined trellises suddenly opened out into a clear circle perhaps twenty feet across. A carved stone table and some metal chairs stood in the middle of it. Torches had been set up around it, trailing orange flames into the clear starry sky. The aroma of kerosene in their wells tainted the lush sweet scent of night-blooming flowers.
A man stood as if waiting for her. He wore a tropical-weight suit in what looked like shades of off-white. A white straw hat rested on the table by him. He had white or pale blond hair clipped close to the sides of a narrow balding head.
Krisna had vanished.
“Ms. Creed?” the man said. “Annja Creed.”
Warily she stopped at the circle’s edge. “Yes,” she said.
“The name’s St. Clair,” the man said. “Cyrus St. Clair. I’m pleased to meet you.”
“To what do I owe the honor, Mr. St. Clair?”
“Here. Sit. Sit,” he said as he did. After a hesitation she followed his example, taking a place across the round table from him.
He studied her for a moment. His eyes were very pale. Their actual color was indeterminate in the dancing torchlight. He drummed fingers on the stone tabletop. It reminded Annja uncomfortably of a pallid giant spider dancing.
“Do you consider yourself a good American, Ms. Creed?” he asked.
She felt her expression harden. “I’m not sure it’s any business of yours, but, yes, Mr. St. Clair. I do. Do you?”
He uttered a laugh that was more like a sort of abbreviated hiccup. “Testy, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know of any productive conversations that ever began that way,” she said.
He laced long pale fingers together before him and leaned his elbows on the tabletop. “Your country needs you, Ms. Creed.”
“The United States is, we’re always told, the world’s only superpower,” Annja said. “I’m an archaeologist. And a reasonably obscure cable-television personality. I find it hard to believe I could make much difference to it, one way or another.”
He shook his head. “I see you’ve fallen victim to the modern distrust of government,” he said. “It’s too bad. It’s government that does the real good in this world. I wish you could see that.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier for me to see what good I could do for an entity as large as the United States government,” she replied.
“With all due respect,” St. Clair said with a tight smile that never threatened to involve his eyes, “it’s not the person so much as the circumstances. You are close to Sultan Wira, Ms. Creed. No other American has gotten near as far.”
Her eyes went narrow. “What exactly do you mean by that, Mr. St. Clair?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s just that
—well, here you are.” He gestured at the fragrant night around them and by extension, she took in the palace grounds.
“And here you are, too, I notice.”
He shrugged. “I have contacts in the palace,” he admitted artlessly. “I actually get to talk to the Sultan whenever I want to.”
“Then I hardly see why you’re bothering with me.”
“Ah, I said I talk to Sultan Wira. I didn’t say he listens to me, did I?”
“And you think he listens to me?”
“What does he have you here for, then?”
“I’m not sure I like where this conversation is going, Mr. St. Clair.”
“Hey. No need to be so touchy. I didn’t mean anything by it.” He leaned back and crossed his thin legs. “It seemed like a fair question to me.”
She doubted that. She did not, on the whole, care much for Mr. St. Clair, or his insinuations. Especially that she should be overawed by his wholly implied connection to the might and majesty of the United States.
Still, the fact that he was able to make his way to this garden in the midst of the well-guarded palace grounds was better credentials than any piece of paper he might show her. And she saw no point, beyond recalcitrance, in being evasive about something that was hardly secret, and which he probably knew all about in any event.
“Sultan Wira has engaged my services as a consultant on archaeological matters,” she said, “regarding certain artifacts he believes might hold particular significance to the Sultanate.”
“That’s it, huh? Really?”
She drew a deep breath and counted silently to five. “That’s it. So I’m afraid whatever errand brought you here was a fool’s errand, Mr. St. Clair. Unless it concerns ancient artifacts.”
For a moment he looked at her intently. The hairs rose at the nape of her neck. Is this about the coffin? she wondered. What possible interest could the United States government have in a Medieval relic?
“On the contrary, Ms. Creed,” he said. “You have yourself some unique leverage, here.”
“To do what, exactly?”