Provenance

by Alex Archer

  “Make Wira see the simple truth that’s staring him in the face,” St. Clair said. “This is a little bitty country in a big bad world. This kid Sultan has done a good job cleaning up after the tsunami. Everybody acknowledges that. And he’s lucked into a minor ocean of oil. But that just gets the big, bad rest of the world even more interested in tearing off a piece of what he’s got.”

  “I don’t think Sultan Wira is going to listen to me on the subject of oil rights, Mr. St. Clair.”

  He shook his head, rapidly, like a dog shedding water. “No. No. I’m just talking friendship. A man in Wira’s position needs friends. He’s got himself a terrorist situation here in this fly-speck country that could snowball way the hell out of control. Things could really boil over in a hell of a hurry.”

  Annja blinked slowly, trying to sort the jumbled metaphors out in her mind.

  “That’s all we’re talking here,” St. Clair said. “He needs a hand. The biggest hand in the world is stretching itself right out to him. Right out. And all I ask is that you see your way clear to helping him take that hand. Grab hold of it.”

  She stood. “I still think you overestimate my influence over the Sultan, Mr. St. Clair. Our relationship is strictly business.”

  He sat looking up at her coolly. “Is it?”

  She frowned.

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The Sultan’s a young man. You’re a long-legged pretty all-American girl. People eat that sort of thing up around here.”

  “Now I know I don’t like the course this conversation is taking, Mr. St. Clair. And I believe it’s over.”

  “That other hoochie isn’t holding back, you can bet your sweet little tail on that.”

  The crudity of his statement was so arresting she actually stopped. “Which hoochie would that be?”

  “That one always slinking around, with the jeweled belly button. She’s a Sufi, you know.”

  “Is she? Lestari? Is that who you’re talking about?”

  “That’s her. You know what the Russians call the Sufis? The fanatics. They blame ’em for kicking their asses out of Afghanistan. And you know what? They’ve got a point, much as I’d like to claim all the credit for my colleagues.”

  “Providing all this is true,” Annja said, “what has it got to do with me?”

  “I just wonder if you’re willing to do as much for your country as that little minx is for her false religion.”

  “If the United States government wants me to sleep with Sultan Wira for its sake, Mr. St. Clair,” she said, “it’s going to have to send me someone higher on the food chain to tell me so.”

  He sighed an exaggerated sigh. “Ah, Americans,” he said. “We’re so spoiled with all these precious rights of ours we don’t want to do anything to stand up for them. Don’t you think that kind of thing led to 9/11?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t.”

  He stood. “Do yourself a favor, Ms. Creed,” he said, “and think about it.”

  “It doesn’t warrant any thought, Mr. St. Clair.”

  He shrugged. “Well, then,” he said, “for the sake of your friend the Sultan—and for your own—I’d suggest you just think again.”

  25

  “Ms. Creed.”

  It was the respectful voice of a female aide. Wira had a cloud of them, of both sexes, all even younger than he and all quietly worshipful of him. Annja mildly marveled that he managed to keep such a level head, between the kind of power he had, and the kind of adulation he attracted.

  She had just taken a nocturnal run around the interior perimeter of the palace walls, but was still all but snorting flames over her interview with St. Clair. She took a deep breath before she answered. She didn’t want to take her anger out on an innocent aide.

  “Yes, Miri,” she said.

  “The Sultan wishes to see you in his study at once, please.”

  She looked down at herself. Her lemon-yellow top was soaked with sweat. But, it wasn’t like Wira to say something like that without reason.

  “I’m on my way,” she said.

  Wira and Purnoma stood peering down at the map display tabletop. It cast a soft multicolored glow on their dark faces. For once Wira had forsaken his stiff tunic for a loose flowing shirt of white silk, with billowy sleeves. Over his cavalry-style jodhpurs, royal-blue with red stripes down the sides, it gave him the look of a swashbuckler from another age.

  Wira glanced up as she appeared in the doorway. “Annja! It’s the most splendid news.”

  He came to her and caught her in a quick hug that made up in passionate intensity what it lacked in duration. “Whoa,” Annja breathed, as he let her go. She brushed at a lock of her hair that had fallen loose to tickle her forehead. “What happened?” she asked.

  “The Philippine government’s reacting like a hollow tree full of hornets that’s gotten knocked over by an elephant,” Purnoma said. “They take anything to do with terrorism very seriously. Good call there, Ms. Creed.”

  “Our American guest has many unlooked-for qualities,” a husky feminine voice said. Annja looked around. In the gloom of the study, where the walls of books sucked in the soft glow of track lighting, she hadn’t seen Lestari standing to her left.

  The woman glided forward. She wore a dark purple ensemble. An amethyst glittered in her navel. Annja, who was less clothes-conscious than any woman she knew, nevertheless felt slovenly.

  “It was a very good scheme,” Lestari said. “I feel shamed I didn’t think of it myself.” She didn’t look particularly ashamed, Annja noted. Nor as if much would ever shame her.

  “The Red Hand junks are scuttling out into the Sulu Sea as fast as their engines will carry them,” Purnoma said. He gestured at the tabletop. “Come take a look at the results of your handiwork.”

  Annja did. To her surprise she saw a dark surface, vaguely restless, with a number of red dots moving gradually across it. They didn’t form anything she’d go so far as to call a formation. But they all clearly headed in the same direction.

  “That is—” she began.

  “Real-time satellite imaging of Eddie Cao Cao’s pirate fleet,” Wira said, grinning with boyish delight at spying on his enemy. He seemed almost indecently pleased with the whole thing. Beneath Wira’s happy-lad exterior Annja thought she sensed more than a touch of the predator with his chase-reflex engaged in him.

  She recognized it well. She had more than a touch of it herself. She felt her own pulse rising, the heat climbing in her cheeks. She owed her own debts to the Red Hand. She meant to exact some of the repayment herself.

  “What you see are the heat-signatures of the vessels’ engines,” Wira said. “They’re not terribly efficient. Nor well-insulated, for that matter.”

  “How is this possible?” Annja asked.

  Wira and Purnoma exchanged a glance. “The imaging comes from an Indonesian surveillance bird, currently operating over the Sulu Sea,” Purnoma said.

  “Indonesian?” Annja said in surprise. “I didn’t know they had any surveillance satellites. I never heard about any such thing.”

  Purnoma showed her a grin. “There’s a lot of things they don’t show you on CNN,” he said. “Especially in the black world.”

  “The Australians helped them build it,” Wira said, speaking with fervor. “The Russians launched it for them.”

  She cocked a skeptical eyebrow at them. “And the Indonesians know you’re borrowing this top-secret surveillance satellite? Last I heard you weren’t on any too friendly terms with them.”

  Again a shared look, half guilty, half gleeful. “I think the phrase is, what they don’t know, won’t hurt them,” the Sultan said.

  “They have no systems built in to track unauthorized access, so far as we can find,” Lestari said. She seemed indulgently amused by the enthusiasm of the youthful Sultan and the middle-aged intelligence chief. “The Australians are not as careful about such things as some pe
ople. Or as paranoid, perhaps.”

  “It’s not paranoia,” Purnoma said, “when people really are out to get you.”

  “Actually,” murmured Lestari, “it can be. The world is full of people who imagine nonexistent plots against them, and fail to see the real threats.”

  Annja wondered what kind of response that would get. Muslim men weren’t noted for encouraging backchat from women, no matter how liberal they liked to present themselves. Powerful men in the U.S. and Western Europe didn’t always seem thrilled by it, come to think of that. She had found plenty of opportunities to talk back to authority figures, and by and large had made the most of them.

  Purnoma only grinned. “Okay,” he said. “So paranoids can have enemies, too.”

  “Why are you so sure the Indonesians can’t detect the intrusion?” Annja asked. The long-term diplomatic and strategic interests of Rimba Perak didn’t concern her except in the abstract. But Indonesia was a big, cranky, heavily militarized local power. If they spotted what was going on and decided to horn in, recovering the coffin could suddenly become exceedingly complicated. Impossibly so, perhaps. She doubted the Indonesians would give her the time of day, nor listen sympathetically to her archaeological concerns for the artifact’s proper preservation.

  Wira smiled at her. “Our software comes from Malaysia. And they are very careful about such things.”

  “Great,” Annja said. “So now what happens?” Her heart was racing. Her hunter’s blood was up. She knew.

  “We go,” Wira said. “The moment you made your excellent suggestion, Annja, I set the excellent Purnoma about the task of dripping the proper poisons in the proper ears. My next step was to put the navy and air force on full alert.”

  “They’ve been on standby since we lost contact with the Ozymandias,” Purnoma said. “It won’t take much to get them ready to roll. Singh’s over at the ministry burning the midnight oil by the barrel right now. We’re looking to intercept by tomorrow night.”

  “Air force?” Annja asked.

  “We have a squadron of Harrier jets,” Wira said. “The British sold them to my father. They were courting his favor rather heavily at the time. We recently upgraded them with kits from Singapore. They have full night and all-weather capability, and carry both laser and low-light television guided anti-shipping missiles from Germany. They will provide a nasty surprise for Eddie Cao Cao.”

  Annja felt a thrill of alarm. “You’re not going to sink his fleet?”

  “We’re going to pound them hard,” Purnoma said.

  Wira did something with his little remote. A white light began to blink on and off, right next to one of the red heat-signatures.

  “There’s your GPS tracker, Annja,” he said. “Our software has overlaid its return on the Indonesian feed. That’s the ship that’s carrying the coffin, although we haven’t identified the vessel itself yet.”

  “Smart money says it’s Cao Cao’s personal ship, the Sea Scorpion, though,” Purnoma said.

  “But we can’t be sure the transmitter is still with the coffin!” Annja said.

  “What do you mean?” Wira asked.

  “She means the pirates may have searched their treasure,” Lestari said, “and found the transmitter.”

  “Wouldn’t they just throw it overboard, then?” the Sultan asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Annja said. She wasn’t sure whether she felt more resentful at the Sufi woman interrupting, or grateful for her support. “It might have occurred to them to place it on another vessel as a decoy, just in case of something like this.”

  “Eddie Cao Cao is paranoid,” Purnoma said thoughtfully, “exactly because he has so many enemies. He hasn’t survived this long in the business without a lot of old-fashioned cunning.”

  “In any event,” the Sultan said, “while we have the surface fleet and the planes to give us cover, it’s the commandos and I who’ll be going in to secure the coffin.”

  “You?” Annja said with alarm.

  Lestari showed her a cool smile. “Our Sultan desires to prove himself in the thick of combat. It’s possible he watches too many action movies on DVD.”

  Wira frowned. “Really, now. I have my duty to consider.”

  “You have to be kidding,” Annja said.

  He blinked at her. “I do beg your pardon?”

  “I shall leave you all to what I’m sure will be a most fascinating discussion,” Lestari announced languidly. “Gentlemen, some words of caution—this Annja Creed is a woman of unlooked-for depths. Underestimate her at your peril.”

  She glided out, as always as if a thin force field cushioned her slippered soles from actually contacting the Persian carpet.

  Annja frowned after her for a moment. I can’t decide whether I’ve been complimented or threatened, she thought. Considering the source, it could well be both.

  “Your Majesty,” Purnoma said, “I’ve got plenty to do for this operation. I’d better go do it.” He vanished, too, leaving his Sultan blinking after him in befuddlement.

  Coward, Annja thought after the fleeing intelligence chief.

  “Annja, I—” the Sultan said, turning to her.

  “I can’t believe you,” she said. Her vehemence caught her by surprise. Wira, too, by the way he leaned back. “First you actually plan to destroy a priceless ancient artifact that might have untold historical significance—”

  “It’s a contingency plan only,” he protested. “You know I’ll do everything in my power to recover the relic intact.”

  “And now you’re actually planning to lead the attack yourself, as if you were a commando.”

  He drew himself up. “I have completed the entire commando training program,” he said. “I regularly train with them, as I think you know. And if you believe the instructors went easy on me because of my status, I very much fear you don’t know them. They’re Sikhs, mostly.”

  Annja vaguely understood that perfected their hard-core accreditation. “Fine,” she said. “So you’re a commando. But these pirates are tough and vicious. I’ve seen them in action. Your men slaughtered them and they kept on coming. If you jump on them aboard their own ships they’ll fight like cornered rats. You could get killed, Wira.”

  He stiffened. “I rather understood that was a customary risk of combat.”

  “But you’re the Sultan. Rimba Perak depends on you. You’ve got mean, militant neighbors looking to swallow you up, big powers circling you like sharks smelling blood in the water, and a gang of internationally connected terrorists who want to set your whole country ablaze as a sort of beacon for world jihad. You can’t put yourself at risk like—like some kind of subordinate. You can’t.”

  He looked at her for a moment. His young face was set, although she would not say hard.

  Then he smiled. “Why, Ms. Creed,” he said. “How sweet of you. I didn’t know you cared.”

  She drew in an enormous breath, uncomfortably aware of just how red her face was turning.

  She glared at him. Then opened her mouth to say something.

  Annja abruptly realized with a bucket-of-ice-water shock that she was arguing heatedly with a man who, no matter how enlightened he was, was still a despot—the absolute ruler of an exotic foreign land. In his own palace. And even though Amnesty International gave Rimba Perak pretty good marks for human rights under Wira—unlike his father—this was still his palace. And just as the ad campaign claimed for Las Vegas, what happened here would most definitely stay here.

  Of course, she carried an American passport. And that conferred certain advantages. She could no longer count the times she’d been waved through foreign customs or interior checkpoints by authorities who proceeded to abuse their own countrymen and women, trying to pass the same point. But when it came to actually standing up for its citizens’ rights abroad, she knew the U.S. government generally stood down.

  The U.S. wanted Wira to play ball with them. If an American national happened to go missing after becoming a guest in the Sultan’s
palace, she could all too easily imagine the creepy Mr. St. Clair’s flip response—it happens.

  All this flashed through her mind as Wira stood with his mouth open and an expression on his face that reminded her of a scolded puppy. She understood from that that he hadn’t decided to weld an anchor around her ankles and drop her off for the sharks in the South China Sea. But if she said any more—especially the kinds of things that were crowding into her forebrain, shoving and jostling each other and clamoring to be let out her mouth—that could change in a hurry.

  She simply pirouetted, with angry ballerina grace, and stalked out.

  TO HER SURPRISE she was able to go to sleep fairly quickly. She’d had a long and grueling day, and the emotional outburst at the end had drained away what energy she had left. She took a shower, composed her mind and was asleep within moments of her head hitting the pillow.

  A dark unknown interval later Annja snapped awake to the awareness that she was not alone.

  She opened her eyes to slits. Moonlight through the open window gleamed along the unmistakable curved blades of swords.

  26

  Trying to keep her breathing as regular as if she was still asleep, Annja waited. She lay on her right side. The wall with the round-arched window in it was close to the bed behind her. She figured it was unlikely anybody was sneaking up that way.

  She had at least three armed intruders in the room with her. Their eyeballs showed as fingernail slices of reflected moonlight above dark masks. Their swords had gently curved blades that widened toward the tips.

  Two intruders advanced to her bedside. The third went to the foot. Their soft-slippered feet made only the faintest of sounds. She wasn’t sure what sense had alerted her. Although now she could smell their sweat, acrid with adrenaline.

  Wait for it, she commanded herself.

  The man who had come up by her shoulders raised his blade above his turban, grasping the hilt in both hands for a beheading stroke.

  Strike.

  Flinging the sheet off with her left hand she summoned the sword into her right. It sliced through the skin and muscle of the assassin’s belly like a knife through warm butter.