by Alex Archer
But when the gunshots came they were from Grimes and his companions rather than the Bedouin leader, the chatter of their semiautomatic weapons filling the air with thunder. Bullets chewed into the man, making his body spasm and dance beneath their force, and he went over backward to lie still in the dirt without pulling the trigger a second time.
For a long moment no one moved, as if afraid to break the stillness, and then Grimes was kicking the ground in his frustration.
They’d wanted the Bedouin leader alive. It was the only way they were going to get answers. Of course, the Bedouin had known that, as well, and rather than submit, he’d made sure he wouldn’t be in any condition to talk.
She had to hand it to him—it was an elegant way out of a messy situation.
Grimes stalked over to the man’s corpse and nudged him with his boot. When he didn’t move, Grimes bent down, rolled the man over on his back and verified that he was, indeed, dead. Grimes quickly searched him, but came up empty. He rose but stood over the body for a moment, staring down at the man’s tanned face.
Annja watched curiously, wondering what Grimes was looking for, and so was able to react quicker than anyone else when Grimes drew his knife and bent over the body a second time.
“Wait a minute, Grimes,” Annja said, concerned he was going to do something unpleasant to the corpse, but her fears turned out to be misplaced. Grimes didn’t take the knife to the corpse, just to the corpse’s clothing.
He pulled the man’s tunic away from his chest and then sawed down through it. The threads made small little popping noises as they gave way beneath the blade. Grimes spread the fabric apart, exposing the flesh beneath.
Where the skin of the man’s face and hands was deeply tanned, his chest was a pale, fish-belly white, as if he hadn’t spent much time in the sun at all.
“Someone get me a rag,” Grimes said over his shoulder and a few moments later one was pushed into his hand. He worked up a mouthful of saliva, spat on the rag and then squatted beside the body. Holding the man’s head steady with one hand, he used the other to scrub at the man’s forehead. After a moment or two of effort, he stopped.
“I knew it!” Grimes said in disgust as he climbed to his feet and stepped away to let the others survey his handiwork.
Annja glanced at the body. Where Grimes had wiped at the man’s flesh with the rag, a circle of pale skin was now plain to see.
Chapter 18
“What the hell?” Connolly muttered, staring down at the corpse along with the rest of them. “What’s going on, Grimes?”
“We’re being played, that’s what’s going on.” Grimes kicked at the dirt.
Annja knew how he felt. She didn’t like being played any more than the next guy, particularly over something like this. Clearly someone had been using the ancient legend of the Giborrim, the guardians of the treasure, in an attempt to scare them off. She, of all people, should have seen through that right from the start. She wasn’t Chasing History’s Monsters’ resident skeptic for nothing. But the story—supported by Ephraim, who she respected—had started to get under her skin.
Someone outside their group was aware what they were doing here and was determined to keep them from finding more of the treasure. Most likely so that they—whoever “they” were—could claim it for their own. If they could get their hands on the scroll’s clues.
And if the treasure wasn’t enough of an incentive, Annja had no doubt Connolly himself had hundreds of rivals who would like nothing more than to see the man fail.
“All right,” Grimes told his men, once they’d gotten a look at the so-called Bedouin. “I want to know who these guys are and what they were up to. Get to it!”
The bodies were searched to no avail. The tents, however, were another story.
If there were any doubts remaining that the group had been masquerading as Bedouins, they were effectively dispelled the minute the team found modern clothing and camping gear—everything from mummy bags to freeze-dried concentrates. The labels had either been cut out or scoured free from most of the equipment and those few pieces that did still have some kind of branding, such as the packets of dehydrated food, came from companies that distributed worldwide. As such, they didn’t provide them with any real information that could be used to identify the assailants.
Things got even more interesting when Grimes and Annja turned their attention to the leader’s tent. Inside they found the same collection of modern amenities, with the addition of state-of-the-art radio gear. What caught their attention, though, was the collection of photographs pinned to the canvas walls of the tent.
They were all black-and-white, about twenty images in all. Judging from the graininess of the images, they had been taken from some distance away.
Each and every one of the photographs was of Annja.
They had been taken at various times of the day—some in the morning, some in the afternoon, a few of them as the sun was going down in the background—but they were consistent in that all of them had been taken during the current expedition, starting almost from the moment the team had left Jerusalem. The first few showed Annja inside the Land Cruiser as they drove out of the city, and from the angle of the image she guessed they been taken from a rooftop overlooking the street. Others showed her working at the first dig site—helping unearth the jars of coins they’d found, and later, laughing around the campfire during dinner. There were even a few of her standing watching Grimes’s men change the tires flattened by the sandstorm.
That she’d been under surveillance that long sent chills down her spine.
“Well, at least we know they don’t want you dead,” Grimes said absently, studying one of the shots.
“Why do you say that?”
He gestured at the photos. “The man who took these pictures could just as easily been carrying a rifle instead of a camera. At these ranges, even a semicompetent gunman would have been hard-pressed to miss.”
Annja looked at the photos again and realized that Grimes was right. They could have taken her out if that had been their objective. A few years ago she might have passed off the idea as complete nonsense, but that was before she’d taken up Joan’s sword. She’d made more than her share of enemies since and any one of them might want her dead. She’d never seen the cameraman, never even known he was out there, and it stood to reason that she never would have seen a gunman, either. One shot and it would have all been over.
But that shot hadn’t come, which meant they didn’t want her dead.
Beck stuck his head inside the tent. “Sir,” he said, “you’re gonna want to see this.”
Annja followed Grimes outside to where Hamilton stood examining an oversize GPS unit, or at least that’s what it looked like to Annja. Hamilton explained that it was a tracking device. A topographical map of the local area was currently displayed on the screen and he pointed to a blinking green dot in the center of it.
“That’s us,” he told them.
He did something to the controls and the image on the screen changed as the map scrolled sideways for a moment to reveal a blinking red dot.
“And that,” he said, pointing at the red dot, “is a target.”
Pop-ups on the lower edge of the screen gave coordinate and distance-to-the-target readings. Clearly the device was picking up a signal from the target, checking the location against a satellite-based GPS system and translating what it learned into a set of directions. It was like a navigation device for a car. All you had to do was follow the prompts on the screen to take you from one location to the other.
“Ever seen one of these before?” Grimes asked.
Beck nodded. “Pretty standard tracker. You tag the target with a beacon, switch it on so it starts broadcasting, and then use this baby—” he hefted the handheld device “—to follow it wherever it goes.”
&n
bsp; “Range?”
The younger man shrugged. “Depends on terrain, signal interference, but generally about ten miles or so.”
That answered the question of how the raiders had managed to follow them from one site to the other without being seen. At some point since taking possession of the vehicles, one or more of them must have been tagged with a radio transmitter that was broadcasting their position. In this case, to fake Bedouins.
What it didn’t tell them was why.
Of course, when you were unearthing a treasure worth hundreds of millions of dollars, it didn’t take a Ph.D. to figure that one out.
It also didn’t explain why the “Bedouins” had tried to kidnap her. And that’s what it had been, she realized, a kidnapping attempt. They’d tried to take her alive before attacking the rest of the camp and she shuddered to think what might have happened to her if they had succeeded. With the rest of the expedition team slaughtered in their sleep, no one would have known she was missing until it was too late to do anything about it.
This expedition was getting more dangerous by the minute.
“Anything else?” Grimes asked.
Beck shook his head. “The latrine’s freshly dug so they haven’t been here very long, certainly no more than a day at most. The rest of the equipment is off-the-shelf stuff, nothing that can help us track down where it came from or who bought it.”
Grimes nodded and, by his expression, Annja knew Beck’s assessment was no more than he’d expected. “All right,” he said, “I don’t want a word of this to anyone, least of all the civilians at camp. Keep your mouths shut unless I tell you otherwise. Now sterilize the site and let’s get out of here.”
Sterilize the site?
It didn’t take her long to discover what he meant.
The bodies of the dead were stacked inside the leader’s tent, doused with gasoline from the extra tanks on the back of the Land Cruiser and set alight. More gasoline was splashed on the other tents and these, too, were set alight. The flames quickly engulfed everything. The stench was awful, but this far from civilization no one was going to come looking to investigate. By the time someone found the remains, there wouldn’t be anything left to tie Grimes and his men to these men’s deaths.
Except you.
Annja realized Grimes was thinking the same thing when he turned to her and said in a low voice, “This is covering your ass as well as ours, so I don’t want to hear any whining about it when we get back to camp. If you’ve got a problem, you keep it to yourself.”
“Understood.”
And it was. The truth was that Annja thought the raiders had gotten what they deserved and she wasn’t too broken up about it at all. She would have preferred taking them alive, if only to be able to question them about the their objectives toward her, but they had made their choice by attacking the expedition in the first place. Annja had no illusions that they would have tried again if the opportunity had presented itself. With the raiders out of the way, the expedition was that much safer.
If she was worried about anyone, it was Grimes. He’d been growing more and more militant the farther they’d gotten from civilization and this latest ruthlessness, while ultimately necessary, concerned her. She had to be ready to react. To anything.
* * *
BACK IN CAMP it took them less than ten minutes to find the tracking beacon attached to the wheel well of the middle vehicle. It was held on with a set of powerful magnets but a good, sharp tug was all it took to break it free. Grimes pulled out the battery and the signal stopped transmitting.
Simple, really.
Half an hour later, Annja sat with Ephraim in the dim light of his tent, talking quietly. She filled him in on everything that had happened since she’d left camp several hours before.
When she was finished, Ephraim sat silently for several long minutes. He seemed to be trying to take it all in. Annja didn’t blame him; all that violence was difficult to get your head around if you weren’t used to it.
And what does that say about her? All that violence barely even made her pause.
“Better them than us, I suppose.”
Annja was surprised. It was not the response she’d been expecting.
Ephraim must have caught her expression. His self-conscious laughter had more than a hint of bitterness to it. “I’ve lived a long time, my dear. We Jews are no stranger to violence, especially in defense of the greater good. I trust you did everything you could. Sometimes violence happens too quickly for others to stop it, especially when one isn’t ready for it.”
Annja didn’t respond and Ephraim was kind enough to pretend he didn’t notice.
“I must say it’s rather disappointing.”
“What is?” she asked.
Ephraim waved his hand. “That it turned out to be men in disguise.”
“As opposed to a two-millennia-old secret society?”
“Exactly! Being hunted by the Giborrim had a sense of, well, romance to it. To find they were simply men in disguise? How…ordinary.”
Annja giggled. She couldn’t help it. To hear the scholarly and erudite professor pine over a missed opportunity to interact with the fantastic was just too much.
Thankfully he had the grace to find himself just as amusing as she did and he joined in, the laughter a much-needed release for both of them.
They quieted after a moment, lost in their own thoughts, and then Ephraim asked, “What will they do with the prisoner?”
Annja shook her head. “I don’t know for sure but my guess is that Connolly will call in his chopper again and they’ll turn him over to the authorities when the opportunity arises.”
“Good. A kidnapping charge is just the thing for a guy like that. If they’d caught them the first time around perhaps they wouldn’t have tried again.”
Annja started. Until that moment she’d been thinking about the two attempts to kidnap her as separate incidents, but now she wondered if perhaps Ephraim was right. Was the man from the museum a member of the group that had been tracking them this whole time? Is that why there were so many surveillance photos of her in the enemy leader’s tent?
She went back through the attack at the Shrine of the Book. She turned the images of her attacker over in her mind, comparing them to the men she’d seen around the fire at the raider’s camp earlier that evening. Were any of them a match?
She didn’t think so.
Still, something nagged at her.
It was there, on the edge of her thoughts, but every time she tried to pull it into the forefront of her mind it slipped away, like a dream in the moments after awakening.
Something to do with the fight…
Whatever it was it remained just out of her grasp.
Ephraim yawned mightily, bringing her thoughts back to the here and now. It had been a long day followed by an even longer night.
“Time to get some sleep,” she said, “before there isn’t any more the night left.”
She said good-night and returned to her tent. Most people would have been uncomfortable with sleeping in the same spot where just a few hours before someone had tried to kidnap them, but Annja had never been most people. She undressed, slipped into her sleeping bag and settled down to grab a few hours of shut-eye.
But thoughts kept returning to her encounter in the Shrine, a single question holding back the boundaries of sleep.
What am I missing?
Chapter 19
“Annja! Come quick! They’re going to kill him!”
The shout brought Annja out of a deep sleep and she was just in time to see Mike yank his head back out of the door of her tent and dash off. His words took a moment to filter their way through her sleep-fogged mind, but when they did she flew into action.
She threw on her clothes, slammed her feet
into her hiking boots and emerged from her tent to the sounds of loud voices coming from the nearby ridge where they had located the ruins of the ancient trading center the day before. She turned and hurried in that direction.
Ephraim caught up with her as she scrambled up the path to the excavation site.
“What’s going on?” he asked as he huffed to keep up with her long-legged stride.
“I don’t know,” she said, her gut tightening. “Stay behind me when we get up there, Ephraim, there’s no telling what we’ll find.”
The older man didn’t say anything, but she could feel his displeasure. What was supposed to have been a professional expedition was quickly turning into a circus sideshow.
They crested the ridge and looked out over the plateau where the trading center had once been. Several of the walls still stood, and though they were little more than knee-high piles of rocks, Annja could imagine how the small community had been laid out because of them.
A larger building, perhaps a public building or synagogue, once sat near the center of the site and it was within its crumbling walls that the commotion came from.
As Annja drew closer, she saw two of Grimes’s security men holding the prisoner they had captured the night before upright between them, the man’s arms secured behind his back. Grimes stood in front of him with his right hand clenched tightly in a fist. The blood streaming from the prisoner’s nose and the eye that was already beginning to swell told Annja that Grimes hadn’t been shy about using it. Connolly stood a few paces away, watching as his second-in-command continued his work.
“I can keep asking all day, if that’s what you want. I don’t think you’ll be in much shape to hear it after a while though, so you might as well make this easy on yourself. Where is the treasure?”