by Alex Archer
The camp was only so big—nothing more than just a few tents and the firepit, really. It would be fairly obvious if Grimes was holding the prisoner captive in one of the tents. But it would have been a relatively easy matter for him to take the prisoner out into the desert and get rid of him when no one was paying attention.
The lights from the camp didn’t reach this far, but there was enough moonlight for Annja to find the trucks without difficulty. She put a hand on the hood of each vehicle as she passed them, looking for the warmth that might signal that a vehicle had been used recently, but each one was cold. In the moonlight, she didn’t see any additional tire tracks that would indicate any of the vehicles had moved since their arrival the day before.
She paused, considering. If Grimes was lying to her, there would be some evidence here, somewhere, of what had happened to their captive. She just had to find it.
She repeated her circuit, but this time she moved from the rear of one vehicle to the next, peering into the cargo compartment of each.
Annja found what she was looking for in the third truck she came to.
In the dim light she could see a large wrapped bundle in the middle of the gear. She reached out and tried the door handle. It was unlocked. She eased the door open with one hand, ready to slap the other over the interior light to keep from giving herself away, but it didn’t come on. Maybe it was broken.
She reached into the cargo space and touched the bundle. The smooth, slick surface crackled beneath the pressure of her hand. The noise sounded incredibly loud to her in her nervous state, but was one she recognized, at least. It was the sound of the heavy-duty bubble wrap they used to secure specimens for shipment. She ran her hands along the object in first one direction and then the other, trying to get a sense of how big it was. It stretched forward beyond her reach, so it was at least three feet long, possibly more. It was also roughly as wide around…as a person’s shoulders.
You need to be sure.
She called her sword to her and used the tip of the blade to carefully cut through the wrappings closest to her. The sword was long, the space limited, and it took her a few minutes of awkward work before she had managed to cut a large enough gash to peel it back. With her sword in one hand, she reached out again with the other.
She felt a man’s boot and then, as she reached higher, his leg. Even without a light she was confident that she had found her missing prisoner.
Grimes had lied about the prisoner’s death without batting an eye. What else might he have lied about? What else might she have missed?
She released her sword so that she would have two hands to work with and then spent a moment securing the bubble wrap back around the corpse’s feet as best she could. In the light of day, it would be obvious someone had tampered with the bundle, but it should pass a casual inspection for the time being. She stepped back and gently eased the rear door closed behind her.
The silence about the camp seemed oppressive, dangerous even, and as she made her way back toward the tents she couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that her lack of information was going to get someone else killed.
She needed to know more.
Rather than going back to her tent, she changed direction and crept through the darkness toward Connolly’s. The guards were posted on the outer perimeter of the camp and so she was able to get close behind the structure without being seen. Light from somewhere inside cast shadows against the canvas walls and with its help she could tell that there were at least two men inside the tent. She assumed they were still Grimes and Connolly. The voices she heard through the canvas moments later confirmed that.
“Didn’t tell us anything worthwhile. We still don’t know who they are or what they want.”
“Of course, we do!” Connolly scoffed. “They want the staff, just as we do.” Annja’s eyes narrowed. Staff? “Since we know that, it doesn’t really matter who they are.”
“I’m not so sure about that. The fact that they went after Creed before the map just doesn’t feel right. Why would they do that?”
“Maybe they want that mysterious sword you keep talking about.”
Annja stiffened when she heard Connolly mention her sword. She thought she’d been discreet and hadn’t realized that anyone had noticed her use of the weapon. Apparently Grimes had.
“I’m not making it up,” Grimes said sharply. “I know what I saw!”
Connolly laughed indulgently. “Relax, I’m not suggesting otherwise. The question is what we’re going to do about it.”
“For now? Nothing other than keep an eye on her. But once we find the staff I suggest you use its power to get her to tell you everything she knows about the sword. Who knows, perhaps you’ll come away with two artifacts of interest.”
That was the second time they’d mentioned a staff. Annja had no idea what they were talking about, but it seemed obvious at this point that the staff was the real reason behind the expedition. Not once had they mentioned the treasure.
She thought back to her work translating the scrolls. She didn’t remember anything about a staff. Had she missed something?
“All right, then. How do you propose we should proceed?”
Grimes’s tone was full of confidence as he said, “I think it’s time to end this farce. With an enemy on our tail, it’s better if we cut to the chase and get the staff. Put Creed and the professor on figuring out the location mentioned in that stanza. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”
Connolly muttered something Annja didn’t catch. Grimes’s reply, however, was loud and clear.
“If they get in the way, get rid of them. We can always concoct some story later about an accident if need be.”
Annja had heard enough.
Chapter 23
“Ephraim! Wake up, Ephraim!”
Annja punctuated her words by shaking her colleague by the shoulder.
That brought the older man out of his sleep with a jolt. A look of fear crossed his face before he realized who it was kneeling next to him in the darkness.
“Annja? What are you doing here?”
She quickly covered his mouth with her hand. She leaned in close and whispered, “Shhh,” only letting go when she felt him nod in understanding.
Annja heard the rustling of Ephraim’s sleeping bag and then a quiet click. The weak light of his portable lamp beneath the covers of his sleeping bag came on. The light allowed them to see each other’s face but wouldn’t easily be seen outside the tent. This time, his voice was barely above a whisper when he asked, “What’s going on? Are we under attack again?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s worse.” She quickly told him what she had overheard.
Ephraim listened quietly, until she got to the part about the staff. His hand shot out and seized her wrist, gripping it fiercely.
“A staff? You’re sure that’s what he said?”
“I’m positive. I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about, though, do you? I don’t remember seeing anything about a staff in the scroll.”
Ephraim’s grip on her wrist eased up, but she could still feel the tension coming off him in waves. He said something under his breath in Hebrew. Annja didn’t know what it meant, but the tone told her it wasn’t good.
“Talk to me, Ephraim. What is it? What’s he referring to?”
Her old friend was quiet for a long time. Annja started to think he hadn’t heard her, but at last he said, “Aaron’s staff. The Staff of Judea. That has to be it. It must have been the treasure referred to in one of the stanzas.”
The Staff of Judea?
At the back of her mind, she remembered a long-forgotten story told to her by the nuns at the orphanage in New Orleans. Something about Moses and his brother Aaron…
Seeing her expression, Ephraim explained. “When the Jew
ish people were captive in Egypt, the Lord sent Moses and his brother Aaron to confront the pharaoh and demand the release of the Israelites. As a symbol of his authority, God gave them each a staff of miraculous power. Moses’s staff had power over the natural elements and he used it to part the Red Sea and draw water from a stone during the Exodus. Aaron’s, on the other hand, was much more potent.”
Annja looked at him skeptically. “You do realize there’s no scientific evidence for the parting of the Red Sea, right?”
Ephraim waved her comment away. “When the brothers confronted the pharaoh, he demanded to see a miracle, so Aaron threw down his staff and it turned into a snake. When the pharaoh’s sorcerers duplicated the act with their own staves, Aaron’s staff attacked and swallowed them all. When this was still not enough to persuade the pharaoh, Aaron called upon the power of the staff a second time and ushered in the ten plagues of Egypt.”
That, at least, was one of the Bible stories she did remember from her childhood. God supposedly sent ten plagues to convince the Egyptian ruler to release the Israelites from bondage. She tried to list them all from memory. There was the water that turned into blood, and then the plagues of frogs, gnats and flies. She remembered those easily enough. After that things got a bit hazy, though. She thought there was something about cows and…boils? Cows with boils, maybe? Those were followed by a plague of thunder and darkness, and finally, the ultimate plague, the death of the firstborn.
“Later,” Ephraim went on, “after Jerusalem was restored, the staff was used by the Davidic kings as a scepter and stored in the temple. Legend has it that the staff miraculously vanished from the temple hours before it was destroyed.”
“Just like the treasure,” Annja replied and Ephraim nodded his head.
They knew what had happened to the treasure—that much of the story, at least, was true. So perhaps the legend of the staff was, as well. Being the bearer of a mystical weapon herself made it that much more difficult for her to dismiss the possibility outright. And if the staff did indeed exist, then perhaps there was some truth to the rest of the story.
A man like Connolly with the power to call down the plagues of Egypt on any city he chose? Annja shivered and it wasn’t because of the night air.
Ephraim stared at her and Annja could see the naked fear on his face even as he said, “We cannot allow the staff to fall into Connolly’s hands, no matter what.”
“Agreed.” She nodded. “Right now, though, we need to get you and the rest of the team out of here.”
Her old friend wasn’t so easily swayed. “How are you going to do that? You’re just one woman, Annja.”
One woman, yes, but one woman with a very special sword.
“I’ll handle it. Don’t worry.” A plan was already forming in her mind. She would get the iPad with the translated verses away from Connolly and then use it to find the staff herself. Once she had, she’d turn it over to Roux for him to safeguard. They’d done so with other dangerous artifacts in the past. Short of destroying it, something she could never bring herself to do, it seemed the best option. She didn’t entirely trust Roux—he had his own agenda, there was no doubt about that—but she was confident that he wouldn’t suddenly go berserk and try to destroy some national capital simply out of spite.
Connolly, on the other hand, would.
Ephraim finally turned to pack his things. “Unless it’s extremely personal,” Annja told him, “just leave it. We don’t have time to secure all the gear and leaving it in place might help disguise that you’re gone until the last possible moment. The bigger head start you get, the better.”
The plan was simple and Annja took a moment to lay it out for Ephraim. He would be in charge of getting his students ready to go. While he was doing that, she would sneak around to the far side of camp and create a diversion, drawing the security team in her direction. With the team distracted, Ephraim would load everyone into the nearest vehicle and head for the closest city while she circled back around to Connolly’s tent to steal the iPad containing the scroll translations. Once she had them, she would escape the same way Ephraim had, in another stolen Land Cruiser.
She tried not to think about the fact that by that point the security team wouldn’t hesitate to riddle her with bullets if they caught her in the act. And that they’d be ready for her this time.
Ephraim was already dressed so all he had to do was pull on his boots. When he was finished, Annja said, “Remember, we need to look like everything’s fine. We’re just two friends out for a causal walk, nothing to be worried or concerned about. Look as normal as you can.”
As they left the tent, Ephraim began regaling her with memories of a dig he’d recently conducted in Laodicea. Annja played along, laughing and asking questions in the right places. When they reached the tent shared by the other two women, they said good-night and went their separate ways—Ephraim slipping inside to talk to the others while Annja headed off into the darkness at the edge of camp where they had dug a pit latrine earlier that afternoon.
She paused in the darkness, waited a few minutes to be certain she was alone and that she hadn’t been followed, then quickly changed direction and headed back toward where the vehicles were parked. She needed a diversion, one big enough to attract the attention of everyone in the camp. After a moment’s hard thinking, she had the answer.
Chapter 24
After the surprise attack the night before, Grimes had set up roving patrols and ordered that two men be patrolling the camp perimeter on a rotating schedule all night long. This was both a blessing and a curse, in Annja’s view. It would give her time to gather what she needed from the parked vehicles once she was sure the patrol had already passed by. But it also made moving in the darkness that much more difficult because she couldn’t know where the patrol was at any given time.
She approached the parked vehicles openly and at an unhurried pace. She had a story ready should she need it; the lantern in her tent had run out of batteries and she needed some new ones. Since she had helped direct how the supplies were loaded onto the trucks, she knew batteries could be found in most of the vehicles and therefore it was a safe bet as an excuse. It would be far more dangerous once she had what she had come for, but that couldn’t be helped. If she was stopped at that point, she would have no choice but to fight her way out.
Thankfully the guards were elsewhere at the moment and Annja was quickly able to find what she needed. Duffel bag in hand, she locked the door, closed it and turned around.
“Identify yourself!” a man called out from the darkness, freezing her in place. Gardner appeared seconds later, his gun in hand and pointed at her.
“Don’t shoot,” she said playfully, doing her utmost to appear calm all she wanted to do was run before it was too late.
Gardner looked over her shoulder at the vehicle and then down at the bag in her hands before he dropped the barrel of his gun. He didn’t put it away, but at least it wasn’t pointing directly at her anymore. Something about his stance and his no-nonsense attitude told her he wouldn’t hesitate to use it against her should the need arise.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
No one needed a duffel bag to carry a few batteries.
Time for plan B.
“One of the GPR units was giving us trouble this afternoon, so I’m going to switch out the pulse-induction units with these spares and see if that solves the problem.”
The ground-penetrating radar devices were some of the most important equipment they had brought with them on the expedition. Designed to send strong pulses of radar waves deep beneath the ground, they allowed the team to see what might be buried beneath the surface without lifting the first shovelful of dirt. The devices were also rather temperamental, a fact everyone on the dig knew at this point. Annja did her best to affect an air of annoyance at the trouble the devices were supp
osedly giving her and prayed that Gardner wouldn’t ask to look in the bags.
“Do you want me to carry that for you?” he asked.
The question was so unexpected that for a moment Annja couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Carry that? Carry what? And then she realized that he was talking about the duffel bag supposedly holding the spare pulse-induction units.
Was he trying to trick me? she wondered.
As he waited for her answer, Gardner smiled tentatively.
That’s when she got it. Gardner was sweet on her! And here she’d thought he was ready to blow her brains out. Could she be wrong about this? When he’d guarded the prisoner, he’d seemed to her to be the security team member who most had it in for her….
“Oh, no thanks,” she said. “I can handle this.”
But he wouldn’t be denied that easily.
“No reason you should have to carry the bag when I’m perfectly willing.”
Annja shook her head. “I couldn’t pull you away from your duty, Gardner. What would Grimes do if he found out?”
She realized her mistake the moment she said it. She’d just unintentionally thrown down the gauntlet, for if he backed out now he would look like he was afraid of Grimes.
“No, please,” he said more forcefully. “I insist.” He slung his weapon over his shoulder and reached out.
It took every ounce of Annja’s willpower not to pull back away from him.
“Sure,” she said, her heart hammering in her throat as she passed over the bag.
“Hey, these aren’t so heavy,” he said, hefting the bag up and down a few inches.
Gardner didn’t seem to notice the sounds of banging inside the bag. “Heavy, no, but they are very delicate. Be careful please.”
“Oops, sorry,” he said. “My bad.”
He moved his arm outward a few inches, holding the bag away from his body so that it wouldn’t bump against the side of his leg.
“Better?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Her heart felt like it was going to explode, it was beating so fast.