Staff of Judea

by Alex Archer

  The ground beneath her feet was shaking. Twice she stumbled and almost went down. Whatever it was, it was very close now.

  Another glance back and this time she could see dark forms on horseback charging toward her. What looked like giant wings spread out behind them.

  The first rider passed her on the left, the second on the right. She had a moment to notice the dark, desert clothes they were wearing and then the third rider burst out of the shadows behind her.

  One minute she was charging forward, the next a muscled arm swooped around her waist and lifted her off the ground, her legs still churning uselessly beneath her.

  Chapter 27

  For a moment Annja fought against the arm of the man who held her, but the idea of falling beneath the hooves of the horse held little appeal. She stopped and swung her leg up and over the horse’s neck so that she was now seated in front of the rider. She dug her fingers into the horse’s mane and held on.

  The group burst out of the riverbed and onto a flat plain stretching ahead of them as far as Annja could see. Which wasn’t far given the limited moonlight, but she had the sense of vast openness. The horsemen spread out into a wide arc on either side of Annja’s rescuer, and she could see that there were at least a dozen, maybe more. They were dressed just as the Bedouin pretenders had been, in black desert garments that covered them from head to toe. Only the strip around their eyes had been left free, the rest of their faces covered by their kuffiyas, protecting them from the flying sand and hiding their features at the same time. The horses’ hooves thundered against the earth as they charged forward.

  “Where are you taking me?” Annja shouted in French.

  The man glanced at her, but didn’t say anything.

  A burst of gunfire whizzed over their heads and the lights of a moving vehicle splashed across the group.

  Annja glanced over her rescuer’s shoulder and saw one of Grimes’s Land Cruisers in their wake. They must have come down the ridgeline by the path they’d originally taken to get to the dig and then cut across country to flank Annja. It was a good plan and they’d only failed because Annja was no longer on foot.

  Without a word, the riders split into two packs. Half of them closed ranks and cut to the left, charging diagonally away from the pursuing vehicle, while the other half, including Annja, did the same in the opposite direction. The other riders with them closed up ranks around Annja, doing what they could to shield her from being noticed.

  The driver of the SUV continued directly ahead, apparently undecided about which group to pursue.

  The other way, Annja thought fiercely, go the other way.

  The Land Cruiser jerked right and headed after the group containing Annja.

  “Can’t a girl catch a break?” she said aloud, which, to her surprise, elicited a chuckle from her rescuer.

  A hail of bullets cut short her realization that he spoke English. The rider leaned forward in an attempt to reduce wind resistance, forcing Annja to do the same.

  The smell of horse filled her nostrils as she bent over its neck. She could hear other guns and realized that her rescuers were firing back.

  Bullets cracked and whined around them. Annja watched as the rider to their left was toppled from his saddle. The man’s horse charged forward, surged ahead of Annja, relieved of the extra weight in the wake of its rider’s demise.

  Grimes’s men were leaning on the horn, trying to spook the horses, but these mounts must have been exceptionally well trained. They responded to the riders’ commands with just the slightest touch.

  A crash of glass reached Annja’s ears and some of the lights behind them went out. More shots were fired, another rider slipped from the saddle and then darkness fell once more as the headlights and floodlamps of the SUV were extinguished with several carefully placed shots.

  Instantly the pack divided once more, the riders breaking off onto individual paths, splitting up and again offering multiple targets. Annja was amazed at their coordination. That kind of synchronicity didn’t happen by chance. Whoever these men were, they had ridden together for some time.

  She was still pondering that when the unthinkable happened. A stray bullet caught their horse in the side of the chest. It stumbled and then abruptly collapsed beneath them, flinging Annja and the rider from its back like stones from a sling.

  Annja felt herself flying through the air for a second before she hit the ground hard, bounced once and rapped her head against a nearby rock. She was unconscious before she fully understood what had happened.

  * * *

  ANNJA AWOKE TO FIND herself lying on a cot inside a large safari tent. She blinked several times, trying to figure out what she was seeing, and then sat up abruptly when she remembered being flung from the horse in the middle of the gunfight.

  That was a mistake. The pain pulsed inside her head like a living thing. She closed her eyes and held her head in her hands as she waited for the pain to pass. It took a long time and her stomach was queasy afterward, which told her she’d best take it easy for a few days until she could be sure she didn’t have a concussion.

  Of course, a concussion was the least of her worries if she’d been captured by Grimes and Connolly.

  The fact that she was lying on a clean bunk inside a tent gave her hope. The light in the tent let her know the night had passed. From the look of it, it was at least mid-afternoon, if not later.

  She was dressed in the clothing she’d been wearing the night before, but the cuts on her hands and face had been cleaned and treated. A stiffness around her right biceps let her know that the bullet wound there had been cleaned and swathed in bandages, as well.

  She got up off the cot slowly, discovering as she put her feet on the floor that she was still wearing her boots. That was something else to be thankful for, as she never would have been able to pull them on by herself the way she was feeling.

  Once she was up, it was a matter of walking forward until she reached the entrance to the tent. She steeled herself for what she might see, then stuck her head out the door.

  She was in the midst of a simple desert camp. A smaller tent stood next to the one she was in and between them was a smoldering fire. An iron rack had been set up over the fire and several pots were resting on it, the smell of a meal emanating from them. A table stood nearby and a long-legged, silver-haired man was seated there, food laid out before him. He must have heard her because he turned and smiled when he saw her standing in the doorway of the tent.

  “Hello, Annja,” Roux said.

  Chapter 28

  Annja stared at Roux for a long moment and then crossed the distance between them and slapped him hard across the face.

  Roux didn’t move, though the smile on his face faltered just a little. “I guess I deserve that.”

  “You guess?” Annja grated, having a hard time restraining herself from slapping him again.

  “Now, Annja, let’s discuss this calmly, please.”

  His placating tone fired her up further. “You want to discuss this calmly? After you sent armed gunmen to kidnap me and attack my camp? Are you out of your mind?”

  The fact that the so-called Bedouins had spoken French had been her first clue. The rest had just been educated guesswork, until now.

  “I had good reasons, Annja, and if you’d stop shouting for five minutes perhaps I’d have the opportunity to explain. Now sit down.”

  That last was delivered with a tone of command and Annja found herself responding to it almost before she realized it. She threw herself into one of the chairs at the table and glared at him.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Would you like something to eat?” He gestured at the table where there was a platter of stuffed Cornish hens, as well as bowls of fruit and vegetables. Annja suddenly realized she hadn’t eaten since dinner the night bef
ore. The food smelled so good that she decided it would be foolish to let it go to waste. As she served herself, Roux began to talk.

  “I left for Monte Carlo shortly after we parted on Tuesday and didn’t realize that you’d signed on to help Connolly in his quest to solve the riddle of the scroll. As soon as I learned you had, I immediately returned to Jerusalem.”

  Annja let the issue of how he’d found out she’d joined Connolly’s expedition go by without protest. She’d known Roux long enough to know that he had a global network of information providers that outrivaled that of the CIA and MI6 combined. He’d kept tabs on her in the past and she wasn’t surprised to hear he’d done the same now. What did surprise her was the speed at which he’d returned to the Holy Land and gotten involved in the search for the treasure.

  “You could have just called me, you know.”

  Roux shook his head. “Actually, I couldn’t. I believe your phone is being monitored.”

  Annja stared at him. “Run that by me again?”

  “Your phone isn’t safe. I believe Connolly’s chief of staff has been monitoring it since you left the city. He’s an extremely dangerous man, Annja, as is his boss. They’re after something more than this ridiculous treasure.”

  “I know. He’s after Aaron’s staff. The Staff of Judea.”

  Now it was Roux’s turn to stare. “You know about the staff?”

  “Up until a few hours ago, I would have said no. But I’m a quick learner.” She told him about the events that had led her to eavesdrop on Connolly and Grimes and what she had subsequently learned from Ephraim about the staff.

  Roux let out a long streak of curse words, some of which were rather creative. Then again, after living for five hundred years traditional swear words probably wouldn’t satisfy her anymore, either, she thought wryly. She waited for him to finish and then said, “I take it you believe the staff is real.”

  Roux cast her a withering glance. “Of course it’s real. Artifacts with true power such as this one are few and far between.”

  Annja poured herself a glass of cool water and took a long drink. Her encounter in the desert had left her parched.

  “So, let me see if I have this straight.” She put her glass back down on the table, afraid of what she might do with it if it was still in hand by the time she was finished. “You needed to reach me, but were concerned that my phone was tapped. So instead, you came up with the bright idea of sending Parisian mercenaries dressed up as Bedouin raiders to the camp to scare us off. And when that didn’t work, you ordered the same group to kidnap me right out from under everyone else’s noses.”

  Roux ignored her rising tone, something he seemed to be quite good at, and asked, “How did you know they were Parisian mercenaries?”

  Annja stared at him for a moment and then ticked several points off with her fingers. “Parisian accent, for one. Military surplus boots, for another. Lack of a decent tan but familiarity with Bedouin customs suggested former service with the French Foreign Legion, for a third. That’s off the top of my head.”

  “I see,” he replied, frowning.

  If there was one thing Roux hated, it was being upstaged. Annja knew he was irked that she’d worked it out so quickly.

  A sudden thought occurred to her.

  “Roux?”

  “Umm?” he answered, distracted.

  “Where are all your people?”

  He focused on her again. “People? There’s no one here but me and Henshaw.”

  Henshaw was Roux’s combination majordomo, butler and bodyguard. Annja had known him nearly as long as she had known Roux and always found the big man’s presence reassuring.

  “That’s not what I meant. Where are the rest of your fake Bedouins? Do they have another camp of their own?”

  Roux gave her an odd look. “My Bedouins, as you call them, are dead, Annja. You said so yourself. Connolly’s men killed them.”

  She shook her head. “No, your other men. The ones who rescued me last night?”

  Roux shrugged. “I’m not sure what to tell you, Annja. It was chance that Henshaw stumbled upon you last night while en route to my location. You were wandering in the desert, with a wound to your head and a leather case clutched in one hand like a life preserver.”

  “Wandering in the desert? That…doesn’t make any sense.” She hadn’t imagined those horsemen and she certainly wouldn’t have escaped from Grimes’s security force without their help. Who on earth were they? And what had happened after that horse had been shot out from under her?

  “The case,” she said. “Where is it?”

  “Henshaw.”

  A moment later the tall British-trained butler Annja had first met at Roux’s Paris estate stuck his head out of the other tent. “Sir?”

  “Bring me that device Annja had with her last night.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Henshaw disappeared back into his tent, only to emerge moments later with the iPad she’d fought so hard to protect. As he drew closer, Annja could see the cracks in the faceplate of the device, but it wasn’t until he actually handed it to her that she saw the full extent of the damage.

  There was a bullet-hole right through the center of the device.

  “Damn.”

  It was like a blow to the chest. She’d done everything she could to protect it during her mad dash into the desert, all of which had apparently been a complete waste of time and energy. For all she knew it hadn’t survived the first volley of gunfire leveled at her.

  “I suppose there’s no chance of recovering the data stored on the drive?” she asked Henshaw, whose knowledge of electronics outdistanced her own.

  He shook his head. “There might be, but I don’t have the necessary equipment here to do it.”

  “Something important, I take it?” Roux asked.

  “Oh, nothing much, really. Just the clues leading to the staff’s hiding place. I’m sure we can do without those, right?”

  Ignoring her sarcasm, Roux got up from the table, disappeared inside his tent and emerged a few minutes later with a few pieces of paper. “Will these help?” he asked.

  Annja recognized them right away. “Ephraim’s notes!” she said, snatching them out of his hand in her excitement. “Where did you get these?”

  “You had them in your pocket when Henshaw found you in the desert. I couldn’t make heads or tails of them.”

  Annja hadn’t had time to examine them when Ephraim had given them to her, so she had no idea what Roux was talking about until she unfolded the pages.

  They weren’t written in any language she was familiar with.

  “What the heck?”

  Roux smiled. “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Annja puzzled over it for a few minutes. As strange as it looked, it also seemed tantalizingly familiar, as if the language was very close to English….

  When she figured it out, she laughed aloud.

  “Perhaps you could fill me in on what’s so amusing?’ Roux asked. He really hated being the one not in the know.

  “Do you have a mirror?” she asked.

  Roux glanced at Henshaw, who disappeared back into his tent and returned a few moments later with a handheld shaving mirror. Roux took it from him.

  “Hold it upright where we can see it,” she told him. Once he had, she held up one of the pages next to it so that the writing on the page was reflected in the surface of the mirror.

  “Bah, it’s still gibberish.”

  Annja took a peek, saw that it was and quickly flipped the page over so that she was holding it upside down. The writing in the mirror transformed into perfectly readable English.

  In order to keep a casual observer from understanding what he had written, Ephraim had written his message upside down and backwa
rd. It was a clever trick and one that didn’t take too much time or effort to learn to do well. Somewhere in his past, Ephraim had clearly made use of the code before.

  “Let’s see what Ephraim had to tell us, shall we?”

  Roux began taking notes as Annja read the pages off to him.

  Chapter 29

  “So now what?” Connolly asked.

  He and Grimes were sitting outside their tent, quietly discussing the events of the night before over Scotch. The search for the staff had not gone well—had not really even begun—and the blame for that could be put firmly at the feet of one person: Annja Creed.

  “I don’t see any reason for us not to continue,” his chief of security and closest confidant responded.

  Connolly frowned. “You don’t think she’ll go right to the authorities?”

  Grimes shook his head. “No, I don’t. If that had been her plan, she never would have stayed behind for the iPad. No, she’s after bigger game.”

  “The treasure?”

  “No, I think she’s after the staff.”

  That got Connolly’s attention. “The staff? What on earth gives you that idea?”

  Grimes turned and looked at his boss. He’d been with the man for almost fifteen years and if there was one thing he had learned it was that Connolly was great at the bigger-vision stuff but sometimes he was terribly deficient when it came to connecting the dots at the micro level.

  “Think about it,” Grimes said. “If she just wanted the cash all she had to do was stay with the expedition and take her share of the finder’s fee when the time came. All aboveboard and legal. With the kind of money we’re talking about here, she would have been richer than she ever imagined. To you, it’s peanuts. But to someone like her? No, she’s after the staff.”

  Connolly waved the idea away. “First of all, how does she even know about it? And second, what on earth would she do with it?”

  Grimes laughed. “Who cares what she’d do with it? That’s beside the point. This woman made her career chasing down artifacts just like this. Do you really think she’d pass up the chance to be the one to discover the staff Aaron used to call down the plagues of Egypt?”