Paradox

by Alex Archer

  Unfortunately the stake-bed was too small to accommodate both the luggage and the passengers from the deceased bus. The pickup that brought up the rear was untouched, although its driver had likewise departed for parts unknown at some time during the proceedings. But it was already overloaded with the expedition's equipment.

  "The good news is," Baron said, "we're getting into the area where I have contacts."

  "Yes, our contacts with the Kurds have been highly gratifying so far," Robyn Wilfork said cheerily. Everyone ignored him. Although Annja admitted to herself he may have had a point.

  Taking Josh Fairlie with him Baron motored off down the road in the truck in search of more transport. Charlie Bostitch and Robyn Wilfork clambered back on the dead bus and sat sharing a seat with their heads together while Larry Taitt enthusiastically oversaw the unloading of the gear from the back.

  Annja went off to the side and sat with Rabbi Leibowitz and watched. "Should we help?" Levi asked.

  "Under most circumstances I would," she admitted. "But I think we probably need to preserve our standing as expert consultants, not grunt laborers. Besides, it'll do the Young Wolves good to work off some of that adrenaline."

  He blinked at her through the thick round lenses of his glasses. "'Young Wolves.'"

  "Sorry. Private nickname I gave them. It, ah, wasn't supposed to come out."

  "They do seem lupine, somehow," Levi said, watching the Rehoboam Academy contingent joke and hoot as they hauled out the baggage. "They show distinct pack behavior, I believe. Very appropriate name, Annja."

  "Thanks. So, how are you holding up?"

  "Me? I'm fine. Why?"

  "Well, I mean…being caught in the middle of a firefight and all."

  He shrugged. "I leave handling that sort of thing to others," he said, as casually as if he were talking about the heavy lifting going on. "As for the danger, I'm a student of the Qabbala. Not in the sense that's received all the publicity the last few years."

  "I understand the distinction. I've run into several flavors of Qabbalist the last few years. All of whom spell it differently," Annja said, laughing.

  He laughed, too. "The Semitic tongues don't fit into Latin transliteration very well, I'm afraid. In any event, I suppose I have a philosophical attitude toward such matters. Perhaps it's merely being an otherworldly scholar."

  She felt a rush of warmth for this strange, genial man. "Don't worry, Levi. Wait, I guess you don't. Keep on not worrying. I'll get you up the mountain and down safely."

  Whether I make it or not, she mentally added. Not that she had any reason to expect things to go bad.

  Aside from the occasional ambush, bombing and assassination, all before coming in sight of the stupid mountain, of course. No reason to expect trouble on the climb at all.

  She thought Levi might be caught out by her declaration, imagine it was bravado, coming from a mere woman. Instead he smiled.

  "Well, of course, Annja," he said. "I knew you would. It's what you do, protect the innocent."

  The Chasing History's Monsters team came down the ridge—the same one over which Ali the bus driver had fled into the snowy wastes of Ağri province, and from whose flank Annja had fired up the roadblock gunmen—carrying their gear. Once the shooting had stopped they had bailed out to record as much as they could of what had happened. Thank goodness they couldn't catch any video of me shooting, she thought.

  They looked oddly deflated. They seemed to be studiously ignoring Zeb, who'd accompanied them to the crest line with a Kalashnikov recovered from one of the dead gunmen hung around his neck on a waist-length Israeli-style sling. Annja thought it a good idea. There was no telling whether the Kurds might decide to come back with reinforcements to avenge their fallen comrades. She wasn't sure whether the trio from New York were in deep denial over the danger or just uncomfortable around an armed man.

  She got a quick hint as they came up to her. All three stared at her as if she'd turned into a scorpion.

  "I feel like I don't know you," Trish said. "I feel like I don't know if I want to know you."

  "Yeah," Tommy said. He still had his big camera perched on his shoulder. "That whole thing totally creeped me out. That dude is dead, Annja. You smashed in the whole side of his head."

  A voice at the back of her skull said, Good. It scarcely penetrated her lead emotion, which was surprised hurt at the reception she was getting from her compatriots. She had steeled herself to take whatever her fundamentalist employers from the other side of the culture wars chose to dish out. But the raw fear and loathing and sheer rejection from what she thought of as her own people felt like an ice-cold bucket of betrayal thrown in her face.

  "But why are you angry with her?" Levi asked. "She saved your lives. She saved all our lives."

  "She should've let the authorities handle it!" Tommy said.

  "Authorities?" Annja echoed.

  Jason shook his head. "Violence never solves anything, man."

  Levi looked at them quizzically. "Violence would seem to have settled that gunman on the bus, yes?"

  * * *

  "NOW THAT IS ONE SORRY-ASS motorcade," Jason said, peering up the road at the approaching procession of vehicles.

  Fortunately the Young Wolves had had plenty of jockish energy to burn up; after Bostitch made a quiet suggestion to Taitt the dead had quickly been gathered up and carried away out of sight over the nearest ridge. What they did with poor Mr. Atabeg, his sunny positivism forever dimmed, and his Kurdish assassins Annja didn't know and didn't ask. The local burial customs and whether they got respected or not didn't much matter to her right now; she wasn't an anthropologist. The CHM crew, whose résumés presumably didn't include TV news, were freaked out considerably by the sight of the bullet-riddled corpses. And even more by the sight of the man Annja had been forced to kill.

  Two hours had passed before Baron called Bostitch to let him know he and Fairlie were inbound with new transport, and requesting nobody fire at them as they approached. Actually seeing the vehicles Annja quickly understood that "new" only applied as a manner of speaking.

  There were four of them, two sedans and two pickups. Proudly leading the way was a slab-sided old Citroën 2CV with square headlights. Its gray color seemed to be what it normally was, not a product of the cloud-filtered afternoon light.

  Annja stood up from the pile of baggage where she'd been sitting. Levi sat beside her. He hadn't spoken a word since their earlier conversation—had never taken his nose out of the Hebrew paperback he'd pulled out of a pocket. She figured he was trying to give moral support in the face of her apparent ostracization from the New York contingent by continuing to sit with her.

  Annja had rebuffed efforts by Wilfork to strike up conversation. She wasn't prepared to deal with his foibles, especially since he seemed to keep intruding deeper and deeper into her personal space. If he chose to interpret her unresponsiveness as shock reaction to taking human lives, or post-adrenaline slump, let him. The latter was at least partially true, anyway.

  The unlikely vehicular procession pulled up alongside the baggage mounds, which had been covered over with blue tarps against a restless wind that sent powdered snow scurrying and eddying everywhere. Baron himself was driving the front car; another man sat beside him. It wasn't Josh, whom Annja recognized driving the Isuzu pickup next in line.

  Baron got out. Charlie lumbered over, relief and concern washing over his big slack features like ripple echoes from two sides of a narrow pool. "Great! You found us more vehicles."

  "Yeah. But we got some news, too," Baron said. "The Turkish army's really locking Ağri province down hard. We'll need to stick strictly to the back roads and camel trails from here on."

  "What about the peshmerga, dear boy?" Wilfork asked. As always he had his small digital voice recorder out and waving like a stubby magician's wand. "They'd seem to be of more immediate concern."

  "Maybe not," Baron said. "Allow me to introduce my man, Hamid."

  A man unfolded
himself from the other side of the gray Citroën. When he straightened he was taller than Annja, at least as tall as Charlie, but lean and wolflike, with coal-smudge eyebrows over dark, dangerous eyes. He had a thick moustache, but beard shadow covered the whole lower half of his face; the top edges of it, angling from ear to mouth, were so precisely straight it looked to have been stenciled on. He wore a colorful wool knit cap and a sheepskin jacket over weathered blue jeans.

  Behind her Annja heard Trish Baxter gasp. Hamid looked that way and scowled. He said something guttural under his breath to Baron. It might even have been English. Then he stepped forward and waved his hand.

  "No camera, no camera!" he exclaimed.

  Jason and Tommy were both filming. With practiced ease Jason stepped toward the tall newcomer, lowering his camera while Tommy kept his up and recording. "Not a problem, my man," the CHM crew chief said, tone soothing but eyes cutting to Baron. "Not a problem. We're not a news crew. We edit this before we send it back, and we can block out his face if that's what he wants."

  Baron said something sharp to Hamid that definitely wasn't English. Hamid stopped and lowered his hands. But he didn't stop glowering at the television crew.

  Baron introduced Bostitch, Levi, Wilfork, Larry Taitt, then Annja. Under other circumstances Annja might have been mildly amused at the pecking order. Josh and the drivers of the other two vehicles came up, and introductions became more general. The local drivers might have been Kurds, too, but they were smaller and altogether less intimidating than Hamid.

  Annja waited until she noticed Baron standing momentarily apart from the others. She walked up to him. "Are you sure this is a good idea?" she asked quietly.

  "We lost our local guide and fixer, you may have noticed," he said. "Under circumstances that maybe suggest we need one now more than ever. I know Hamid—I've worked with him before. He knows how to get things done."

  Annja was prepared to swallow her ambivalence about Baron and his own ability to "get things done," at least in the absence of firm evidence of actual wrongdoing. And as long as he seemed to be using his competence to keep everyone alive and moving forward. She wasn't happy about extending that kind of grace to a stranger in an even stranger land.

  "How well do you know him? It's not as if our relations with the local Kurds have been cordial so far," Annja pointed out.

  Baron shrugged. He seemed impatient, shifting his weight from foot to foot and speaking with more than a hint of tension. "Look, I've worked with him, okay?"

  If anything that set more alarm bells ringing. Annja knew they were not very far from the borders with Georgia and Armenia, two former Soviet republics affected by violent unrest, one of which had recently fought and lost a short if vicious war with its former masters. Not to mention how near they were to Iraq and Iran as well. It was not a tranquil part of the world. Nor did the possible kinds of "work" Hamid and Baron might have found to do together in the region allay Annja's many misgivings.

  "As I told you before," Baron went on, "there are Kurds and there are Kurds. Some of them shoot at us. Some are listed by the U.S. State Department as terrorist groups.

  "Hamid, here, will help us deal with the bad ones. Look, why don't you just leave this part of things to the professional and not worry your pretty little head about it?"

  Annja just stared at the arrogant man. Did he really say that? she wondered as he moved off with quick lizard motions to consult with some of the acolytes who were coming back from loading gear from the dead bus into one of the pickup trucks. It left her shaking her head.

  "Well, it troubles my scabby old outsized head, too, if it's any consolation to you, Ms. Creed."

  Annja spun to find Robyn Wilfork looming behind her.

  "So sorry. Didn't mean to startle you. I thought post-adrenaline reaction had set in and you'd be more…relaxed," he said with a smile.

  Reaction had indeed set in, with its attendant mental dullness, sense of wondering what anything was worth and incipient nausea. The aftereffects of adrenaline overload were all way too familiar to Annja.

  "Under the circumstances relaxation doesn't seem to be much of an option, Mr. Wilfork," she said.

  He shook his imposing head. The wind ruffled his yellow-white hair as he gazed around the uneven horizon, with white-peaked mountain walls rising to the sides and in front. The breeze came from the west, though, and was warm. It wasn't snowing anymore.

  "I suppose not," he said. "I have to admit, dinosaur that I am, that under most circumstances, or I suppose if any other woman were involved, I'd quite agree with the bellicose Mr. Baron. But given the somewhat…startling and indeed impressive faculties you've displayed, I'm just glad you're on watch as well. You may well see things our masculine egos blind the rest of us to."

  He didn't say anything about Trish, the only other woman in the party. Annja tended to agree with the tacit assumption that Trish wouldn't be much use in danger. She wasn't at all abashed about that judgment, either. It wasn't about being male or female but about experience and courage. Abundantly blessed with physical courage, Annja tended not to be awed by it. She was more interested in the moral kind, herself. That to her mind was what separated true heroes from the psychos and blunt instruments. From what she knew of Trish, she wasn't likely to rise up in the face of real danger.

  But she wasn't willing to let the journalist off the hook. "I would've thought old-school socialists had a more enlightened outlook on women, Mr. Wilfork."

  He laughed gustily. "Oh, my no, my dear. Not us graybeards who were around when Marcuse and Che walked the earth. There were giants in those days, at least in their own minds. No, our prevailing wisdom was the dictum of Brother Stokeley Carmichael, that the only place for women in the revolutionary movement is prone."

  And he ambled amiably off, suit coat hiked up and hands in his trouser pockets, leaving Annja with her eyebrows climbing up her forehead.

  Chapter 15

  Leif Baron hadn't been kidding about camel trails. They came equipped with real camels.

  "Okay, are we officially having an adventure now?" Trish Baxter called from the back of her beast. Wedged between the furry humps, she swayed alarmingly in her saddle with each lurching step the camel took.

  "Well, if you're cold, miserable, uncertain where you're going to spend the night, hoping it doesn't snow again, and your butt and the insides of your legs are chafing," Annja said, "that's definitely an adventure."

  It was cold, although not currently snowing, and the winds weren't strong as the group threaded their way among hills where the steep rocky sides were dotted with bare scrub. Annja and her mount were cresting a low gravelly pass between ridges. Half of the long column had already passed over it.

  Annja wasn't at all miserable. Oddly enough the transfer to the camel and mule train had perked up the spirits of the whole Chasing History's Monsters crew. In fact, everybody's moods had improved. It was as if the transition from the familiar modern world to the Arabian Nights version had signaled an entry into a fantasy realm. Annja held no illusions that they were any safer than when they were clanking along in their collection of ramshackle vehicles. And she didn't know if any of the others actually harbored any. But she still shared the general high spirits.

  * * *

  THEY HAD DRIVEN PERHAPS twenty miles from the point of the ambush, along roads that started out as goat tracks and got worse from there. Charlie had brought Annja and Levi into the Citroën to ride with him in the lead vehicle while Larry drove. Baron and Hamid followed in the truck right behind.

  "So what's the CV in 2CV stand for, anyway?" Larry asked, trying to play tour director, as usual.

  "Cheval-vapeur," Annja said. "The full name means 'two steam horses.'"

  "Steam horses? You're kidding!"

  "Not at all," Annja said, smiling despite herself. It was a relief to get away from the Chasing History's Monsters crew and their silent reproach. Their stares had gotten a little hard to take while waiting for Baron's return. She'
d struggled to keep from telling them to grow up and face the reality of their situation. "It's a measure of engine power," she continued.

  "Surely you don't mean this car has only two horsepower?" Charlie said, turning around in the front passenger seat to stare at Annja in alarm.

  She shook her head. "Different measurement system. And no, I don't have any idea what it really means. I just always loved the name steam horses."

  "You're quite a remarkable woman, Ms. Creed," Charlie said.

  "It's simple French, Mr. Bostitch," she said.

  Half an hour later the car had come to a stop next to what appeared to be a large herd of camels and donkeys standing in a draw. Everyone had gotten out of the cars, believing they were only stretching their legs and lower backs—welcome, after jouncing over miles of washboard track. The Chasing History's Monsters crew unloaded their gear and set to shooting the herd, grateful to have something to do.