The Golden Elephant

by Alex Archer

The sword responded to her summons and materialized in her hands.

  With a gasp the monks jumped back. Even the abbot’s eyes flew wide in amazement.

  Annja wheeled toward the altar with its seated golden Buddha. The statue smirked as if enjoying the show. Annja raised the sword high and brought it whistling down toward the first monk to bar her path.

  The acolyte, a skinny kid with zits and ears like amphora handles, screeched, closed his eyes, ducked his head down between his narrow shoulders and threw his staff up horizontally to protect his earthly shell.

  The sword came down on the middle of the staff. The tough Thai hardwood parted like twine.

  The sword’s tip whistled harmlessly inches from the acolyte’s nose as Annja had aimed it. The acolyte dropped both halves of his stick from stinging palms, fell to the floor, curled into a fetal position and began to cry.

  Annja jumped over him to deliver a very credible flying front kick to the chest of the next man in line. He was so taken aback by what had happened to his compatriot that he was not only wide open but also unmindful of balance. He fell immediately.

  Sparks flew in Annja’s eyes from a stinging savage impact from her left. Things weren’t going to go all her way after all. Blinking at the tears that suddenly filled her eyes and trying to ignore the ominous ringing in her ears, she wheeled counterclockwise.

  But she did not lash out with her sword.

  Like it or not, she knew the monks were innocent. She was the trespasser. And they were doing nothing to her she wouldn’t have done to intruders in her Brooklyn loft.

  Unwilling to risk killing a monk defending his home and place of worship, or even nick one if she could help it, Annja raised the sword in a horizontal overhead block to meet the staff rapidly descending toward her skull.

  The staff parted as readily as the first had. The liberated end bounced right off the crown of her head. It probably didn’t even cut the scalp—her eyes didn’t instantly flood with blood—but it still hurt a lot. The monk meanwhile did nothing to the control the downward sweep of his truncated stick. He left himself wide open and Annja caught him on the chin with a somewhat more enthusiastic high kick than she otherwise might have delivered.

  His teeth clacked and he went down. She doubted he’d get up shy of a ten count.

  Violent motion tore at her peripheral vision. She spun right. A monk was swinging a sword for her neck in a decapitation stroke.

  She hacked desperately across her body, aiming for the blade. It flew from his hands with a musical twang as she struck it an inch from the hilt. She let her momentum carry her into the erstwhile swordsman and slammed him with shoulder and hip. It knocked him sprawling, not off his feet but staggering drunkenly into his comrades behind.

  More by instinct than anything else, Annja ducked sideways beneath another horizontal swipe from behind. Its wind of passage kissed her left earlobe. She kicked straight back with her left foot, felt her heel connect with meat and bone, heard the sound of expelled breath.

  Her training and experience were sufficient that her body could fight by itself; she blocked and struck without conscious intent. Indeed she had to in a swirling fight like this. Her mind raced, trying to spin out a plan. Because no one was skilled enough to survive long against these odds.

  Apparently her subconscious was already on the job. She found herself rushing at the man whose sword she’d knocked away. She parried left and right. One cut slashed sparks, bright orange in the gloom, from the sword reaching for her, along with a sliver of steel. The other chopped another blade off just below the tip and barely missed the top of the wielder’s head.

  The man’s eyes opened wide in horror. His arms flew up to protect his face. The voluminous yellow sleeves of his cloak billowed before him like wings.

  It cleared Annja to boot him hard in the crotch.

  She felt bad about that—additionally bad, since after all, these men were blameless, if perhaps a little zealous in their pursuit of somebody wandering the grounds after hours. All she needed from him was that he double over. She just didn’t see a way to ask nicely.

  Double up the hapless monk did. Annja sprang. Her foot came down on his bent-over back between the shoulder blades. With all her momentum and the steel-spring strength of leg muscles she drove herself upward.

  As she did she released the sword. Soundlessly it returned to the otherwhere.

  She caught the top of the open transom. Never designed to support the weight of a woman as tall and well muscled as Annja, its support chains instantly began to rip free from the wall. But her walking-shoe soles slammed into the wall beneath it. She pushed off instantly, pulling hard with her arms, and half scrambled, half slithered through the opening into the warm, moist embrace of the night.

  She did a somersault on her way over the lower course of the roof to the ground below. By good fortune as much as acrobatic skill she got her legs under her. She even had the presence of mind to let them cushion her shock of landing, then let go. She went into a forward roll and wound up flat on her back dazed and breathless from the impact.

  Annja lay still for the duration of an inhalation deep into her abdomen. From inside the temple a furious clamor rose to a crescendo. She heard a bellow she took to be the head monk himself, presumably commanding the pursuit.

  She jackknifed, snapping herself to her feet from flat on her back, and sprinted for the woods.

  As she did, something registered on her subconscious—a glint from the underbrush to her left, beyond an outbuilding behind the great hall that looked suspiciously like a garage.

  Making no attempt at stealth, Annja crashed into the brush of the nearest treeline. Ten feet in she drastically slowed. Moving cautiously, she breathed through her nose in long, slow breaths from the diaphragm despite the sheer effort of will it cost her, because it was the best way to rapidly reoxygenate her adrenaline-pumped body. She angled off to the right.

  She picked her way carefully, circling around to the left, about thirty yards back in the woods. The moon had risen. Between that and backlighting from the now wide-awake monastery she was able to find paths that brought her into least contact with crackly twigs and rustly boughs.

  The racket from the buildings helped. She could probably have tramped around like a Shriner two days into a Bourbon Street binge without being heard, as the abbot hollered orders she couldn’t understand. The monks and acolytes darted this way and that, uttering shrill cries to show their zeal and waving swords and staffs menacingly but not venturing too far into the woods. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to run into that magically appearing sword.

  Annja slipped back toward the monastery. Sooner or later the abbot would herd a search party into the woods, and they knew their home ground far better than she did. Besides, she had at least a measure of payback in mind. She suspected her detection by the monks hadn’t totally been a stroke of bad luck.

  She paused beside a thick trunk with shaggy bark peeling off in long strips. Not fifteen yards ahead and to her right crouched a familiar, emphatically female figure. Even from behind there was no mistaking Easy Ngwenya.

  Annja looked around. Bending a little lower, she found a broken branch. It was well on its way to decomposing back into the jungle floor, but plenty solid for her purposes. Rising, she threw it end over end.

  It hit the tree to the crouching figure’s left. Annja winced—she had been aiming at the tree to the right. But it had the desired effect—it produced a satisfying thunk.

  Instantly it seemed ten million birds and some poodle-size fruit bats erupted from the branches above the lurker, all complaining at the top of their lungs.

  Instantly the beams of a dozen flashlights converged on the figure’s hiding place. With a triumphant roar the monks charged.

  Annja ran lightly away, back toward the road and her hidden Honda.

  My work here is done, she thought.

  15

  “Excuse me, miss?” A stout Chinese businessman in a blue business suit with
sweat streaming down his face behind his knockoff Armani shades stood over her.

  “You’re Annja?” a wiry woman with blue-lensed sunglasses pushed up onto her frizz of red hair asked.

  “Miss?” the Chinese man said.

  Continuing to ignore him, Annja rose from her table in the little tea shop in Bangkok’s Phra Ram 2 district. Outside the window all around the little shop, giant crane-topped buildings rose into the sky. Between the nascent skyscrapers she could see the skinny cone of an ancient wat, or temple, across the Chao Phraya.

  “You’re Patricia Ruhle?” she asked as the redhead approached. Annja knew from reading her curriculum vitae online that her guest was in her early forties. As the woman approached between the mostly empty afternoon tables Annja saw that while she looked her age, and had probably never been conventionally pretty in her youth, experience and activity, and probably attitude had given her a rugged exuberance that neither years nor mileage seemed likely to erode any time soon.

  The woman nodded. “That’s right. And you’re Annja, yes?”

  “Miss, if I may intrude,” the Chinese man said. “I may be able to make a proposition which would be of benefit—”

  His English was excellent. But his intent would’ve been way too transparent to Annja even if he hadn’t spoken a word. Since returning to the Thai capital to muster resources for the last leg of her journey to the fabled and elusive Temple of the Elephant she’d learned the hard way that the famed Bangkok sex trade wasn’t just all about rich Westerners purchasing the services of young Thai girls and boys. Well-heeled Japanese and Indian tourists, as well as the Chinese, proved to be anything but averse to leggy russet-haired American girls. This wasn’t the first allegedly lucrative invitation she’d been tendered. She doubted it’d be one of the most peculiar, either.

  “Buzz off, Jack,” the red-haired woman said. To Annja’s complete astonishment Ruhle then snarled at him in what Annja could only guess was Mandarin. Whatever she said made his eyes go wide and his features ashen before he turned and practically scuttled from the tea shop.

  The woman came up to Annja shaking her red head. “I’m Ruhle. Call me Patty, please.”

  She stuck out her hand. Annja shook it, unsurprised to find the grip dry and firm as a man’s. Patty had square, well-used hands. They suited the rough-and-ready rest of her.

  Patty wore cargo shorts like Annja’s, red Converse knockoffs, and the mark of her profession: a tan photographer’s vest of many pockets and a camera over a short-sleeved shirt printed in flowers of red and pink on white. Annja was similarly dressed in adventure-ready tropic fashion.

  “Not that there was anything wrong with that guy’s concept,” Patty said as they sat, “if you edit him out of it.”

  It took Annja a beat to realize she’d just been propositioned. She smiled and shook her head. “Not that I’m not flattered—”

  “Say no more,” Patty said. Her grin never slipped. Annja had the impression it seldom did. “It’s usually best to keep professional relationships about business anyway.”

  If the older woman felt any resentment about being turned down, Annja could detect no sign of it.

  Annja nodded. “I agree.”

  The server, a tiny Thai woman with round cheeks who seemed to be the proprietor, came and took Patty’s order for green tea. Then the red-haired American woman leaned forward onto an elbow on the table.

  “So,” she said. “You’re mounting an expedition. Tell me about it.”

  “Oh, you know,” Annja said with a smile, “a perilous trek through jungle and mountain in search of a lost temple. The usual.”

  She anticipated skepticism, possibly snark. She spoke lightly to defuse that, figuring it might make it easier to overcome resistance. Instead Ruhle arched her brows and rounded her eyes.

  “No shit?” she said.

  “None whatsoever,” Annja said, still smiling.

  “But I thought, with satellites and aircraft and all, there wouldn’t be any lost sites left.”

  “There probably aren’t. But they’re still finding them, one or two a year,” Annja replied. “Most satellites have higher-ticket tasks than hunting archaeological sites,” she said. “The discoveries are usually made by accident when third parties analyze imaging for other purposes. And in this part of the world the jungle can still do a lot to conceal structures.”

  “If you say so,” Ruhle said, less dubiously than Annja expected. “You’re willing to pay even if this turns out to be a wild-goose chase?”

  Annja nodded. “I’m paying for the expedition,” she said, “not its outcome. Although I hope—and think—the outcome will mean a lot for all of us.”

  Any shots Ruhle took of artifacts would belong to Annja. But Patty was free to snap incidental pictures of the expedition and the country they passed through along the way. She could sell those at a profit. Possibly to her usual employer. If Annja really turned up some amazing new discovery, even incidental pictures would skyrocket in value.

  Ruhle stuck out her chin and nodded. “Sounds good so far,” she admitted.

  The server brought tea and bowls of soup. Annja smelled pungent spices in the steam. She smiled. It seemed that she spent half her life in tea shops, coffee shops and sidewalk cafés. Almost as much time as she spent being pursued through the brush in remote countries, in fact. Of course both were a product of the life she led—the uniquely doubled life. Or tripled, if she considered her job on Chasing History’s Monsters as distinct from her field archaeology.

  Annja had occasion to meet with all kinds of people in the course of her tangled skein of pursuits. Since she drank little and disliked bars, coffee and tea establishments provided nice neutral locations to do so. Nice public locations, where the presence of witnesses provided constraints on certain kinds of behavior. Not all of Annja’s contacts were either reliable or safe.

  “It was good of Rickard to recommend you,” Annja said, “since I work for a rival network and all.” A Dutch archaeologist she’d met on a dig in upstate New York had gone to work for the National Geographic Channel; Ruhle was a regular contributor to both the magazine and the television network. That made her technically an enemy of Annja’s television employer, the Knowledge Channel.

  Obviously that sort of thing mattered little more to Patricia, or their mutual acquaintance, than it did to Annja.

  “How is old Rickard, anyway?” Patty asked. “I haven’t seen him in donkey’s years.”

  “No idea,” Annja said. “I haven’t seen him since the Patroon dig. We sometimes get into amiable debates on alt. archaeology.”

  “That makes you the only two on that newsgroup,” Patty said with a laugh.

  Annja laughed, as well.

  “So where is this lost temple of yours?” Patty asked.

  “How do you feel about crossing into Myanmar?” Annja asked.

  “You know the Burmese-Thai border’s closed.” Like a lot of old-timers Patty didn’t feel obligated to use Burma’s newer, state-decreed name. “Been a lot of political unrest going on that side of the Mekong. More than usual, that is.”

  “I realize that,” Annja said evenly. She had checked the CIA World Fact Book online. It mentioned the border closure in a traveler’s advisory, as an aside to advising Americans to stay out of Myanmar altogether. The government was even more autocratic and repressive than Thailand’s.

  “Why not just fly right into Yangon?” Patty asked, “Save yourself a hike and a lot of Indiana Jones stuff?”

  Annja laughed at the reference. “Because the central government is likely to take too keen an interest in me,” she said, “especially as someone they’re going to think of as a journalist.”

  She held up a hand. “I’m not claiming to be one, you understand,” she said. “But I know from experience that because I’m something of a TV personality, foreign governments don’t tend to see much distinction.”

  The photographer nodded. “Got it.”

  Of course, the Burmese didn’
t have to know she was connected with Chasing History’s Monsters. She could arrange to enter the country under an identity other than Annja Creed. She didn’t think Ruhle needed to know that much about her, especially on such short acquaintance, with no commitments either way as yet.

  But a little more explanation was in order. “The Myanmar secret police are pretty aggressive with tourists right now, my contacts tell me,” she said. “They’re facing a lot of unrest. And of course the ‘war on terror’ covers a multitude of sins. Frankly, I don’t want to lead a bunch of government thugs to what could prove a trove of priceless cultural artifacts.”

  Patty cocked her head like a curious bird. “What, you don’t trust the government of Myanmar to safeguard its people’s priceless cultural heritage?”

  “Not on your life,” Annja said. “A lot of my fellow anthropologists and archaeologists would find that heretical—way beyond political incorrectness. But no. Not Myanmar’s government.”

  Ruhle barked a laugh. “Good call.” She studied Annja for a moment. Her eyes were blue. They narrowed in a grin that rumpled the older woman’s face all up and made it frankly ugly and delightful at the same time. “You’re not going to be put off by a little border-busting, are you?”

  “I haven’t before,” Annja said.

  Patty laughed. “Well, one thing’s for sure,” she said, “you may just be a consultant and a talking head on that stupid show, but you’ve got the makings of a true crisis photojournalist. But is your disregard for danger on par with your lack of concern for the, ah, legal for malities?”

  For a moment Annja sat returning the woman’s unblinking gaze. It was not unfriendly. Neither was it particularly yielding.

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” she said at last with a smile. “But I can honestly say…it has been so far.”

  The creases in Patty’s brow deepened. “There’s more here than meets the eye, isn’t there, Ms. Creed?”

  “Annja, please. And isn’t there always?”

  Ruhle guffawed and slapped the table as if she were killing an especially annoying mosquito. Heads turned at the few other tables occupied this time of day. “What I see I definitely like—and please rest easy I mean that in a professional sense.”