Restless Soul

by Alex Archer

  “Your boss isn’t going to get far in that Jeep,” Annja said. From the blank look on his face she knew he couldn’t understand her. “But you understand the gun. Thugs always understand guns.” She pointed the muzzle at him, then at a crate and then to a spot beneath the opening. “Move!”

  He looked puzzled for only an instant, and then he clambered to his feet and stepped around the body of his dead companion, eyes lingering on the blood.

  “Move!” Annja figured the other man would be back soon when he gave up on the Jeep. “Hurry!”

  If he didn’t understand the words, he understood her intent. The crate was roughly a meter cubed, and he strained to push it under the opening. He looked to the dozen crates remaining and picked a smaller one to set on top.

  There had been five or six times the number of crates when Annja was there before. They’d worked at a steady pace to move the goods. But move them where? At the far side of the cavern the teak coffins stood undisturbed. Fortunately, they’d not cared about those treasures, which Annja considered every bit as valuable as the gold Buddhas—more valuable in an archaeological sense.

  He had a hard time lifting the crate and looked to her for help.

  She shook her head. “I’m not dropping the gun,” she told him. Again, a blank look met her steady stare. “Try again. You can do it.”

  While he struggled with it, she bent and retrieved the keys from the dead man’s belt, and then patted his pockets, pulling out a few business cards and a folded piece of paper. She stuck these inside her shirt, intending to look at them later when she was out of here. His other pocket was empty. No wallet or ID or any sort of a passport that would facilitate traveling across borders.

  The man grunted as he arranged the second crate so it could serve as a ladder. Annja gestured for him to step back.

  “What to do with you…what to do.” She sucked in her lower lip. “If I let you go up first, you might try to kick me or do something else to cause problems. You might holler and bring your boss back. If I go first, you might grab my leg.” She slipped close to him and lifted the gun. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth just as she brought the stock down against the side of his head.

  Annja didn’t want to kill another one of them. She wanted them alive for the authorities to question. Eyes flitting around the chamber, she spotted a length of rope around a crate. She dropped the machine gun and unfastened the rope, and then used a length of it to tie up her prisoner. Adept at knots, she felt certain he wouldn’t be getting out of this anytime soon.

  She checked his pockets, finding no ID, but pulling out a few business cards and a pack of cigarettes. The latter she dropped with disgust. Spotting the pistol, she snapped it up and thrust it in her waistband.

  “Can’t afford to leave you a weapon,” she said. Then she struggled to prop him up against a wall near the lamp, and took a moment to examine the head wound she’d given him. His chest rose and fell regularly.

  “I think you’ll be all right,” she pronounced. “Fit enough to serve a prison sentence.” A last look around the chamber and a moment more to disable the machine gun, then she started toward the coffins, wanting to see if the pottery was still inside them, but she heard the engine again. She climbed up the crates. Her legs ached, the right one still sore from where Doc had removed the bullets. She felt the stitches pull. The impact of jumping into the cavern hadn’t helped, and she wished she had taken the time to locate her boots before she’d left the Thins village.

  She pulled herself halfway out of the hole and grabbed at the rope ladder bunched up at the top. “Lovely.”

  The man who’d taken off in the Jeep had returned on foot, his machine gun again pointed at her.

  18

  He didn’t bother to ask questions this time, no doubt realizing she wasn’t about to give up Lu or any other information. He aimed the machine gun, snarled at her and pulled the trigger.

  She dipped her head below the rim, feeling the bits of earth and rock pelt the top of her head from where the bullets chewed up the ground. One end of the rope ladder came loose, shot through, and she hung on the other side as it swayed precariously. The firing continued, the bullets ripping into the ground furiously, as if they were as angry as the man who fired them.

  When they stopped, Annja didn’t pause. Quick as lightning she lifted herself up over the lip again and rolled toward him, seeing that he was jamming in another magazine. Vaulting to her feet, she put her head down and barreled into him.

  Annja drew her right hand back into a fist and punched him in the face. Blood spurted from his nose as he fell back.

  She followed, knees on his chest, left hand reaching for the pistol she’d stuffed in her waistband, drawing it and shoving the barrel under his chin.

  He made a move to shove her off, and she clocked him again with her fist.

  “You’re the one who needs to cooperate now…if you want to live.” She pushed the gun against his throat. Annja didn’t intend to kill him—despite everything he’d done, including admitting to torturing and killing Zakkarat. But she didn’t need him to know that. She dug her knees in harder, inadvertently cracking at least one of his ribs. She almost apologized.

  “Tell me what this is about—the treasure…the trucks.” Some part of her realized that she didn’t need the information. She’d stopped the relic smuggling and captured the villains, salvaging a happy ending amid the tragedy of her Thai guide’s murder and the deaths of two Thins villagers. She could leave the questioning to the Thai authorities—let them track the treasure already hauled away. It was their country and their problem. Let them interrogate this foul man.

  But another part of Annja needed to know. That part wanted everything tied up with a neat little ribbon. “I…said…talk.”

  He groaned when she dug her knee into his side and pushed the gun against him with more force. She eased up only a little so he could speak.

  “You are more than a television archaeologist, it seems.” His words were strained from her weight and his broken ribs. He coughed and grimaced. “Talk.”

  “I’m only a part of this, Annja Creed.” He smiled then, the malevolent expression sending a shiver through her. “A sizable part, yes, but only a part. You have cut the tail off the snake, not its head.”

  He said nothing else, despite her repeated questions and jabs with the gun.

  “The skull bowl. Tell me about that.”

  He shook his head and grinned wider.

  “Damn it!” Annja pushed herself off him, further injuring his ribs, and again forced back an apology. She waved the gun at him, but he made no move to get up.

  Bending over him, gun still threatening, she tugged a pistol from a holster at his side and flung it with such anger that it arced out of sight down the slope. Next, she rifled through his pockets.

  No wallet. No ID. Nothing.

  “Who are you?”

  He kept smiling, blood from his broken nose spilling over his lip. He stuck the tip of his tongue out and licked at the blood.

  She fumed and dug the ball of her foot into the ground, ran her free hand through her hair and got a good whiff of herself. God, but she stank, from the mud and the river and from the sweat. She needed a long, hot bath.

  Had Luartaro reached the authorities? Were they on their way? Should she wait for them?

  “No,” she said out loud.

  He looked at her quizzically.

  “I can’t wait.”

  Maybe Luartaro was still groggy from the ox tranquilizer the retired veterinarian had used on him. Maybe he hadn’t reached the authorities yet.

  She would take that task on herself, just to be sure.

  Annja gestured with the pistol, and the man got to his feet slowly. She gestured toward the hole. He showed no emotion, but he kept his eyes on her.

  “The authorities are on their way,” she told him.

  Still no reaction on his face. Could he tell she was bluffing?

  The authorities will be
on their way if they aren’t already, she told herself. A quick glance at the truck showed that the front tire that had been shot had not gone flat, and with luck it wouldn’t.

  “Sit.”

  After a moment, he complied.

  She pulled up the rope ladder and practically cocooned him in it, tying him up. She made sure the knots were tight; he wouldn’t be freeing himself. She used the cable from the winch to secure the men up top she’d subdued earlier. One of them was groggy, but a quick tap to the side of his head sent him unconscious again.

  “Let’s get some mug shots,” she said, going to the side of the trail where she’d dropped the net bag containing her digital camera. She came back to the cocooned man and wiped the blood away from his nose. “Say cheese.”

  Annja unwrapped it from the plastic. “Nuts.” She hadn’t noticed it earlier, but the camera had been ruined sometime during her mad dash yesterday. A bullet was lodged near the lens, spiderweb cracks radiating from it. She tried to thumb it on, just in case. “Nuts. Nuts. Nuts.”

  She made a move to heave it down the mountainside, but stopped herself. The memory card might be all right, meaning all the pictures she took yesterday could be saved, or maybe someone could fix the camera. She wrapped the camera in the plastic and the net bag again. Then she leaned over the hole, taking another look at the crates and craning her neck so she could see her captive. Testing the cable and rope on the men up top, she pronounced them as secure as she could make them.

  She climbed up to the truck, pleased to see her backpack sitting on the passenger seat. Opening the door took a bit of muscle, as it was dented and did not fit properly. It took two yanks before it whined and relented. So the man had driven the Jeep out of the truck’s way and had come back to take the truck, dropping her pack in it. But he hadn’t possessed the keys—or else she suspected he would have roared away and left her in the cavern. Annja jangled the keys she’d taken from the man in the cavern and on her first guess found the one that fit in the ignition. Despite the rust and the age of the vehicle, the engine purred.

  “On second thought—” She left it running and slipped out, leaving the door open and marching straight to the man cocooned in the rope ladder. Her muscles grew sore as she tugged him to his feet and shuffled him to the back of the truck. Opening the tailgate and lifting him inside was almost impossible, but Annja was nothing if not determined and finally heaved him in. Then she latched the tailgate and climbed back into the cab.

  Annja practiced with the clutch, gas and brake pedals, which were stiff. She had to move the seat forward and adjust the rearview and side mirrors, all of which were covered with a dirty film. The stink of cigarettes permeated the cab, but her own bad odor overpowered it. She fought the bile rising in her throat and stuck her head out the window to suck down some better air.

  “Let’s get out of here. But first, let’s see where here is.” In her net bag was the map one of the villagers had drawn for her. Though pretty and well rendered, it wasn’t terribly useful. She leaned over and thumbed the glove box. “That’s better.” Several maps were stuffed inside, and she got lucky with the first one. It even had a faint blue circle drawn on it that she guessed approximated the location of the treasure cavern. “The lodge would be here.” She tapped her finger at a spot that didn’t look terribly far away. That’s where she intended to go first.

  She would see if Luartaro had made it back and then head to the nearest city to contact the authorities…likely the city she and Luartaro had taken the bus from to reach the lodge. Annja nudged her pack to the side and spread the map on the passenger seat and studied it.

  She reached for the backpack, unfastened it and dipped inside. Her fingers found the dog tags immediately. The lid she’d padded with a piece of her pant leg was intact. But the skull itself was in four pieces. Her heart sank.

  19

  Annja carefully backed down the trail. The truck was too wide to fit on it for most of the way, and so she took it over bushes and ferns, scraping against trees and trying to retrace the path it had taken to limit the damage to the foliage. In places, she followed deep ruts the truck had made when it came up when the ground was muddier.

  She was confident the skull bowl could be repaired. Many artifacts in museums and collections had been reconstructed from fragments. Pottery and clay figurines were often painstakingly reassembled because they were found in pieces, though sometimes just the pieces were displayed. The skull bowl had been sturdy, and so she hadn’t thought to pad it. But then she hadn’t expected to take it on a wild slipping-and-sliding ride down the side of the mountain when she was first running from the gunmen. Her fingers occasionally continued to rustle through the bag and over the skull segments, finding a bullet. Maybe the bowl had stopped a bullet that would otherwise have found her.

  The bowl could be repaired, but should it be? Though she’d seen many grisly archaeological finds through the years, this one particularly disturbed her. Maybe it was better off shattered.

  She punched the brake on a steep incline and felt the truck shimmy and slip and heard the cargo in the back shift. She wondered if her prisoner was being squished by crates and was mildly disappointed with herself for not stopping to check on him when the slope became gradual.

  Annja did, however, stop to look at the map. It was shiny with a thick, slick lamination and rendered in a combination of pleasing pale and bright colors. It was the sort of map bookstores displayed in their travel sections, not something a driver would pick up at a gas station or in a way stop. It included the topography of Northern Thailand, listing the elevations of different sections of the mountain ranges, and the borders were dotted with pictures and interesting snippets of information about islands, beaches, temples and the larger cities. Names and numbers at the bottom on the opposite side were probably towns and cities and their populations. The print was too small to read in this light. The reverse side also showed street maps of Chiang Mai and Bangkok—the latter looking formidable because of its size. She flipped it back over to the side showing Northern Thailand and the mountains.

  She’d save the map for Luartaro; he’d like it and might find something marked on it he’d like to see.

  “But no more spirit caves.”

  She touched her index finger to the tiny silhouette of an airplane. Mae Hong Son’s airport was the one they came in at and took the bus from, and Mae Hong Son was the closest city to her current location in the mountains. She noted all the streams and rivers in the area, many of which she suspected would have flooded their banks. To the north and south the waterfalls were marked—Pha Sua and Pha Pawng; she remembered seeing them coming in on the plane. Beautiful from the air. Plenty of roads were marked on the map, but there were no names that she could spot. One stretched up to Huay Pha, a town or large village. That road cut around a hill and to Doi Pai Kit, another village. She recalled seeing a brochure for the area at the lodge. So if she found the road and made it through those villages, she’d find the lodge and could use the phone in the office to contact the authorities. She’d also look for Luartaro.

  Next would be Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai. Outside of a thread-fine line that may or may not have been a road, the map didn’t show a direct route from Mae Hong Son to the larger city. But there were several routes that twisted and turned through the mountains and would eventually get her there—taking the scenic route, so to speak. She’d heard the men mention Chiang Mai, and one of the business cards listed Chiang Mai. Annja’s desire to finish the puzzle would lead her there.

  “And maybe lead to a nap first.” She stifled a yawn and rotated her shoulders against the seat back. God, but she was exhausted and achy. A brief nap would put her in a better mood and make her more alert. A bath was on her list, too. She didn’t want Luartaro to get a whiff of her right now.

  The mountain trail she backed down wasn’t on the map, nor was the thin gravel road she found at the bottom. It wasn’t really a road, either, she decided after half a mile. It was a mou
ntain bike path, and she saw deep ruts from the truck’s tires and maybe the Jeeps before it, and a few small trees with badly scraped bark.

  The truck bounced along on it, able to turn around in an area of tall grass so she was pointed south, in the direction she was heading. The seat was uncomfortable, the springs in it shot, and she had to stretch to reach the pedals. Although Annja was tall, she couldn’t move the seat forward quite far enough; the mechanism was rusted. She figured the tall man she’d taken out first had been the driver. The steering wheel was caked with a dirty film, and the gearshift was likewise filthy. She noted it all, but it didn’t bother her; she was as dirty as the truck.

  CLOUDS WERE INCREASING and the light was fading by the time she found a proper road, one with a sign that indicated Tham Pla National Park, Tham Pla Cave and—to her relief—Mae Hong Son.

  She reached the resort on the outskirts of town before sunset and parked the truck in front of the office. There was no trail wide enough leading to the cabins and she wasn’t about to ruin the manicured gardens for her convenience. She made a quick check on her prisoner, who looked the worse for wear but in no danger of dying, then she headed inside, relayed the bad news about Zakkarat, made sure someone would contact his family, and then she asked about Luartaro. Yes, he’d returned, but he’d gone out again after using the telephone. Yes, she could use the telephone, too.

  Annja retold the story three times before she was convinced they’d put her through to a police official who believed her and who was fluent in English. She was on the phone for the better part of an hour, answering questions and providing directions to the mountain treasure chamber as best she could. She told them about Zakkarat, the men she’d tied up and the truck filled with crates. And she agreed to wait for police to meet her at the resort; they would accompany her and the truck to Chiang Mai, where the department had a headquarters. Annja wanted to go there, anyway. She made one more phone call, this a quick one.