Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Lost Cult

by E. E. Knight

  NEW ADVENTURES BASED ON THE WORLD’S BESTSELLING VIDED GAME

  While on a mission for the CIA to recover stolen Iraqi artifacts, Lara Croft narrowly escapes death—only to be thrown headlong into her next action-packed adventure.

  After destroying years of his research on the ancient Méne cult, archaeologist Professor Frys is murdered by an unknown assassin. Lara Croft knows her colleague must have stumbled upon a dangerous secret—and someone took his life to ensure it would remain in the shadows. So Lara jets to the mysterious cloud forests of eastern Peru, home of the Méne ruins, and makes a shocking discovery; A group is attempting to revive the sinister cult and its mind-controlling ways. One of the followers is Lara’s former friend and failed protégé, Tomb Raider Ajay—and she is determined to see Lara silenced … permanently. But Lara, never one to run from a challenge, has other plans.

  Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, Eidos, Core, and the Eidos and Core logos are registered trademarks of Eidos Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Used under license. © 2003 Eidos Inc. All rights reserved.

  Visit our website at www.delreydigital.com

  Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Lost Cult is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2004 by Core Design Limited

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.delreydigital.com

  ISBN 0-345-46172-X

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition: August 2004

  To HPL,

  for grabbing my imagination

  and never letting go

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I give thanks to my wife, Stephanie, my parents and family, Paul Witcover, Steve Saffel, John Silbersack, Kate Scherler, the 254s, and the Inkplots for their time, advice, and support. Finally, I’d like to thank the people at Eidos Interactive and Core Design Ltd. for many (arguably too many!) hours of great gaming, following Lara’s shapely form in and out of peril.

  PROLOGUE

  The Tomb Raider fell through darkness.

  She dropped, as she did all things, purposefully: back slightly arched, arms tight to her sides, feet shoulder-width apart, shivering. The air was far below zero at this altitude. She inhaled the mask’s oxygen through her mouth, as she had since she’d started flushing the nitrogen out of her blood in the Royal Australian Air Force C-130J transport an hour ago.

  Getting the nitrogen out of her blood saved her from the bends. Breathing through her mouth saved her a nosebleed.

  A high-altitude low-open jump is nothing to sneeze at—or during.

  She watched the flashing red telltale projected onto the inside of her visor by a tiny laser cylinder near her temple, corrected her course by extending an arm. The distant lights of the island of Mauritius, now twenty thousand feet below, comforted her. The Indian Ocean was a big dark place…

  Terminal velocity. Glorious! The free fall equivalent of rapture of the deep, helped by warmer air as she passed into a more comfortable thermal layer. If it weren’t for the masked HALO helmet—it made her look a bit like Darth Vader, or so the Aussie aircrew had joked—her eyelids would be peeled back to her hairline about now.

  The rugged volcanic mountains of the southern half of the island could now be distinguished from the horizon. The drop aimed for an expansive estate on the coast that had once been a sugar plantation.

  She watched her telltale, slowly spreading her arms and legs to retard her fall. Her jumpsuit cracked in the wind. As the altitude ticked down, she placed her gloved hand on the rip cord in case the auto-deploy failed. It didn’t. Her employers issued good equipment, she granted them that … Blast, I’ve overshot.

  After the hard, internal-organ-rearranging jerk of the black chute opening, she swung herself in a tight 180 to get back on course. Not many seconds now. A flashback to standing on the electric swings at the amusement park as a child, her father glowering, her nanny shouting imprecations, played through her head. She corrected course again, fighting the breeze coming from the interior of the island…

  …and saw the rooftop cooling unit on Lancaster Urdmann’s estate below. The industrial-sized air conditioner was her DIP: desired impact point. She got her first good view of the Renaissance-style main house. It was uglier than the satellite pictures let on. Urdmann had all the taste and restraint of a sybaritic Saudi prince.

  Why anyone needed two outdoor pools and a spa… But then Lancaster Urdmann—ex-arms dealer ex-Cold War military financier with a penchant for working both sides of the Iron Curtain—could afford them. When Urdmann retired from the grit and danger of gunrunning, he’d indulged a passion he had developed as he roamed the global hot spots: collecting and selling antiquities. Now he was in possession of some Iraqi artifacts acquired from the fleeing gangsters of Hussein’s regime, and the Americans and British weren’t interested in meeting his price for stolen goods.

  So she’d been hired to handle the retrieval.

  The Tomb Raider landed hop-skip atop the van-sized air-conditioning unit, thinking that satellite guidance was a Very Good Thing. Feeling a bit giddy, she fought the urge to bring her heels together and stick the landing, gymnast style. The exhilaration of a jump would blur her focus if she let it, and she had to stay clearheaded and on task. Instead of posing, she whirled her hands to take in her chute, unbuckled the harness, and let the packs of gear fall. With that done, she unzipped the jumpsuit.

  She felt uncomfortably hot—ironic considering that the tight black overall covering her from crown to corns was a piece of insertion technology colloquially known as a coolsuit. Another gift from her employer, it prevented body temperature being detected from the outside. Inside, you sweated.

  No rooftop guards. She crouched, did a few experimental stretches. No cramps, no joint pain. She began to fill pockets and belt pouches with gear, touched the ear transmitter beneath her head sheath. “Osprey is at alpha.”

  “Copy Osprey,” her guardian angel said. “Proceed.”

  She snapped open a tool kit on her chest. Its tiny light revealed the latest in high-tech burglar equipment. Ignoring the jimmies, skeleton keys, alligator clips, and minicomputer, she selected an Allen wrench and began opening the access panel on the cooling unit. It came away easily.

  She dropped inside. The dunnage bag with the rest of the gear waited among the whining fans and cauldronlike condensers, placed by the prep team a few days ago. A scribbled drawing duct-taped to the end of the bag caught her eye. A childish stick figure that was—how had her biology teacher at Wimbledon put it?—mammiferous looked back at her. It read:

  HI LARA!

  “Oh, grow up,” she muttered.

  She lifted off the panel to the intake duct. The prep team had done a good job; the metal didn’t look cut. She stuck her head inside. The meter-long blades of the intake fan roared below.

  Her insulated snips cut the connection between fan and control unit. She stopped the fan with the bottom of her boot, dr
opped her backpack to the duct below the fan, and wriggled between the blades.

  It took a little over thirty seconds for the fan to come back on. By then the Tomb Raider was negotiating the elevator junction. She passed one of the heat sensors on the way. The little gauge did double duty: checking the function of the air conditioner and triggering an alarm if an intruder, animal or human, tried the air shafts. She crawled past, hoping the coolsuit was doing its job, following the schematics she’d committed to memory.

  Two turns later, she looked through the wall-mounted air-conditioning duct cover and down into Urdmann’s display room.

  Now for the fun bit.

  A new oxyacetylene minicutter came out of a pouch on her arm. She began cutting, careful not to let the cover fall; the floor was one big pressure sensor…

  “Osprey here. I’m at objective. Going for the alarm box.”

  “Copy Osprey.”

  She took a tube out of her pack, screwed on another piece, which she then unfolded into a rifle stock. The line thrower was a one-shot weapon; she had to do this right the first time.

  Turn on the laser, find the target, exhale halfway, press the trigger button—

  With a shoulder-bruising foop, the compressed air cartridge exploded and the harpoon with its trailing line covered the twenty meters in an eyeblink, burying itself just above the alarm box. She coated the metal side of the launcher with quick-acting glue and anchored it to the side of the shaft.

  Then she slid headfirst down the threaded nylon line, gloves and inner-thigh padding absorbing the burn.

  Patching the bypass into the alarm was hard enough under normal conditions, but she had to do it upside down while hanging from her crisscrossed knees. She’d practiced it in Baghdad with a virtual reality helmet, but that alarm had been only similar to Urdmann’s, not an exact replica. She broke open the alarm panel with her knife, had to read the cryptic electronic notations on the motherboard by helmet-light—and the distorting visor wasn’t a help. She popped a memory chip out of the board, and flashing lights went on in the display room. Out came two miniature alligator clamps attached to the spoof board in her kit. She fitted them, mentally timing down the seconds she had until every alarm in the house went off. Five, four, three…

  Green light on her spoof board.

  She dropped to the floor, drew a .22 pistol fitted with a silencer. With three quick shots she killed the alarm lights; there were no local switches to turn them off. She hoped the guards on the grounds hadn’t seen the lights through the glass doors leading to the patio for the few seconds they’d been flashing.

  “Osprey. Bypass completed. Are we clean?”

  “Copy Osprey. The house sent out a tamper alarm to the security company. Not your fault; we anticipated it. We smothered the call.”

  “Please convey my thanks to the White Hats.” Hackers on your side were also a Very Good Thing. “Any sign of the guards?”

  “Negative.”

  She peeled off the coolsuit hood and mask, shook her hair out. She mopped sweat out of her eyes with the tight-folding towel she always carried in her pack.

  Urdmann displayed his treasures more brazenly than Lara did her own. Urdmann’s category cards romanced the art, whereas in her own collection she kept description to a minimum. The walls held tapestries, rugs, and friezes; the waist-level cases containing artifacts were arranged in mazelike concentric squares, so that one had to do a good amount of twisting and turning to reach the central display. Here and there larger pieces, everything from urnlike Chinese burial caskets to statues and busts in varying degrees of deterioration, stood on pedestals.

  All of the highest quality. Urdmann’s prices pushed the envelope even for four-thousand-year-old artifacts, but the man sold no forgeries. The one redeeming quality in an otherwise disgusting character was his professionalism. She grudgingly granted him a modicum of respect for that.

  She resisted the impulse to browse and found the Iraqi artifacts in a slightly taller case in the center of the room. Urdmann was proud of his new acquisitions. She popped the locks with a glass cutter and began to sort the items, separating the choice from the dross, the legally obtained from the stolen. This was why they needed a Tomb Raider instead of an agent: Not just anyone could distinguish Old Babylonian cuneiform from neo-Assyrian, or a holy symbol of Marduk from a whimsical bit of decor.

  One of her targeted items, the rarest and most valuable, wasn’t with the others: a briefcase-sized set of legal tablets that were in a very real sense the world’s first comprehensive law book—a codified set of Hammurabi’s laws. She’d have to explore the house, starting with Urdmann’s study, so she’d better secure what she already had.

  She reached into a satchel at her belt, unfolded and carefully filled two bags with tablets, a pair of painted vases, jewelry, and religious icons, then removed a cylinder from her equipment vest and triggered the built-in packing balloons to inflate and cushion the pieces. Then she took a second cylinder the size of a shaving-cream canister from her pack and squirted its contents into the bags. The Styrofoam-like packing would lock the items in place.

  With the alarm disabled, it was a simple matter to cut out a pane in the glass doors, remove it with a suction cup, and step out onto the patio. She tossed the bags behind a shrub, tied them with a nylon line, and began to scale the Renaissance-style exterior. Baroque architecture looked impressive, but it gave her any number of hand- and footholds. She picked her path to the roof using Juliet balconies and cornices.

  Back on the roof, she reported in to Roost. Then she hauled up the bags, keeping an eye toward the guardhouse at the rear of the grounds. She retrieved the rest of the gear from the air conditioner.

  “Condor is on the way, Osprey,” her guardian angel reported.

  She tossed her two cushioned sacks of swag into a bigger bag. This one was bright orange. She turned a knob that inflated more cushioning within the semiluminous pickup container. With that done, she inflated the last item, a miniature dirigible complete with a wind-guiding tail. As it filled automatically with helium, she let go of the wire-cored line, and the dirigible shot up into the air, still inflating.

  Even if the guards had seen the balloon take off, it was too late now.

  Two hundred meters of line later, the orange pickup bag lifted off the roof. Condor, a fixed-wing recovery aircraft, would snatch the line in midair between protruding, antlike jaws.

  It was all over, save for a few ifs, ands, and buts.

  If Condor’s pilot flew as well as the Australians who’d dropped her, Iraq would get its treasures returned quietly.

  And Lara Croft would get a chunk of her life back without having to give endless depositions to the lawyers of three different countries following the murder of Von Croy in Paris and her bloody pursuit of the cabal that had killed him.

  But the Tomb Raider wanted those last, missing tablets. Not just because they were part of her mission. And not just because they belonged to the Iraqi people. She would be fully within her rights to pull out now, take no further risks. The mission parameters gave her that option. But she knew she wouldn’t take it. To leave the law tablets behind would be to grant Urdmann a small victory, and she found that she wasn’t prepared to do that.

  Urdmann’s upstairs study and bedroom were accessible from the other end of the roof. She went to the edge of the roof and peered down at his balcony. A curtain flapped in the breeze through an invitingly open French door. The study balcony was beside that of the bedroom.

  As she climbed down to the study balcony, she heard the mellow burr of the Condor’s engines. Far above, signal strobes began to flash on the rising balloon, line, and recovery case.

  Good work, lads.

  Now on the narrow balcony, back against the wall, she heard a sonorous snore from the bedroom.

  She used an old-fashioned jimmy on the French door and crept into the study. Ambient light from the exterior illumination gave her enough to go on. She could still hear the snoring fro
m the connecting bedroom.

  The tablets sat on a library table beneath a picture of a dark-eyed, comely woman with Betty Page bangs. Urdmann was hiding them in plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter, using them as bookends to a set of Gibbon’s Rise and Fall: first editions, by the look of them. She reached out and gently touched the tablets on which some nameless scribe had set down the laws of another age.

  The wonder of it fed the Tomb Raider’s soul.

  The snoring in the next room stopped. She held her breath until the noise came back louder than ever.

  She took one of the tablets from its wooden stand, ignoring the first-edition Gibbon, and examined it with her kit light. It was a solid sheet of clay. Rows of wedge shapes had been pressed into the wet clay with a stylus; then the tablet had been baked and glazed. If there’d been a binding, it had long since rotted away.

  The lights came on. She startled, but didn’t drop the tablet.

  “Lara Croft,” came a smooth, BBC-pitched voice from behind. “So they cared enough to send the very best.”

  The snoring still echoed from the other room.

  With a glance, she checked Lancaster Urdmann’s reflection in the window. He didn’t appear to be holding a gun. The Tomb Raider carefully replaced the tablet.

  Then she turned on her heel, swinging the .22 up and pointing it at Urdmann. His eyes were brown, a slightly darker shade than hers. They held no fear, no emotion at all.

  “Oh, please,” he said. He touched a button on the wall, and the snoring cut off.

  Lancaster Urdmann had a lush fringe of salt-and-pepper hair running from the crown of his tanned, mostly bald head to his thick sideburns. He wore a silken Turkish robe. A landslide of hairy fat descended from his chin.

  Urdrnann ignored the pistol and looked into the Tomb Raider’s eyes. “I knew an attempt like this would be made, so I added a couple of extra alarms. It was that Kunai fellow showing up with that cock-and-bull story about needing a translation of symbols from some Babylonian law book that tipped me off. His whole story stank from here to the Yukon.”