by E. E. Knight
The Tomb Raider had no idea what he was talking about, but then she wasn’t familiar with all the preparations that had gone into this operation. Perhaps an agent going under the name Kunai had attempted an earlier reconnaissance and been rebuffed.
“I’d love to chat, Urdmann, but I’ve got an early meeting,” Lara said.
“Then leave, by all means. I’ve no gun; I’m not stopping you.”
“Very reasonable of you. I’ll just take these tablets and be on my way.”
He took a step closer. “Leave me my souvenirs, Croft. I had to negotiate with some very unpleasant people to acquire them.”
“Those ‘unpleasant people’ were thieves and worse.”
“Yes, well, as I said, unpleasant. But I did what I had to do to safeguard the tablets. You should be thanking me.”
“The tablets are part of Iraq’s heritage. They belong in Iraq, not in the study of Lancaster Urdmann.”
“As if the bloody wogs gave that”—he snapped his fingers—“for their heritage before we dug it up for them and told them that it was worth something!”
“Cut the John Bull, Urdmann.” She reached with her free hand, grabbed one of the tablets.
Urdmann took another step closer. “No, Croft.”
“I’ll shoot,” she warned.
He shook his head, his jowls trembling like jelly. “You’re no killer, Croft. You won’t shoot an unarmed man.”
She grinned wolfishly in response.
“We can come to an arrangement. Some money for the upkeep of that drafty old manor of yours. Perhaps—”
For an obese man, Urdmann moved fast. The Tomb Raider moved faster. Her pistol spat even as he lunged at her, and a track of red scored Urdmann’s fleshy right forearm. He fell back, clawing at his desk.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said drily.
“You shot me,” Urdmann said, blood running from between his fingers as he smothered the wound. His brown eyes held shock now. And anger. “That bloody burns!”
“It’s only a scratch,” Lara said. “If I’d really shot you, you’d know it.” As she spoke, keeping the pistol trained on him all the while, she stuffed the tablets into her pack. Then, as an afterthought, she tossed him her travel towel. “I suppose you realize you’re dripping blood all over a thirteenth-century rug.”
“Eleventh!” Urdmann protested, grabbing the towel and pressing it to his arm. A film of greasy sweat had appeared on his brow.
“I’ll take your word for it. But you might want to look at those pikes again. Please drop dead at your earliest convenience.”
She stepped past him onto the balcony. Behind her, one of Urdmann’s guards burst in, rifle at the ready.
“No, don’t shoot, you fool! You’ll damage the tablets,” Urdmann bellowed.
She swung over the side of the balcony and dropped to the ground. A Klaxon sounded. Lights went on all over the grounds.
Oh, bother.
She hit and rolled, then ran downhill, heading for the west wall. A peacock squawked as she leapt a decorative hedge. She climbed up an iron fence topped with sharpened spear points.
“Osprey!” her guardian angel broke in. “Condition check.”
“Running for my life,” she gasped.
“Why aren’t you with Condor? They just picked up the cargo. Why did you break plan?”
“Contingency.”
For the first time, the guardian angel’s voice showed signs of stress. “There is no contingency. You were supposed to go out on Condor. Now—”
“Listen,” she interrupted. “Can we talk about this later? I’m kind of busy now. I’ll see you in the Seychelles by the seashore.”
She ripped the coolsuit going over another fence. She made note of the extraction point and jumped down into the outer grounds.
Lancaster Urdmann employed a full-time security staff of eight. Labor in Mauritius was cheap. But they stayed on the inner grounds, in the house, and at the road gate.
She heard a police whistle blow from Urdmann’s balcony. Flashlights bobbed at the side of the house, then swung in her direction.
She crabbed into a stand of brush. Beyond the estate’s outer wall, a hundred meters away, the night sky loomed. She crawled toward it, hoping that whatever firearms the guards possessed didn’t come equipped with light intensifiers. The coolsuit would hide her from an infrared scope.
The outer wall was concrete with shards of broken glass embedded at the top amongst coils of razor wire. Lara angled for a thick palm near the wall. Urdmann’s landscapers had cleared everything on the other side of the wall, trying to keep people out, not in.
The Tomb Raider saw the lights of a jeep roaring across the outer grounds. She climbed the palm, got amongst the fronds at the top, saw a clear a spot on the other side of the wall, and jumped. She brushed wire on her way down, but her falling weight carried her through. She didn’t think she’d been cut too badly.
As she hurried down the steep slope, she marked the little inflatable boat waiting for her among the oceanside rocks.
Gunfire from behind—she threw herself sideways. Urdmann’s guards stood on the roof of their vehicle, muzzles blossoming yellow as they fired automatic weapons at her over the top of the wall.
Trigger-happy amateurs. You get what you pay for, Urdmann. One man with a scope would have got me.
She dropped to her bottom and slid on the loose soil as bullets zipped all around. She bumped and thudded, smashing body and gear on volcanic stone, cushioning the precious items in her pack with flesh and bone, until she was out of the line of fire and among the giant boulders at the edge of the ocean.
The com-link was gone; the headset had come off somewhere on the slide. She waded out, felt the sting of seawater on her battered thighs and backside, reached a hand down. It came back up bloody.
Scratch one coolsuit as expended in the line of duty…
Djbril, her freelance ex-military gearhead, helped her into the boat with a smile but said nothing. It was his kind of mission: a week’s worth of lounging on a cocktail-service-included beach capped off with one night of noisy excitement. When she had settled into the boat, Djbril tossed her a first aid kit, still not saying a word. That was one of the things she liked about him.
Then the Zodiac’s two-hundred-horsepower engine roared to life, and the boat shot away from shore, heading for the open ocean.
***
Ten hours later, Lady Croft tested the water temperature in the spa-sized tub in the bathroom of her room at the Stansfield resort hotel in the Seychelles and dumped the second of three boxes of lavender-scented Epsom salts into the sudsy water.
She glanced at the full-length mirror in the shower door next to the tub, turned, lifted her robe, and winced. The pummeling she’d taken on her slide to the sea had left a series of black-and-blue souvenirs of Mauritius. At least the cuts and abrasions were healing nicely, thanks to applications of antibiotic cream.
Now for a glorious soak, then a real sleep. Upon arriving at the hotel, she’d stuffed herself with poached eggs, fried tomatoes, and toast—she never skipped breakfast, but contingencies sometimes forced her to enjoy it at seven o’clock at night. Then she’d limped down to the hotel druggist for the Epsom salts.
Speaking of which, the tub was nearly full. She topped it off with the third box of bath salts. Then she stuck one leg in up to the knee, relishing the painfully hot water.
Exquisite. She stuck her other leg in and prepared to lower herself ever so slowly into the steaming bath.
Her suite door buzzed loudly. Go away, she thought at whoever was out there. Whoever was out there wasn’t listening; the door buzzed again. Sighing, Lara left the tub, rewrapped her cushy robe about herself, and went to the door. She looked through the peephole, saw an oversized nose and watery blue eyes.
The American. The guardian angel in her ear. She opened the door.
“Hey, Lara.” A thin veneer of Yale lay over an accent from the Georgia pinewoods. “Hope
you weren’t sleeping.” She liked the American; he was so awkwardly polite.
“What now? Did you miss something at the debriefing?”
“No. We missed something on Condor. The Hammurabi tablets. The Iraqis are screaming.”
“And why do you think I’ve got them?”
“Because you’re Lara Croft, that’s why.”
She had to smile at that. “Supposing I do know where they are, when is my record going to be cleared? That was our deal, wasn’t it?”
“It’s been done.”
“Not according to my lawyers.”
Her guardian angel frowned, reached for his cell phone. Lara crossed the room to the bulging Viennese dresser for hers. They faced each other like two gunfighters across the burgundy-colored carpeting and punched in numbers.
The American held up his index finger, spoke into his phone. Waited. Spoke some more.
“A fax is coming through,” said the associate working the graveyard shift at her solicitor’s, her voice tinny in Lara’s ear.
The American closed his cell phone with a click. “You should be good now.”
Her phone: “Yes, here’s your Interpol file, Lady Croft. All the stops are gone.”
“Thank you so much,” she said and hung up.
“Well?” asked the American. “Where are the tablets then?”
She walked over to the tub, went down into a very unlady-like squat, reached one hand into the still-steaming water, and pulled up a waterproof case. She opened the seal and extracted her lucky backpack.
“You take that with you into the tub?” the American asked, looking at the battered backpack.
“Never out of reach when I’m out of England.”
She pulled out the tablets in their own cushioned, waterproof wrapper. Handed them over. “That concludes our business, I believe.”
“It does. Sorry about the delay. Unintentional, I assure you.”
“I never thought otherwise,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’m sore, and very, very tired.”
The American flicked a strand of straw-colored hair out of his eyes. “We’ve got a cure for that where I come from. Some good Kentucky bourbon, a strong set of hands, and a big ol’—”
“I don’t drink,” she said. “And if you want to cure something, I suggest you focus on your prep team. That was sloppy work. Urdmann spotted the Kunai fellow right from the start.”
“Kunai? We didn’t send anyone in with that cover.”
“My mistake.” She took a scrunchie out of her robe pocket and began to put up her hair. “Be an angel and close the door quietly on your way out, would you?”
PART ONE
1
Chaos reigned in the converted farmhouse during the last morning of Dr. Stephen Frys’s life. Dresser drawers hung open in his bedroom—dark, thanks to the still-closed curtains, except for a guttering candle. Dropped towels lay all over the bath, but no water speckled the tub; he’d washed in a basin so he could hear any suspicious sounds coming from outside the house. The bed stood as tidy as on any normal morning, but only because the professor hadn’t slept in it.
Dr. Frys even skipped his beloved morning tea, taken with lemon, sugar, toast, and the incomparable view of the Scottish Highlands, a tradition that dated back to the first morning he and his late wife had spent in Whistlecrack House thirty-one years ago.
Blood—thanks to a trembling hand during his shave—spotted his chin and the mole on his left cheek as he lumbered down the narrow stairs. He listened to the silent darkened house and heard only the wind outside.
He dropped his dusty suitcase to the kitchen floor with a thud, then removed his thick, black-framed eyeglasses and rubbed them clean with his handkerchief, a gesture any of his senior students knew meant a pause in the lecture while the professor turned something over in his mind. As he put the handkerchief back, he patted his pocket, reassuring himself that his cell phone was still there.
Any visitor to Whistlecrack House stopped and looked at the fireplace first when they arrived in the kitchen. Almost big enough to climb in if one crouched, it filled one wall, a great arch of brick with iron-mongered doors, a spit, hooks, and shelves for baking, roasting, or frying foods.
Last night the fireplace had been roaring. Paper after age-yellowed paper, notebook after notebook, reams of photocopied research, even old-fashioned carbon copies had flamed yellow-orange, curled, blackened, and then turned to fine gray ash almost as quickly as he could feed the fire.
Dr. Frys checked the blackened mass. A substantial part of his life lay in the still-smoldering heap. He prodded the pile with a poker, and the fire burst into new life as he exposed the last few unburned reams of typescript. He stirred the mass to make sure of the destruction.
Life does save its best jokes for last. The ashes were all that remained of research that had once made him a bit of a joke in his profession … until he gave up trying to pry open closed and comfortable minds. But now that same research had turned out to be of unexpected interest to hard-eyed, ruthless men. He’d always been half afraid of the secrets he’d discovered, but after three decades in which not even a graduate student had asked about his Méne work, he’d half forgotten about it as well. He and Von Croy should have abandoned their research without publishing any of it, left the frightful revelations where no one would ever find them.
But the cat was out of the bag now—and she’d had rabid kittens.
He checked the clock, pulled out his cell phone, and tapped in a number. It wasn’t even eight yet, but there was no harm in checking.
Just the answering service again, and he’d already left a message.
Dr. Frys stepped lightly past a cream-colored wall covered with family photos—an empty hook and an oval a slightly lighter shade than the rest of the wall marked the place where a photo had hung—and went to the front sitting room. Without parting the curtains, he looked through the narrow gap between glass and fabric, wincing as the morning sun hit his eye. He repeated the process at the other side of the window.
No sign of them.
The note for the police—or them—to find sat on the mantel. An identical copy rested folded inside a little plastic 35 mm film canister he’d put down the kitchen drain, blocking the plumbing. Even if the police didn’t find it, the new owners would.
He picked up his suitcase and walked to the garage, the final change to the house that his beloved wife, Emme, had lived to see. He opened the connecting door with a swift motion. His eyes swept across the dim garage, checking the condition of its sole window before he entered.
The powerful old Merkur beeped an acknowledgment as he deactivated its alarm. He placed his suitcase in the boot and pushed it shut with a soft click. He popped the bonnet and picked up his attaché case from where it lay atop the fluid reservoirs, hidden there since last night. Grit smeared the weathered leather.
He climbed into the car, pulled the door closed as softly as he had the boot, and took a deep breath as he slid the key into the ignition.
Then came the temptation. Again.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just chuck the contents of his attaché into the fire and wait, engine running, in the closed garage until he escaped into the sleep he so desperately needed? Oblivion. No more strange eyes watching him as he bought his groceries, no more funny looks from the police as he spoke of burglars who took nothing, no more fearful listening at each creak and crack in the old house. A younger heart might be able to summon the courage to fight them, but his old pump with its bad valve…
Almost too much effort to run. He resettled his glasses on his nose. No. It wasn’t just his life and sanity they threatened. When he’d seen that accursed monocle, realized how near the rot had spread…
Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out his cell phone and placed it in its dashboard cradle, checked the battery indicator, and started the car. With luck, and he couldn’t have expended all his share in sixty-eight years of living, he’d meet her in London before his
flight. Von Croy had always spoken highly of her. Personally, Frys had always considered her to be a bit of a loose cannon, to say the least. There was no question of her talent, her knowledge, her bravery. But her methods were so … unorthodox. Those pistols she wore—and, according to the magazines, was not shy of using—he did not consider them to be the proper tools of a serious archaeologist. But now the very qualities that had caused him to view Lara Croft with suspicion had made him seek her out for help.
The electric garage door answered to the sun-visor button.
He didn’t wait for it to open all the way but backed out as soon as he thought he had clearance. But he thought wrong. He tore away the plastic weather strip at the bottom of the garage door, heard splintered wood scrape across the roof of his car as he backed out and turned around in the gravel driveway.
The glitter of sun on a windscreen down the road panicked him. A sedan was coming from the north. He forgot about shutting the garage door again as he backed around and shifted into drive, then stomped on the accelerator. Gravel flew as his tires spun. He fishtailed at the end of the driveway and knocked over the white-painted rural delivery postbox with “Whistlecrack House” painted in green, friendly script on each side.
A silver roadster appeared in the road south of his driveway, pulling out from cover as it moved to block the narrow mountain road. The driver stared straight at him from under a cloth cap, daring him to smash into the side of the little sports car. Frys swerved into the leafless bushes the little car had been concealed behind and barreled straight through, then swerved back onto the road that snaked along the side of the fells.
The sedan and the silver roadster were right behind him. With a burst of speed, the roadster shot ahead, coming around his right side too quickly for Frys to do anything but swerve into the gravel it kicked up from the slender verge. Then it was past him. Its brake lights flared, and he stomped on his own brakes as the sedan pulled next to him, the sound of its tires like the yowling of an alley cat. He dragged the Merkur against the mountainside, caught a flash of the sedan driver’s pox-scarred cheek in the second before his air bag deployed, smacking him in the face and flipping his glasses off the back of his head.