by Alex Archer
The damage jumped out at her the minute she removed the towel. The corner of the drawing that had gotten wet had separated, the top layer of paper lifting up and curling away from the one below it.
Except...
There was only supposed to be one layer, not two.
Annja stared at it in puzzlement for a moment, before picking it up to get a better look. On closer inspection she could see that they were actually two different pieces of paper, carefully fitted and glued together.
She took the drawing back into the bathroom and laid it on a towel at the edge of the sink. She turned the shower on full blast—hot. After making sure the drawing was far enough away from the shower to keep it from getting wet, she took a towel from the rack and left the room, closing the door behind her. She then laid the extra towel against the bottom of the door, effectively trapping as much steam inside the room as possible.
Now there was nothing more to do but wait.
She paced back and forth in front of the bathroom door for just over fifteen minutes. She was tempted, more than once, to open the door and take a peek, but doing so would release the steam and heat. She gritted her teeth and left it alone. She even gave it an extra ten minutes, just to be certain. By the time she finally opened the door and let all the heat and humidity out of the room, she was ready to scream.
As the steam cleared out, she got her first look at the drawing.
The top layer had curled up and separated from the layer below it, leaving her with two rolled tubes of parchmentlike canvas. A quick glance told her that the new layer also contained a hand-drawn image; she took them both out to the sitting area where there was more light so she could examine them in detail.
She set aside the top layer, the drawing of the prehistoric Lake Makgadikgadi. She already knew what it was and there wasn’t anything to be learned there. Instead, she turned her attention to the newly revealed image on the second layer of parchment.
It was, she realized, a series of images, arranged one above the other in a vertical line. They were crudely drawn by hand but recognizable nonetheless.
The first was a building of some kind; two diagonal lines joined together to form a roof over two vertical lines that formed the walls. Written in the center was the notation DM.
The second image looked like the old pirate symbol of a skull and crossbones, but in this case the image of the skull had been replaced by the head of an elephant. As strange as it looked, Annja knew it couldn’t be anything else; those oversize ears and long trunk were unmistakable even in a childlike drawing such as this.
The third symbol was of a baobab, a large fruit-bearing tree that could be found in Africa, India and parts of Australia. Often called a monkey bread tree because of the popularity of its fruit among the various species of monkey that liked to make their homes within its branches, the baobab stored hundreds of gallons of water in its trunk and was thought to live several thousand years.
But what really caught her attention was the fourth and final image. This was drawn much more carefully than the three before it and took up most of the lower third of the page. It was drawn as if the viewer were standing in the opening of a cave, looking out into a massive canyon filled with earthen buildings painted in brilliant colors.
She knew instinctively she was looking at the image of the Lost City that Humphrey had intended to find when he set off on his final expedition, but it was the words beneath the image that drew her attention.
The tulip stands amid the wild beasts,
Within its walls, the first of the answers you seek.
Find the gray crown that watches over the flock,
To receive a piece of the puzzle you hope to unlock.
Annja’s breath caught in her throat as she finally understood what she was looking at.
It was a map!
The images, combined with the riddlelike verse, were clues to the route Humphrey had planned to take to find the Lost City. It couldn’t be anything else. He’d hidden it behind a drawing supposedly done by Gilarmi Farini, the man who had originally discovered the city. It was like a neon signpost in the night to those who knew what they were looking for.
No wonder Porter had wanted it so badly.
If she could unravel the clues Humphrey had left behind, Annja was confident she could retrace his steps and discover, once and for all, what had happened to him during that final, fateful expedition.
As the night burned on toward morning, Annja got to work.
8
The first thing she did upon rising the next morning was put in a call to Doug Morrell. Given all the strange and unusual things Humphrey had searched for over the years, she knew Doug would not only know who he was but probably had a file cabinet full of information on him. Getting the chance to solve the final mystery of the man’s disappearance would be a challenge Doug would leap at.
Unfortunately, the call went very differently than she expected.
Doug answered on the fourth ring, which should have told her something, but in her excitement she missed the lack of his usual enthusiasm.
“Forget the bat men,” she said to him. “I’ve got something even better. What if I told you that not only did I know exactly what Robert Humphrey had been searching for when he disappeared into the jungle three years ago but that I also know where he went and exactly how to get there?”
Her producer didn’t say anything.
“Doug? Did you hear me, Doug?”
“I heard you just fine,” he said, more stiffly than usual. “But I refuse to fall for something that’s so obviously a prank. When you’re ready to be a grownup and put this behind us, let me know. Until then, I’ve got work to do.”
He hung up.
Annja pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it.
Doug hung up on her.
She couldn’t believe it.
Hitting the redial button, she waited until he answered for the second time.
“I’m serious, Doug. I know exactly what Humphrey was looking for and I’ve got the evidence to prove it! All we have to do—”
“I’ve already apologized for the drone, Annja. I’m not going to do it again. If you can’t accept my apology, fine, but stop trying to tease me with stories of Humphrey’s Lost Expedition and the Vanished Tribe. It’s just not going to work.”
Then he did it again.
He hung up.
Annja gritted her teeth. She went to hit Redial again but stopped, her thumb poised over the button. Doug thought she was giving him hell for the stunt he’d tried to pull with the mechanical bat man and she knew from past experience that once he got an idea in his head it took a herd of stampeding elephants to get it back out. She was going to have to come at this from a different direction, it seemed.
She jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes and dashed down the hall to the stairwell, where she took the steps down two at a time. She emerged into the main first-floor hallway and hustled down its length until she reached Lenny’s door and banged on it.
It took a minute, but he eventually opened the door a crack and blinked out at her.
“Annja? What are you—?”
She didn’t give him a chance to finish, just pushed passed him and into his room. “I’ve got this terrific idea for the show but I can’t get Doug to listen to me. He thinks I’m getting back at him for what he did the other day.”
She turned to face him, only to come to a stuttering halt. “Oh!”
Lenny was standing just inside the door wearing only a tight pair of boxer briefs that left very little to the imagination. He had a hard, muscular body and Annja felt her gaze drifting down from his face....
She blushed and quickly looked up. “Sorry! Didn’t realize you were, uh...”
Lenny, a mischievous grin on his face, made no move to cover up. “Come on in, Annja, by all means. No need to wait for an invitation.”
Annja turned around, her voice steady as she said, “Shouldn’t have barged in. You’re rig
ht. Can you put some clothes on? I need your help with something important that I can’t do alone.”
“You’re sure you want me to get dressed?” he asked. His voice had gotten lower, huskier.
Time to nip this in the bud right now.
“Remember what I did to that drone, Lenny?” she asked.
He got the hint.
After a moment, he said, “All right. Open your eyes and tell me what this is all about.”
He’d pulled on a pair of cargo shorts and a loose cotton shirt.
She filled him in on what had happened, explaining about the robbery and how she’d ultimately discovered that there was a second set of images hidden behind the first.
Lenny raised his eyebrows in surprise. “So you think it’s authentic?”
“Yes! I can’t imagine anyone going through that much trouble for a fake, can you?”
Her companion had to admit that he couldn’t.
“Porter knew the ‘map’ was there,” Annja said. “It’s the only explanation that makes sense. Why else would he want the drawing so badly?”
“So what’s the problem?” Lenny asked.
“I called Doug to convince him to finance an expedition to follow in Humphrey’s footsteps, using the clues as our guide, but he hung up on me before I even had a chance to explain what I had.”
Lenny frowned. “Hung up on you? That doesn’t sound like Doug.”
“I’m afraid that’s my fault. I was ticked when I spoke to him earlier this morning and now he thinks I’m just trying to get even with him.”
Lenny laughed. “Ah, now I see. You want me to tell him you’re not making this up.”
“Exactly. He’ll listen to you.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. He’s not very happy with me right now. I did let the drone get destroyed, after all.”
“Trust me. The minute he realizes we’re serious about showing the world exactly what happened on Humphrey’s last expedition, he won’t give the drone a second thought.”
Lenny agreed to give it a try. He pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed Doug. The two of them spent several minutes talking before Lenny handed her the phone.
“Yes, Doug?”
“If this is a joke I swear to you I’ll—”
“It’s no joke. Everything from the way the sketch was hidden to the notations on its face indicate it was created and intentionally left behind by Humphrey prior to his departure. He must have known that he might not make it back and he left behind some insurance. Just in case.”
Doug grunted. “All right, fine. I’ll take your word for it. Now what?”
“We go after him. With the show’s backing, Lenny and I could buy the gear we need right here in Maun and be on the road before nightfall.”
“Nightfall, huh? What does Lenny think of the idea?”
Annja glanced over at her cameraman, gave him the thumbs-up and said, “He’s behind it one hundred percent. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime and he knows it.”
There was silence on the line as Doug thought that one over. Annja could see Lenny looking at her quizzically, no doubt wondering what she had just committed him to, but she waved him off, waiting on Doug’s answer. Given how long it was taking, Annja was half convinced he was going to say no and she was preparing another round of arguments when Doug finally said, “You’ve got a week. Can you do it in that amount of time?”
Annja fist-pumped the air. “One week. With the map at our disposal, that should be plenty of time.”
In truth, she wasn’t exactly sure how long it would take, but she could always argue for more time if it turned out they needed it. Doug would be reluctant to pull the plug once filming was already under way.
They said their goodbyes and Annja got off the phone before Doug could come up with some crazy addition to what should be a straightforward expedition. They had Humphrey’s map; all they had to do was decipher the clues and follow it.
Nothing to it.
The fact that they had already been buying supplies and equipment from the locals for the past couple of weeks during their ill-fated search for the bat men would make preparations for this new search easier. She would restock their gear and food supplies while Lenny saw about extending their Nissan SUV rental for another week. When he was finished, he would bring the vehicle around to the outfitters to be loaded. If all went well, they should be on their way before lunch.
9
The owner of the general supply was a jovial fellow named Michael Isooda—“Just Isooda to my friends.” He welcomed Annja back to the store and then worked with her for the next forty-five minutes to gather the materials they were going to need. A week in the bush wasn’t all that long, but it helped to be prepared for any eventualities. Her biggest concern, of course, was making sure they had enough water. The Kalahari was a desert, after all, and water would grow scarcer the deeper into it they went.
As she waited for Isooda’s staff to package up everything she’d ordered, Annja reviewed one of his maps of the Kalahari, paying particular attention to the northern stretches of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
When she’d been up until almost dawn the night before, working on deciphering the clue Humphrey had left behind, she became confident she had figured out the first couple of lines.
The use of the word walls in the second line indicated that they were looking for a building of some kind and the reference to it being amid the wild beasts suggested that it was within the confines of the game reserve. Annja had been confused by the reference to the tulip until she figured out that it was code for something of Dutch descent, the tulip being the national flower of the Netherlands.
So the end result was that she was looking for a building associated with the Dutch in some way that stood within the boundaries of the game reserve.
Before she’d called it quits to grab some sleep, she’d also turned to the online community of myth hunters by way of the alt.archaeology.esoterica newsgroup for help.
She’d logged in under her usual pseudonym and had posted a request for any information connecting the Dutch to the legend of the Lost City of the Kalahari. Logging off, she’d then tried to get some sleep.
When she awoke a couple hours later, midmorning, she’d found several replies, one of which had caught her attention.
The post was by someone using the handle SirDrake. Farini and his son supposedly spent two days recuperating at a mission founded by an old Dutch priest on their return from the Lost City.
It was the connection Annja was looking for. She sent SirDrake a follow-up. Do you know the name of the mission or where it was supposed to be?
His reply had only taken a few minutes. No name given, but it was supposed to be located in what is now the northern part of the wildlife sanctuary in Botswana. Sorry I can’t be more helpful.
Annja assured her new online friend that he had been more than helpful and signed off, happy to have a starting point. She was looking for a Dutch mission in central Botswana. There had to be records of that kind of thing, didn’t there?
But try as she might, so far she hadn’t been able to locate any. Having exhausted her usual sources, she was now left with staring at the storekeeper’s map and trying to imagine the logic of where to build a mission.
She was so engrossed she didn’t hear Isooda approach.
“Looking for something in particular, Annja?”
She glanced at him, smiling, and decided to take a chance. “As a matter of fact, I am,” she said, and then went on to explain about the mission.
Isooda’s smile deepened. “You need Dr. Crane.”
Annja didn’t know who that was.
“Dr. Crane is a good man. If you are sick, you can go to him and he will help you, even if you cannot pay.”
Annja could certainly appreciate someone donating their time and skill to help those who were less fortunate, but she didn’t see what that had to do with finding the Dutch mission.
“Dr. Crane’s compoun
d is here,” Isooda said, pointing to a spot on the map that was about one hundred kilometers south of Maun within the northern reaches of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. “His family built a medical clinic on the ruins of a much older facility. They have been helping the local people for generations. So much so that when the reserve was created, Dr. Crane was given permission to keep running his clinic inside the park. I would think that is the place you seek.”
“Does he have a phone?” Annja asked, thinking to save a few hours of potentially unnecessary travel, but Isooda shook his head.
“I’m afraid not. If you want to speak with him, you’ll either have to wait until he comes to town or go out to his compound.”
“How do you know when he’s coming to town?”
Isooda shrugged. “I don’t.”
So the reserve it was, then.
Annja thanked him for his help when Lenny called to tell her that their truck had not one, but two, flats.
“Can’t you just change them?”
“I could, if I had more than one spare. I’ve notified the rental company and they say it’s going to take at least an hour to bring the extra tire on over.”
So much for making an early start of it.
“So rent something else.”
“Tried that, too. Apparently they’re out of four-wheel-drive vehicles at the moment. I, for one, don’t want to be driving around the African delta in a Ford Escort.”
They had no choice but to wait.
This was not an auspicious start.
* * *
PORTER WAS ENJOYING a late breakfast when his cell phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID and saw it was Bryant, his personal bodyguard and right-hand man.