by Alex Archer
“Because I got a look at their boss, like I said. The Sword—Sayed Houssam—if that’s his real name. I suspect it’s not, too close to Saddam Hussein, probably picked it for that reason.” Annja made a huffing sound and fluttered her hair. She realized the night-vision goggles had been taken off her head. “Funny thing is, Oliver probably had no clue that he got a shot of a terrorist.”
Annja leaned so close to the man that she could smell the stink of him. Despite the cool weather, he’d been sweating, perhaps hadn’t changed clothes for a while, and there were blood spatters on his shirt, though it didn’t look to be his blood. She pulled back.
“If they hadn’t come after Oliver and me, no one would have known that the Sword was in Australia. We were only shooting a one-hour segment, and there wouldn’t have been any room for shots of the student dig and Sayed. Oliver just likes—liked—taking lots of pictures.” She brought her face inches from his. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Your cameraman?”
“He does speak English!” one of the archaeologists cut in. “Yes, my cameraman. Oliver.” One of the assassins on the ridge had told her that he’d been killed, but she wanted confirmation.
“He’s dead,” the man said. “The American with the blue eyes and expensive cameras.” His voice was raspy, perhaps naturally or because Dari had punched him in the throat. It sounded as if it was difficult to get the words out.
“Where is his body?”
“Gone. Nothing but ashes. Nothing to find, and nothing to bury. And you should have joined him.” He tried to spit at her, but he couldn’t work up the saliva, and apparently he couldn’t turn his head.
Jennifer leaned over him and clacked the pliers. “I want to know why you killed Josie and that student.” She leaned back and held her free hand to her mouth. The smell of him was intense.
“She told you,” he said, adding in a string of ugly-sounding foreign words. “The Sword did not wish to be seen in this place. No witnesses.”
“The world thinks he’s in England,” Annja said numbly.
“Yes,” the man answered. Again he seemed to struggle to get the words out. “Unfortunate that the Sword came to this desolate hole on a day when someone was shooting pictures.”
Unfortunate for Oliver and Josie and Matthew, Annja thought.
Jennifer choked back a sob and gripped the pliers so tight that even in the scant light Annja could see that her knuckles were white. The woman clearly wanted to hurt someone, she was so angry and distraught over Josie’s murder. Annja reached up and took the pliers from her.
“The Sword does not want Egyptian artifacts,” Annja said. She watched the man’s brow furrow. “What does the Sword want here?”
“His cause is just!”
Annja made a snarling sound. “I read the papers. The Sword rarely has a cause beyond money. He doesn’t bomb stadiums and blow up buses to make a political point. Someone pays him to do those things.”
The man snarled, but still his head did not turn. “The people he works for have causes. That is enough. Their cause becomes his cause!”
“For the right price.” Annja sat the pliers down; she noted that Jennifer’s eyes were fixed on them. “And what is Dr. Hamam’s cause?”
The man looked straight ahead, up into the face of the archeologist with the gun. He set his lips into a thin, defiant line.
“I can make him talk,” Jennifer said. Her words came out a whisper, no power behind them. She gulped in air and fought the tears that threatened the corners of her eyes.
Annja leaned forward again, put her hands on his shoulders and put all her weight on him. “You will tell us.”
His eyes seemed to fix on a spot far from the clearing in the forest preserve.
“What does Dr. Hamam want with the Sword?” For good measure she jabbed her knee into his side, noting that he didn’t even flinch. Annja detested the notion of torture, but Oliver’s face loomed large in the back of her mind. “What foul, foul thing is the Sword up to here?”
He remained silent. Sounds came to her, someone talking to Sulene, Jon talking to Cindy, Jennifer giving in to her sobs, the crackle of the still-burning fire. Faintly, she heard sirens.
“You’ll tell the police, then,” Annja said. She jabbed him again and then pushed off him to help her stand. “And I’ll tell them all about the Sword being in Sydney.”
“He is the wind, American,” the man said. “He cannot be caught.”
The archaeologist holding the gun lowered it and pulled back on the trigger. “I’m betting, mate, that everyone here will say I shot you in self-defense.”
“I don’t know what the Sword’s ultimate work here is,” he spit, “but it will be glorious and deadly.”
Annja turned away, disgusted and frustrated. “He probably doesn’t know,” she told Jennifer. “Lackeys like him are usually not let in on the prize. They’re merely brought along to help obtain it.”
Moments later, a police van drove into sight. There was another car behind it, back by where the archaeologists parked their vehicles, and a truck that looked like a SWAT wagon. Annja could see the flashing lights, and she heard someone talking loudly over a police radio.
There were more headlights coming through the trees, two more police cars judging by the height of the flashing lights, and after a moment, another truck. She heard the sound of a helicopter. It seemed that Dr. Michaels had been able to lure a small army of police.
The side of the van read Cessnock Correctional Centre. Two officers got out, guns holstered, but the snap off them so they could be pulled quickly. The taller one pushed his hat back and took a look around. Wes and Jennifer were quick to meet him.
Annja held back and listened.
“Not easy to find the road,” the tall officer said. “But your directions were good.”
“I used to drive cabs when I was in college,” Wes said. “I know how to give directions.” Then he started to explain what had happened at the site, Jennifer interjecting about the shootings.
“No ambo yet?” This came from Sulene, who continued to worry over Jeff.
“No, not yet,” Annja told her. “But the police are a start. The ambulance shouldn’t be far behind.”
“I hope not for Jeff’s sake,” Sulene said. She took a glance at the cops and then looked back at Jeff. “I wish that friend of yours—Dari—killed that son of a bitch rather than just cracked his neck.”
“There’s been enough killing. Besides, if his neck is broken, might that not be worse than death?” Annja yawned. Despite her nap in the Purple Pussycat, she was feeling the effects of the ordeal, and knew she could do with some more sleep. And maybe a trip to the hospital wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all, she thought. Grazed, shot, cracked ribs and a sprained ankle…a little professional mending might be a very good idea. “What a thoroughly rotten day this has been.”
Dari joined her, watching as four more officers, these state police, joined the two from the van. After a few moments, Jennifer led them to the injured killer and gestured at the two bodies.
The bald biker’s face looked much worse than Annja had realized. Close to the fire the flames revealed every cut. The gargoyle tattoo was obscured by a smear of blood, and the fleshy ridge above his right eye was torn where one of the men had ripped out his silver hoop. The diamond stud had likewise been ripped out of his nose.
“Where’s that sword you were swinging?” he asked her. “The one you found on the ridge?”
Annja shrugged. “I must have dropped it somewhere.”
“Pity. It was a beaut,” he said. “That would have been a souvenir worth keeping.”
A brief silence settled between them.
“Sorry about all of this,” she said. Annja didn’t know quite what else to say. She’d inadvertently dragged other innocents into her adventures before, but rarely did they get beat up so badly. “Sulene’s right—you need to go to a hospital.”
“I’m in better shape than you,” he return
ed. “At least I wasn’t shot.”
“At least we’re both alive.” Annja’s voice trailed off as two of the police officers looked under the blankets at the bodies. A third went to Jeff’s cot.
The remaining three continued to talk to Wes and Jennifer, all of them hovering around the intruder. Jennifer talked about the two jeeps filled with the men who drove away. Then she pointed to Annja, and the police looked her way.
“You going to talk to them?” Dari raised a bloody eyebrow. Annja could see where bruises were starting to form on his cheeks. They would be large and would cover most of his face.
“I guess I’m going to have to,” she said. “But they’re not the ones I need to talk to. Those guys are back in Sydney.”
“Where this Dr. Hamam teaches?”
Annja nodded and shuffled toward the three policemen.
“Those men were looking for Annja Creed,” Jennifer said, waggling her fingers. “The woman who was doing a television special about our dig.”
Annja heard more sirens, and hoped it was the ambulance.
“Ambo’s coming,” an officer announced. “And so’s a medi-evac chopper. It’s just trying to find a close place to land.”
Annja stood next to Jennifer and told her side of the story, leaving out her sword, but leaving nothing out about Sayed and Dr. Hamam.
The police listened, one of them taking notes, one of them asking questions, and the third appearing to keep an eye on the Arab, but carefully taking in her story. She was surprised that they seemed to believe her, and at the same time she was glad that none of them had heard of her before or had watched a single episode of Chasing History’s Monsters.
Somehow she’d expected at least one of them to accuse her of being partly responsible for the carnage; she would have accused herself if she were in their position. And she half expected to be asked to “come downtown with us, ma’am.” Instead, the lead officer told her simply to stick around the country a few more days and let them know where she would be staying. He passed her a card with his name and contact numbers on it.
“And contact the Sydney police first thing in the morning,” the lead officer said. “They’ll want to ask you about the incident at the hotel. State investigators are going to want to talk to you, too.”
“Of course,” Annja agreed.
“You really should have talked to the Sydney detectives right away, ma’am,” he said.
“I realize that now,” she said apologetically.
“Yeah, hindsight really is twenty-twenty. Take care of yourself ma’am.”
Then he left her to call in a preliminary report.
Annja breathed a sigh of relief. She knew she could well be wanted in the Sydney hotel matter, and word of it hadn’t trickled out to police forces in other towns.
Annja learned that not all of the area police had come from Cessnock, but it had a prison, and Wes had told them there were a lot of men who needed locking up—hence the Cessnock police were asked to bring a prisoner transport van. One of the officers looking at the bodies grumbled that they didn’t need to bring their van for one live prisoner, adding that instead the archaeologist should have called for multiple ambulances.
Moments later an ambulance arrived, and Sulene waved frantically to get the paramedics’ attention.
“Jeff should be going on the helicopter,” Sulene said. “You can put that bastard on a backboard and take him in the ambo. I want Jeff on the helicopter.”
Annja wandered back to Dari.
“You should go with them, Dari.”
“Look, Miss Cr—”
“Annja.”
“Are you going? You were shot.”
She didn’t answer. She stared at the flames.
“The ambo’s from Cessnock, Annja. You’ll like the town. They call it a city, but it’s a spit of a city next to Sydney. It’s not too far north of here. Don’t think it has more than twenty thousand folks. But you can’t call it a woop woop, either.” He crossed his arms. “Used to be a mining town, but the coalfields all closed down some years back. Now it produces wine. The Darkinjung tribe settled it a few thousand years ago, then the Europeans came and wiped out a lot of the indigenous folk with their diseases. A lot of history there, that’s what you’d like about it.”
“I might visit it when I come back for a vacation,” Annja said.
“So you’re not going in the ambulance?”
She shook her head.
“You’re going to see Dr. Hamam, aren’t you?” Dari asked.
Annja nodded sadly.
“Seems like you’re more than just a television archaeologist,” Dari said.
“And you’re more than just another bloke from the Cross,” she replied with a smile.
“You look me up next time you’re in Sydney. Easy enough to find me through one of my op shops,” he said.
“I promise.” Annja felt in her pocket for the keys to the SUV. She had her own ride to the university.
23
Fortunately, one of the police officers drove Annja to the end of the service road where the SUV was parked. He just assumed the car was hers—it was a rental after all, and she had the keys for it. Though she’d been pretty complete in her descriptions of the fight on the ridge, and the subsequent one in the student camp—including telling them about the man trapped in the underground temple—she’d neglected to mention lifting the keys. She’d wanted transportation without having to ask someone to chauffer her around.
Unfortunately, the tank was less than a quarter full, and so another stop at a gas station was in order. Perhaps not so unfortunate after all, Annja decided, as she left the highway and exited into what Dari had called a woop woop. The town might have been small, but the gas station doubled as a convenience store.
Annja bought a bottle of pain killers, a comb, a brush and hair tie and a brown sweatshirt that displayed a picture of an Australian cattle dog. The other selections featured sharks, Tasmanian devils, boomerangs, aboriginal flags and various coats of arms and were in colors bright enough to add to her headache. Then she visited the restroom and turned on the tap, filling her hand with cold water and swallowing two pills before tackling anything else.
She looked into the mirror and shuddered. Annja had been in plenty of scrapes before, but she couldn’t recall when she’d been in so many fights within such a short amount of time.
“Who told me I looked like hell?” She shook her head. “I look worse. God, do I know this person staring back at me?” Tangled hanks of hair pulled out when she combed it, but after several minutes she’d managed to make it presentable, and she twisted it back into the tie.
Her face was another matter. She scrubbed it and scowled at a bluish bruise on her cheek, and another on her jaw, the latter turning a vivid purple. Her lower lip was a little swollen, but maybe no one would notice that. There were five small bruises on her neck, where one of the men must have grabbed her and squeezed. She stared closer. It looked as if she had the makings of a black eye.
Another trip to the cash register resulted in a travelsize stick of deodorant and overpriced makeup that covered up most of the evidence of the fight.
A vial of perfume completed her purchase. She dabbed some behind her ears and on her wrists to get rid of some of the stink she’d acquired from her ordeal. She used a liberal amount of the deodorant and threw the rest away. Then she tossed her blouse in the garbage, along with the jacket she’d taken from one of the men. She put on the sweatshirt and decided she looked acceptable enough.
“At least I look more like a human and less like something a big cat dragged in. I guess I clean up pretty good.” She no longer resembled the gaunt, haunted, battered-looking woman of a few minutes ago.
Annja knew that in her previous state she likely wouldn’t be able to talk her way past any security guard—and that’s what she’d likely need to do. She’d looked like a homeless person.
A third trip to the cash register bought her two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a
carton of milk, a big green apple and a handful of candy bars. She took them out to the SUV and started eating before she pulled back onto the road. She’d paid for everything with some of the money from the roll she’d taken off one of the men. It couldn’t have been helped, she knew; the gas station didn’t take American credit cards and she’d been pretty well tapped out after paying the painter for a lift in his pickup.
She spotted a speed-limit sign as she pulled back on the highway and pointed herself toward Sydney. Annja didn’t look down at the dash to see how fast she was going; she knew it was above the limit. She just didn’t want to know how much above.
Annja feasted quickly, both because she was famished and because she was nervous. Something was up, and she hadn’t put the pieces together. But she knew it had to be bad to involve the Sword. The police had heard of him, and the officer who’d given her the lift said a bulletin was going out immediately. The police had seemed reluctant to consider Dr. Hamam a threat, especially when Cindy and Jon came up and reiterated how the professor couldn’t have realized what sort of company he was keeping.
“Oh, he knew,” Annja muttered as she slugged down the milk. “But what are the two of them up to?” She stashed the wrappers back in the bag and set it on the passenger’s side of the floorboard. Then, hunkering down and still keeping her eye on the road, she reached under the passenger’s seat. “Lovely.” She pulled out a gun and immediately cut her speed. “I so do not need to be pulled over and have the cops find this.”
She scolded herself for not searching the SUV thoroughly at the gas station. The gun might come in handy, but she still preferred the sword. She put it back, contorted a little, and reached under the driver’s seat, finding a map folder, but no more weapons. The map, she reasoned, would come in far handier than the gun.
Annja turned on the radio, curious if she’d hear a breaking-news bulletin about Sayed. Instead, she heard the DJ announce a power hour of heavy-meal bands. “No, thank you,” she said as she turned it off. She put both hands on the wheel and watched the miles go by.