Eternal Journey

by Alex Archer

  When she neared Sydney she fished out the map, finding one detailed enough of the city to show the university. There was a light attached to the rearview mirror, and she turned it on.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  There were five circles on the map, drawn in thick pencil. Did they mean something? Or were they drawn by the rent-a-car place in response to a previous driver’s questions for tourist stops? She abandoned the map and let her thoughts whirl until she turned off into the city.

  Taking a side street, she pulled over and looked at the map more closely, holding it up to the light. The places marked were near the intersections of George and Argyle Streets in the Rocks area not far from Circular Quay and the harbor; another at Harris and Miller; the smallest circle at Bulwara Road and Mary Ann; one at William and Forest, not far from Kings Cross; and the fifth obscured the street names but sat in the middle of a triangle formed by Chinatown, Capital Square and Paddy’s Markets. There were three small X marks, too, but they were in the middle of squares and not associated with a particular street.

  It took her a minute to find the Darlington campus of the university on the next map fold and to trace a route there. That’s where she intended to begin, as not a single student at the dig knew where Dr. Hamam lived.

  “At the university,” Jon had told her right before she left. “If he’s not at the dig, he’s at the university. He lives for Egypt.”

  It least it would be a start. Someone at the university would tell Annja where Dr. Hamam lived; she could be charming and persuasive when needed.

  Traffic was light, Sydney seemed like a ghost town at this early hour. Residential streets were mostly dark, and Annja was struck by the disparity in traveling only a few blocks. Fine, big houses that were well kept up and that she knew would fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars lined a clean street of manicured lawns. Within minutes she came to a section reminiscent of any large city—rundown places with peeling paint, sagging roofs, broken steps and cracked sidewalks. Sheets served as drapes in one place; next to it was a narrow two-story building with the windows boarded up and a tricycle with no wheels sitting out front.

  She came to a small business district that looked as if it had some age to it but was clean and tidy. The lights burned softly in a bakery, and she imagined that people were already preparing the morning’s goods. A going-out-of-business banner was plastered across the window of an art gallery. This part of the city reminded her of one of the smaller New York City boroughs she liked to frequent.

  She pulled onto one of the university’s main drives, and noted it was close to 4:00 a.m. It was a big campus; she could tell that even in the darkness.

  “How the hell am I going to find him?” she muttered. A few moments later she parked next to a kiosk, ghostly lit by a streetlight. It didn’t take her long to find a faculty directory. “Now why would his office be way over there?” She tapped the map. “Because he’s temporary, as Jon said. Just a visitor. And one who has more than worn out his welcome.”

  She chewed on one of her fingernails and twisted the hem of her sweatshirt with her other hand. Whatever Dr. Hamam and the Sword were planning would happen soon; she just knew it. And that meant she didn’t have a lot of time to track them down and end it.

  She got back in the SUV and took Missenden to Parramatta, avoiding the interior of the campus. She didn’t see a soul out and about, though she saw quite a few lights on. She took a right on Ross and found Science Road, passed a campus security car that paid her no heed and rolled into a parking lot. The sign said she needed a parking sticker, but she expected to be in and out before anyone cruised by and noticed her vehicle.

  She tried three doors and couldn’t find anything open, not even a window she could crawl through, and there was nothing she could climb to reach the second floor and try the windows there. Annja went back to the parking lot and looked around. There were four cars. One of them might belong to Dr. Hamam. She went to the door closest to the lot and pounded on it. She paced on the short sidewalk and pounded again, pressed her face to the glass of a small window set halfway up in the door and peered inside to find the hall beyond dimly lit.

  Annja bent to get a close look at the lock. She tucked her arm into her side and ground her teeth together; her ribs were reminding her they were still cracked. She could tell the door required a key card, but she might be able to trick it. There didn’t look to be any way to pick it, and the window was safety glass, the kind that had the wire running through it. She was too big to fit through it anyway.

  A third time pounding, and Annja was just about ready to find campus security and plead her case. But through the small window she saw a man coming down the hall, arms swinging loosely at his sides. He took his time getting to her, and he only opened the door a crack.

  She produced her wallet, the way a cop showed his badge on TV shows. It displayed an old press credential card on one side that she’d acquired for doing a series of segments in Europe a few years ago. She’d kept it because it looked impressive and official.

  “So?” he said, unimpressed. His gray-green shirt was crisp with creases and had a name tag sewn on it, but she could only make out the letters Th. “What can a reporter want at four in the morning? And at this building?”

  It wasn’t quite four yet; Annja checked her watch.

  “I’m with a film crew doing a special on a dig north of Sydney.”

  “Dr. Hamam’s big project?”

  Her eyes glistened and she slipped the tip of her tennis shoe in the door.

  “Yes, I need to speak with him. It’s urgent.” She put on a concerned face, forehead scrunched in wrinkles. “It’s very important.” No pleading in her voice, all businesslike. She met his gaze and didn’t blink.

  He looked through the window and into the parking lot. “That your car? The big black one?”

  She nodded.

  “You need a sticker to park there.”

  “Is Dr. Hamam here?”

  “I don’t think so. He works late, but not this late. And he doesn’t come in this early.”

  “Could I check? His office?” She worked to keep from talking too quickly, as she sometimes did when she was in a hurry. “It would only take a moment.”

  “I suppose. Got nothing else to do right now. But you need a sticker for the lot.”

  “I’ll risk it,” she said.

  “I’ll have to go with you.”

  “Of course.”

  He let her in and closed the door firmly behind her. Immediately she was assaulted by the smell of floor polish and disinfectant. Thadeus was the name on his shirt.

  “You’re the night watchman?”

  He gave a clipped laugh. “Hardly, though I suppose you could say so. I’m the third-shift janitor for this building, and in another hour I’m going to be heading home for a nice long weekend. So you’ll make this quick?”

  “Of course. Thank you, Thadeus.”

  Hamam’s office was down a turn in the corridor, nearly at the other end of the hall. They hadn’t quite got there when the janitor shook his head and stopped.

  “No lights. Told you he didn’t work this late, or come in this early. You could try back on Monday.”

  “I’ll have to go to his house, then.”

  “I suppose so,” he said.

  She hesitated. “But I don’t know where he lives.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “But I bet his address is in his office.”

  He shook his head again.

  “And I bet you have a key.” She turned on a dazzling smile and prayed that it would work. For a moment it looked as if it was lost on him and that he would boot her back out into the parking lot.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.

  “I’ll be quick. I promise.”

  He hesitated.

  “It’s important. Really.” This time a hint of desperation crept into her voice. Annja didn’t want to break into the office, but she knew at this point she w
ould. Something bad was transpiring—she knew it with every inch of her being, and she was obligated by some unknown force to do something about it.

  “All right.” He looked at her, puzzled, and fished out a ring of keys. His fingers went to a tarnished one that had Master written on it on a small piece of masking tape. “But you’re not to take anything.”

  “No.”

  “Then be quick. Neither one of us needs to get in trouble.” He opened the door and turned on the light, and after she slipped inside he stood in the frame, arms crossed in front of his chest. “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” he said again.

  She was immediately struck by the plainness of the office. There were no pictures or certificates on the walls, and the bookcases were only half-filled. The desk was uncluttered, with in and out baskets on one corner, the phone and a carefully folded newspaper on another. There was a calendar blotter, and she stepped behind the desk.

  She looked up to see Thadeus watching her.

  Today’s date was circled in green marker on the calendar, but nothing was written in the space beneath. Previous dates had things marked like “Student essays due,” “Report to the vice-chancellor,” “Evening seminar on the papyrus of Ani.” There were also scrawls in hieroglyphics, and Annja wondered if they were doodles or secret reminder notes.

  “Find an address?”

  “Not yet.” She opened the desk drawer and discovered pens and pencils neatly lined up in a tray, every pencil sharpened to a fine point and not a single mechanical pencil in the bunch. There were index cards, sticky note pads and paperclips, all of it orderly. Nothing personal, she noted, no photographs of family members or favorite dogs, no candy bars or packs of chewing gum. She looked in another drawer.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking,” Thadeus said. “If I had an office, I wouldn’t keep my home address listed in it. I’d know where I lived, and I wouldn’t need anything to remind me.”

  Annja was quick to answer. “I thought maybe I’d find a faculty directory, or some letters that had been sent to his home address that he’d brought in. It would be an apartment, I’d think, him being here as a visiting professor. Though I suppose he could be renting a house near the campus.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Thadeus was getting impatient, his knee jumping and his mouth working. She looked through the next drawer, finally finding something personal—a paperweight of an Egyptian pyramid. She turned it over and smiled: Made In China. There were more office supplies, but nothing of interest.

  “Time to go,” Thadeus said.

  Annja briefly entertained the notion of leaving with him and finding a way to slip back in. She knew where the office was and therefore which window to break now. Maybe she could find something on the bookshelves.

  “And what’s so important anyway that it can’t wait for later in the day? Campus operator can maybe help you after nine or so. Why not wait for Monday?”

  “Because I think your visiting professor is involved with an international terrorist and I want to know what they’re up to.” Annja spoke rapid-fire out of frustration, having resigned herself to looking elsewhere.

  The janitor made a huffing sound. “I wouldn’t doubt it. He’s an odd duck, that one. Strange hours. Strange visitors.”

  She looked up and studied his face; the janitor wasn’t kidding. “What visitors?”

  “Aside from you? Well, yesterday, or maybe it was the day before, a Middle Eastern gentlemen—I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what country he was from—thought he’d snuck in here without me seeing. Not much passes by me, though. Small man, but I didn’t like the looks of him. Face all scarred. I would’ve tossed him out, but I just didn’t want to—”

  “Confront him?” Annja asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Annja dug through the rest of the drawers in a frenzy. “He’s a terrorist, that man you saw, and he goes by the name of the Sword.” It was all right to reveal that, she figured, as it would be out on the news soon enough if the police took it seriously.

  “What’s he doing with Dr. Hamam?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.” The desperation and frustration were thick in her voice. “Damn. Nothing.”

  Thadeus cleared his throat. “He also spent a lot of time at the museum on campus, or so he told me one night. We’ve quite the Egyptian display. I went through it once, took my middle son.”

  She looked up again.

  “But it doesn’t open until noon on Saturdays.”

  Annja came around the desk, so quickly and clumsily that she knocked over the wastebasket. Crumpled and burned papers tumbled out. She plopped down on the floor and started going through them. There was an acrid scent to them, as if they’d been burned fairly recently. She thought she should have noticed the smell immediately, but then the scent of floor polish and disinfectant had hung heavy out in the hall.

  “Find something?”

  “Maybe. Give me just a little bit more time.”

  “Didn’t like the looks of that scarred fellow at all. Wasn’t the disfigurement, mind you. My wife’s missing her left arm from the elbow down, born that way.” He paused and rocked back on his heels, looked left and right out of the office to make sure no one else was about during this ungodly early hour. He leaned back in. “I didn’t like the way he walked, all skulky like, and the way he kept his head down. He was dressed too good, an expensive suit like you’d see on a movie star or a politician.”

  He continued to discuss the terrorist, asking Annja what things he’d blown up and what she knew about him. She didn’t answer; she was too caught up in the notes she’d found. The largest crumpled piece had been on the bottom and was charred the least. She carefully opened it.

  “What’s it say?”

  She saw no problem reading it to him, as he’d been so cooperative.

  Thoth is the judge of right and truth of the company of gods, all in the presence of Osiris. Hear Thoth’s judgment. Osiris’s heart has been weighed, and the soul of that heart has provided testimony. His heart has been found right according to the trial in the great balance.

  She paused. “I think it’s a translation from the Book of the Dead.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s not really a book. It’s just called that.” She continued:

  Osiris, no wickedness has been found inside him, and he has not committed an evil act. He is worthy of the offerings that are made in his temples. His mouth does not speak evil words.

  She paused. “Interesting, but not useful,” she decided.

  She looked at the rest of the pieces, not able to make out any complete sentences. Thadeus knelt in front of her and tried to help.

  “‘Pipe, pump,’” he read. “‘One hundred psi, 150 psi.’ That’s all imperial measurements, not metric. Means pound per square inch.”

  “But inch of what?” Annja mused aloud. “Water, gas, solid?”

  She unfolded a half-charred receipt for truck rentals—three, no clue to the size or the company. Then she found part of an address, which she showed to the janitor.

  “That’s not all that awfully far from here. It’s an old industrial complex. My dad used to work at the Palmen Factory there. But it’s closed now.”

  She stood and paced in a tight circle. “Think, think, think.” Then she paced in front of one of the bookshelves, eyes scanning the titles while her mind continued to whirl.

  Ancient Egypt, by Daniel Cohen; Ancient Egypt, by Geraldine Harris; Ancient Egypt, by George Hart; The Egyptians, by Roger Coote; Ramses II and Egypt, by Oliver Tiano; The Nubians: People of the Ancient Nile, by Robert Bainchi; Gods and Pharaohs from Egyptian Mythology; High Pressure Pumps Instruction Manual.

  She stopped at the last title and pulled it from its spot, passing it to Thadeus. “What do you make of this?”

  He thumbed through it as he stood. “Pretty basic,” he said. “Imperial again, not metric, so I doubt he got it here. Tells you how to operate water pumps and connect th
em to various lines.”

  Annja’s throat grew instantly dry and her breath caught.

  Inside the underground temple to Hathor, beyond the burial chamber, was the pond covered with dead fish. She hadn’t given it any thought when she saw them—other than noting how absolutely awful they smelled.

  “The fish were dead because the water had been poisoned.” Annja made the mental leap to that conclusion. “And the manual on water pumps, rented trucks…it means they’re going to poison something bigger. A lot bigger.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to absorb the enormity of what she guessed was about to transpire.

  “I think they mean to poison Sydney’s water, and kill an awful lot of people. Dear God why?”

  24

  Annja glanced at the dashboard clock. It was almost 4:30 a.m. It had taken her several minutes to search Hamam’s office and find the clues in the trash—what she hoped were clues, anyway—to his horrid plans. And it had taken a handful more minutes to call the police and try to explain her suspicions.

  “Your name again, ma’am?” the officer had asked.

  “Annja Creed,” she’d repeated. “I’m an American, and I—”

  “The television personality. Yes, ma’am, I know who you are. Where are you?”

  Annja knew she was wanted by the authorities, bare minimum for questioning. But most likely she was some sort of suspect in the shooting incident at the hotel. Enough guests standing in the hall had seen her fight with the men in her room and kill two of them.

  “I’m at the university,” she’d answered truthfully, stifling a yawn. “I’m in an office building off Science Road, Dr. Hamam’s office on the first floor. The building has green trim around the windows.” Then she had tugged the card out of her pocket and gave him the name of the police officer from Cessnock she’d spoken with a few hours ago. He’d tell the Sydney police about the gunmen at the dig; that would give credence to her story. She rattled off the location of the old industrial park where she thought something bad would transpire, based on the note in the trash, and the intersections circled on the map that she could remember. She’d left the map in the SUV.