Eternal Journey

by Alex Archer

  At the same time the janitor was in the office across the hall, calling campus security and telling them to locate Dr. Gahiji Hamam.

  When the police officer kept asking Annja more information about herself, and when it appeared that he was deliberately trying to stall her, she hung up and left. She was certain she could find the industrial park from the directions Thadeus had given her.

  As she drove, her head occasionally nodding in fatigue, she prayed that the officer had believed some of what she’d told him. She intended to call again if no police showed up at the industrial park. She thought it a good bet that some police might go to the university. Thadeus had said he’d wait for them and tell them his own suspicions about Hamam and his terrorist visitor.

  I’m tired, so very tired, Annja thought. And on top of that she ached from the top of her head to her very sprained ankle. She felt miserable and could benefit from rest and medical care, but there wasn’t time for it.

  The campus still looked uninhabited as she drove through it; not a soul was on the sidewalks or driving into or out of the parking lots. It would be so very easy to fall asleep, she thought, yawning and rubbing her eyes. She still had two candy bars left from her convenience-store stop, and so she ate them, barely registering their sugary taste as she pulled out of the campus gates and headed south.

  She followed the janitor’s directions, aided by the map sprawled on the passenger’s seat. She turned on the radio, again hearing no news reports, though she did find a talk-radio program discussing the soaring prices of aboriginal art. She let it play just for the noise.

  “Why would they want to poison people?” Annja asked aloud. She had learned long ago that talking to herself sometimes helped her puzzle out problems. “Innocent people who have nothing to do with Egyptian artifacts—why hurt them? I’m not wrong. That’s what they’re going to do, this Dr. Hamam and Sayed the Sword. But why?”

  There seemed to be no other explanation for the pumping equipment, truck-rental receipt and the dead fish at the dig site.

  “And why Sydney?” A big city, sure. But off the proverbial beaten path as far as terrorist activities went—most of those hotbeds were in the Middle East, Europe and the United States. “Why Sydney?”

  She slammed the palm of her hand against the steering wheel. If it was to cover a theft, that seemed pretty ludicrous. If Dr. Hamam wanted to steal artifacts from the student dig, he could have done it easily—without exacting a death toll. Some of the graduate students under his auspices practically worshiped him. Take Jon and Cindy and maybe even Matthew, for example. They would have helped him crate up the pieces and never asked what would happen to them. Hamam likely could have told them the relics were being shipped to Egypt for closer study, and the students would not have raised an alarm. They might have even helped him carry the crates directly to the airport.

  Maybe the professor had indeed stolen the relics, or at least some of them. Jon had told her all the pieces from inside the temple were intact, with traces of color remaining, and therefore exceedingly valuable. But as much as Annja revered the past and its antiquities, and recognized the importance of the Australian find, she knew that the artifacts were just things, and not worth killing that many people over.

  “He could have just flown away with them,” she said, yawning, and then yawning longer and wider. “Why couldn’t he have left everything else alone?” A commercial came on advertising discounted day trips to the Blue Mountains, the Three Sisters rock formation and a small zoo in the area with koala bears that could be petted. Annja’s head bobbed forward and she dug the fingernails of her left hand into her palm to force herself to stay awake.

  “What if Oliver hadn’t stood on the ridge less than forty-eight hours past and taken a shot of Dr. Hamam and the terrorist? Maybe he didn’t even take any images. Maybe Oliver just looked. But what if he hadn’t stood up there? And what if I hadn’t joined him?”

  She knew if Oliver hadn’t walked up the ridge just before they called it a wrap, then the Sword would not have seen him. Assassins would not have subsequently killed him and come after her. And though those assassins might have later descended on the archaeology digs to eliminate potential witnesses, she and Oliver would have been on a plane to New York and oblivious to their nefarious deeds.

  And as a result, maybe no one would have been alerted to the poison—before the act. Maybe no one would have known about the powerful terrorist on Australian soil.

  “And maybe no one would be trying to stop him.” Annja leaned forward in her seat and looked up at a street sign. “Not this one. Gotta be the next.” She kept driving south. “Maybe Oliver climbed that ridge and became a sacrificial lamb. Maybe Ollie’s sacrifice was to get my attention and set things in motion.”

  More cars were out on the streets now than when Annja had first come into the city. People were no doubt heading out to early-morning jobs. She saw a station wagon full of kids and suitcases, a family leaving on a vacation.

  “Good that they’re getting out of Sydney,” Annja mused. “This place isn’t safe right now.”

  The dashboard clock read 4:44 when she pulled up to the industrial park. The sky was starting to lighten, and from the looks of the few thin clouds overhead it would be a bright day. The sign at the entrance to the park was old and weathered, and a plank of wood was missing out of its middle. There were several lights on high poles in the parking lots, but only about half of them worked, and those glowed with a pale blue-white. They looked to be the kind with sensors that signaled them to come on at dusk and turn off when the sun rose.

  The tall wire gate was pulled closed, but there was no lock on it, only a chain that dangled loose. Annja turned off the radio, left the SUV running and jumped out. She pushed the gate open with little effort—though it squealed loudly—then she slowly pulled into the parking lot, not bothering to get out again and close the gate. Her gaze flitted everywhere.

  No sign of any police cars yet, but that didn’t mean they weren’t on their way. She’d come directly from the university and had not been too careful about obeying the speed limit.

  Two small factories, the ones directly to the east, appeared to be closed, their walls made of some sort of rusted metal and rust-stained concrete, and most of the windows broken. Annja spotted seagulls flying out of a hole in a roof. There was a larger factory beyond them still operating, smoke coming from one of its stacks. If there were other complexes, she couldn’t spot them from here, and so she drove across a section of a parking lot that was empty of everything save tall tufts of weeds that sprouted from cracks in the pavement.

  Beyond the first of the closed factories, which sported fading graffiti and under it the names of the former businesses, was a larger lot that had a few dozen cars. None of the vehicles were new or expensive, marking them as belonging to laborers who likely weren’t earning a high hourly wage.

  Annja shook her head to rouse herself. The sugar from the candy bars either hadn’t kicked in or she was so hopelessly tired that a sugar rush wouldn’t matter.

  She spotted a one-man shed where perhaps a factory watchman was posted. It was in the middle of the lot, and she headed there. No sooner had she passed two rows of cars when she veered away.

  “So tired I’m not thinking straight,” she said. “I talk to him—or her—and let on by asking questions that I’m not supposed to be here, I will probably get bounced.” She drove around the southern edge of the factory, not knowing really what she was looking for, maybe a big garage or warehouse where the rented trucks might be, a place to mix and load the poison. An empty place, most likely, she thought.

  “Empty and ignored,” she told herself.

  She turned around and drove back to the two abandoned factories, and she scrutinized them more carefully. The first had been a cement plant, and was the uglier of the two. Its two stacks were corroded, and a thorny vine, dying with the fall, had grown halfway up one of them, birds’ nests dotting it here and there. She rolled down her
window and leaned out; the air was filled with an unpleasant smell that could have come from this abandoned place or from the operating factory. Her eyes watered.

  The building wasn’t especially large, and resembled an ugly box, with twisted pieces of rebar sticking out at odd angles like the legs of an overturned spider. There was a roll of something like barbed wire stretched across a bank of windows that had been broken. It would effectively keep most people out. Probably not to keep them from looting the place, Annja guessed, but to keep them from hurting themselves inside and suing whoever owned this monstrosity.

  What struck Annja was that despite its horrid appearance, it was clean. There were no piles of refuse around it or discarded fast-food bags, no mounds of cigarettes or other detritus from people who’d cruised in the lot.

  The building had a wide corrugated door, mostly rusted, that was chained and locked. At least it looked locked from her vantage point. There were a few smaller doors, one with a faded Workers sign above it, another with Deliveries. She thought those might not be locked, so she slipped out of the SUV and tried them. Not only were they locked, but also they were rusted shut, with no sign that anyone had broken in.

  She looked through a low window, one the roll of barbed wire didn’t quite reach. The interior was thick with shadows; the emerging sun and what glow was left from the lights in the parking lot weren’t quite enough to reach very far inside. From what she could tell, it looked as if a jumble of girders had fallen from above, and a metal stairway that stretched out of sight was missing most of its steps. The floor and walls had thick cracks, and all the other details were lost in the darkness.

  She hurried to a window on the other side and saw nothing different, save a concrete truck, which immediately set her heart beating faster. Then she noticed it was missing tires in the front; it hadn’t been anywhere in quite some time. Annja dashed back to the SUV and went to other closed factory.

  Maybe it was nothing, the address in the wastebasket, she thought. Or maybe she’d read it wrong or Thadeus had given her bad directions. She tried to tell herself that she was jumping to conclusions about the terrorist poisoning Sydney’s water supply—but that didn’t work. In her gut she knew she was right.

  She’d take a quick look at this one, she decided, and then she would try another spot marked on the map.

  She came at the next building from the rear, where she was surprised to see an open section where part of a wall had been brought down. Jensan’s Tile was painted in a repeating stripe around the top, the letters looking dark gray against a pale gray building. She turned off the SUV this time, pocketed the keys and jogged toward the opening.

  The structure was a mishmash of material. Part of its skin was corrugated metal, but from the inside she could tell it was over a wood frame, with beams that stretched up about twenty feet. This section must have been a storage area, as the floor was hard-packed earth with tiny gravel chips scattered everywhere. She saw the remains of pallets, some of them charred.

  There were no traces of whatever kind of tiles the place used to manufacture, but an open man-sized door set in an interior brick wall hinted that she could find out. She stepped through it into a fairly small room that had probably served as an office. A metal desk was intact against the wall to her left, the chair so much splinters in front of it. There were remnants of other desks and file cabinets, wooden ones that must have been expensive in their day—one brass handle remained attached to a drawer.

  She was about to turn and leave to pursue one of the other spots marked on the map when she heard something coming from beyond a closed door.

  Annja wished she’d brought the gun with her; she’d left it under the seat in the SUV, and she wasn’t about to go back and get it. She glided forward, careful not to step on anything that would make noise and give her away. The door that led away was cracked open, no longer hanging properly from broken hinges. She scowled. If she opened it, it would make a heck of a racket. But would it be heard above the noise that was getting louder?

  She peered through the crack and inhaled sharply. Six men worked over a hole they were enlarging in the concrete floor. They were using something like a jackhammer, and it, coupled with the concrete breaking away, was responsible for the noise. There was obviously electricity in the building, to operate their tools—and for the bank of flickering lights that hung overhead. With no windows, they wouldn’t have to worry about the light attracting attention from anyone passing outside.

  The room had been used for manufacturing the tiles, or at least cutting them. On the far side, Annja could see what remained of conveyor belts, and there was something that looked like a guillotine that might have been used to break larger tile sheets into specified sizes. All of it was rusty and broken, and pools of water on the floor, which sparkled incongruously in the lights from overhead, suggested that the roof leaked in several places.

  Craning her neck and forcing the door open just a bit wider, she cringed when it squeaked harshly. She waited but it was not enough, apparently, to draw the men’s attention. She saw three vehicles to her left. One was a jeep, with mud thick on its tires and quarter panels, and a shattered windshield from where she had shot it hours earlier. Another was a small four-door Honda sedan, forest-green and certain to be inconspicuous on the street.

  The vehicle that made the hackles on the back of her neck rise was a mid-sized tanker truck that read, Bob’s Pools And Water Gardens. A wavy blue line underscored the words, and smiling goldfish in sunglasses frolicked above Water Gardens.

  A man perched on top of the truck was draining large jugs into a hole in the top of the tank. A hose ran from a port on the back of the tank and coiled on the concrete a few feet from the men who were maneuvering their drills against the floor.

  She nudged the door open wider still and touched her sword with her mind.

  Why did I have to be right?

  25

  Annja wasn’t confident she could take them. There were seven men, and though she only saw guns on two of them—pistols shoved behind the waistbands of the men facing away from her—she knew they could all have weapons.

  Four of the men were dressed in the same dark clothes the other thugs had worn. They didn’t have ski masks—no one to conceal their faces from here. Instead, each had a small black turban that appeared tightly wrapped. The six around the hole were wearing goggles, the cheap plastic kind designed to protect their eyes from the shards of flying concrete. Two wore pressed blue pants and beige shirts. Across the back of one she read Bob’s Pools. They’d made no effort to keep their clothes clean, and the pants were dusty from the chipping concrete. The final man, the one on top of the tanker truck, had on jeans and a flannel shirt, a short brown beard and he reminded her of the assistant from Home Improvement.

  She turned her ear to the door and listened closely. The two men in the Bob’s Pools shirts had backed away from the hole and were conversing. One was an Asian man, tall and broad shouldered. She recalled some of the graduate students mentioning a big Korean. The other was darker skinned, and she recognized him from out on the street by her hotel.

  Annja knew she needed to act quickly, but she also knew a little more information could prove useful, and a little more time might allow the police to show up and better the odds.

  “The first chemical will neutralize the chlorine in the city’s water,” the Korean explained. “It is very concentrated, so take care not to splash any on you.”

  “And then we recycle it through the tank?”

  The Korean smiled. “The main that runs under this building is old and one of the largest in the city. It will be easy to tap into, and out here no one will notice the smell.”

  “Except us.” The man wrinkled his nose and gestured to another man, who had just put down his drill. “Get us the masks, and then make the connection. It stinks worse than roadkill.”

  Another man, this one so young-looking Annja thought he should be in high school, pointed to tanks propped up
against the base of a broken assembly table. “And these?” He picked up a wrench that was at least two feet long.

  “After the chlorine has been neutralized,” the Korean answered, “then we use those. Don’t you listen?”

  The tanks were filled with poison, and Annja knew she couldn’t let the men dump them into the water supply. She could not wait any longer, despite the horrible odds.

  Where were the police?

  Perhaps the officer she’d spoken to hadn’t believed her—the tale was a little farfetched, something out of a bad movie. Or maybe they’d already cruised through the lots, as she had, and found nothing amiss. But wouldn’t they have noticed her SUV? In any event, she knew enough science to understand time was running out.

  Chlorine was used in drinking water to help make it safe. It could potentially detoxify whatever poison the crew intended to introduce. But if the chlorine was neutralized, the poison could work all of its grisly wonders. She was certain it had killed all those fish in the cave. Undoubtedly it could also kill people.

  She centered herself and closed her eyes, sought the balance she had learned to achieve through her rigorous martial-arts training. Her breathing even, her heart beating strong and calm, she was ready. Reaching for the sword, she opened the door.

  Annja had to yank it hard, the metal screaming against the concrete because it had dropped on its hinges. She leaped through the opening, just as two of the men reached for their guns.

  Everything happened so quickly, she tried to register it all. The two men in Bob’s Pools shirts darted behind the tanker truck, and the man on top slid off, landing on the side away from Annja. Three of the seven were no longer visible.

  That left four to contend with in plain sight—two with guns, and two who were picking up lengths of chain that had been lying on the floor. The teenager was still holding the massive wrench in one hand.