Cradle of Solitude

by Alex Archer

  “I’m told that Professor Reinhardt from the Museum of Natural History is already waiting for us below. As the official representative from my country, he will be in charge of the project, though any actions that impact the remains directly must be approved through you. Will there be a problem with that?”

  Annja shook her head. Bernard Reinhardt was an old friend. She’d worked with him on several projects and tried to find time to say hello whenever she was in Paris. His conduct in the field was impeccable; she couldn’t have asked for a better partner.

  “Let’s get to it,” she said.

  Stepping over to the ladder that extended out of the hole in the tunnel floor, Laroche swung himself onto its rungs and started downward.

  Annja gave him a moment, and then followed.

  4

  Lights had been strung along the ceiling of the tunnel and in their glare Annja could easily see the differences between this tunnel and the one above. It was narrower, for one, with walls of hewn limestone rather than concrete, and with a ceiling that was a good two feet lower than the previous passageway. Where they had been able to walk two abreast with room to spare in the tunnel above, down here they were forced to move single file down the narrow corridor. It was also quiet. Gone were the faint sounds of distant trains rumbling through the walls; the limestone surrounding them seemed to swallow up even the slightest echo, devouring it before it could move more than a few inches from its source.

  The most striking difference, however, was the sense of age that filled the rough-hewn walls around them. This tunnel had been around for a long time, that much was obvious, and Annja found herself wondering just what it had seen and been witness to over the years.

  “This way,” Laroche said as he led her down the tunnel. They’d only walked a dozen or so yards before the opening to a chamber loomed on their left. The string of lights led inside and Laroche and Annja followed them.

  Entering the room, Annja stopped short, her eyes widening at what she saw.

  The entire chamber was fashioned of bones.

  Human bones.

  Tibias and femurs by the thousands were stacked neatly side by side, interspersed regularly with rows of skulls, their empty eye sockets staring at her as if in accusation. Here and there the skulls had been arranged in artistic patterns, a cross being the most common. There were no intact skeletons, the goal of the arrangement clearly having been to make the best use of the space available, and Annja could only assume that the rib cages, spines and other bones that would have made up the rest of each skeleton had been used to fill in the spaces behind the larger bones. Most of the stacks rose to a height of about 5 feet and from what she could see they were a few yards deep in some places. To her left was a plaque noting the year the bones had been interred as well as the cemetery from which they had come.

  Clearly they had entered the original catacombs.

  “Annja!” an exuberant voice cried, pulling her away from her study of the skulls before her. She turned to find her colleague, Professor Bernard Reinhardt, emerging from the chamber just beyond, his hand extended in welcome. The smile on his face was outmatched only by the size of his handlebar mustache, which stretched a good inch past his cheeks on either side.

  Reinhardt was a large, portly man in his early sixties, though he had the exuberant energy of a man half his size and age. He’d been known to work right through the night and into the next day while on an important dig, putting most of the graduate students who worked with him to shame. In the narrow confines of the underground passageway he appeared twice as big as usual and Annja found herself having to stifle the urge to back away as he thundered toward her. He was dressed in a thick flannel shirt, jeans and solid pair of hiking boots, a far cry from the three-piece suit, complete with pocket watch and chain, that he liked to wear while at the museum.

  Annja had met him several years before while in Paris for a symposium during which he’d delivered a presentation on the Saxon conquest of Normandy. She’d been so impressed with his quick mind and engaging delivery that she’d introduced herself after his talk. Despite the obvious difference in their ages and educational backgrounds, their shared love of European history had turned them into colleagues with genuine respect for each other’s specialties.

  “Hello, Bernard,” she said, ignoring his outstretched hand and giving him a quick hug, which earned her a hearty embrace.

  “It is so good to see you, Annja,” he said, releasing her. “Have they told you why you are here?”

  “Just that they’ve discovered something of interest to both your government and mine,” she replied.

  Bernard grinned. “Well, then, if they didn’t spoil the surprise, I’m not going to, either. This way, my dear.”

  He turned and led her through several other chambers, each one similar to the last. The stacks of bones seemed to go on and on; everywhere she looked, the walls were covered with them. Not that Annja was surprised. She’d heard it estimated that there were more than six million skeletons interred down here in the dark.

  That’s a lot of ghosts, she thought.

  Ahead of her, Bernard came to a halt at the entrance to a side chamber.

  “Is this it?” she asked.

  He nodded, then extended a hand, as if to say, After you.

  Her lantern held high, Annja entered the chamber.

  The room was small, no larger than ten square feet, she estimated, and so it didn’t take her long to pick out what she’d been brought there to see.

  The skeleton was seated with its back against the wall of the antechamber, its legs stretched out before it. A cavalry saber was gripped in one hand, in the other, a Colt revolver. At first glance both weapons appeared to be in excellent condition. So, too, was the uniform the skeleton wore—wool trousers and a light shirt, both partially covered by a long frock coat that hung to midthigh. The three bars that designated the rank of captain had been sewn onto the coat’s collar. A kepi hat was still perched atop the skull where it rested against the back wall.

  The dirt and dust that had settled on the remains of the clothing made it difficult to determine the exact color of the uniform, but there was no mistaking the brass emblem of a wreath pinned to the front of the hat. The arms of the wreath rose on either side, surrounding the three letters nestled between them.

  CSA.

  As she stared at the emblem in surprise, Annja finally understood what Laroche had meant. They weren’t questioning that the remains belonged to an American. Not at all. They were questioning his status because the America he’d belonged to no longer existed.

  The Confederate States of America.

  5

  Annja walked over to the skeleton and settled into a crouch before it, her gaze moving slowly and carefully, taking in the details. Behind her, she heard Bernard step into the room.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it?” he said, his voice hushed, as if in reverence for the dead man before them. “To think he’s been down here for a hundred and fifty years, just waiting for someone to come along and find him.”

  Annja nodded. She was amazed that anyone had done so, frankly. The chances of the construction team finding the adjacent tunnel, never mind following the right series of chambers to wind up here, several hundred yards from the entrance, were astronomical.

  “Any idea who he was?” she asked, looking back at her colleague.

  Bernard shook his head. “Not a clue. But that’s why we’re here, my dear, to solve the mystery.”

  And a mystery it was. Annja couldn’t think of a simple reason why a Confederate soldier, a captain no less, would have been wandering around down here in the catacombs miles from any known entrance. Had he simply gotten lost? Stumbled around in the dark, unable to find his way back out, until eventually he’d succumbed to a lack of food or, more likely, water?

  If that was the case, what was he doing with a cutlass and pistol in hand? Just who, or what, had he been defending himself against?

  An interesting p
uzzle, to say the least.

  And just the kind of thing that Annja lived for.

  She reached into the bag at her side and pulled out her digital camera. She rarely went anywhere without it and it was times like this when she was thankful she’d adopted the habit. Eventually, she knew, they were going to have to remove the skeleton from the catacombs and take it back to Bernard’s laboratory for proper examination, but there were a lot of things they needed to do before that and documenting the site as they’d found it was the first priority. The position of items in relation to others and the context in which they were found were just as important to an archaeologist as the items themselves. The photographs would help them establish a record of where each item was in relation to all the others, allowing them to reconstruct the site down to the finest detail if necessary as their investigation progressed.

  She started by taking several wide-angle shots, panning her way around the room until she had covered it all. They would be able to make a panorama-style shot from the photographs showing the entire room and even use them to create a three-dimensional computer model.

  When she was finished with that task, she focused on the skeleton itself. She took several shots to establish its position against the wall, then moved in for close-ups. She’d taken about a dozen pictures and was about to call it quits when the light from the flash bounced off the uniform the skeleton wore and highlighted something she hadn’t previously noticed.

  Bernard must have seen her sudden tension.

  “What have you got, Annja?” he asked as she leaned in closer to get a better look.

  “Not sure yet,” she murmured, her gaze on the skeleton in front of her.

  As the flesh beneath it had decayed, the uniform coat had folded down upon itself, hiding small stretches of fabric between the folds. The light from the flash had thrown back an oddly shaped shadow from one of them, suggesting that there was something else there. Annja withdrew a pen from her pocket and gently lifted the edge of the folded material, revealing what lay beneath.

  The blackened edges of a bullet hole stared back at her.

  Gently, Annja used her pen to lift the coat’s edge away from the shirt beneath. The dark stain that covered the yellowed linen shirt beneath answered one question that had been nagging at her.

  The soldier, whoever he was, hadn’t wandered down here, gotten lost and eventually died of thirst, as she’d first hypothesized.

  He’d been shot in the chest.

  And from the looks of it, he’d died pretty quickly thereafter.

  This hadn’t been an accident; it was murder.

  Bernard crouched beside her and she showed him what she found.

  “See the rounded edges of the bullet hole?” she asked, pointing with the end of the pen. “And the way the fabric is still intact all around it, rather than stretched or torn?”

  Bernard nodded. “The musket ball was moving so fast that it didn’t have time to do much damage to the material as it passed through. Must have been close range, then.”

  “Just what I was thinking, as well.”

  She sat back on her haunches and stared at the dead man in front of her. “He wasn’t here by accident. We’re too far away from any easily accessible entrance for that to be the case. He came here deliberately, perhaps to meet someone…”

  “And whoever it was gunned him down where he stood,” Bernard finished for her.

  “It’s no longer an interesting archaeological puzzle,” Annja said as she climbed to her feet. “Now it’s a homicide investigation.”

  The police, however, wanted nothing to do with such an old murder. After a few quick calls back to headquarters, Laroche approached and informed Annja and Bernard that they were still in charge of the investigation, that their skills were going to be more valuable in terms of identifying the victim and perhaps even his murderer than anything the police could bring to bear on the problem.

  Homicide or not, it was their problem to solve.

  Several technicians from the museum arrived, summoned earlier by Bernard when he’d realized what it was they were dealing with. The technicians had a portable specimen case with them, essentially a long, flat box that looked like the case for an electric keyboard, and carried several toolkits of different shapes and sizes. Annja stepped out of the way to give them room to work in the narrow confines of the antechamber.

  One of the technicians withdrew a video camera from the case he carried and, switching on the high-powered light attached to it, began to pan his way around the entire room in unwitting mimicry of what she had done earlier with the still camera.

  When he was finished, he nodded at one of the other team members, who opened another case and began assembling an odd-looking device from the parts inside.

  Annja was expecting the skeletal removal to be a long, drawn-out process of removing each bone piece by piece and then placing them into the specimen case, so she was surprised when the man she was watching picked up the device he’d been assembling and moved over to stand next to the skeleton. The device looked like a fire extinguisher, though the canister was blue rather than red, and the operator wore it hanging from his shoulder on a strap. The other end of the hose running out of the top of the cylinder was attached to a gunlike device in his right hand. He turned and aimed the gun at the skeleton.

  “Hey! Wait a min—”

  She didn’t get any further. The technician squeezed the trigger and began spraying a fine white mist over their mystery man. The mist settled on the skeleton for a moment and then ballooned up into a white foamlike substance that hardened in seconds. Less than five minutes later the entire skeleton was wrapped in a cocoon of hardened foam.

  Annja turned to Bernard and asked, “What, exactly, is that stuff?”

  The older man smiled. “Do you like it? It’s a new tool my staff and I have come up with in order to transport delicate artifacts.”

  He stepped over to the skeleton. “The foam is genetically engineered and completely biodegradable. Flash a UV light on it and it fades away to literally nothing.

  But in the meantime—” he reached down and rapped on the foam with his knuckles “—knock, knock, it’s as hard as steel.”

  Something that hard must weigh a ton, Annja thought.

  “How are you going to move it?”

  Bernard eyed the cocooned skeleton with something like genuine affection. “That’s the beautiful part. It’s light as a feather.”

  It was, too. With one technician at the feet and another at the head, the skeleton was gently lifted off the ground and placed inside the specimen box with barely an effort.

  “Will wonders never cease?”

  She was impressed. That foam could have saved her hundreds of hours of effort on earlier digs.

  “How long have you been using it?”

  Bernard’s expression went sheepish and he mumbled something under his breath.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,” Annja said.

  “That was our, um, first field test.”

  If he hadn’t been on the other side of the specimen case, she would have throttled him where he stood. As it was she had to settle for giving him her best glare and vowing to make him pay for using one of her digs as his guinea pig.

  They closed up the specimen case and, with one person on either end, carefully lifted it up and carried it out of the room. It wasn’t heavy, but the close confines of the tunnel made it awkward and they took turns carrying it back out to where the catacombs intersected the Metro line. Bernard spent a few minutes talking with Laroche before returning to Annja’s side.

  “Help will be here shortly,” he told her.

  Ten minutes later a pair of Metro workers arrived, pushing a small handcart along the subway tracks. The newcomers showed one of the museum techs how to operate the cart, the specimen box was loaded on it and, as a group, they set off on the last leg of the walk back to the surface.

  As they emerged from the steps leading to the underground, th
ey found a small crowd had gathered around the station entrance, attracted by the museum van that was parked haphazardly on the curb. A few people pointed in her direction and more than one began taking pictures with their cell phones.

  As she glanced away, Annja thought, These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along. The memory brought a smile to her face.

  Bernard must have noticed, for he asked, “What’s so funny?”

  Trying to explain Star Wars humor to a French archaeologist was an exercise in futility so she just shook her head. Thankfully, Bernard let it go, as he was needed to help get the specimen case properly situated into the rack designed to hold it inside the van. Annja glanced once more at the crowd nearby, wondered just what it was that had drawn them and then climbed into the front seat to wait for the others to finish.

  A DARK-HAIRED MAN in his mid-forties, dressed in blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, glanced at the picture he’d just taken with his cell phone from across the street. He grunted in satisfaction. It wasn’t the best image, but it was good enough. The woman’s companion, Professor Bernard Reinhardt, was well known to them, but she was a mystery. The photo would help them identify her and from there they could assess just what kind of threat she posed to their plans.

  Satisfied, he sent the image as part of a text message, dropped his phone into his pocket and started walking down the street.

  He hadn’t gone more than a few blocks before the phone rang in response.

  “Michaels,” he said, answering it.

  The voice on the other end was younger, full of cockiness. “Next time give me something difficult, will ya? Her name’s Annja Creed. She entered France on the fourteenth with an American passport.”