Provenance Page 3

  She settled on unfastening the dead man’s web belt. It was bloody. She grimaced but pulled it out from under him. She’d learned not to be squeamish since the sword had entered her life. Darn, she thought. And I became an archaeologist so I wouldn’t have to deal with bodies that were still juicy.

  She stood up. Everyone was staring at her with a combination of fear and awe. She felt hurried relief that, in apparent violation of the laws of motion, her breasts had not escaped custody in all the commotion.

  “Listen, people,” she said, “this is secret stuff, okay?”

  Everybody nodded.

  “I know,” the young steward said. “You’re some kind of special operator.”

  She gave him a smile. “I was never here,” she said. “Okay?”

  “Anything you say, ma’am,” he breathed. He seemed to be working on not hyperventilating. She reckoned she had probably tripped the switches for all his adolescent male fantasies at once.

  She turned to look at the others again. They seemed mostly to have huge saucer eyes, like alley cats who have been awakened to find themselves nose-to-nose with a grizzly bear.

  “What you saw,” she said, “is a big bald guy in a tux take these two down.” That was a fair description of pretty much any random member of Garin’s squad of bodyguards. “You didn’t see any details because you were busy ducking like the smart people you are. You really don’t remember it clearly anyway—you’re so traumatized and all. Do you understand? This is extremely important.”

  They stared.

  “Nod,” she said.

  They nodded.

  “Breathe,” she said.

  They breathed.

  “Great. Now—you, what’s your name?” She turned to the steward.

  “Tommy.”

  “Great,” she said. “You nice folks all go in here and do what Tommy tells you. And Tommy will keep watch, and take care of you, and remember his responsibility is to stay with you and not, under any circumstances, to play hero. Right, Tommy?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “And you.” She turned to the female staffer. “What’s your name?”

  “Tina, ma’am,” she replied confidently.

  “You help Tommy take care of these people and keep them calm and safe. Are we good?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” she said, eyes shining. “Very good.”

  Annja nodded decisively. “Okay. I’m going to go deal with some more of these bad guys. And once more, you never saw me, because I was never here!”

  “Oh, yes,” they chorused. “Didn’t see a thing.”

  It’d be nicer, she thought as she buckled the gory web belt around her narrow waist, if this getup didn’t make me look like a direct-to-video prom queen from hell. But we do what we have to do.

  4

  Steam wisped from Annja’s mug of hot chocolate as she emerged from the small but well-organized kitchen of her Brooklyn loft. She wore a dark purple sports bra and white terry shorts. Despite the air-conditioning holding the flat summer day’s heat at bay, her skin was sheened with sweat from her morning workout.

  Finding a spot at one end of her sofa that was clear of books and manuscripts, she plopped down. She picked up the remote from the coffee table, its glass top also loaded down with artifacts, magazines and stacks of printouts. She clicked on the television.

  One of the cable news channels came up. There weren’t many kinds of daytime television she could bear to watch. Actually, most of her viewing consisted of watching DVDs, either of movies or occasionally whole seasons of TV series. She hated only being able to watch part of a story, and she hated commercial interruptions, although she did find some ads entertaining.

  Not like I have much time to watch, she thought.

  The modest wide-screen set showed a long, gleaming white ship shot from above. Helicopters swarmed around it, including the shark shapes of gunships. Boats of various sizes surrounded the huge luxury vessel.

  Annja grimaced. She didn’t have to read the white letters at the bottom of the screen. It was the Ocean Venture, where criminal investigators and counterterrorism experts from the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S. were still trying to sort out what had happened.

  She muted the sound. It wasn’t as if they were going to tell her anything she didn’t already know. She just felt sorry for the passengers and crew, still stuck on board while authorities grilled them.

  “WE’RE CLEAR TO GO,” Garin had said, when he walked into her stateroom without knocking.

  “What?” she replied, shocked.

  He smiled that devil’s smile of his. “I pulled some strings,” he said. “Amazing what’s available to be pulled when one is CEO of one of the world’s largest oil companies. I could get used to it.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You talked our way out of interrogation? What, did you bribe the SEALs? The Royal Navy? All of the Netherlands?”

  “None of the above,” he said. “It’s always easier and cheaper to bribe the media. Listen and learn, young Annja.”

  The terrorists had never known what hit them. By the time the first SEALs swarmed over the stern from their fast STAB craft in the wee hours of the morning—they’d beat the Royal Dutch commandos by half an hour—the hijackers were all being guarded by Garin’s highly professional security team in the cruise liner’s ballroom. Garin had communicated with the rescuers in advance, using the ship’s radiotelephone. Captain Nygard, who had started the rescue rolling by surreptitiously pressing a concealed panic-transmission button when the masked men burst onto the bridge, was very cooperative. One of Garin’s bodyguards, himself a former Royal Marine commando, had dropped the hijacker aiming at the captain’s austere silver-haired head with a head shot of his own. Garin’s call had prevented any unpleasant incidents. Under normal conditions a counterterror team hitting a hostage situation would automatically kill anyone they saw holding a weapon.

  Annja had captured several hijackers. She hadn’t had to kill any more. Having a beautiful woman wearing a bloody and not very substantial evening gown burst in and aim an assault rifle at them got their attention. Especially since the rattle of gunfire hinted how very far wrong things had gone for them.

  The presence of almost a score of far more professional armed thugs in the midst of their intended victims had taken the hijackers utterly by surprise. They’d obviously expected the cruise liner to be a soft, undefended target. Civilian vessels usually were.

  The total butcher’s bill had been nine hijackers killed, three wounded. Almost twenty more had been taken prisoner. One of Garin’s men had been wounded slightly when a mettlesome but overwrought female passenger, believing him to be a hijacker despite his evening dress and lack of a ski mask, nailed him above the right eye with the spike heel of her shoe. I knew those things were dangerous, Annja thought when she heard that.

  Once the ship was secured, and the antiterror units converging on the liner had been alerted to the fact, Annja and Garin had returned to their cabins to change out of their incriminatingly bloody clothes. En route Annja wiped down her AKM and magazines for fingerprints and hid them in a broom closet. She showered and then had a fit of the shakes.

  A pair of SEALs paid a visit to her cabin half an hour before Garin showed up. She was sitting in a chair wearing jeans and a short-sleeved blouse and the most innocent expression she could muster. They had been briskly professional as they searched her cabin for lurking terrorists, told her to stay put and await further instructions, and left.

  She fully expected to spend hours being grilled by spooks and operators from half the nations of the earth. When they had rendezvoused briefly after the ship’s recapture, Garin explained that the Americans were coming because they had the closest operational team available. The Dutch were sending men because the ship was in their territorial waters and the UK was getting an oar in because a lot of its nationals were on board the Ocean Venture, and anyway it still liked to imagine the Caribbean belonged to the Royal Navy.

  A
nd then Garin came waltzing in to tell her they were free to go. A EuroPetro helicopter was descending toward the afterdeck helipad to lift them off.

  SITTING SAFE AT HOME in the air-conditioning of her loft, Annja blew at the hot cocoa, as if that would actually do any good, then tentatively sipped. As always it was hotter than she suspected and scorched her lips and tongue.

  She winced and set the cup down. It was all part of the ritual.

  She still remembered the surreal feeling as the blue-and-white Dauphine leapt gracefully off the Ocean Venture’s deck while Dutch commandos on guard stood by as unresponsive as statues, as if their camouflage battle dress wasn’t being whipped and their very eyeballs blasted by helicopter rotor-wash.

  “Why are they letting us go?” she asked Garin.

  He smiled. “I told them something far more compelling to their minds than mere truth,” he had told her. “I told them what they wanted to hear.”

  The media, courtesy of Garin’s bribes or not—Annja took what he told her with a grain of salt, although experience had shown her that the more outrageous what he said sounded, the more likely it was to be gospel truth—were asserting that the would-be hijackers had fallen for a multinational sting operation designed to trap modern-day pirates of the Caribbean. It wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded—on the flight to Curaçao Garin explained what a huge and growing problem piracy was worldwide, although largely unreported even by the sensation-hungry news media.

  She could also see how the nations of the multinational antipiracy task force would be more than happy to take credit for what they believed had been accomplished purely by Garin’s security team. They couldn’t be happier than Annja. She’d spent way too many uncomfortable hours answering pointed questions from sweaty men in uniforms.

  For their part, the “People’s Revolutionary” terrorists had reportedly confessed to being pure pirates, interested only in looting the wealthy passengers and gouging a vast hush-payment out of the cruise lines to get their ship back. She knew not to take anything in the news at face value—she’d seen what really happened far too often. But she suspected that much was straight. She hadn’t bought the “revolutionary” line from the outset, and gathered Garin hadn’t, either.

  Garin. At least he seemed to be done with her semi-coerced services as escort. That was a relief, too. She hadn’t really been able to enjoy the cruise anyway….

  To what extent Garin would consider she had returned his favor was an open question. But then, so was Garin. He had off-handedly explained that he had felt compelled to act when a little girl broke away to try to rejoin her mother, from whom she’d been separated. “Don’t think it was a good deed on my part,” he’d assured her. “I was simply worried that, once the hijackers started shooting, they wouldn’t stop.”

  It was entirely plausible but she didn’t believe it for a minute. Sitting in her own living room she still wasn’t sure what to believe. Sometimes Garin seemed an embodiment of evil. Sometimes he seemed merely to be totally selfish—and she had seen enough authentic evil not to buy into the currently dominant wisdom that the two were one and the same. Many of the worst monsters she’d met believed what they thought was right so selflessly that they didn’t care how many people they had to kill for their own good.

  Sometimes Garin seemed almost chivalrous. She suspected that was illusion, too.

  But she didn’t know. I don’t know anything where Garin’s concerned, she thought. Except that our destinies are entwined, and going to stay that way so long as I carry the sword.

  The TV switched to show a man with one of those boyish-gone-middle-aged hardcase faces under a crewcut the color of a steam iron. The screen identified him as spokesman for the Cruise Line International Association. She guessed he was about to very earnestly, and with great sincerity, lie across his bow tie about how the cruise lines would never, ever pay hush-money to terrorists.

  She’d had enough. She turned off the television and picked up a recent copy of The Journal of Forbidden Archaeology. Thumbing to an article on crystal skulls, she began to read.

  MEETINGS WITH the Chasing History’s Monsters staff ate up Annja’s afternoon. Her producer, Doug Morrell, had been in fine form, flitting around the meeting room like a butterfly.

  “I don’t really think,” Annja found herself saying at one point, “that we need to address the issue of whether the Loch Ness Monster is actually a shipwrecked alien from a water world.” Although he gets credit for unusual imagination for that one, she thought.

  “GIRLFRIEND,” Clarice Hartung said, leaning forward over the table, “I don’t see how you manage to eat that much and stay that slim.”

  Annja chewed the mouthful she had bitten out of the specialty of the house—a prime rib sandwich, blood-rare, on toasted sourdough, with just a touch of horseradish—and shrugged. “I mostly seem to have trouble keeping weight on,” she said.

  Clarice shook her head in mock despair. She was a production assistant on Chasing History’s Monsters. She had milk-chocolate skin, a cloud of reddish-brown hair that was more curly than frizzy, big dark brown eyes and a wide smile. “I’d kill for a problem like that.”

  “You look great,” Annja said, taking a bite of pickle.

  “For a full-figured woman, you mean?” Clarice said.

  “No. Seriously.” To Annja’s eyes her friend was no more than pleasingly padded. Certainly not fat. And even Kristie Chatham might envy the décolletage threatening Clarice’s Caesar salad from her golden-tan blouse. Had Kristie ever deigned to notice lowly production assistants.

  Annja thought of saying as much. It just wasn’t her. She could think catty. But she seldom voiced it.

  “It’s the starch,” Mindy Llewellyn said.

  “Say what?” Clarice asked, in the middle of taking a bite from her roll.

  “Your problem is the amount of starch you eat,” Mindy said. She was a somewhat hyper young woman, with ash-blond hair hanging straight to frame a gamine face with big blue eyes. She did makeup for several shows, including Chasing History’s Monsters.

  The closest thing Annja had to real friends on the show, the pair had prevailed on her to accompany them to Corrigan’s, an Irish pub near the studios and consequently favored by the crew—although not, for the most part, the on-air talent—for a bite to eat after the production meeting. “To decompress from Doug,” as Clarice put it.

  Annja found it a pleasant enough place, with its dark-stained wood paneling, muted Celtic music and the prints on the walls, most of which seemed to celebrate not just leprechauns but worldwide specimens of what alt. archaeo, Annja’s favorite newsgroup, liked to call “the fairy faith.”

  “Girl, I don’t even want to be as thin as you,” Clarice said. Mindy was toothpick-thin. Annja worried a little about her health.

  Mindy shrugged. “I never seem to have much appetite,” she said. She had ordered a salad, too, and a mineral water. She picked at one and sipped at the other. “But if you’re really concerned about your weight, you want to stop obsessing on fat and start looking at the amount of starch you eat. Take those fat-free yogurts you’re always snacking on. Have you looked at their contents?”

  “Hey, they’re healthy,” Clarice said.

  “Are they? They have the same amount of calories as the normal, full-fat yogurt. What they replace the fat with is starch.”

  “But carbohydrates are brain food.”

  “If you sit on your brains. Some are okay, but starches go straight to your blood sugar. And your hips. Like that roll. And the croutons.”

  Clarice looked at the roll, frowned and replaced it on the bread plate. “Are you trying to rob me of my simple pleasures in life?”

  “I’m just saying,” Mindy said. She shifted restlessly on the booth seat where she sat next to Annja.

  Clarice sighed. “Well, the truth is, I worry about our Annja spending too many nights alone on her couch with museum samples and moldy manuscripts,” she said. “You’re going to turn into a mummy,
girl. And not the kind that goes with a daddy.”

  “Too bad the only bones you’re handling are long dead,” Mindy said. She snickered. “I can’t believe I said that.”

  Annja favored them with an exasperated half scowl. “Thanks so much for your votes of confidence. You sure know how to give a woman confidence in her own sexuality.”

  “Oh, you’ve got loads of sexuality, Annja,” Mindy said. “Men throw themselves at you like moths at a flame. And you swat them like moths.”

  “I think it’s more like they smash their little antennaed moth heads in against the glass wall of her apparent indifference,” Clarice said.

  “I am not indifferent!”

  Clarice smiled an extra wide “trapped ya” smile. “You’re right,” she said. “The word is oblivious.”

  Mindy’s skinny butt bounced on the bench. “Good one!”

  Annja sat back and crossed her arms. “I’m so glad we had this time together,” she said.

  “Oh, don’t take it so hard, Annja,” Mindy said. “We tease you because we love you.”

  “And we wish you’d give some nice man a chance to.”

  Annja sighed. She’d given some a chance. But they had a tendency to not stick around.

  Or to die.

  But she couldn’t tell her friends that. Even though their well-intentioned teasing was like sticking a knife in an open wound.

  “What you need,” Mindy said, swirling a plastic sword with a piece of lime impaled on it in her tumbler of mineral water, “is a nice, rich oil sultan. But not one of the religious fanatic ones. Or a fat one with oily skin and too many rings. A handsome, dashing young sultan!”

  “Right,” Annja said. “And they exist where?”

  Clarice cocked an eyebrow at Mindy. “You been playing Prince of Persia on your PlayStation Two again?”

  “All right, how about just a billionaire? I mean, a nice young billionaire. I’m not talking Donald Trump orange comb-over here.”