Provenance Page 8

  The subject line read Re: Birthday Party. The e-mail address belonged to a college nerd friend of hers who now worked for a software development company.

  The message read, Picked up an image of a ship sailing from the P-City harbor at the time you gave me. Whoever knew a Robert E. Howard fan would name a Liberian-registered freighter?

  “You are such a dork, Frank,” she said to the room. “And I’m a total dork, too, for getting the reference.”

  The bad news, Frank continued, is that it’s tricky to track a ship across the big blue Pacific without something like a Keyhole bird targeted specifically on it.

  “Great,” Annja murmured. She was trying to fend off the despair a few seconds longer. I was this close…. However, the most recent image I can find confirms that, at least for now, your target’s on a heading consistent with its self-proclaimed destination of Mati on Mindanao in the Philippines. I think I can keep tabs on it enough to confirm it’s continuing to head the right way. As long as there isn’t a storm.

  “Right,” Annja said. “No storms. In the Pacific.”

  She was going to need luck. Or the artifact for which so many had died—whatever it was—was going to be lost to science.

  And into the hands of parties about whom all she could say was that they were evil.

  11

  The sentry walking the foredeck was a small, wiry man in loose, dark pants and shirt. The cloth wound around his head would have been a deep green, had there been any illumination there on the foredeck right by the freighter’s blunt prow. The captain and crew kept the Solomon Kane dark.

  The AKM strapped to the sentry’s shoulder was almost as long as he was.

  The noise was like a car backfiring halfway down the block. It reached his ears a second before the hollow-tipped 180-grain .45-caliber bullet reached his right temple. He wasn’t even curious yet when he died.

  Men were already swarming over the railing to either side of the bow. The body did a fast-motion melt to the grubby deck.

  The intruders wore black uniforms, with black boonie hats, black boots, black web gear. Their faces were blackened. Their suppressed submachine guns, HK UMP-45s with suppressors screwed on their barrels, were likewise black. The dark hilt of a short sword jutted over each man’s shoulder.

  Using a variation of the approach that had been used to steal the coffin from them, they had come in motor launches from over the horizon. The Kane was not a particularly prepossessing nor well-maintained vessel. If it even had radar it probably wasn’t functioning reliably, not that their three small inflatable boats would have been easy to pick up. The freighter’s crew seemed a lot more concerned with not being seen than seeing—given the general blackout, no spotlights swept the water.

  A fire team of four invaders knelt to cover their comrades with shouldered weapons. Two more quartets ran aft to press themselves against port and starboard ends of the deckhouse.

  A man walked sentry on the deck before the bridge. Apparently sensing something amiss, he came forward to the rail to peer into the night. He did not attempt to unlimber his own AKM.

  He never got the chance. One of the four men who knelt in the bow fired a single shot from his UMP. The turbaned head jerked. The sentry toppled over the rail to land with a clatter on the main deck.

  At once an alarm began to ring from high up on the deckhouse. Muzzle flashes lit the night. As yet no bullets came near the raiders, who were still climbing aboard and moving according to a hastily choreographed but well-rehearsed scheme. As two more fire teams came up, one man from each of the first two quartets to the deckhouse twirled a grappling hook briefly from a black-painted fist and tossed it upward over the rail.

  I AM MUCH TOO OLD for this shit, Captain Thorolf Sigurdsson thought, seeing the man on sentry watch vanish over the rail right before his eyes.

  Two of the three passengers on the bridge with him and his night-watch crew exchanged alarmed barks in what he believed was Indonesian. Or some accursed language or dialect of that accursed archipelago—there were ten thousand islands to choose from, after all. One hit the switch to sound the ship’s alarm. Sigurdsson winced as automatic gunfire snarled immediate response.

  “We use radiotelephone,” the leader barked at him in English. He alone was bareheaded. He and his aide wore autopistols in flapped holsters. The third man, clearly a mere foot soldier, carried a Kalashnikov slung on his back. All three men wore curve-bladed swords thrust through their sashes, or in the leader’s case his web belt. The archaic weapons seemed as much a badge as the racing-green turbans.

  In his youth, Thorolf Sigurdsson had been a lusty seaman, eager to live up to the tradition of his Viking forebears who settled his home in Iceland a thousand years before. He studied hard and earned his master’s license. He was a master seaman, but never one to be overly concerned with the niceties of maritime law.

  In his declining years, that casual attitude had tripped him up, along with a certain propensity to alleviate the boredom of lengthy sea voyages with alcohol. He had not lost his certification…quite. But such was the cloud over his head that he had been lucky to find employment with the somewhat shady holding company, nominally headquartered in Monrovia, who owned the Solomon Kane. From scattered hints he gathered the company in turn was owned by someone in the People’s Republic of China.

  Despite his lapses in judgment, and maybe even morals, he had never stooped to piracy. Nor once considered it. And while he had no more patience or reverence for customs and taxes than he ever had, he drew the line at terrorism.

  Unfortunately, it seemed his employers did not.

  Cursing the wakefulness that had driven him to this late-night visit to the bridge, Sigurdsson nodded to his own radioman, a diminutive Ghanaian national who insisted on being called Bob. Bob, ebony face sweat-sheened beneath his baseball cap, leapt up from his seat with alacrity. The leader’s lieutenant, still standing, picked up the handset.

  The front windscreen shattered.

  Thunder filled the bridge. The green-turbaned head exploded as if filled with nitroglycerin.

  THE VESSEL THAT had dropped off the assault boats kept steaming steadily forward, closing with the Kane on a course to pass a few hundred meters to her portside. This was a fairly well-traveled sea-lane; the very immensity of the Pacific made it advisable for ships to ply consistent routes across it, so that help might have a better chance of finding them in a timely way if something went horribly wrong. Worldwide, on average one major ship—freighter to container ship to even oil supertanker—was lost each week. Some were sunk by storms or rogue waves. Others simply vanished from the face of the earth.

  For all his high technology, Man was little closer to taming the voracious appetite of the sea than when his ancestors first ventured into the surf on badly trimmed logs.

  When the growling whine of the freighter’s alarm reached the approaching ship, a freighter no more descript nor reputable-looking than the Kane, muzzle flashes blossomed like fireworks from her deck and deck house, and all need for pretense evaporated. Spotlights blazed from the second ship’s own deckhouse, turning the Kane’s midnight foredeck to day and blinding enemies who happened to be looking that way. Crashing volleys of Kalashnikov fire filled the night with sound and fury. It would have signified more had it been aimed better, or at all. As it was, most of the frenzied full-auto bursts, each dumping an entire magazine, did no more than highlight targets for the men in black to hit with precisely aimed shots.

  Fire teams raced back along both sides of the deckhouse. One man fell as a burst from inside an open hatchway ripped across his belly. The man behind him threw a grenade. He and a partner followed its crack and white flash into the passageway. The first man went high and left, the other low and right.

  Three green-turbaned men had been crouching just inside the hatch. Two lay on the deck. The third was shot as he leaned against the bulkhead clutching his shattered leg.

  He had dropped his AKM. It made no difference. Whateve
r the outcome of this brief, savage fight, mercy would neither be requested nor extended by either side. This was to the death.

  CAPTAIN SIGURDSSON stared with wide, horrified eyes at the headless thing still leaking blood, black in the dim red and amber lights of the bridge, onto his rubberized deck.

  The bridge filled with garish, blue-white light. Another vessel, whose approach his radar man had marked just before all hell broke loose about him, had illuminated the Kane with spotlights of tremendous candlepower.

  His four bridge crew, the radar man, Bob the Ghanaian, the helmsman and the officer of the watch, a Christian Lebanese named Sa’uf who was having a hard time concealing his terror, had all thrown themselves flat. The remaining two terrorists, the leader and the guard crouched behind the captain.

  The guard straightened briefly to fire a burst. It took out most of what remained of the front windscreen and made such a hideous, head-shattering noise Sigurdsson was actually amazed all the glass didn’t burst out of the radarscope and other instruments on the bridge. The man ducked down again.

  The leader, who identified himself as Commander Guntur, had unsnapped the flap of his holster. Now he took out a handgun and, duckwalking over to the prone captain, pointed the weapon at his grizzled crew cut.

  “You think you can betray us?” he hissed in his barbarous English. “I kill you first. Then—”

  Light filled the bridge and blanked out the captain’s senses.

  In a moment his vision returned, with a semblance of functional consciousness, although not yet hearing. Or perhaps the fight taking place before Sigurdsson’s wide eyes, sporadically seen between big, drifting afterimage patches, really was silent.

  Flash-bang, he realized. He was gratified someone cared enough not to throw in a full-strength antipersonnel grenade. Then he realized the attackers might simply be interested in preserving the instrumentation, which, out of date and repair though it was, was needful to operate the ship.

  A big man dressed all in black, his face and hands painted black as well, dueled face-to-face with Commander Guntur. His hair was strangely pale. Sigurdsson realized he must have worn a black hat of some sort, now lost in the desperate struggle. Guntur thrust at his largish belly with his saber. The man swept the blade aside with what looked almost like a Roman short sword.

  Steel met steel with a faint clang. In that it was slowly coming back, Sigurdsson realized his hearing had gone away, too. It reassured him his eardrums weren’t shattered. Both of them, anyway.

  As the two men traded blows, sounding like a master chef sharpening his knife on steel, the captain became aware of the third terrorist, the guard, lying on the deck not two meters away staring at the captain with one eye. The other, along with a big part of his head, had evidently been blown off, probably by a burst fired unheard in the wake of the stun grenade. Sigurdsson became aware that the right side of his own head, the one pressed to the deck-mat, was wet with something warm and sticky.

  He fought to control the rebellion in his stomach.

  Commander Guntur reeled back. His eyes stared like those of a frightened horse from a mask of blood, black in the lurid light from the other vessel. His opponent had slashed him clear across the forehead, unleashing a torrent of blood.

  Screaming without any words Sigurdsson could comprehend, the terrorist leader flung himself forward, slashing wildly with his sword. The burly man stepped into him, blocked the stroke forearm to forearm and rammed his blade into Guntur at the notch of his sternum, angled upward to cleave the heart. Guntur’s eyes bulged. He gasped, choked. Then he seemed to deflate around the blade.

  The big man caught him and eased him down onto his back. Putting a black boot on his chest he wrenched the sword free. Then he wiped it carefully on the dead man’s shirt.

  He looked over and down at Sigurdsson. “Are you all right, Captain?” he asked. He spoke English with a Dutch accent.

  Sigurdsson’s throat felt parched, as if he’d wandered the deserts for days without water. “No,” he croaked. He hoped he actually made enough sound to be heard over the firefight still cracking on outside. He couldn’t hear himself, but then he could still hear little but residual ringing in his ears. “But I do not think I am wounded.”

  The big man nodded his square head. He reached a big hand down as if to help the captain. Sigurdsson just stared at him.

  The black-painted face split in a big white grin. “Don’t worry, Captain,” he said. “We mean you no harm. Had we done, you would have died with that Sword of the Faith devil, trust me on that.”

  For a moment the captain looked into those ice-blue eyes. Then he held out a hand and allowed the other man to help him up. Although he was no small man himself, the other hauled him to his feet as if he were a child.

  To his surprise the man was clearly—seen closer up—around his own age, no stranger to his fifties. He even showed a bit of a gut, although adipose tissue didn’t seem to account for a high percentage of his bulk.

  He would have looked ridiculous, with the short beard that framed his broad, square face spiked as if moussed with black paint, had Sigurdsson not just seen him kill a young, fit man in a sword fight.

  A sword fight, the captain thought. In the twenty-First Century. And I thought I was the Viking.

  The tumult of shots and shouting began to dwindle. The big man got a thoughtful expression. The captain realized he was receiving radio reports through the lightweight headset clamped to one side of his head.

  “The ship is almost secure,” the intruder told him. “It will be done within minutes, when we flush the last of the rats from the bilges. We will have to confirm against your crew list, but I believe none of your crew has been harmed.”

  “They’re good boys,” the captain said hoarsely. Too good for this cursed tub, he thought. “They’re too wise to try to play heroes for the profits of another man.”

  The other laughed. “That is indeed wise. Besides, the heroics are provided free. I don’t think this lot would have left witnesses behind once you delivered your cargo, my friend.”

  It was an easy enough thing to say—calculated to disarm the captain’s suspicions. Except Sigurdsson’s real suspicion was that the mad Dutchman was right.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d suspected his passengers would shoot them and dump them into the sea when they reached their destination. He’d doubted that was Mindanao, no matter what the charter read.

  A second man in black entered the cabin. From the blond crew cut over which his own headset was clamped, to the handsome, boyish face visible beneath the bootblack, Sigurdsson knew he was an All-American Boy before he opened his mouth and confirmed it.

  “Ship’s secured, Elder Brother,” he said, touching finger to forehead in salute. His tone toward the older man was almost reverential.

  “Thank you, Brother,” the big man said. “Tell the others well done. They have done the Order proud.”

  “I have to know,” Sigurdsson said, his voice as rough as a gale sea, “is that damned box radioactive?”

  The big blacked-out Dutchman blinked his sky-blue eyes at him. Then he laughed.

  “Only metaphysically, my friend,” he said. “Only metaphysically.”

  12

  Annja sat in relative cool beneath the gaudy awning of an outdoor café a few blocks from the hotel. The white buds in her ears and a playlist of Medieval and Renaissance tunes kept the noise of midtown Panama City at bay. There wasn’t much to be done about the exhaust smells, especially thick in the heavy, humid air.

  The coffee shop served excellent coffee and even better limeade. Annja reckoned she could stay there happily hydrating herself until her bladder gave out. It was all she could do at the moment anyway.

  In keeping with Panama City’s somewhat self-conscious role as a modern financial center the café offered free wireless access. She was trying to find something online about the bones of a stray “very holy man” turning up—anywhere in history.

  Luck had no
t gone her way so far.

  On one Web site she did turn up a brief, tantalizing allusion to a treasure of more than earthly worth that was supposedly unearthed in Jerusalem by an order of knights under the command of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, during the Sixth Crusade in the early 1200s. She had to chuckle at the historical irony of that. The Web site went on for pages about how the Vatican had conspired against the knights—beginning before there actually was a Vatican. But Annja knew Emperor Frederick II was a man against whom the Pope genuinely had conspired. And not just one pope, but a succession of them, excommunicating him twice and waging relentless war against him.

  Regretfully she dismissed the whole thing. Frederick had been something of a rationalist for his day. He had only gone on Crusade when the Pope threatened him with excommunication, and one of the reasons the Pope excommunicated him anyway was that, instead of reconquering Jerusalem with the usual exemplary slaughter, he had simply rented it from his friend, the equally humanist Sultan of Egypt. He was hardly the sort to found a religious order. Much less to set them to searching for holy relics.

  She sat back and sipped at her latest limeade. She was coffee’d out. If she drank any more she’d have to throw herself in the ocean and swim to Maui to have a prayer of winding down before next week. She gazed at the unhelpful screen of her notebook computer and sighed.

  Why am I even involved? she asked herself. I’m an archaeologist. I’m bound to try to see artifacts properly conserved. Except in this case I’m not even sure there is a relic.

  But telling her about the artifact’s existence had clearly cost Cedric Millstone his life.

  Something had left a trail of dead bodies, including those Garin and Annja had been compelled to kill aboard the Ocean Venture, from the time Annja had come within unwitting proximity of it. Abenicio Luján had seen something—a crate whose dimensions suggested a casket, a box to contain a coffin—brought out of the boathouse turned charnel house in the Old Harbor district of Casco Viejo. So an artifact existed. And it must be of extraordinary value, for people go to such lengths to possess it.