Provenance Read online

  She scratched an eyebrow. A waiter came by to see if she needed anything. She waved him off, aware only that he seemed awfully solicitous of her. He didn’t set any threat warnings ringing, so she paid him no mind.

  I’m more than just an archaeologist now, though, aren’t I? she thought. Whatever lay behind it, the proliferation of dead bodies made it her concern. She was becoming a protector, maybe even an avenger. And there was much to avenge.

  She felt a cold certainty that people would continue to be endangered, or even killed, until she tracked the mysterious artifact down. It gave her a sense of urgency, like a pressure inside the chest.

  For now she operated on the assumption Millstone had told her the truth. At least as he knew it. Deathbed statements, she knew as a historian, were accorded special weight in the law. While she doubted Cedric Millstone had had specific foreknowledge of his death, he must have known he was squarely in someone’s sights. A rival, or rivals, whose identity she couldn’t even guess at.

  “And if I hadn’t been so quick to dismiss the possibility of working with his group,” she said aloud, bitterly, “all that knowledge might not have died with him.”

  “I beg your pardon, señorita?”

  It was the handsome waiter again. She looked up and happened to meet his eye. He beamed.

  Oh, my God, she thought, he’s hitting on me. Why would he do a thing like that?

  “No,” she said, her own reflex smile curdling. “Thank you. I’ll let you know.”

  His disappointment was clear on his olive features. But he nodded and went about his business.

  What’s wrong with you, girl? she could almost hear Clarice ask. Why not let your hair down and live a little? You got away from the nuns, remember?

  She sighed. “I don’t have time,” she said aloud, quite peevishly. She returned to her Internet search for clues into the nature of her mysterious objective.

  She heard her cell phone’s ringtone. She picked it up. The caller ID said Dale.

  It was the code name for one of her nerd contacts. Frank wasn’t the only one she’d set to trying to track the Solomon Kane.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi, Annja,” a male voice said. “Something’s come up.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your friend’s ship has changed course. It happened early this morning, ship’s time. If one of my peeps hadn’t lucked onto a shot from a French bird of it pointed in a different direction we’d’ve lost it completely.”

  She felt an all-too-familiar plummeting sensation inside her. Too close! she thought.

  “I’m grateful to your friend for tracking it down,” she said.

  “It, uh—it did cost some money.”

  She sighed. “I’m good for it.” I’m going to need to take some more of Roux’s commissions, she thought, even though they smack of pothunting. And they’re a devil to reconcile with my work schedule on Monsters.

  Oh, well. Nobody had told her her new life would be easy. Or cheap.

  “I know you are, Annja. Just thought I’d say.”

  Am I painting a big fat target on my back here? she thought, somewhat wildly. I mean, it’s not as if the NSA would ever think of monitoring cell phone traffic here at the Pacific outlet of the Panama Canal or anything.

  “Why are you calling me,” she asked, trying to sound casual, “instead of handling this in e-mail?”

  “Well…” She could hear his reluctance. “Something’s come up.”

  “What?”

  “Well, like I said, we’ve been pretty lucky so far. But our luck might be about to run out.”

  “How so?” She felt a passing idle wish she could reach through the airwaves and shake the answer out of him. Nerds loved to dramatize.

  “There’re some storm systems forming in that part of the world. If the skies cloud over your friend’s ship, we can kiss overhead imaging goodbye.”

  Swell, she thought. “All right,” she said. “Can you at least give me a destination?”

  “Not with any certainty,” her contact said. “They can always change course again. But right now they’re pretty clearly heading for the Marquesas, in the South Pacific. As a matter of fact—”

  There was one of those pregnant pauses that suggested he was typing busily away on his own keyboard, looking for new data. “They’re making right for a particular island. One that has a surprisingly large airfield, from the overhead shots. Apparently there’s an astronomical research station there. I’m not sure the island even has a name, but I have a latitude and longitude. I’m e-mailing it to you right now.”

  “Thanks. We’ll settle up later,” Annja said.

  “Great, Annja. Always fun talking to you.”

  She hung up and put her cell phone back in its belt holster. Then she surfed to a travel site to start looking for flights to French Polynesia.

  13

  Annja was arguing in French with the pilot of the small airplane.

  It concerned the firefight quite unmistakably taking place on the airstrip of the tiny island they were descending toward.

  “I am a charter pilot, not a mercenary,” the pilot shouted excitedly over the roar of his two engines. He was a wiry man whom she guessed to be middle-aged, although some of what she took for aging may simply have been the result of years of overexposure to the sun. His blue eyes contrasted madly with skin like old leather. He had a thatch of stiff, straw-colored hair and dark glasses perched on a beaky nose. He wore blue denim shorts, a blue denim shirt, and white deck shoes without socks. He had a gold chain around his right wrist and a big multifunction watch on his left.

  The curiously shaped plane, with its twin tail booms and propellers in front of and behind the cabin, wallowed from side to side. Annja wondered whether that was due to winds close to the waves and nearing land, or whether he was that jittery. “I am not paid to land in a war zone!”

  “But I’ve got to get down there,” Annja said. She sat in the right-hand seat. She was dressed in a cream-yellow short-sleeved shirt and khaki cargo shorts. Her ponytail was passed out the back of a tan baseball cap. Wraparound amber sunglasses that were unobtrusively also shooting glasses covered her eyes. She had come dressed for trouble.

  Evidently she had found it. Earlier than she could possibly have anticipated.

  The engines whined as the pilot pulled back on the yoke. He ignored Annja’s plea. The island and its black X of landing strip swept by beneath.

  “See?” she said. “Nobody’s shooting at us.”

  “That’s how I like to keep it!” he shouted.

  Of all things a C-130 Hercules sat toward the middle of the strip, which occupied much of the low western end of the island of Le Rêve. The island resembled a kidney bean with its smoothly curved side facing south and a concavity that looked too gradual and shallow to provide much of a harbor on the north. Eastward from the strip the island rose in a series of densely forested hills. On one of them stood the astronomical observatory her contact had mentioned.

  The four propellers of the Hercules were spinning but clearly feathered. The fat cargo plane wasn’t moving. Men fought around the aircraft and the nearby cluster of buildings, mostly Quonset-style huts and manufactured-looking wooden structures with pitched roofs. They fired at one another from the ground, around the buildings, over stacks of colorful plastic drums. From the air there was no telling them apart—they all wore sand-colored battle dress. She didn’t even have a clue how many factions there were. It might be massively multiplayer war down there.

  I wonder if some of them were my late-night visitors? Annja thought. Naturally they wouldn’t be obtuse enough to wear black uniforms in broad daylight.

  “I feel your pain,” the pilot said, banking right, to the north. “But if I get shot I’ll feel my pain more.”

  She wanted to tell him no one would shoot at them. That stuck on her tongue. She wasn’t at all sure it was true. It was just as likely both sides, or however many, would assume the light plane was rein
forcements for the opposition. Then everybody would shoot at them.

  “But I came all this way from America!” She had chartered the aircraft on the French-owned island of Nuku Hiva, sixty miles of open water to the northwest. Her informants told her that the Solomon Kane had made landfall shortly before dawn that morning.

  So challenging had it been to make the proper connections to get there, the slow surface-going vessel had beaten her.

  Her pilot shook his head. He continued his bank, turning back toward Nuku Hiva. “You must learn to accept disappointment,” he said, leveling the wings. “It is part of life.”

  She grubbed in her pocket and brought out her wallet. “A thousand dollars if you get me onto the island.”

  He turned to blink at her through his aviator glasses.

  THE WIND BLEW from the west. The airplane came in low over green water from the east, heading into it, so it could slow to the lowest possible ground speed before falling out of the air. Fortunately, the larger of the two runways ran east-west. If the plane had been forced to land in a crosswind the pilot probably wouldn’t have done it for any amount of money.

  Then again, landing wasn’t exactly on the agenda. There was a limit to what Annja would get even for a thousand dollars.

  The Frenchman cranked down the landing gear as the island approached. The plane rocked and tried to rise as they swept across the foam-flecked beach and hot air flowed upward from the land. Annja swiveled her head left and right. She was looking for combatants.

  There were none to be seen. She was pretty sure they were still shooting at one another as energetically as before. But they were doing it from behind cover. Approaching ground level she and the pilot no longer had the height advantage to spot them.

  The tires kissed the runway with nervous squeals and a quick kick to the tailbone. Annja unfastened her safety harness. It seemed a pretty foolhardy thing to be doing, under the circumstances.

  The airplane vibrated. It was already shaking pretty comprehensively—this felt different.

  A hole rimmed in white, as if with frost, appeared in the front windscreen just to the left of the driver’s head. A crack filled the cockpit. Annja felt something buffet her lips, like a light tap from someone’s fingers.

  A hole appeared in the window beside her head. She had felt a bullet’s wind of passage.

  “That’s it!” the pilot screamed in a shrill voice. “I am out of here!”

  She reached out and seized the yoke with her left hand. “If you don’t do what you promised,” she yelled, “I’ll crash us.”

  He glanced at her. What he saw in her expression evidently convinced him she wasn’t kidding.

  She wasn’t. We’re on the ground, she thought fiercely. We’d survive. Probably.

  He kept the aircraft on the ground. He continued to slow. They passed the stationary Hercules on their left. Then they were past the cluster of structures.

  “This is it!” he shouted. “You must go now.”

  She looked out her window, the one with the hole. The airspeed indicator had them going about twenty miles an hour. It still seemed pretty fast.

  “This is probably a bad idea,” Annja said. She yanked open her door. Clutching her day-pack to her chest she rolled out.

  She hit the hot blacktop, bounced, rolled. Her teeth clacked together. Immediately the airplane’s engines howled as the pilot jammed the throttle to the stops so hard he must have bent the handle. The little red-and-white plane scooted away, rapidly picking up speed.

  Annja stopped rolling after fifty feet. One of the benefits of her martial arts practice, along with gymnastics training and yoga, was enhanced body awareness. She already knew two things—nothing was broken, and she’d ache for days.

  The plane seemed not so much to lift off as run out of island. It just skimmed the waves for a moment, then began to climb. Annja rolled into the ditch beside the runway. She was thankful the pilot had gotten away okay. He really hadn’t signed on for a hot landing zone.

  And he had done what she paid him for—delivered her intact. Mostly, she thought, feeling bruises develop on her hips, buttocks and shoulder.

  She let her pack slide to the bottom of the ditch. It was lined with weeds and litter that, she hoped, didn’t house anything too venomous that bit. Or anything that bit too hard. She looked back along the runway toward the airfield buildings and the C-130.

  The big cargo plane was lumbering into motion, turning onto the runway as if to taxi for a takeoff. She guessed it would have to go all the way to the east end to get a long enough takeoff roll. She knew the Hercules could take off on a fairly short runway—surprising what you learned, when you knocked around the world as much as she did, not to mention got knocked around by it—but it was still a great wallowing beast, and short was relative.

  Then she saw men running toward her on her side of the runway. Her lips skinned back from her teeth. They were white guys, beefy, not fat like some private military contractors, or overly ripped like ’roid rats. They looked as if their skins were stuffed with muscle like sausages, the way U.S. Army troops in peak training form did. Are they the guys who broke into my loft? she wondered. The odds seemed good they were from Millstone’s bunch. Especially when she spotted sword hilts stuck up incongruously from behind their shoulders.

  They carried submachine guns or carbines. That put her in a bind. She doubted they intended to kill her. She figured Americans would be conditioned against shooting a white woman without extreme provocation. If they did want her dead, the sensible way to do it was from a distance, by shooting her, that being what guns did and all. But if they wanted to take her prisoner, they could neutralize the advantage of her sword and the surprise factor it gave her just by acting professionally.

  Bullets kicked up sand around the men. Two fell. The others dove into the ditch on Annja’s side and began returning fire. Someone across the way had ripped them with a light machine gun.

  The five survivors forgot totally about Annja for the moment. Taking advantage of the distraction she jumped up out of the ditch and darted for a stand of palms thirty yards or so behind her.

  With every step she expected to feel bullets lancing like needles through her back. But the opposition forces, whoever they were, didn’t seem interested in her, either. People shooting at them were much more interesting than someone running away from them. She reached the shade of the palms and threw herself down in the pale sand between two of them.

  She looked back in time to see the Hercules lumbering down the strip, following the path the smaller aircraft had taken with its touch-and-go. It struck her as dead-brave or at least desperate, to run the gauntlet of fire like that. The machine gun sounded. The burly cargo plane could probably absorb vast numbers of the fast but little bullets. She wasn’t so sure about the aircrew.

  It was academic. Just before the plane drew even with her she heard a nasty crack, its ultra high-frequency and energy harmonics paining her eardrums from fifty yards away. A white flash and a cloud of debris flew away from the outboard engine on the plane’s far side.

  A big plume of black smoke immediately streamed back from the stricken engine. The propeller slowed to visibility. The C-130 trundled onwards. Can it take off on three engines? Annja wondered. The pilot seemed determined to try.

  The coffin must be aboard, she realized with a shock. They’re trying to get it away at any cost.

  This time she saw a white comet, blindingly bright, streak from among the buildings on the strip’s far side. Someone was firing missiles at the huge airplane. This one hit the undercarriage, blasting half of it to wreckage. The airplane pivoted like a hippo ballerina and went in to the ditch.

  Annja scrunched up her face and flattened herself, expecting an orange fireball and a rolling blast-wave. In fact, lots of nothing happened. The aircraft just lay there with its huge tailplane upraised. The propellers of the three surviving engines began to slow to join that of the disabled one, which had completely stopped spinnin
g. The pilot had evidently switched them off.

  From Annja’s right came the crack of grenades and a fresh outburst of shooting. The men who had started toward Annja gestured that way in evident agitation. Looking, Annja could see explosions on her side of the strip. A wooden outbuilding went up in orange flames and greasy black smoke.

  Farther along, the American-looking fighters were laying down their weapons and standing up with their hands behind their heads. Their opponents, their identities still mysterious to Annja, had apparently turned their far flank and gotten in behind them, starting to roll up their line. With their tactical position untenable and the airplane carrying their priceless relic nose-down in the ditch, the Americans had no choice but to surrender.

  Dense undergrowth grew down to within forty yards of the palm trees where Annja had taken shelter. Hoping the trees would screen her—and the victors wouldn’t look too hard her way—Annja began to speed-crawl on elbows and belly toward the cover of the brush.

  14

  Annja feared she was about to witness a massacre or worse atrocities. That sort of thing was anything but rare in the Third World, she knew all too well. If the winners were terrorists there was no telling how mindlessly brutal they’d be.

  But when they appeared, rising up from cover on the far side of the strip and approaching in a skirmish line from Annja’s right, the victors carried themselves and moved like professional soldiers. Dressed in jungle cammies and boonie hats, although of a different pattern than their foes’, and carrying assault rifles, they looked a lot like the men they systematically disarmed and herded into a group. They even wore swords of their own slung over their backs, to Annja’s amazement. The most visible difference between the groups was that the winners were shorter, darker-skinned and wirier, evidently Asians of some kind. Annja thought they might be Filipinos.