Chapter 2

"If you'd please follow me, miss?" The maître d' was a soft-spoken, light-skinned black man, tall and slender in his white shirt and black trousers, with hair cut short.

The establishment was called, simply, the Penthouse. Its decor was as spare as its name: dark stained oak wainscoting beneath ivory wallpaper, muted chrome accents and crystal lighting. The tablecloths gleamed immaculate white; the only touches of color in the room were the long-stemmed roses—the color of fresh-spilled blood—set on each table in narrow vases.

The real interior decoration was all exterior—the glory of midtown Manhattan by night.

Four men sat at a table with an empty chair, right by one window-wall with lights glimmering in it like a galaxy's worth of stars. The oldest man, and largest in every dimension, pushed back his chair as Annja approached behind the quietly respectful maître d'.

"Ms. Creed," he said in a voice that boomed above the discreet murmur of conversation, the tinkle of silver on porcelain and ice in crystal. "How good of you to join us. I'm Charles Bostitch. Please call me Charlie."

He wore an obviously expensive but somewhat rumpled brown suit with a brown string tie and an expression of jovial indifference to the stares of the other diners on his big, florid fleshy face. His hair was brown and graying at the temples; it looked natural to Annja, not that she was any judge. Seams of his well-rumpled face, exaggerated by his big grin, almost concealed his brown eyes.

As she approached she realized he was very tall. He towered over her, which was rare: he had to be six-four or thereabouts, probably crowding three hundred pounds. He had the look of a former star college quarterback who hadn't quite had the NFL stuff, and whose career and physique had begun their downhill slide about the same time as graduation and continued until his fifties.

He was a billionaire who had made his money the old-fashioned way—inherited it from his Oklahoma oilman daddy. But, according to the information Roux had given to Annja, he had more than doubled the family fortune despite frequent bouts with expensive bad habits. He'd supposedly cleaned himself up and was now a vigorous proponent of muscular right-wing Christianity.

Bostitch's handshake was firm and dry and all-enveloping. Annja could feel at once how he could overpower most people without consciously trying. But Annja was not most people and she was hard to intimidate.

"It's an honor to meet you at last, Ms. Creed," he boomed. Two of the other men at the table had risen politely. The third sat hunched over and peered myopically at an electronic reader.

"Please allow me to introduce my good friend and associate, Leif Baron."

"A pleasure." Baron smiled and nodded. The smile didn't reach his gray eyes. He was Annja's height. He had the broad shoulders that tapered through well-developed trapezoid muscles and thick neck to the almost pointed-looking crown of his shaven head of an aging but still formidable mixed martial arts prizefighter. His suit was expensively tailored to a form as compulsively fit as Bostitch's was sloppy, his tie muted. She could feel the callus on his trigger finger when she shook his hand. The guy was ex-military, she had no doubt.

"And this is my aide-de-camp, if you'll pardon my French, Larry Taitt."

This was a jockish bunch, Annja thought. Taitt was a gangly brown-haired man who was not quite tall enough for basketball and not quite burly enough for football. Maybe baseball was his game in college. Or, she couldn't help thinking, high school; he looked seventeen, despite the ultraconservative dark suit and tie, even though he must have been in his early twenties at least.

"It's great to meet you, ma'am," he said, big floppy-dog amiability warring with painfully proper upbringing.

He worked her hand like a pump handle until his boss dryly said, "You can let go anytime now, Larry." He dropped her hand and blushed.

"And you'll have to excuse the rabbi," Bostitch said pointedly. "He couldn't bring any real books to bury his nose in, so he's settling for second best."

"Oh," the fourth man said. "Please forgive me. I was just catching up on the latest digest from Biblical Archaeology Online. I got engrossed and forgot my manners."

Momentarily he got crossed up as to which hand he was going to shake Annja's with, and which he was going to use to straighten his yarmulke, which had begun to stray from the crown of his head of curly brown, somewhat scraggly hair. He had an ascetic's face, bone-thin and pale olive, a disorderly beard and brown eyes that looked enormous behind round lenses so thick he should have been able to see the rings of Saturn with them. He looked to be in his early to mid-thirties. Finally sorting the unfamiliar mundane details out, he shook Annja's hand as eagerly as Taitt had, if with a far less authoritative grip.

"I'm Rabbi Leibowitz," he said. "It's wonderful to meet you. I'm a big fan."

"Thanks," Annja said with a thin smile as Bostitch pulled out her chair. She sat. She was secure enough in her own strength of character not to resent what others would probably take as a male-chauvinist gesture. Even if, considering the source, it probably was one.

"You may or may not have heard of me before," Bostitch said, seating himself. "What really matters is that I'm a rich guy who finally got serious and accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior kinda late in the game. And I'm dedicated to proving the exact, literal truth of the Bible to help save a skeptical world."

Annja looked at him over the top of the menu. "Not just the truth, then."

He laughed. He seemed to do that easily. "Of course I'm interested in the truth, Ms. Creed. I say we go take a look and let the chips fall where they may."

He leaned forward. "In this case, though, I'm pretty confident what we're going to find will confirm the Book of Genesis. And blow the world away."

Annja glanced at the rabbi. He was lost in his reading again. Annja wondered what his role was in the expedition.

"We'll see," she said.

"Let me tell you a little bit about myself and my associates," Bostitch said. "I inherited a bit of money from my dear old daddy. I did the college thing, majored in partying. Got serious enough to get my MBA and come back to the family business, which was mostly oil. We expanded into agribusiness and, eventually, into defense.

"I was a pretty wild colt as a young man, Ms. Creed. Until, as I said, I was saved. Since then I've been mindful of giving back. I founded and fund the Rehoboam Christian Leadership Academy for young men in Virginia, near Quantico."

He nodded to Baron, who sat to his right. "Mr. Baron here came through that program. That's how we met. After he went through he consented to become a volunteer instructor. Leif was quite a bit older than our usual students, actually—he'd served as a Navy SEAL and then built his own security firm into quite a successful operation."

"Security?" Annja asked.

"Private security contracting, Ms. Creed," Baron said. "I own China Grove Consultants."

"Oh. Mercenaries," Annja said, nodding.

He smiled humorlessly. "That's not a term we're particularly fond of. In fact we've devoted a substantial amount of money to lobbying the UN to closely regulate the international private security and private defense contracting business. We'd like to see the UN move away from their conventional Blue Helmet peacekeepers, who tend to be brave but ineffectual, to contracting with private agencies to conduct peacekeeping operations."

"And you'd be the contractor, I'm guessing?" Annja asked.

He shrugged his massive shoulders. "We'd be there bidding along with the others. And we do a good job. At a lower cost to our principals than conventional military forces."

"Leif's taken a leave of absence in order to help with our expedition," Bostitch said. "He's our organizer and expediter. He'll run the show on the expedition. And Larry, here, went through the academy. He was a star pupil and I decided to take him under my wing, once he got his law degree."

Larry grinned and bobbed his head. "It's a real honor," his said, "getting to work with such great men and great Christians as Mr. Bostitch and Mr. Baron."

Annja couldn't help but like the enthusiastic young man.

"And Rabbi Leibowitz is a rising star at the Israeli Archaeological Institute," Bostitch added. The man in question looked up, blinked, grinned shyly and promptly went back to his reading. Annja had known some compulsive readers in her life—she came close at times—but the rabbi definitely took best in show.

Their waiter arrived and asked her for her order first.

"How rare is your prime rib?" she asked.

"Almost bleeding, ma'am."

"Great. I'll take the sixteen-ounce cut with the rice pilaf and steamed broccoli. Tossed salad with vinaigrette, no croutons. And iced tea and ice water, please." She thought about ordering wine to see if it put her hosts off balance. But she was no wine connoisseur, any more than she was a consistent drinker of any sort.

Nor did she want to risk diminishing her capacity even a little bit. It was definitely a temptation to a person of her scientific background to dismiss them all as religion-addled halfwits, especially Bostitch with his slathered-on hick accent and goofy good-old-boy manner. But Bostitch was an extremely successful businessman.

And although she had known some Navy SEALs who, while good-natured and in certain ways frighteningly competent, were not too bright, she didn't have Baron sized up that way, either. While a lot of fairly random and even wacky types had prospered in the general rain of soup that had fallen on the defense and security industries after 9/11, she knew the mercenary business, whatever euphemism it operated under, was literally a cutthroat business. She'd heard of China Grove, as it happened; their reputation wasn't too savory. If anything, they tended to be a bit too good at what they did. Leif Baron was not a man to be taken lightly.

"I guess you don't worry about your weight much, Ms. Creed," Baron said as the waiter left, having taken all the food orders.

"Constantly," she said. "I really have to work to keep it up enough that I don't start burning muscle mass."

He sat back. She got a flat shark stare from those gray eyes. Then Charlie Bostitch guffawed and slapped his thigh with a beefy hand. "Good one!" he said. "Our Ms. Creed's a woman with spirit."

She wondered if there was more to this group than she was being told. Despite Charlie's boisterous good nature Annja was starting to fear working with them would be a mistake. The way Baron joined in the laughter a beat late didn't greatly reassure her.

Their food arrived. It was excellent and excellently prepared; Bostitch had decent taste in restaurants. Annja's prime rib was rare, as advertised, which made her happy. It could be hard getting a really rare piece of meat these days.

As they ate Bostitch gave her his pitch, with occasional comments from Baron. They were brief and to the point, Annja had to admit. The former SEAL might not be likable and might be a touch too tightly wired. But he seemed to know his stuff.

"The Ararat Anomaly," Bostitch said, "was first spotted by an American recon flight along the Turkish-Soviet border in 1949. Since then it's been photographed on several occasions both by surveillance aircraft and satellites."

"Most recently by the space shuttle, in 1994," Taitt said.

"But no one's been allowed to examine it firsthand," Annja said.

Bostitch looked to Baron. "Not allowed to, no," the shaven-headed man said. "But last year an expedition did manage to reach the Anomaly. Briefly."

"And you had something to do with this?" Annja asked.

Again the unpleasant smile. "Not directly. At the time I was deployed to Kirkuk with my boys." Annja knew he was referring to northern Iraq—the part claimed by the Kurds, as it happened.

"Let's just say I had a hand in expediting the process," he said.

"So what did they find?"

Under the table Charlie evidently had his hand in his coat pocket. "This," he said, producing a plastic bag with a showman's flourish. It contained an irregular dark brown object about five inches long and maybe an inch wide.

"What's this?" Annja asked. He passed the bag to her. She turned it over in her hands. "It looks like a piece of old wood."

"Very old wood," Bostitch said. "It's been carbon dated as just under 3,500 years old."

"We believe the Flood happened in 1447 BC," Taitt said.

"Interesting," she said in a neutral tone. She passed the bag back to Bostitch. Taitt handed her several sealed plastic bags containing shards of pottery he'd taken from an attaché case.

"And here," Bostitch said, shoving a thick manila folder toward her, "we've got the documentation on the artifacts. All done up proper."

Except for the little detail about lack of official permission, she thought. Ah, well, stones and glass houses, as it would gratify Roux way too much to remind her.

She flipped through the papers inside the folder. "All right," she admitted. "Whoever did this appropriately documented the discovery and extraction of the artifacts, and didn't record the use of any kind of destructive practices. But these artifacts were basically found lying around in the snow. There's nothing about the structure itself. If any."

"Oh, it's there, all right," Bostitch said. His eyes shone with fervor. "The expedition members saw it plain as day, rising before them—a great ship shape, dark, covered with snow and ice."

"And they didn't document that?" Annja said.

"They had some…equipment malfunctions," Baron said. "Only a few shots one of them took on his cell phone actually came out."

Annja raised an eyebrow at him. Taitt pushed a sheet of paper at her. On it were printed several blurry photographs.

Her frown deepened as she studied them. "This could be anything." It looked big. It even looked vaguely ship-shaped.

She shoved the printout back at Taitt. "Then again, so do a lot of things. If I understand correctly the usual scientific explanation for the Anomaly is either a basalt extrusion or some kind of naturally occurring structure in the glacier itself. I don't see anything here to make me think differently."

"Ah, but the men who were there, Ms. Creed," Bostitch said, "they saw. And they know."

"None of you was on this expedition?" she asked.

"Unfortunately, no," Bostitch said.

"And can I talk with anybody who was?"

"Unfortunately," Taitt said, the young lawyer coming out, "it would be inadvisable at this time."

Meaning, somewhere along the way they had stepped on serious toes, she figured. And they were hiding out. Or…worse? They played for keeps in that part of the world. They always had. It was something she suspected U.S. policymakers, even many of their grunts on the ground, failed to really appreciate.

It was a game Annja was far too familiar with. She'd played for such stakes before. She didn't doubt she would again.

But not for a wild-goose chase like this.

"Gentlemen," she said, "thank you for a wonderful dinner. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get home. I got an early start this morning."

That was true. And while the flight from Montreal to New York had been anything but lengthy the attendant hassles and stresses of air travel constituted a sort of irreducible minimum. She always thought so-called "security" measures—which would make any serious-minded terrorist bust out laughing—couldn't get more intrusive or obnoxious. Any kind of air travel these days was exhausting.

She rose. Larry Taitt stood up hastily, knocking his chair over. "You mean you won't do it?" he said in alarm, turning and fumbling to set the chair back up.

"That's exactly what she means," Baron said evenly.

"Are you sure you won't consider it, Ms. Creed?" Bostitch said, also standing up politely, if with less attendant melodrama. "It's the opportunity of a lifetime."

"That's what I'm afraid of," she said.