15
There were worse places to be stuck than on the beach in Tahiti.
Lying on her towel on Maeva Beach, with a colorful sarong wrapped around her waist and the island of Moorea rising picturesquely across the turquoise waters of the lagoon like a cinder cone covered in lush tropical vegetation, Annja chafed at paradise. The coffin and its mysterious contents were slowly making their way across the Pacific to the Philippines. And there was nothing she could do but think.
When, sometime before midnight, the inhabitants of Le Rêve had crept out of the hiding places they had so prudently found when the crazy foreigners started shooting up their island, Annja had pitched her best hysterical American tourist act for them. The French-speaking locals, both native Polynesians and colonial expats, were sympathetic. They were pretty shaken up too, although both sides of the firefight had treated the few inhabitants they dealt with—the ones who hadn’t successfully scampered off into the scrub—with scrupulous politeness. It was like a War of the Gentlemen.
Annja would’ve loved to interview some of the gentlemen, whom the locals saw fit to continue to hold captive in the Quonset warehouse, although they replenished their supply of beverages and gave them food besides. No opportunity presented itself. The islanders were twitchy, understandably, and Annja did not want to call any unwanted attention to herself by pushing too hard to talk to a bunch of captured mercenaries, which the inhabitants believed the American fighters were.
The locals treated Annja in very friendly fashion. She soon relaxed, especially once she realized no one gave much thought to who she was or where she had come from. Since they couldn’t fit her in their minds with either set of combatants, they took for granted she was who and what she said she was, and had arrived by charter plane—and awful luck—shortly after the white guys took over the airfield.
A large and cheerful native family had taken her in. The husband was a machinist who made replacements for cars, boats, aircraft and just about anything else with metal parts that broke for the islanders. It was a lot cheaper than having them shipped there, not to mention quicker. The wife ran a taxi and tour service. The kids, who ranged from toddlers to teens and whose numbers Annja was never sure of, especially since she was pretty sure neighbor kids circulated freely in and out, bombarded her with questions about America in French. She’d at last gotten to sleep in the wee hours of the morning.
Morning brought a French gunboat. It also brought final ruination of Annja’s plans to talk to the prisoners from the previous day’s battle royal. During the night they’d got the hinges off a personnel door and escaped. They left behind the Hercules crew, including the guy with the busted ankle, who were a mixed bag of Americans and Australians and claimed innocence. The French colonial police kept them secluded, but the airfield manager, a fat, cheerful French expatriate from Lyon with an imposing walrus moustache, told Annja the flight crew claimed to be a charter, hired to pick up a cargo and fly it to the United States. They believed the plane could be made airworthy, although how long that would take and how much it was going to cost worried them. The authorities, while not notably sympathetic, seemed inclined to believe them.
More to the point, the authorities believed Annja, especially when she brought out the hysterical American-woman tourist routine again. Age of global paranoia or not, Le Rêve didn’t have much by way of entrance and exit controls at the best of times. The airstrip barely had radar for the roughest-and-readiest form of air-traffic control. She expanded on what she had told the locals. The light charter flight had arrived after the initial takeover but before the Asian dudes attacked. The charter pilot flew away and left her, mainly because he could. She ran off into the weeds and hid until the shooting stopped and the bad men went away. The end.
The colonial cops, if anything, seemed less interested than the locals did. They barely bothered to glance at her passport, which was real. Her story was at once both plausible and impossible either to prove or disprove. Nor could they see her having anything to do with the mysterious firefight, either. After cursory questioning they cut Annja loose.
She had the impression the authorities were simply going to throw their hands in the air on this one and cross their fingers no reports of the battle found their way on to the Internet. Nobody local had gotten dinged, particularly no one from the French-run observatory. As mere astronomers, Annja knew they rated—if possible—lower than archaeologists in the world power structure, but their university would be sure to emit colossal clouds of stench had anything befallen them. No dead bodies were left behind to clutter things up. The property damage could be ascribed to the frequent tropical storms, including the one bearing down on the island even as Annja flew off to Tahiti, southwest of Le Rêve.
So here she was, lying out on the white sand near the Sofitel Maeva Beach Hotel, which was a curious step-design resembling a section cut out of the middle of a Meso-American temple. It was pleasant enough and also relatively cheap, by Tahiti’s ruinous tourist-trap standards, anyway.
She had spent the last two days snorkeling in the lagoon to admire the coral and the brightly colored fish. That and fending off amorous advances from French and American tourists, trying not to get sunburned and slowly going crazy.
Thanks to some software, probably only mildly heinous and illegal, provided by her go-to geeks, Annja could actually track the ship now carrying the coffin in real time. And wasn’t that exciting, she thought. Even watching a jetliner cross the Pacific live would have been like watching nothing happening at all, actually, since on a fifteen-inch laptop screen it would move about an inch an hour. It would look like a still photo. And the ship moved much slower than that.
She took a certain gloomy satisfaction that she couldn’t see it anyway. The long-promised storm system had swallowed the western Pacific, so far as satellite imaging in visible wavelengths was concerned. She was not about to pay the costs of trying to get more close-up pictures of the ship. She hadn’t even gotten to see what it looked like, although she rather guessed it had a sort of pointy end, a sort of flat end, and was longer than it was wide.
Annja fervently hoped that, wherever they were going, the mysterious Asian fighters were seasick every nautical foot of the way. She still wasn’t sure who was playing in the coffin sweepstakes, nor how many players there even were. But she was in no doubt that they were all mightily pissing her off.
She made herself close the laptop. She laid it aside beneath a towel so the sun wouldn’t fry its electronic brain, which without any help ran hot enough to scorch her legs if she got careless about using it on her lap. She spent a fruitless while trying to get in to the book she’d grabbed on a whim at the hotel shop, a novel about the romantic adventures of an intrepid, globe-trotting female archaeologist, the intrigues she got up to and the beautiful, exotic men she got up to them with. She was totally unable to suspend disbelief. These writers have no clue, she thought.
With a sigh she shut the paperback, dropped it back in the string bag she’d bought, tempted as she was to chuck it into the surf. She followed it with the computer. Picking up the bag with one hand and the folded rental chair with the other, and ignoring the odd wolf whistle she trudged back to the hotel.
The lobby was like the inside of a cave, cool and dark—at least after hours of the dazzle of South Sea sun on white sand. Annja had returned the chair at the rental kiosk outside by the pool.
“Ms. Creed?” a male voice said.
The voice sounded unfamiliar. Warily she turned.
“Yes?”
Two men stood in the lobby among the potted palms. One was a handsome young blond guy, built like a linebacker, with a fresh gray-eyed face and short blond hair. The other was heavyset, but in a way suggesting more muscle than body fat, with gray-shot dark-blond hair and beard cropped close to square head and jaw. His eyes were brilliant blue. Both wore standard tropical tourist drag—T-shirts, shorts, sandals.
Annja’s eyes narrowed. To her recollection she had never seen either man’s face before. Yet both seemed somehow familiar.
“May I help you?” she said in neutral tones.
“We need to speak with you confidentially, concerning a highly urgent matter,” said the older man. He had a European accent—Dutch, she thought.
“With all respect, I’m not sure what that could possibly be. I don’t know either of you gentlemen.”
“You did know our associate, Mr. Cedric Millstone, though, didn’t you?” the young man asked.
“Our late associate,” his partner added.
She looked from one to the other. The young man seemed to be trying hard to keep his dead-serious manner. The older man seemed quietly amused.
She didn’t bother asking how they’d found her. If they’d been able to punch through Garin Braden’s wall of obfuscation and mount an operation to crash through her skylight in Brooklyn inside of forty-eight hours, tracking her to Tahiti’s capital Papeete in a similar period of time was no great stretch.
Especially when those people had resources sufficient for little errands like capturing ships in the mid-Pacific, and dispatching small armies to distant Polynesian islands.
“My room,” she said. “Five minutes.”
She was amused to see the younger man give a look to the elder that was nearly panic-stricken. She had little concern about her physical safety, and if possible less about what an island of total strangers would think of her. Besides, it amused her to fantasize what would happen if word ever filtered back to the television studio in Manhattan that she’d entertained two men in her hotel room in Tahiti. Clarice and Mindy would crack open a bottle of champagne and exchange high fives.
Annja firmly dislodged the speculation from her mind. It reminded her all too acutely of what she was missing.
SHE WAS DRESSED conservatively, long khaki pants and cream cotton blouse, when the brief authoritative knock sounded on her door five minutes later. She admitted the pair.
“I am Hevelin,” the burly, bearded man told her when she had shut the door behind them. “My associate is Mr. Sharshak. It is good of you to consent to meet with us like this, Ms. Creed.”
“You might as well call me Annja,” she said, walking back to sit on the orange bedspread with its white tropical-flower designs. She intended to make herself as comfortable as possible physically, no matter how uncomfortable the interview turned out to be otherwise.
She looked challengingly up at them. “So. Are you going to report me to the French authorities?” If they were going to try strong-arming her, she wanted those cards on the table right away.
Young Sharshak looked positively pained. “By no means, Ms. Creed,” Hevelin said. “Your secret is safe with us. And we ask you, if we may, please, for similar discretion.”
“Fair enough. How did you boys get out of that metal hut, anyway?”
“It wasn’t easy,” Sharshak said with a grin.
She smiled and nodded appreciatively. She had him pegged for a terribly earnest young warrior-hero-jock type. It was nice to see him flash a little humor.
Hevelin took the easy chair by the window. Sharshak sat in the wooden chair at the desk. The floor-to-ceiling curtain stood open next to the Dutchman. For once Annja had lucked in to a great view—over the beach and the lagoon, with Moorea green and black in the background. As opposed to the usual view she got, of the restaurant roof and the garbage containers.
“Ms. Creed,” Hevelin said, “we belong to an ancient order of knights—the Knights of the Risen Savior, founded in Jerusalem in 1228 by the Emperor Frederick the Second.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of any order called the Knights of the Risen Savior,” she said. “And I find it hard to believe the man they called stupor mundi, the Wonder of the World, would found any such order. He had far more of a reputation as a patron of the arts and sciences, and a humanist for the time, than for his piety. That’s putting it mildly, given what a major thorn he was in the Vatican’s side.”
“You know your history, I see,” Hevelin said.
“I’m a professional. The Middle Ages and Renaissance are my specialty.”
“The Emperor, if the accounts of our Brotherhood are to be believed, was a complex man. He did found a new militant knightly order—a secret order. At the risk of sounding disrespectful of our patron, I suspect the prospect amused him. He would have his very own equivalents to the Templars and the Hospitallers. He was, as you must know, an avid collector of curiosities.”
“It wasn’t so much what he founded,” Sharshak said, all earnestness again, “but what we found.”
“The coffin,” Annja said.
The young man blinked blankly. Hevelin smiled. “You describe the container. We are accustomed to thinking in terms of the contents.”
“I’ve no idea what the contents are,” Annja said, “although Millstone suggested it was the bones of a very holy man. Whoever that might be. I blew him off at the time. Which, yes, I regret very much.”
“You mean you spent all that time on the island with the holy relic and never got a look at it?” Sharshak asked.
Annja sighed deeply. “I hope the French colonial police aren’t as efficient as you are. Or worse yet, the DGSE.”
“Neither the police nor La Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure has the motivation we do,” Hevelin said. “Indeed it’s in their interests if this whole matter simply goes away. No one likes doing unnecessary paperwork. Even intelligence agents. Perhaps especially them.”
“Anyway, the answer’s no. I only got a peek inside the crate. I didn’t see much but packing material,” Annja admitted.
“You would have seen little in any event,” Hevelin said. “We resealed the coffin itself, as you call it, after we recovered it. We try to keep moisture from damaging the contents, which are very precious.”
He leaned forward, knitting his big square hands together between his hairy knees. “What our order found in Jerusalem had an enormous effect on the Emperor. Whether it produced some intense religious reaction within him, only he and our Lord can know. But his actions indicated he took the discovery most seriously indeed.
“He charged us with guarding the relic. And preserving thereby the order of the world.”
She raised a skeptical brow. “The order—”
“Of the world, yes. The sealed metal coffin, or rather its contents, were believed to threaten the very fabric of society in some way. Despite, or perhaps because of, its holiness.”
“Hoo,” Annja said.
“Among other things the Emperor Frederick richly endowed us with funds and properties.” Hevelin shrugged his massive shoulders. “Over the centuries we have added to that initial endowment, amassing substantial financial holdings over eight centuries.”
“So how did you avoid the fate of the Knights Templar?”
“Well, as you point out, Ms. Creed,” Sharshak said, “you’ve never heard of us, have you? Our Elder Brothers saw early on how the Templars’ wealth and prominence earned them as much resentment as admiration. And we didn’t lend money to princes.”
“Prudent of you. So. What’s really in the coffin?” Annja asked.
The men looked at each other. Hevelin’s lips were rather thick within his beard. He moistened them with his tongue before he spoke.
“It is a very powerful relic,” he said.
“Powerful how?” she asked. “In the sense of the ability to perform miracles?”
“Maybe it can,” Sharshak said, eyes shining.
“And maybe I don’t buy any such mystical explanation,” she said.
“It must have some power,” the young man insisted. “To have made that kind of impression on a man with a temperament like the Emperor Frederick’s.”
“All of us make mistakes,” she said. “Even old Fritz. And I doubt I need to remind you how big a cathedral you might have built out of all the fragments of the ‘True Cross’s cattered through churches all over Europe.”
“Let us say, at the least,” Hevelin said, “that the contents possess enormous symbolic significance. Their mere possession confers great status and propaganda value. Such that, in the wrong hands, they could cause irreparable harm. One might almost say, unimaginable.”
She frowned. “I am still having a hard time fitting my mind around concepts like an eight-hundred-year-old secret somehow threatening the modern world. Such an item causing unimaginable harm strikes me as well, unimaginable.”
“We’re in a race with evil Muslim fanatics for possession of the holy relic,” Sharshak said. “That must tell you how important it is.”
She sighed. “Well, a lot of people have been willing to die for it, and a whole lot more to kill for it. So thinking about it I’d have to say it’s having a pretty malign influence on the world.”
“That has much to do with why we were conveying it to our newly built chapter house in North America,” Hevelin said, “where it could be kept safe from the eyes of the world. And the hands of profaners.”
“Speaking of profaners—if you mean those men you fought on Le Rêve, they sure didn’t act like Muslim fanatics. They fought as if they knew what they were doing—both sides did. But after they got the drop on you, they seemed to treat you pretty well.”
“That’s the honor of fighting men,” Sharshak said. “We’d’ve done the same for them.”
“Maybe. Okay, forgive that—I’m sure you would. But when I think evil religious fanatics, I think, burning people at the stake, flying airliners into buildings full of people, that sort of thing. Not this chivalrous treatment of defeated enemies. That wasn’t even common in Medieval times, as you’ve got to know. Chivalry was more a creation of popular culture than any widespread reality.”
“Yet the Saracen king Saladin was noted for treating his defeated foes decently,” Hevelin said.
A lot better than the Crusaders treated Jerusalem’s Muslims and Jews, Annja thought, not to mention Greek Christians when they sacked Byzantium.
She shook her head. “Well, maybe we’ll have to disagree on the nature of fanaticism. Who were they, anyway? The same people you took the relic back from in midocean? A pretty slick trick, by the way.”
Sharshak grinned. “Thanks.”
“They were not,” Hevelin said.
“So who were they? People who would arrange the hijacking of a cruise liner full of innocents just to cover a theft—and then turn around and murder the thieves they hired to pull off the heist—” She didn’t know for sure that was what happened, but it fit the evidence better than any other explanation she could think of. “Well, I’ve got no trouble calling people like that evil. No trouble at all.”
“Let us say this is a multisided struggle,” Hevelin said. “There are evil men who will stop at nothing to get their hands on this most holy artifact. We are its rightful guardians.”
Sharshak leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “We’d like you to help us recover it, Ms. Creed.”
“Well, here’s the problem,” Annja said. “Whatever the details, we’re dealing with a priceless archaeological artifact that should go back to its rightful owners.”
“That’s us,” Sharshak said.
“That’s not really clear to me,” she said. She passed her hands over her face and smoothed back her hair. “It seems to me the proper authorities should decide.”
Hevelin laughed. “And who might they be, in this instance, Ms. Creed?”
“I don’t really know,” she said. “Okay? I admit it. I’m pretty sure these Muslim commando-types aren’t the rightful owners. Maybe if they were Arabs, but they clearly aren’t. But until I have a better idea of the real rights and wrongs of the situation, I can’t help you.”
Sharshak looked as if he wanted to argue. Actually, he looked as if he wanted to cry. But Hevelin stood up.
“Very well, Ms. Creed,” he said. “We respect your reservations. However, I urge you to consider carefully that others will not.”
“Are you threatening me, Mr. Hevelin?”
“You have nothing to fear from us. You have my word on that. But I cannot speak for the other parties involved in this affair. Good afternoon, Ms. Creed.”