Читать книгу: «Paradox»
Levi began to twist alarmingly in his ropes
Annja reached up and grabbed his right boot to stabilize him. Whether the experience unnerved him or not, he didn’t continue the conversation. That suited Annja fine.
In the early afternoon the storm clouds returned with a suddenness that halfway tempted Annja to believe in Levi’s dueling mountain deities. At almost the same moment a soft cry came from above and Annja looked up to see Larry’s head silhouetted against the ominous boiling clouds. She could tell he was grinning.
Less than five minutes later Levi and Larry were helping her scramble onto the top of a gently sloping plain of ice, pierced by snow-mounded juts of rock. A mile and a half ahead of her rose the snow-covered peak of Ararat. And there, a quarter mile away to the south and west of them, the long, dark mound of the Ararat Anomaly seemed to hang over the edge of the abyss.
Paradox
Rogue Angel™
Alex Archer
THE LEGEND
…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.
The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade. The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.
Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.
Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn….
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
1
“Such exquisite form,” Roux said. He glided to a stop easily on the ice of the outdoor skating rink. “You make falling upon your wonderfully sculpted posterior a balletic act. Pure poetry.” He kissed his kid-gloved fingertips.
“How about a hand, here?” Annja Creed asked. She sat like an abandoned rag doll with her mittened hands on the ice and her legs stuck out in front of her.
She regretted the request at once. The slim old man with the bright blue eyes and the carefully trimmed white beard began to clap slowly.
Seeing her expression start to resemble gathering thunderheads he desisted and extended an arm. All around them cheerful skaters passed by emitting dragon puffs of condensed breath against a black night sky from which the bright multicolored rink lights banished stars. She fought the impression they were laughing at her.
With the help of Roux’s strength, surprising in a man his apparent age, she found herself back upright with her feet beneath her. Temporarily, anyway. She teetered, the blades of the rental skates strapped none too comfortably to her feet that slipped back and forth over the ice. Roux held her by the arm, steadying her.
“Where is your vaunted sense of balance, which you have supposedly gained through rigorous study of your black arts?” he asked.
“Martial arts,” she said. “ And the problem isn’t lack of balance. It’s lack of friction.”
“If you say so. Now, pay attention. The principle is simplicity itself. When you go with the direction of the blades, you move without effort. If you press at an angle to the blade, you push. You see?”
Annja did. She was starting to. Sort of. She made herself draw deep breaths to the diaphragm, calming, centering herself. You can keep your head while people are shooting at you, she reminded herself sternly. So you can keep your head while doing something little children do effortlessly.
The fact was, she was determined not to let this get the better of her. She wasn’t in the habit of backing away from challenges. It made her curse Roux all the more for talking her into this despite her reservations.
As she propelled herself forward a skinny septuagenarian a head shorter than Annja easily passed her by. Not a yard ahead of her a tiny girl, elfin face bracketed by enormous white puffy earmuffs, skated fearlessly backward.
Annja sighed. “I thought the Quays of the Old Port Skating Rink didn’t open until December.”
The outdoor rink was in the old St. Lawrence River dockside district appended to Montreal’s downtown. Like every other run-down waterfront in every other major North American city, it had been renovated and gentrified at enormous expense sometime in the last quarter-century. Now the skaters glided and chattered to saucy French techno-pop before the broad, benign domed edifice of the Marché Bonsecours, the old market that once housed City Hall.
“Customarily it does not open so early,” Roux said, tipping his hat to a passing pair of handsome middle-aged women. “But the winter has come early to Montreal, as you can see. This global warming, it fails again to materialize, it seems.”
He shook his head. “I do not understand you moderns and your superstitions. Even should the good Earth be warming, why is that bad? I lived through five centuries of what your scientists now call the Little Ice Age. Including times in which it lessened. In the times it grew cooler again, the people suffered, grew sicker and poorer. Crops failed. And whenever the weather grew warmer, prosperity and happiness returned.”
She said nothing. From her own detailed knowledge of history, especially European history, she knew her mentor was right about the previous effects of climate warming.
She also knew he wasn’t kidding about having experienced it for himself. What was worse, he wasn’t even delusional.
“All right,” she said to her companion as they picked up speed. She was finding a certain degree of control. She learned things quickly, physical or mental. “You’ve brought me here. You’ve established your dominance by ritually humiliating me. What’s so urgent that you had to see me?”
“What else but the offer of a job? At a fee most welcome, given the sadly depleted state of our exchequer,” Roux said.
Annja knew Roux was fabulously wealthy but he loved to cry poor. However, she also knew for a fact that their occasional joint covert enterprises, while tending to command high fees, were phenomenally expensive. For one thing she burned through all-but-bulletproof fake identities, with attendant documentation, the way some people smoked cigarettes. Even with volume discounts, the requisite quality was costly.
“Then give,” she said. The old man loved to hear himself speak and would ramble all night, or possibly for days, if she didn’t occasionally boot him back in the general direction of the subject at hand. The trouble was, he was highly entertaining to listen to. Being a raconteur was another skill he’d had a long, long time to develop.
He clucked and shook his head. “You moderns have no sensibility of the rhythms of life. Everything is always ‘hurry-hurry-hurry.’”
“You got that right, old man,” Annja said with a grin.
Roux sighed. “A consortium of wealthy American Protestant fundamentalists are organizing an expedition to examine the so-called Ararat Anomaly, believed by many to be Noah’s Ark. They wish you to come along and direct excavation and preservation.”
“No,” Annja said without hesitation.
His fine brow creased in a frown. “Why must you always make things so difficult, child?”
“ You’re trying to hook me up with a bunch of Biblical literalists? They’re like the archenemies of anthropologists and archaeologists.”
“Why must you be so dogmatic? You really should be more open-minded.”
“The Ararat Anomaly is a total crock. The mountain’s sixteen thousand feet high, for God’s sake! How does a flood plant something up there?”
“It is, in fact, Turkey’s highest mountain at 5,137 meters. Or 16,854 feet, as you Americans would say. I’m with you, by the way—the metric system was another unlovely conceit of the French Revolution. We might as well have kept their ridiculous calendar, with its ten-day weeks and its months with names like Heat and Fog!”
“Okay. Almost seventeen thousand feet, then. Thanks for making my point for me.”
“But what of the photographic evidence? The Ararat Anomaly has repeatedly been photographed by surveillance aircraft and satellites. Some analysts claim it resembles the Biblical description of Noah’s Ark.”
“It’s just a natural formation.”
“Ah, but do you know that for a fact? How? Is this your science, to determine truth by decree like His Holiness the Pope? You’ve not been there. No one has, for very long. No expedition has ever succeeded in examining it in detail.”
“Of course they haven’t,” Annja said. “The Turkish government won’t let anyone in because of trouble with the Kurds. And with the fighting between the Turks and the Kurds continuing the way it is, the Turks are especially unlikely to let anyone in now.”
“Just so. Yet the expedition sponsors and organizers, who I assure you are serious men who are not to be taken lightly, believe they have a way to get to the mountain and climb it with ample time to perform at least a site survey and preliminary excavation.”
“You mean go in illegally, don’t you?” she asked.
“It’s not as if you are a stranger to that sort of thing, Annja dear.”
She shrugged. The motion momentarily unbalanced her. She felt proud that she managed to right herself without clutching at Roux. He had them skating in a circuit about the rink’s long oval now. She noticed he also kept them clear of the rail, most likely to prevent her grabbing it and vaulting to solid ground. Or ground with friction, anyway.
Roux had declared himself her mentor when she first came into possession of Joan of Arc’s sword through some kind of power she did not fully comprehend. Even now she didn’t really know what that meant. The sword traveled with her in another plane and was usually available to her in times of trouble. She could call it to her hands by willing it there if conditions warranted it. It was a privilege and a burden at the same time and Roux, who claimed to have been Joan’s one-time protector, came along as part of the deal. He was always pressing her, pushing her to extend her boundaries, challenge herself.
For the most part Roux seemed content to play business manager for her unorthodox archaeological services. She knew, though, that he had an agenda entirely his own. And she had no real clue as to what it was.
“Where is your dedication to the scientific method?” he asked. “Where’s the spirit of scientific inquiry? Where, even, simple human curiosity? Absent investigation, child, how can you be so sure what it is or is not?”
“Well,” she said, “I mean, how likely is it?”
“My principals claim to have in their possession relics recovered from the site. Allegedly these substantiate that it is, at the very least, artificial in origin.”
His gloved hands gestured grandiosely. Other skaters glanced their way and giggled. But it didn’t disturb his balance in the slightest. In fact he skated with the same ease with which a dolphin swam. He’s had a lot of time to practice this, too, Annja reminded herself
“Think, Annja!” he exclaimed. “Even if it doesn’t happen to be the Ark, would not a man-made structure atop the mountain be a magnificent archaeological find? Would it not also be in dire need of professional preservation? And also, the Americans offer quite a handsome fee.”
“There’s that.”
“You won’t even have to organize matters, nor run the expedition. That burden is borne by others. You’ll be there purely as chief archaeologist.”
She sighed. Roux could be devilishly persuasive.
He was right about one weakness of hers in particular. Science and the scientific method were very important to her, as was the spirit of scientific inquiry. But mostly, she was as curious as the proverbial cat.
“All right, you old renegade,” she said. “You’ve got me wondering just what is on top of that stupid mountain. I’ll agree to hear them out.”
“Splendid.”
“I’m not promising anything else,” she said, shaking her head so emphatically she blew her balance again and had to windmill her arms frantically. Her legs in their black tights slid right out in front if her. She landed on her tailbone with an impact that shot sparks up her spine to explode like fireworks in her brain.
Roux blinked down at her. “Try to contain your excitement, child. People stare.”
Grumbling, she allowed him to help her up once more with his surprising strength of grip and arm.
“Besides,” Roux said as she came back onto her skates, a little tentatively. “I can’t dally here with you forever, delightful as your company always is. I’ve got other projects to attend to. I’ll set up a meeting and will be in touch.” He skated away from her with great speed.
“Roux!” Annja called out to him as he disappeared. Once again she was left wondering what she was getting herself into.
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.
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