The Cradle of Life (9 page)

“I think so.”

“Such as…”

“That's the question, isn't it? When we find that out, we'll know why someone was willing to kill for it.”

Lara stood up. At least she now had some idea of what the Orb was, though she was no closer to discovering who the men in the tomb were.

Enough of flipping through books. Right now, Lara needed action.

Shouldering the rifle, she headed for the stable—and the target practice she'd promised herself.

 

Lara entered the grove cautiously, sitting side-saddle (like the proper English girl Miss Stehlik had raised her to be), with the rifle poised on her shoulder.

The trees made a canopy above her, blotting out the sun. A thick, seemingly impenetrable wall of green surrounded her.

The first man popped out from behind a pine to her left.

In one fluid motion, she swung the rifle around, targeted, and squeezed the trigger.

She'd fired true. The bullet caught her target square in the forehead, and he simply exploded, disappeared from sight, shattered into a thousand pieces.

Cardboard pieces, of course, but Lara pictured the Asian man from the Luna Temple—Jimmy's killer—in the target's place, and smiled, tight-lipped, with satisfaction.

A second target slid down from a branch high above her and to the right.

She fired again—another hit.

And before she could even lower the rifle, another target came swinging toward her through the canopy of trees and she hit that, as well.

Lara reloaded.

In her mind, she put all the targets she'd just killed in diving suits, placed them in the Luna Temple, and stood over their bodies.

She rode on. There was a slight breeze in the grove, from out of the north. Leaves rustled above her.

A target shot up directly in her path, swinging back and forth like a pendulum.

Lara aimed…

And just as she fired, her horse reared up suddenly, and her shot went wide.

She frowned. Something had spooked the horse—what?

Then she heard the noise, as well—a thrumming from up above.

Lara looked up and saw a helicopter plummeting from the sky—a government copter, heading straight for the launching pad behind Croft Manor.

MI6, Lara knew instantly. What other branch of the British government wouldn't even bother phoning for an appointment?

She didn't know what they wanted, didn't care. She didn't have time for them right now.

She dug in her heels, urging her horse forward. As they rose past the target Lara had missed, she frowned.

She pictured Jimmy's killer, holding up the Orb in his grasp, smiling. Escaping on her DPV while the temple collapsed around her, burying Alexander's treasure, Jimmy and Nicholas's bodies.

Without easing up on the reins, Lara swung the rifle back over her shoulder. A quick glance behind her to sight the target, and she fired again.

As she swung back around, she heard the target explode.

And another popped up right in front of her, barely five feet away. No time to bring the rifle to bear.

So she punched it square in the face.

Lara rode on, her knuckles stinging. She didn't mind a bit. Hitting things was much more viscerally satisfying than squeezing a trigger. Part of her even hoped that whoever MI6 sent would give her a hard time.

She wouldn't mind dealing out another punch or two.

 

Lara burst through the door into the long hall, and saw two men—strangers to her—sitting at the table.

Bryce and Hillary stood over them, looking uncomfortable. Hillary was talking.

“Perhaps you gentlemen would like some tea while you wait—”

“No, they wouldn't,” Lara interrupted. “Tea is for guests. The door is for intruders.”

She nodded to the entryway behind her.

Give them credit—neither of the two men blinked.

“Lady Croft,” one said.

“Or should we call you Lara?” the other asked.

“In any case,” the first continued, “we need your help. I'm Agent Calloway. This is Stevens.”

Bryce edged closer to her, lowered his voice. “Lara, these men are from M-I-Six—”

“I know that, Bryce,” she said, folding her arms across her chest, not lifting her gaze from the two intruders for a second. “It's clear from their soft hands and pressed suits that these are men who make decisions then leave the dirty work to others. I have no interest in—”

Calloway reached into his pocket and dropped a photo on the table.

Lara glanced at it quickly, then froze in place.

Her mouth dropped open in shock.

The photo was of the Asian man—Jimmy Petraki's killer.

“This man's name is Chen Lo,” Calloway said, nodding at the picture. “Along with his brother Xien, he runs a ring of Chinese bandits known as the Shay Ling.”

“I know the Shay Ling,” Lara said, which wasn't exactly the truth; she knew of the Shay Ling, knew their reputation, she'd come close to run-ins with them once a few years back, and had only on the advice of a certain person who at that point in her life she'd trusted stepped aside to avoid that runin, which was neither here nor there.

What was important was what had happened in the Luna Temple.

“Then you know what they do,” Calloway said. “They deal in guns, diamonds, antiquities…anything Chen Lo can sell on the black market. They followed you from the moment you arrived in Santorini—”

“Why?”

“For this.” Stevens stood and handed her a piece of paper—a fax.

It was a drawing of the Orb.

“After you were picked up at sea, a listening post in Malta intercepted that fax,” Stevens continued. “It was sent from Chen Lo to a man named Jonathan Reiss.”

Lara nodded. Another name she knew.

“The scientist?” she asked. “Won the Nobel Prize?”

“One and the same,” Calloway replied. “He's now the foremost designer of biological weapons in the world.”

She frowned. “No. That can't be right. He's a respected man, I've seen him at—”

Calloway handed her a sheaf of photos.

The first she recognized instantly—it had run on the front page of every newspaper, worldwide, two years ago last August sixth. The anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. There had been an attack on a group of tourists visiting the museum that commemorated the bombing. Two hundred and ten people killed—most of them Americans—by a nerve gas that had disrupted brain function in the most painful way conceivable, before death followed.

Lara stared at the image of the two women lying on the floor, their faces frozen in a rictus of horror, and flipped to the next picture.

It was of a small village—one-and two-story houses, some of them with chunks of building missing. The image brought to mind someplace in Europe, the Balkans most likely. The focus was on the burning stack of bodies at the center of the image, and their blackened, bloated faces.

“Enhanced cholera,” Stevens said.

Lara nodded, and flipped again.

The third and final picture was from a battlefield somewhere—Africa, most likely, the soldiers were all black men. They were all dead, as well, sprawled unnaturally on the ground.

Calloway took the pictures back.

“Reiss's creations have been at the heart of every act of bioterror in the past fifteen years,” he said.

“His disdain for life is legendary. He has no political agenda, doesn't care who his weapons kill or why,” Stevens put in.

“A modern-day Doctor Mengele,” Calloway said.

Lara nodded, her mind racing as she absorbed what the two agents were telling her. Reiss, after the Orb. The
mati
—the key to a terrible secret. What did he think he was going to find?

She paced the length of the room, once, twice.

It had been a day of surprising revelations. The Shay Ling, and Jonathan Reiss. Shadow guardians, and smatterings of the Maasai language in a Greek temple.

Her eyes fell on the fax she'd sent Kosa. The drawing of Alexander's army lying dead on the battlefield.

The picture Calloway had just shown her—the army of bloated, disfigured corpses—flashed before her eyes.

The connection struck her like a physical blow.

A plague, she realized. Alexander's army had perished from a plague.

Stevens started talking again.

“We know Chen Lo followed you to obtain the Orb. We also know that he'll deliver it to Reiss soon. What we don't know is why. Candidly, that terrifies us.”

Lara was listening—barely. Her eyes were still on the drawing of Alexander's army.

On the soldier holding the small box in his arms. What she'd thought to be a treasure chest of some kind.

Not a treasure chest at all.

She thought of the objects the temple had been rumored to contain, and a chill went down her spine.

“Pandora,” she whispered.

The ultimate biological weapon—the sum of all evils contained in this world.

“Reiss is not to be trifled with,” Stevens was saying. “The doctor—”

“Pandora's box,” she repeated, louder this time.

Everyone in the room turned to her.

Hillary cleared his throat. “I beg your pardon?”

“Pandora's box—that's why Reiss wanted the Orb,” Lara said. “He's going to use it to find Pandora's box!”

A long silence followed.

“Umm,” Bryce said. “Pandora? Like in the fairy tale?”

“You mean the Greek myth,” Stevens said. “Pandora is given a box by the gods, told not to open it. She does and unleashes pain in the world?”

Lara nodded. “I'm afraid that's the Sunday school version.”

“There's another?” Calloway asked.

“Several. There are analogues to the Pandora story to be found in almost every culture.”

She crossed to the far wall, to her father's prized Loring—a globe close to a hundred years old. Until a few months back, she'd kept it in the room that used to be his study, where Lara had sat at his feet, enchanted, as he spun her bedtime stories night after night, tales of the long-vanished kingdoms that dotted the ancient globe. Stories of gods who walked the earth, secret societies that controlled mankind's destiny…

Creation myths from every corner of the world.

“How do you think life began?” Lara asked, spinning the globe. “Shooting stars, meteor, primordial ooze…”

Stevens and Calloway shook their heads, waiting for her to continue.

“Actually,” Bryce said. “It's fairly well known that—”

Hillary whacked him.

“My father told me a story once,” Lara said. “In 2300
B
.
C
., an Egyptian pharoah found a place he named the cradle of life; where we, life, began. There he found a box. The box which brought life to earth. The pharoah opened it, but all that was left inside was the Ramante: a plague which came as a companion to life.”

“Companion?” Stevens asked.

“In nature there's always balance. The world comes in pairs. Right and wrong. Yin and yang. What's pain without pleasure—”

Calloway cut her off. “What did this plague do?”

“It leveled pharoah's army.”

She met Calloway's gaze, held it with her own. “That's right. Just like the army in your photo.”

The two agents glanced at each other, and sat a little straighter. Leaned a little closer.

“Go on,” Calloway said.

“The pharoah's son dispatched his finest soldier to take the box and transport it to the end of the world, beyond the reach of man. The story ends there.” Lara spun the globe again. The room was silent a moment.

“I don't understand,” Calloway finally said. “What does this have to do with Reiss? With the Orb?”

Lara stopped the globe, with her finger stuck square in the middle of India.

“Two thousand years later, Alexander the Great reached India. His army was ravaged by a plague—”

She passed her copy of the fax she'd sent Kosa to Calloway—

“—after one soldier discovered a small box among some remains.”

“India.” Stevens frowned. “So you're saying—that's where the pharoah's man brought it?”

“That's right,” Lara said. “India—specifically, the Bay of Bengal—was commonly regarded as the end of the world in Alexander's time. No one knew about the Americas, or China.”

“And Alexander found it?”