Solomon's Jar (15 page)

Above her head a yellow glow spread like a blanket. It had a benign, almost comforting appearance.

Annja wasn't fooled by that for a nanosecond. Apparently Stern's yacht had an engine with fairly substantial fuel tanks. They had just exploded. If Annja surfaced through that deceptively gentle glow she knew she'd functionally be necklaced like a South African informer.

Having some warning about what was about to happen, she'd drawn a good deep breath. She set out swimming underwater with strong strokes of arms and legs. She may not have grown up with boats, but she'd swum like an otter since she was four years old.

She swam until the yellow glow from the surface
lay well behind her. Then, lungs burning, she swam some more.

When she could no longer stand the pain, she surfaced. Behind her the
Zohar II
wallowed in the soft swell with its deck just above water. Everything from there up was a great compound billow of yellow fire, with dense, greasy black smoke roiling out of the midst of it and fouling up the sky.

She let out the deep breath she'd gasped down without volition and shook water from her nose and eyes. “Wow,” she said.

For some reason the only thing she could think about for a moment was that her spike heels were still aboard the blazing yacht. “Good riddance,” she said aloud.

She looked around. She was all alone in the water. If any survivors had leaped from the boat they were bobbing around on the far side of it. She turned to look toward shore. It lay perhaps half a mile off. A somewhat tedious swim, but well within her capabilities.

She heard the whine of an outboard motor. She immediately thought someone had seen her bail and had come out to finish the job. Her head and shoulders rose from the sea as she sucked down a deep breath, increasing her buoyancy, ready to dive fast and deep. She reckoned her best and probably only shot was to remain submerged until her persecutors decided she must've drowned….

“Wait! Don't be a bloody fool!” a voice called over the snarl of the approaching boat. It was a familiar voice, with a distinct educated-middle-class English accent.

She looked around. A small white powerboat slid toward her, riding a rolling crest. The driver was waving vigorously to her from behind the wheel.

“Aidan? What on earth are you doing out here?”

The engine's sound diminished as the boat approached broadside to her and stopped just a few feet away. She bobbed in the surge that rolled from it.

“I believe you Yanks have some less polite terms for it,” the young man called, half standing to lean over and extend a hand to her, “but I'd call it a rescue.”

He helped haul her aboard. She lay dripping puddles into what she thought might be called the scuppers. Or was it a bilge?

“The shoe is on the other foot,” he said. “Or some such rubbish.”

“That's fair,” she said.

Annja's dress was plastered to her body revealing more skin than she would have liked. Pascoe chivalrously looked away as she tried to wrestle it back into place. He revved the engine and turned the boat around, heading into the crowd of watercraft clustered closer to shore.

“Where are we going?” she asked, sitting on the seat behind Pascoe.

“Somewhere fast,” he said, “in the faint hope that we can lose ourselves. In a pinch—if the authorities nip us, say—I can claim with perfect honesty to be taking a survivor of the explosion to shore for emergency medical examination.”

As he spoke she heard the warbling of electronic sirens from shore.

“You don't really need medical attention, do you?” he asked, looking concerned.

“No,” she said. “You're not worried about the authorities?”

“Not half so much as I am about the lot that did in Stern and his floating pleasure palace.”

Luxurious as its appointments had been, the
Zohar II
struck Annja as having been on the small side to be a “palace” of any stripe. She didn't say so. Now that survival did not require immediate action and reaction, she felt mostly stunned.

“Good point. What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked, realizing her rescuer could hardly have been nearby in any kind of coincidence.

“Keeping an eye on our friend Mark Peter Stern,” Pascoe said, with a nod of his head to a big camera case that lay by Annja's feet. It sat half open, a camera with a long lens visible inside.

“Subtle,” she said, watching a white-and-yellow helicopter with a shrouded tail rotor that had begun to prowl
toward the blazing wreck from the shore. Her interest was abstract. Weariness descended on her like lead fog.

“But not too easy to pick up among all the other boats around unless someone was keeping a lookout specifically for such surveillance—which in Stern's case would mostly consist of paparazzi. Nobody noticed the crew on another boat setting up to fire that antitank missile, for instance.”

Annja sat dripping and stared at nothing in particular. She felt numb. She knew that she needed desperately to sort out any number of things that had just happened. But somehow she couldn't muster the urgency.

Something,
though, pierced her lassitude. She raised her head and looked in the direction of the smoking wreck. Other boats had begun to swarm around it in vain hopes of rescuing somebody.

“Right now! Turn hard!” she shouted.

Without hesitation Pascoe cranked the wheel hard right. A line of water spouts six feet high marched across their curving wake. Bullets would have raked the boat stem to stern had he turned a half second later.

“Bloody hell!” he shouted as the whine of the helicopter's engines and rotor chop became audible above the roar of the boat's motor. “What is it now?”

“Somebody in that helicopter flying toward the wreck is shooting at us,” she called, looking back at the chopper. It hovered broadside to them now, a sleek Aerospa
tiale Dolphin SA-366, not twenty yards up. A man was visible in the open doorway, aiming what looked like an AK at them. “Swerve,” she shouted another order.

Pascoe obligingly cranked the wheel left. Again bullets ripped the water where they would have been but for the rapid course change.

“Sod this for a game of soldiers,” Pascoe shouted, barely audible above the roar of their motor. Annja didn't have the slightest notion what it meant. Their latest turn aimed them toward a variety of anchored boats. Pascoe rolled the throttle full out to put theirs among them.

“Will you check my eyes?” Annja asked suddenly.

“What? What?”

Boats flashed by to either side, rocking gently in the powerboat's wake. “My eyes. I'm afraid I've got a concussion.”

“You may just be mad. They're shooting at us, woman!”

Pascoe glanced back. The chopper was approaching them slowly from behind. The gunner in the doorway seemed reluctant to fire with all the other vessels so close, just as the Briton had hoped.

Annja stood behind him, bracing herself with one hand holding the back of the seat. She flexed her legs as Pascoe turned the wheel over hard again, this time to port. They passed between a schooner-rigged catama
ran and a big white power cruiser. A topless woman who had been sunbathing on the cruiser's afterdeck rose up and shook her fist after the boat whose wake had carelessly drenched her.

“Please,” Annja said. “I need to know.”

Pascoe's handsome face scowled ferociously. He looked intently into Annja's eyes. “Both pupils the same size. Now will you let me drive?”

“Sorry,” she said. “It was important. Break left!”

Pascoe had turned them back into open water. The helicopter now prowled alongside them to their port side. The gunner raised his rifle.

The powerboat veered hard as Pascoe complied. For a moment Annja feared he turned too tightly, that inertia would have its way and break them over the berm of swell that had built up along the hull outside the turn. She feared they'd be scattered across the waves like rag dolls. If that happened they'd either be killed outright, or too hurt to do anything when the helicopter dived in close and the gunman pumped bullets into their floating bodies….

But Pascoe kept the boat on her keel. Annja was impressed at his skill. The boat passed beneath the helicopter, which turned on its axis to pursue.

“Head us straight out to sea,” Annja suggested.

“What? Maybe you took too hard a crack on the head after all. That chopper's faster than we are!” Pascoe said.

But the cobwebs had cleared from Annja's brain.
Perhaps it was a brand-new adrenaline dump on top of the old one. She felt much better, almost exhilarated.

“I've got it,” she said.

The helicopter had spun round. A line of bullet holes appeared in the prow of the powerboat. Pascoe turned the small craft back to starboard and lit out for open water.

Annja heard the gunner's bellow of rage even above all the rotor chop and surf hiss and engine noise. Pascoe had the throttle wide open. The small boat banged across the tops of the waves, each impact like a sledgehammer to the bare soles of Annja's feet.

Suppressing a thrill of alarm that the small craft might break apart from the violence of its own passage, she crouched down in the stern. The helicopter was overtaking them rapidly. Its pilot, she guessed, was as sick of his quarry's disobliging antics as his gunner. If they did what she anticipated, the chopper would zip past them and then flare into hover mode broadside to them, so that whether they broke left, right or came straight on, they couldn't escape getting hosed down by copper-jacketed bullets.

As the Dolphin closed in, nose down to drive with its main rotor's maximum thrust, Annja stood abruptly. In her hand she held a loop of a nylon rope that lay coiled in the stern. Dangling from the end was another grapnel-style anchor. It was a much more modest anchor than the one she'd struggled with on Stern's yacht.

Well, anchors have been lucky for me today, she thought, and cast.

In a long underarm lob the anchor rose toward the oncoming rotor disk. The pilot apparently saw something flash toward his face and responded by reflex. The helicopter banked hard left. The man in the door, seemingly oblivious to anything wrong, raised his rifle to his shoulder. The chopper was close enough that Annja could see him grin beneath his dark aviator glasses.

The anchor passed between rotor blades. The trailing blade caught the rope high up near the hub.

Instantly Annja heard a change in the rotor sound. The rotor, rather than severing the tough synthetic rope, wrapped it tightly around the shaft. The anchor, brought up short, bounced upward again. This time it struck a blade.

The thin composite sandwich sheared with a crack and a screech. The face staring at Annja over the Kalashnikov's sights went pale as the helicopter rolled rapidly counterclockwise around its long axis. The pale yellow flames that leaped from the muzzle brake when the gunner's finger tightened on the trigger stabbed impotently into the sky.

The Dolphin rolled onto its back and pancaked onto the Mediterranean. Annja heard a loud crack as its backbone broke. As it began to settle in the water a yellow glow of flame began to shine from within the cockpit.

The speedboat fell away to one side, engine idling. “Bloody hell,” Aidan Pascoe said. “That's impossible.”

“Just dumb luck,” Annja said. He stared at her, blue eyes wild.

She grabbed him by arm and shoulder and pushed him back into the driver's seat. “Drive,” she said. “Or do you want to try explaining this to the Israeli port police?”

The engine snarled back to full throttle. Annja rocked back as the little craft took off across the blue-green water.

“Either Israeli search and rescue has some pretty harsh ideas about how to go about their business,” Annja called out from the bathroom, “or we've got a new player in the game.”

She dashed cold water from the tap on her face. She wanted a shower. Her dress felt like papier-mâché molded to her body, and her skin itched from dried salts and less desirable substances from the Jaffa anchorage. But there were some things to be cleared up first.

“I don't know.” Aidan Pascoe sat in a chair in a corner facing the twin beds. With the curtains drawn and the light off a twilight gloom pervaded the modest hotel room. Only a buttery glow at top and bottom of the reinforced drapes showed that the sun was setting over Tel
Aviv. “But I'd guess we've just had another run-in with our friends the Russian
mafiya.
It's about the right approach for brutal completists, mopping up after the way they did with the helicopter.”

“You're probably right.” Annja said.

The television was on with the sound muted. For about the tenth time since they'd turned it on, it showed a past-prime pop diva in London, peroxide curls awry, mascara tear-smeared, sobbing about the loss of her adored spiritual leader Mark Peter Stern as her Pakistani soccer-player husband hovered in the background looking vaguely scandalized by the proceedings.

“What does the news say?” Annja asked.

“Still blaming terrorists, of course,” Pascoe replied. The screen now showed burly yarmulke-clad settlers rioting at the Temple Mount. “If it was the Russians, I suspect that terrorists will remain the official explanation, and the story won't have many legs.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The
mafiya
has its influence, after all. There's been never a peep in the international media about that slight unpleasantness we were embroiled in over in Amsterdam, has there? ‘Terrorism' is a useful catchword, always available to swallow inconvenient loose ends,” he said.

He took a sip of the whiskey he'd bought in the hotel lobby and shook his head. “Bah. Vile stuff. Not as bad as their gin, but there you have it.”

Annja splashed more tepid water on her face. It made her feel a little better. It cut the salt sting if nothing else. It didn't improve what she saw in the slightly cloudy glass, however.

“Could it have been?” she asked.

“What?”

“Terrorists?”

“Not a chance. Who'd rent a helicopter like that to a Palestinian? An expensive bit of work, that Dolphin. And also if one was positively frantic to get put under a microscope by the Israeli security service, that would be just the ticket, wouldn't it?”

“You're right.” Her arms braced on the sink, Annja drew a deep sigh and considered her reflection in the mirror. She sported two black eyes and looked like a raccoon. Her cheeks were puffy and her upper lip split. Her nose had, amazingly, not been broken again.

“It's all right,” Pascoe called out. “You look beautiful. Relax.”

She laughed ruefully. “I look as if I just had a not very promising debut in the middleweight division.”

“You should see the other guy.” Pascoe joked.

She shuddered and turned away from the mirror. “Please don't say that.”

“Ah. Sorry. Just trying to sound like a Yank. I wasn't thinking. Forgive me, please.”

Smoothing back her hair, which felt as if it were
pulling at her scalp with a thousand little hands as all the salt dried in it, she came into the main room. “It's all right,” she said. “I can't hide from things I do. That way lies madness—of one kind or another.”

He tipped his head and looked at her like a curious bird in the gloom. She sat on the edge of a bed.

“What was that thing that blew up Stern's yacht?” she asked. “Some kind of rocket?”

“Antitank missile. Almost certainly laser guided. It was much too big for a free-flight rocket such as an Armbrust or a Milán. And a wire-guidance system won't work over open water. Shorts out, you see.”

He set his drink on the little round table by his armchair and leaned forward, knitting his hands together. For the first time she noticed they were large hands, substantial hands. They looked strong. They looked out of place with the rest of his pink-cheeked, almost juvenile appearance, although she of all people knew a working archaeologist wasn't going to have the fine, soft hands she'd somehow expected to find on the ends of the pretty young man's arms.

She put her arms straight back to either side and leaned back on them. She raised an eyebrow at him. “How come you know so much about it?”

“I was with a Javelin antitank team in Northern Ireland for a year,” he said, “Royal Fusiliers. Bloody
foolishness, really, since the Provos never managed to come up with any tanks.”

“Was it dangerous?”

“Not for us. It was after the Provos started negotiating with Downing Street. There were a lot of nasty incidents that never made it to the telly, but they were directed almost exclusively against rival drug dealers. Lucky for me I mustered out before First Battalion got stuck into that mess over in Iraq.”

“Why were you keeping watch on Stern?”

“Same reason you are,” he said. “We're all looking for Solomon's Jar, aren't we?”

“What put you onto Stern in the first place?”

“You didn't think you were the only one to know about that last-call recall trick, surely? Although to be wholly candid, I merely read the telephone number over your shoulder.”

She laughed. “I didn't really think about it until now. I guess I should've connected it all once I learned you were seeker23.”

“You took your own sweet time coming to the Holy Land,” he told her. “Did you try the Malkuth offices in New York?”

“The White Tree Lodge, in Kent,” she said. “You saw the card, too, I'm sure.”

“Yes. How'd that turn out?”

She felt her expression harden without intention. How much dare I tell him? she wondered.

She kept it terse. She admitted having been forced to kill to escape a death sentence in the churchyard behind Ravenwood Manor. She did skip past exactly
how
she'd fought her way free of her would-be executioners.

He leaned toward her, blue eyes intent. “We need to talk,” he said.

She smiled faintly and pushed back a stray lock of hair that was tickling her forehead. She was very aware of her own stale smell of dried seawater, sweat and petroleum fractions. “I thought we were talking,” she said.

He picked up his glass, looked into it. An inch of brown liquid stood at the base of a small pile of slumping ice cubes. He took the glass in both hands and, leaning forward, swirled it between his legs, elbows on thighs. The ice made tinkling music in the glass.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I'm an archaeologist. Although I believe you once characterized me as a pothunter.” She couldn't help the last coming out with some asperity; it was the ultimate insult one archaeologist could pay another.

“I think that whatever my suspicions were, they've moved well past that, Annja my dear,” Aidan Pascoe said. She found she didn't mind him calling her that, even though he said it with an edge of sarcasm. “What I meant to ask was rather more along the lines of, are you human?”

She laughed. “Do you expect me to turn into some kind of reptilian alien before your eyes?”

“I'm not sure what to expect. I'd have said rubbish to all that about aliens passing as humans when I woke up this morning. That was before I saw what appears to be a very attractive and intelligent but otherwise altogether unremarkable young woman bring down an SA-366 helicopter by chucking an anchor at it.”

“I told you, that was just a lucky—”

He showed her a forestalling palm. “Please. I suspect we need to trust each other. To start, I'd like to be able to trust you not to insult my intelligence. Too much has gone on, from your astonishing presence of mind, not to mention competence, during our escape in Amsterdam, to that distinctively European cross-hilted broadsword you made such short work of those bully-boys with in the Old City, which mysteriously appeared and just as mysteriously vanished. What are you, Annja?”

She sighed. “I'm afraid if I tell you the truth, you'll
really
believe I'm insulting your intelligence.”

“Try me,” he said.

“What would you guess, if you had to?”

“I don't believe in superheros. Although you'd look smashing in a cape and tights. Or tights, anyway. Then again, I no longer pretend to know. I accused you of being some kind of CIA agent or special-operations
type, back in that canal in Amsterdam, but that doesn't answer it, either. There's not a training course in the world that could teach you to make a cast like that with the anchor. Much less summon a sword out of thin bloody air. I was never the sort to swot for the SAS. But even I know that much,” he said. “So suppose you tell me, Ms. Creed.”

“I'm on a mission from God.”

He blinked. “You and the Blues Brothers?”

She shrugged helplessly. “Believe it or not, that's the least…silly…way I can think to put it. I'm not even formally religious. I was raised in a Catholic orphanage, mostly, but like a lot of kids who went through parochial school growing up, that tended to make me more defiant and antireligious than anything. Or at least mistrustful of organized religion.”

“Very well. Go on.”

She explained how she had found the medallion in the cave in France, how she had, without conscious intent, much less knowing how, spontaneously restored the broken blade with her touch. She mentioned Roux and what he had told her about her legacy as successor to Joan of Arc. She didn't see any good reason to mention Garin Braden. She wasn't sure she believed the story any more than she'd expect Pascoe would. She shrugged and looked at him.

“Good Lord!” Pascoe exclaimed when she'd fin
ished. “You make it sound as if I've been serially rescued by Buffy the Vampire Slayer!”

“Well—not really. There hasn't been any unbroken succession of champions or anything. After they lost Joan, it basically took half a millennium for conditions to be right to appoint a new champion of good. Or anoint. Whatever.”

It was not, of course, either the whole truth or nothing but the truth. But Annja felt guilty telling him even this much. He certainly didn't have a proverbial need to know more details—or even more correct ones. As it was she'd told him this edited version of the truth because she could only see worse problems arising from trying to stonewall him. He was keen and analytical enough to arrive at the truth on his own—and imaginative enough to concoct potentially disruptive theories if he missed the mark.

“That's the most preposterous thing I've ever heard,” he said finally. “Then again, nothing less preposterous would begin to account for what I've experienced in your company.”

He rubbed his forehead. She sat in silence in the gloom and gave him time to think. It was hard. She liked him. She felt a need to be understood by him. Yet she didn't dare give him more details than she had already. And though she didn't think of herself as particularly adroit at relations with living people, she realized at some level the best thing she could do was bite down
and hold her peace, whatever it cost, and let him sort out what he'd choose to believe.

He raised his head. His eye met hers. They were large and luminous in the dim. After a moment he smiled.

“Let's get cleaned up and go for dinner,” he said. “Adventuring is hungry work, I find.”

 

“H
OW DOES
a self-professed agnostic get selected to be the champion of good?” Pascoe asked after they returned to the room. Once more he sat on the chair while she lay on one of the beds, propped on pillows. She'd had a tougher day than he had. They had turned on the lights by the beds. It still wasn't very bright. That seemed to suit both of them.

Dinner had passed in uncontroversial conversation. That had been by tacit agreement. Once Pascoe accepted the situation he was in, he either had a proper sense of discretion or was taking boyish delight in playing secret agent. Or, she reckoned, both.

“You aren't the first one to ask that question,” she told him. “You're not the first to get an entirely unsatisfactory answer to it, either.”

He looked at her a moment, then laughed. “Do you believe in Him now?”

“Well, I sort of have to. I guess. Although the impression I'm getting is that our religions don't necessarily get all the details exactly right, let's say.”

“What would your illustrious predecessor say if she heard you talking like that? The angels talked to her on a regular basis, didn't they?”

“I think she may have been delusional,” Annja said. “Roux never really contradicted me when I suggested that to him. Although I did feel bad about it after the fact because Joan's such a painful subject for him.”

“So no angelic voices for you, eh?”

She shrugged. “If angels did try to talk to Joan, they might have had their work cut out getting a word in edgewise, if you catch my meaning. That may have been what led to her downfall—trouble sorting out the signal from the background noise and all. May the spirit of my revered predecessor forgive my saying so.

“You know, all of this isn't any easier for me to digest than it must be for you,” she said.

“I suppose not,” Pascoe said thoughtfully.

“In any event, no angels have spoken to me so far that I know of.”

“What happens if they start?”

She smiled almost shyly. “Cross that bridge when I come to it?”

He laughed. He had a good laugh. Solid, louder and fuller than she'd expect to come out of his somewhat slight frame.

“What about you?” she asked.

He blinked. “Me? No, no angels have spoken to me, either. Not that it's ever occurred to me to listen,” he said.