Текст книги "The Bone Conjurer"

Автор книги: Алекс Арчер

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

2

Annja’s belt loops dragged over the bridge railing, but didn’t catch. The man was heavier than she’d expected from such a slender frame.

Bracing air tugged off her ski cap and bruised over her scalp. It hissed through her too-thin-for-winter jacket as she fell, headfirst and backward, toward the water.

With less than twenty feet from railing to water, she worked quickly.

Twisting in midair, still maintaining a death grip on the man, she managed to kick and aim his legs downward. Now she fell over him, positioned as if she’d stepped up to put her arms around his shoulders for a hug.

Impact loosened her fingers from his body, but she scrambled to grip the slippery coat fabric. His horizontal body broke the surface of water and slowed his descent, while Annja’s body crashed hard against his. It felt as if she’d landed on the ground, belly first, after a daring leap from a backyard trampoline.

At least she was making comparisons and not pushing up daisies, she realized.

The water was only slighter warmer than frozen. Some summer heat must yet be trapped in the depths. Or a toxic boil.

Their bodies submerged and Annja immediately struggled with the backpack straps. The first one proved difficult. She couldn’t get the tight strap over the man’s shoulder.

Breath spilling from her faster than she wished, she stopped herself before a frustrating cry would see her swallowing water. As it was, she’d snorted a healthy dose upon submersion and it wasn’t the finest vintage she’d tasted. If she did survive drowning, the toxic cocktail she sucked down her throat would surely kill her, if not at least make her glow electric green in the dark.

With thoughts of hypothermia storming her thinning brain waves, Annja jerked on the backpack strap and tugged it from the man’s arm. His body felt twice as heavy now. He was sinking fast, taking her with him. The canal wasn’t deep—perhaps fifteen to twenty feet—but a person could drown in less than a foot of water.

Utilizing a death grip on the backpack strap, she struggled to release his other lifeless arm.

A wince let out her last ounce of breath. Thanks to some trapped air, the backpack floated and Annja hooked it over an arm and bent her elbow. Kicking, she headed toward the surface, but quickly decided to change course for the murky shadows to her right.

Surfacing under the bridge, she gasped. The icy air pierced like needles at the back of her throat. Spitting out water, she sucked in just as much. Sputtering, she bit on a nasty piece of something she didn’t care to identify.

A kick of her legs slammed her against the slimy log bulkhead hugging the bridge girder.

Shivering, she pushed the hair from her eyes. She wanted to climb out, but didn’t know if the sniper would still be watching. Of course he would. Whoever he was. Was he allied with Sneak? If so, then someone wasn’t playing nice.

She couldn’t risk the chance of emerging in plain sight. She’d have to swim downstream as far as possible.

“Should have stayed home and popped in an episode of Supernatural,” she grumbled.

A cup of hot chocolate sounded too good to be true right now.

Her words stuttered from the cold. But the sound of her voice reassured in a strange way. The sting on her neck had subsided. The bullet must have only skimmed flesh. She was alive, which is what mattered.

Submerging was a difficult choice, but she took a deep breath and let her body drop into the dark, muffling depths.

The murky water and her position under the bridge made it impossible to see. But she didn’t need to see. It wasn’t as though she’d run into a boat or shark down here. Though a whale had been trapped in the canal a few years back. It wasn’t so much taking a bite from a fish that Annja worried about, as the raw sewage in the water.

A slight lightening in the waters signaled she’d cleared the bridge. Keeping close to what she felt was the shore, though her shoes didn’t touch bottom, she kicked swiftly and stroked with her free right arm, while maintaining a secure clutch on the backpack with her left.

A muffled horn honked as a car passed over the bridge. Annja was surprised to hear sound at all. The reminder the real world was so close again bolstered her confidence and made kicking in the cold waters easier.

A branch snagged her ankle. She kicked frantically, briefly panicking. Bubbles of air escaped, and she had to surface to gasp in air. She didn’t bring up her shoulders, only the top of her face. Sucking in the cold November air, she then inhaled deeply and went under.

While she hadn’t planned for an adventure swimming the depths this evening, Annja could only fault herself for not expecting it. When did the world just leave her alone and allow her a normal day?

Finding a surprise smile, she soared forward, turning in the water, to tilt her face to the surface. The world could mess with her all it liked. She was up for the challenge.

Paddling her hands near her thighs to keep her body under as much as possible, she managed to break the surface with only her face. A scan above the lumber edging the shore spied rooftops where she guessed the sniper had shot from.

A gulp of air, and she again submerged. She was on the wrong side of the river. But she wasn’t about to cross it. The current would carry her the way she’d come. Which meant she’d have to go another hundred yards at least, to put her out of sight of the buildings.

What seemed like an hour in the water was probably more like fifteen minutes. It was fourteen minutes too long.

Emerging, she dragged herself up along a mooring of old timbers lashed together with slimy rope. Slipping around behind the mooring put her next to a dock. The backpack no longer floated. It snagged on a branch—no, it was a hook of iron rebar.

Annja tugged, but the rebar held her prize securely. It was close to the surface. Deciding to get out from the water, and struggle with the backpack then, she heaved herself up. Using the rope wrapped about the moorings, she managed to slap a hand onto the dock.

The sting of a warm leather-gloved hand gripped her wrist, and reeled her in as if a giant fish. She was able to stand—for two seconds.

A fist to her gut forced up a hacking cough of water. Annja stumbled backward. Her soggy boots slipped on the wet plank dock. She went down. The landing might have hurt worse if she had feeling in her body. The cold did a number on that.

Kicking at the man who leaned over her, she managed a boot to the side of his face. He yowled. The hood of his jacket fell away to reveal a bald head.

She hadn’t the mental dexterity, or warm enough muscles, to exercise a judo kick or to pull out her Krav Maga moves.

Annja turned and pushed to her knees. Swinging out her right hand, she willed the sword into her grip. It arrived from the otherwhere, solid and weighted perfectly to her hold.

Not completely focused, her brain felt half-frozen. She blindly swung backward. Contact. The hilt struck his temple.

The attacker went down in silence. Must not have expected the fish to bite back.

Annja whipped the sword into the otherwhere. Moving as quickly as her numb limbs would allow, she crawled to the water’s edge and dipped a hand into the canal glimmering with oily residue. Her fingers hooked the backpack strap. It came free of the rebar with a tug.

Her cheek settled on a thin layer of snowflakes. Lying sprawled, her hand gripping the heavy backpack, she closed her eyes.

Did other women spend their Saturday nights like this? She must be doing something wrong. What did a girl have to do to meet a nice guy who wasn’t either set on killing her or being hunted himself?

Standing, her body shivering and her steps moving her in zigzags across the ground, Annja didn’t look back.

If the man lying on the ground was the sniper, she wanted to get out of his range before he came to.

Her lungs thudded like heavy chunks of ice against her ribs, and the muscles in her legs felt as if they’d been stretched like taffy. She wasn’t far from home.

Forcing herself to wander through the debris-littered back lot of a warehouse, she found the street and trudged onward.

When a cab pulled alongside her, Annja hugged the icy yellow vehicle before crawling into the backseat.

“GOOD GIRL, ANNJA. You got the prize.”

Dropping the sniper scope, the tall dark-haired man quickly crossed the cement floor and descended the iron stairs. Each footstep clanked loudly. He wasn’t concerned with stealth.

He’d almost been too late. Hadn’t been able to stop the first shot. But the second he’d altered the course. Not much, but enough to save the girl.

Now, to see what she did with the prize.

HARRIS LET THE PHONE ring six times before hanging up. The sniper had agreed to contact him with details of the skull’s whereabouts, and keep him posted about each move Cooke made.

He wasn’t supposed to fire a shot unless the man holding the skull looked as though he would hand it over to someone else. Cooke hadn’t even gotten the thing out of his backpack. Harris, from his vantage point on a building half a mile down the canal, bit back a growl as the pair went over the railing, taking the skull with them.

“Idiot,” he muttered. “Ravenscroft must have hired the sniper. That man knows so little about fieldwork!”

Tucking the cell phone inside his jacket, Harris eyed the brick-fronted warehouse where he knew the sniper had been positioned. The shooter should be long gone.

Five minutes later, Harris topped the fourth-floor stairs in the abandoned warehouse. His shoes crunched across debris of broken glass and Sheetrock. An icy breeze whipped up his collar and froze his face. At the far end of the warehouse he saw the M-16 rifle, still set upon a tripod.

He rushed through the darkness and stopped before he tripped over a man’s body.

“What the hell?”

Inspection found no ID on the body. He wore black leather gloves and shooting glasses. The sniper. He was dead. No blood evidence. Looked as if someone had broken his neck.

Harris stretched his gaze through the hazy darkness in a circle around him. Whoever had taken out the sniper could still be lurking.

Why had this happened? Had Ravenscroft sent his own backup?

It made no sense at all. This was merely a surveillance job. Keep an eye on Cooke, and make sure he doesn’t do anything rash between the time he landed in New York and met Ravenscroft for the handoff.

Harris scrubbed a hand over his scalp. Anything and everything had gone wrong.

“Ravenscroft is not going to like this one bit.”

3

The cabbie had argued fiercely for a generous tip after he’d seen Annja was dripping wet and smelled like something he’d dumped out of his rain gutter last week. Good thing the twenty she’d stuffed in her back pocket had survived the swim.

Much as Annja wanted to unzip the backpack and discover what she’d almost drowned for, the call of a hot shower denied that curious need.

Dropping the backpack inside the door of her loft, Annja made a beeline through the living room for the bathroom. Twisting the spigot, she would let the shower run for a few minutes to warm up.

Stripping away her wet clothes, she caught a glance of herself in the vanity mirror. Her lips were blue, as was the fine skin under her eyes. Tilting her head up she stroked the bruised skin on her neck. An abrasion tormented the base of her earlobe. The bullet had skimmed her flesh, but hadn’t drawn blood.

“Lucky girl.”

To touch it hurt worse than actually getting the wound.

She pressed a palm over her gut. She could still feel the bald guy’s knuckles there. He’d packed a force. But she’d gotten lucky when the hilt had clocked him on the temple. A blow to that sweet spot joggled a man’s brain inside his skull and instantly knocked him out.

“Should have searched him for ID,” she said to her sodden reflection. “You weren’t thinking straight, Creed.” Due to her frozen brain. “Who was watching us that would rather kill the one who holds the artifact than see it retrieved?”

Because the shooter had to have known if he did kill one or the both of them, the backpack would be irretrievable.

Had Sneak expected a tail? He’d been nervous. Probably a thief. Might explain why someone was following him.

Twisting the water faucet adjusted the temperature and she climbed into the shower, but was too weak to stand any longer. Settling into the tub in a self-hug, she let the warmth spill over her aching half-frozen muscles.

Annja had learned long ago comfort was never freely given. If she needed a hug or a reassuring word, it had to come from herself. She was fine with that. If you couldn’t pick yourself up after a trying challenge, then you’d better get out of the game because life wasn’t designed for sissies or wimps. Mostly.

She laughed into her elbow. “You must still have brain freeze. The game? Whatever.”

A half hour later, with a mug of hot chocolate in hand and some warm flannel pajama bottoms and her Dodgers sweatshirt on, the final shivers tickled her spine.

Annja squatted on the floor before the waterlogged backpack. It reeked of things she’d rather not consider. Things she had washed down the shower drain. Toxins in the Gowanus Canal? Big-time.

This is a complete loss, she said to herself. Good thing it wasn’t hers.

Setting the mug on the hardwood floor, she then unzipped the pack. Water dripped out from the inside, but not a lot. Inspecting the tag on the outer rim of the zipper teeth she read it was designed for hiking and was waterproof.

“Good deal.”

Tools and a metal-edged leather box were tucked inside. The tools she took out and examined, placing them on the floor in a line. Not like carpenter’s tools. A small screwdriver slightly larger than something a person would use to fix eyeglasses was the only one she thought fit for a house builder.

The assortment included a handheld drill with a battery pack dripping water. A glass cutter. A few flash drives. A wide-blade utility knife. Soft cotton gloves, only slightly wet. A stethoscope. And a small set of lock picks in a folding black leather case.

She blew on the flash drives, wondering if they would dry out enough to attempt to read. She wasn’t sure she wanted to risk an electrical failure by inserting the memory sticks into her laptop.

“Who would use stuff like this?”

She looked over the array on the floor. An interesting mix. An archaeologist might use the gloves, but she preferred latex gloves herself. Never left home without a pair.

Instinct said thief.But why would a thief steal something like an ancient skull if they had little idea of its value?

Though Sneak had said he’d been hired to bring this to someone. And he feared that someone.

Too tired to push her reasoning beyond simple deductions, Annja decided to sleep on it. But not until she’d opened the box. She’d sucked in half the Gowanus Canal to get the thing and had taken a bullet. Kind of. It sounded more dramatic than it was, she admitted to herself.

Secured with a small padlock, the box was made of a hardwood edged in thin metal. The wood was covered with pounded black leather, impressed with a houndstooth design. It didn’t look old, only expensive. It resembled a reliquary, though on the plain side.

Annja eyed the lock picks tucked inside the leather pouch. She’d never used anything like them before, but had read a few Internet articles on how to manipulate the pins inside a lock with a pick. A girl could use a set like this. Definitely something to hang on to.

The padlock was simple enough, though it was heavy, made of stacked steel plates. She might fiddle around with the picks, but would get nowhere.

The wood box was hard, like ironwood, and she was glad for that. Hopefully it had kept the water from seeping inside.

Foregoing any burgeoning lock-picking skills, she picked up the knife and rocked the tip of it around the metal edging. Small finishing nails secured each end of the metal strips. She managed to pry off two sides, and another, until the entire top square of wood could be removed.

“So much for the security of a padlock.”

A fluff of sheep’s wool poufed out of the open box.

“Good,” she muttered. “Still dry.”

Carefully plucking out the packing revealed the top of a skull. Annja drew it out and held it upon both palms. The eye sockets observed her curiosity without judgment.

Immediately aware of what she held, Annja gasped. “An infant’s skull.”

It wasn’t uncommon to unearth infants’ and children’s skulls on a dig. She did it all the time. But it didn’t make holding something so small, and so precious—obviously dead before it had a chance to live—less agonizing.

Switching to the analytical and less emotional side of her brain, Annja inspected the prize. The bone had a nice polish to it. The cranium was overlarge compared to the facial bones, as infant skulls were. Large eye sockets mastered the face. The lower jaw bone, the mandible, was not intact.

The parietal and frontal bones, normally fused with various sutures, were instead joined by thin strips of gold placed between them, much like glue, to hold it together. The anterior and posterior fontanels were also joined with those sutures. Each fontanel, normally the soft spot on an infant’s skull, was smooth and shiny gold.

“Fancy. I wonder whose living room shelf this has gone missing from?”

Turning it over and taking her time, Annja smoothed her fingers over the surface, feeling for abrasions or gouges. There were no markings on the exterior bone that she could find. Sometimes knife marks remained after a ceremonial removing of the scalp. The gold lining the plates was fascinating enough.

No dirt. It didn’t smell as if it had been freshly unearthed. It was musty but clean.

It looked an average skull, stained with age enough she’d place it a few centuries old, at the least. There were no teeth in the upper maxilla, nor did it look as though there ever had been teeth. Could it be newborn?

“So sad,” she muttered.

And yet, the elaborate gold decoration might prove it was an important person. Perhaps a child born to a royal or great warrior.

Retrieving a digital camera from the catastrophe she called a desktop, Annja then placed the skull on top of a stack of hardcover research books. She snapped shots of the skull from all angles. When the flash caught the small gold triangular posterior fontanel section, she noticed the anomaly in the smooth metal.

“So there is a mark.”

Sneak had mentioned a curious marking in his e-mail. Holding the skull close to the desk light, she squinted to view the small impression in the shiny gold.

“A cross? Looks familiar.”

She had seen it many times researching renaissance and medieval battles, religions and even jewelry.

A cross pattée was impressed in the gold. It was a square cross capped with triangular ends. An oft-used symbol in medieval times. It did not always signify a religious connection, and some even associated it with fairies or pirates. The Knights Templar had worn a similar cross on their tabards.

The cross pattée was more a Teutonic symbol than Templar, she knew that. The Templar’s red cross on white background tended to vary in design. That set her original guess of a few centuries back, perhaps to the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

Sneak had thought it twelfth century. It was possible, she acknowledged.

Hell, the skull could be contemporary. She wouldn’t know until she could get it properly dated. And Annja knew the professor who could help. But first, she’d send out feelers to her own network. If the skull had been stolen from a dig, someone would be looking for it.

Powering up her laptop, she inserted the digital card from the camera into the card reader to load the photos she’d taken.

As she waited for the program to open, Annja wondered again about the man on the bridge. Dead now. Yet, a part of his life sat scattered beside a puddle on her floor. A foul-smelling puddle. That canal water was something else.

At the time, she’d suspected he’d been frightened. But now she altered that assessment to worried. Fear would have kept him from approaching her. Worry had kept his eyes shifting about, wondering what, if anything, could go wrong.

Had he been aware he was being watched? By a sniper? Perhaps by the buyer who didn’t trust the thief would bring the prize right to him?

What about the bald man who must have followed her swim through the waters and waited for her to surface? Same guy as the sniper? Or an ally tracking the target by foot? Was he allied with the sniper or Sneak?

Something Sneak said now niggled at her. He’d been hired to hand this over to—how had he put it?– a specific individual,and had a bad feeling about it.

So who was Sneak? An archaeologist? He’d only claimed to work on digs over summers, and that was part-time. Could have just been a lark, joining friends to see if he liked the job. He hadn’t struck her as someone in the know. If he had rudimentary knowledge on skulls, such as she, he could have puzzled its origins out.

Maybe. She hadn’t figured the thing out yet, so what made her believe anyone else could?

Online, Sneak had sounded like a layman who stumbled across an artifact while hiking with friends near a defunct dig site in Spain. And yet, that explanation didn’t feel right to Annja.

Add to the leery feeling the fact a lock-pick kit, drill and glass cutter had been on his person…

Annja knew when people hired others to handle artifacts and hand them over it was never on the up-and-up. Whoever had hired the sneaky guy may have also killed him.

But why? If the sniper had known the man carried the artifact on him, why then kill him and risk losing the skull in the river?

Annja envisioned a body found floating in the Gowanus Canal come morning. It wasn’t as though it never happened. Heck, the canal was rumored to have once been the Mafia’s favorite dumping grounds. But it had been cleaned up quite a bit since the Mafia’s heydays.

Annja considered her options.

Bart McGilly was a friend who served on the NYPD as a detective. He knew trouble followed Annja far more closely than she desired, and was accustomed to calls from her at odd hours of the night.

He didn’t know everything about her. Like at certain times she could be found defending herself with a kick-ass medieval sword. And after successfully dispatching the threat, the sword would then simply disappear into a strange otherwhere Annja still couldn’t describe or place.

What was it about the sword? Since she’d taken claim to it, weird stuff happened to knock on her door weekly. It was as if the sword attracted things to her. Things she needed to change. Things that required investigation. Things that could not always be determined good or evil, but, Annja knew innately, mustn’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.

It was as if she’d become the crusader for lost artifacts and weird occurrences. World-changing occurrences. And that put a heavy weight on her shoulders.

Bart was also unaware she really could use a good hug every once in a while. With the sword came challenge and hard work and, oftentimes, danger. Survival and strength could only be maintained with good old-fashioned friendship. Of which, she had a few, but not a single person she could call a BFF.

Did she need a BFF? Probably not. Then again, probably.

With a sigh, Annja retrieved her mug from the floor and took a sip. Cold. But still, it was chocolate. Propping a hand at her flannel-covered hip, she leaned over the laptop.

The photo program allowed her to choose a few good shots of the anterior and lateral views, and close-ups of the gold on the fontanels. She cropped them to remove the background. Didn’t need anyone knowing her curtains were badly in need of dusting or that her desk was a disaster.

Signing on to her favorite archaeology site, Annja posted the pictures along with a note about a friend showing her the skull. She wouldn’t make up a story about finding it on a dig, because that could get her in trouble. She had no idea where this had come from, and if she guessed a wrong location, well, then.

She’d check back in the morning.

Before signing off, she searched the Carroll Street Bridge to see if it had security cameras. It didn’t. Which wouldn’t help her sleuth out who she’d spoken to, but proved excellent should the sniper want to track her.

On the other hand, if the sniper and the bald guy were indeed two different people, the sniper may have tracked her home.

Flicking aside the curtain, Annja scanned the street below. Car headlights blurred in the snow that had turned to sleet and rain. No mysterious figures lurking.

She picked up the phone to call Bart. It was past midnight, but she dialed, anyway. Bart’s answering machine took her cryptic message about swimming the canal with a stranger. He’d call her in the morning, for sure.

With one last inspection over the skull, she decided to forego doing an Internet search on random skulls. That would bring up more hits than her sleepy eyelids could manage.

Instead, she flicked off the desk light and wandered into her bedroom. It hadn’t felt so good to crawl between warm blankets in a long time. Annja dropped instantly to Nod.