The Lost Scrolls. Alex Archer
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hope there weren’t condoms in it, she thought.
“Wait,” she said. Jadzia’s last statement had finally penetrated her protective shields of puzzlement. “You’re blaming the oil companies?”
Jadzia nodded.
“Isn’t that a conspiracy theory?”
“Aren’t we victims of a conspiracy?” Jadzia said in infuriatingly superior tones. “Or do you really think that those men all just independently decided to attack us last night, and wound up doing so all at the same time by coincidence? That’s just stupid.”
Annja frowned. It made the snottiness immeasurably worse, somehow, when the brat being snotty was right. At least about that angle of conspiracy. Obviously someone had conspired to hit the Polish-Egyptian dig team last night. And they’d done a hell of a job. Had it not been for the fact that she was getting used to coming under attack, they would have made a clean sweep.
Annja’s fork halted halfway to her mouth. She lowered the chunk of fluffy French pastry with frosting just melting off in the Alexandrian morning heat back to her plate. She felt her stomach do a slow roll. So many, she thought desolately.
She saw the faces of the dead. The beatnik-looking Naser, darkly pretty Maria, cheerful Szczepan Pilitowski, who had died giving Annja a chance to save Jadzia, the scrolls and herself. Ismail—Dr. Maghrabi—who had tried to shield them all with his body, and had been ruthlessly gunned down.
Is this what it means to carry the sword? a lonely child’s voice asked from the wilderness of Annja’s mind. She already knew the answer.
She could hear the gruff voice of her sometime mentor, Roux’s, trying to encompass cynicism and compassion at once, saying, “You cannot save the whole world, child.” And she knew that was true, too.
But can’t I even save those within reach of my arm?
“See?” Jadzia crowed, sipping at her coffee. “You have no answers for me.”
Anger spiked in Annja. She held her body as still as if it were encased in concrete, did not allow the anger to travel so far as her eyes. Jadzia’s malice was the petty malice of a spoiled child, she reminded herself. Innocent malice, if there was such a thing.
And surely there was. By no stretch of her vivid imagination could Annja see Jadzia setting about the callous murder of a dozen helpless, harmless men and women. Her petty rudeness belonged in a different universe from such an act.
Oddly, the very act of restraining herself from lashing back at Jadzia made Annja feel better. “I still think it was most likely Muslim fanatics,” she said in an only slightly constricted voice.
“Why would they attack our dig? Why would they care?” Jadzia asked. “We’ve never heard a peep from Islamists. No threats, not anything. And the Muslim Brotherhood has very much to do already.”
Such as waging an increasingly successful campaign to dislodge the fairly secular Egyptian government, Annja thought. She already saw the sand leaking out of her theory anyway. She had knocked around, and been knocked around of late, enough to have uncomfortably firsthand knowledge of Western special-operations gear. The attackers had worn Western-style blackout dress and night-vision goggles, and carried the generic Western counterterrorism weapon, the MP-5. Presumably the Muslim Brotherhood could buy that stuff and learn to use it. Even at Western expense, given the enormous amounts of military aid and training the U.S. gave Egypt. But for a group as determinedly old-fashioned as the Brotherhood, it seemed distinctly out of character.
Annja took a last sip of her mostly cooled coffee and stood up. “I need to move,” she said. “Getting the blood flowing will help me think.”
“THEY CONSPIRED against us,” Jadzia said again. She dangled her long legs over a parapet of rough dressed stone. Several stories below lay a little shelf of rubble at the base of the citadel wall, and then the water of the Eastern Harbor, slogging and frothing.
Annja paced the terrace behind the Polish girl. White gravel crunched beneath her soles, and she could practically feel the afternoon sun beating on the wide brim of her hat with angry fists. She tried not to think of the risks Jadzia was subjecting herself to. While signs in various languages placed at intervals warned against precisely what the girl was doing, enforcement of safety rules did not seem to constitute a priority for whatever agency had charge of the big, blocky, fifteenth-century fortress of Qait-Bey. Nobody had yelled at her to get down. As for Annja, she already understood that the only way to get Jadzia to stop doing what she was doing was to try to physically prevent her. And the last thing they needed was to draw attention to themselves by getting into a fight.
Actually, the very last thing they needed was for them both to get arrested for causing a public disturbance at a national monument. Her estimate of the Alexandrian police was such that she expected it might take them only seconds to sell the young women to whoever it was who wanted them so dead.
“Why do you blame the oil companies?” Annja asked. She hated to feed Jadzia’s probable paranoia. But she was out of other answers, and a brisk walk through winding streets and out to the tip of the peninsula through growing morning heat hadn’t done a damned thing to replenish her stock. Although Jadzia’s constant whining was at least a bit of a distraction, she had to admit.
“They have the most to lose from what we might discover,” the young Polish woman said.
Annja stopped and looked at her. “What did you find in those scrolls, anyway?”
Jadzia shrugged and kicked the heels of her tennis shoes against the yellow sandstone. They were the only part of her ensemble of the night before Annja had let her keep. “You were there for one of the most tantalizing parts.”
“That bit about the crystals? That just sounded like New Age craziness warmed over.”
Jadzia laughed. “Right. Twenty-five hundred years old is very new.”
“But, I mean, that charging-crystals stuff—”
“We found more earlier. It spoke of all those things you found so funny—flying chariots, artificial lights, lances of light. The ancient Greek who wrote those scrolls, who somewhere got a much purer version of the story than Solon passed down to Critias, he did not have the language of technology to describe an artificial power source. He probably didn’t understand it. Some kind of divine gift, like Zeus’s lightnings chained, would be the closest he could come to expressing it.”
“But using gemstones for batteries,” Annja said. “I’m no physicist, but that sounds pretty implausible.”
An Air France Airbus climbed past them from its takeoff roll, momentarily blanking out the conversation in the scream of its engines. “What?” Annja shouted.
“I said, how would that airplane strike an ancient Greek? Implausible, yes? Everything is impossible until someone does it.”
Annja sought an answer to that and could find none that didn’t ring as hollow as a pewter doubloon. Come on , she told herself. Is she really that much smarter than I am? Or am I letting myself get intimidated, just because everyone told me what a supergenius she was?
Annja had been arguably the brightest girl in the orphanage where she was raised. It had gotten her knuckles rapped by the nuns for being a smart aleck, and had seen her shunned sometimes by girls who thought she was too smart for her own good.
But she thought she had gotten over the expectation of being the smartest person in the room by about the middle of her first semester as a college freshman. So even if Jadzia was smarter than her by some great yawning gap, it did not follow she had to think herself stupid.
“How would something like that work?” she asked. “Storing energy that way.”
Jadzia shrugged. “I am no physicist or engineer, either. But perhaps in some way involving the molecular bonds of the crystalline structure itself?”
That brought Annja up short. That