Lara Croft and the Blade of Gwynnever

by Dan Abnett

  At the sound of more gunfire, Lara dropped and scanned. She saw a wolf go down, and then a muzzle flash from the window of a car parked several metres away to her right. There was another howl, and the wolf pack stopped, turned on the car, and began to surround it. Suddenly, they were growling and barking, and throwing themselves at its doors, trying to get at the driver and passenger within.

  The headlights went on, the engine ignited, and the car turned hard and sped off, ploughing through the remaining wolves, who lunged after it until it accelerated away. Then another howl from their leader sent them padding off in the direction of the ridge.

  Lara breathed a sigh of relief.

  But it wasn’t over.

  She heard snuffles and snickers and looked around. Not all of the animals were gone.

  Hyenas, drawn by the smell of blood, were gathering. She reloaded and began shooting bursts at the dark forms. Carter fired, too, but it took a lot of rounds to drive the hyenas off.

  Several of the hyenas had toppled dead before the rest of the pack was put off its feast. The hyenas cleared the area, skipping and running away into the mountains.

  Lara holstered her guns and took a blade out of her ankle sheath. She used it to pry open the dog’s jaw and release her foot. Its incisor had pierced the leather of the toe-cap, and its lower teeth had scored deep grooves in the sole. The boots were ruined. She’d chosen the boots to wear with the abaya, and they had very pointed toes, so the last inch, where the wolf had bitten down, was empty. Her feet were intact.

  Lara wiped her knife and sheathed it and accepted Carter’s offered hand to get back on her feet.

  “Are you okay, Lara?” asked Carter.

  Lara smiled.

  “Denny can add a good pair of dress boots to the long list of things he owes me,” she said. “But we should probably see if Strand survived the house fire.”

  They turned towards the house, as the last of the fire guttered out. All of the soft furnishing had perished, but the house was built of stone. There was nothing left in the room to burn, except for the wooden beams and joists holding up the first floor, and they were huge and ancient. It was safe for now.

  “You ever hear of wild animals that didn’t bolt at the sound of gunfire?” asked Carter. “Or the presence of humans or fire?”

  “Welcome to my world,” said Lara.

  They walked back into the house and found Strand in a hall closet, his hands clamped firmly over his ears, apparently reciting a prayer. They had to manhandle him out, under protest.

  “You hold him, and I’ll hit him,” said Lara, exasperated. “And I’ll put us all out of his misery.”

  “No...no...” said Strand. “Not again... I’ll come quietly, only don’t let the wolves get me.”

  “I should’ve let them kill you,” said Lara.

  “Not the wolves!” shrieked Strand.

  “The bloody Wolf-Heads,” said Lara. “It’s a pity they couldn’t shoot straight. Now, on your feet, Strand, and let’s get out of here.”

  Strand tried to stand, but couldn’t, and when Lara hooked an arm under his armpit, his legs still turned to jelly.

  “Let me do the honours,” said Carter, bending to pick up Strand in a classic fireman’s lift. The kid went limp.

  “Right, let’s get out of here,” said Lara.

  “I can’t carry him all the way back to the city,” said Carter.

  “You won’t have to,” said Lara.

  They strode past the mauled bodies of animals and humans. The hyenas had not discriminated between types of carrion. It was dark, with only moonlight to guide her, but Lara had no trouble finding the second vehicle that the Wolf-Heads had arrived in. They wouldn’t be needing it now.

  Lara opened the rear door, and Carter dropped his shoulder and lowered Strand onto the backseat. Strand didn’t resist. He curled up, shaking. Carter closed the door and went around the back of the vehicle to get in the passenger side as Lara had already climbed into the driver’s seat.

  The keys were in the ignition.

  “Fancy car to leave unsecured,” said Carter.

  “Close protection,” said Lara. “In a situation like this, they want to ensure a quick turnaround for pursuit or a fast getaway. They don’t want to be fumbling for key fobs.”

  “Good point,” said Carter.

  “But Vata’s a clever man. He didn’t leave until he was sure Denny wasn’t in that house. He knows we were here. This car belongs to him, so it’s bound to have GPS tracking. We need to be sensible about this.”

  “So, what’s the plan?” asked Carter.

  “We’ll talk when we get back to the city,” said Lara. “This car could be wired for sound, and I have no intention of sharing my plans with Mr. Vata.”

  “Another good point,” said Carter.

  “Let’s just enjoy the drive,” said Lara, putting the car in gear and pulling away hard, making the gravel of Denny’s drive kick out in a spray in their wake.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  THE YELLOW DOOR

  Kurkarob

  “The house is shut up. Mr. Denny is not here,” said the housekeeper, firmly.

  Lara had walked to the house with the yellow door, alone. She didn’t expect to find Denny at home, and an unaccompanied young woman stood the best chance of getting across the threshold.

  “Do you remember me?” asked Lara. “I was here a couple of days ago. Denny and I are old friends.”

  She smiled at the old woman and took her hand. “I lost an earring in the house. It belonged to my late mother.”

  She squeezed the old lady’s hand.

  “Your mother is dead? Poor child, and so young.”

  “Perhaps you’d make me some of your wonderful coffee while I look for it.”

  “Come,” said the housekeeper. “I have tulumba, homemade. You will love them, so sweet and delicious.”

  While the housekeeper was busy in the kitchen, making coffee and arranging the syrupy sweets in a dish, Lara searched the house. She riffled through Denny’s desk, checked his mail, and even browsed the newspapers and magazines on his coffee table. She looked through the pile of books by his bed and turned out his laundry basket. She found nothing to suggest where he might have gone.

  After ten minutes she wandered into the kitchen.

  “You find?” asked the housekeeper.

  “No,” said Lara. “Perhaps I lost it somewhere else.”

  “So sad,” said the housekeeper, pushing the dish of tulumba closer to her. “Sit. Coffee and tulumba will make you feel better.”

  “I should go,” said Lara.

  “Sit,” said the housekeeper. “It is too quiet. I like company. Who knows how long Mr. Denny gone to Egypt?”

  Lara had the little glass of steaming Turkish coffee in her hand. She was very relieved that she didn’t have any of the rich, dark liquid in her mouth. If she had, she might have choked on it. The search had not only been fruitless, it was redundant. All she’d had to do was befriend the housekeeper.

  “A holiday?” asked Lara, all innocence.

  The housekeeper laughed.

  “Business. Is all business with Mr. Denny. He love it. He say soon he will be home for good. I not believe him. He love travel. He love business. He love business travel. Today Egypt, tomorrow who knows?” She laughed again. Lara laughed with her.

  “Eat,” said the housekeeper.

  Lara ate.

  “You weren’t seen?” asked Carter.

  “Only by the housekeeper. Did you drive the car around the city?” asked Lara.

  “I took in the sights,” said Carter.

  “Nothing too obvious, I hope,” said Lara.

  “I did what you told me. I hit the records office and the library and an Internet café. I left Vata a nice data trail. I hope you’re going to tell m
e that Sampson did, too.”

  “No such luck,” said Lara. “I was stupid to expect it.”

  “Dammit.”

  “He is very close to his housekeeper, however, and she has a soft spot for vulnerable young women. She lets her guard down.”

  “You found something out?” asked Carter.

  “I had to eat a lot of tulumba and drink a lot of Turkish coffee, but, apparently, the pyramids are particularly beautiful at this time of year.”

  “He’s in Cairo,” said Carter. He considered the information. “Why Cairo?”

  “Because that’s where his buyer is,” said Lara. “Except...I think it’s more than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it, Carter. Cast your mind back to the dig. Put yourself back in that place, on that amazing site. We both saw it.”

  “The obelisk... The needle... An Egyptian site under London.”

  “Exactly,” said Lara. “This thing is starting to look much bigger than just the sword. It’s context.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “We go to Cairo,” said Lara. “I’d like to know why Vata is so desperate to get his hands on the sword. And I’d like to know who Sampson’s actually selling to. But there are a few loose ends to tie up here, first.”

  Strand complained nonstop. He complained about his injury, and he complained more when Lara refused to take him to a hospital, despite her explanations about having to answer for a gunshot wound. She extracted the bullet herself, and he complained about the injections of local anesthetic. Despite a large dose of sedatives, he continued to complain as she worked. He moaned when she cleaned and dressed his injury, and he whined when she reminded him to take his painkillers. He complained when he had to share a hotel room with Carter, and he bitched when Carter left him alone in it to put some data on the car’s GPS.

  Strand complained about the room service and protested his safety when they ate out in public. He whined about the length of the journey to Adnan Menderes Airport and bitched about his economy ticket. When he found out that the tickets Lara had bought for herself and Carter weren’t going to be used, he was almost apoplectic.

  Lara was past caring.

  “Shut up, Strand. You got lucky,” said Lara. “You survived Zizek, Sampson, and Vata, the greedy, bloodthirsty bastards. And you were damned lucky I didn’t put you out of your misery. Keep your mouth shut, and the authorities might never know you started this whole damned mess. Just get on the plane.”

  With that, she turned and walked off.

  Carter and Strand watched her walk away for a few moments, and then they looked at each other.

  “Is that it?” asked Strand, like a lost child.

  “I guess so, buddy,” said Carter, feeling a little sorry for him. He stuck out his hand for the other man to shake. Strand swallowed hard.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Just do as she says, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Right,” said Strand. “Screw her, then.”

  Carter’s patience ran out. He sighed, turned, and jogged after Lara.

  “We leave the car here,” said Lara. “The GPS data and the plane tickets should put Vata off our scent, for a while at least.”

  “Where to next?”

  “How do you feel about trains?” asked Lara. “The metro takes us to Izmir, and then it’s a comfortable sleeper to Istanbul, where we can pick up a flight to Cairo. We pay cash, we’re untraceable, at least until we fly.”

  “What are we waiting for?” asked Carter.

  “Who knew Turkey had such a great train service?” asked Carter, sitting in the restaurant car, eating the last forkful of his chicken dinner.

  “You can thank the English, French, and Germans,” said Lara.

  “What?” asked Carter, surprised.

  “A history lesson for another time,” said Lara. She pushed her own plate aside and opened her laptop. She logged in, and a screen appeared offering her free Wi-Fi.

  “And we’re connected,” she said.

  “How do we track down Denny? Finding one man in a city of seven million people is like finding a needle in a haystack.”

  “Closer to eight million,” said Lara. “But that isn’t our problem. I know most of Denny’s haunts, and if he’s not in any of them, I know the kinds of places he likes to stay. He shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “So what are we looking for?”

  “Links,” said Lara. “What do we know about the Egyptian civilisation, the culture? How does it translate to other cultures across the globe?”

  “How did it come to Britain, and when?”

  “Exactly,” said Lara. “And, if there is a connection back to Egypt, who in modern Cairo wants this sword back in the country?”

  “Who is rich enough to buy it?”

  “And ruthless enough to deal with Denny Sampson?”

  “And connected enough to know how to find Denny?”

  “Let’s get back to our couchette,” said Lara, closing the laptop and gathering her things together.

  “I’m too excited to sleep,” said Carter.

  “Not to sleep, to work. Privacy.”

  “The list of clients Denny has dealt with in the past is too long,” said Lara. “And none of them feel like an obvious fit. They’re industrialists, collectors. Some of them not entirely honest, most with agendas. Mafia connections in America, Europe, Russia, China, even the Middle East, but not specifically Egypt.”

  “What about Vata?”

  “We don’t work for Vata.”

  “But maybe his interest is the same as the buyer’s.”

  “Okay,” said Lara, typing Vata’s name into the laptop keyboard. She’d bypassed Google to use more specialist search engines, but it still took her several attempts to track down the man she was looking for. She was glad she’d met him. The only photograph on record was in the Deep Web, and was at least twenty years old.

  “Dritan Vata, the youngest son of a woman widowed in 1970 when her husband died in one of Tito’s prisons. He’s listed because his father was the famous Kosovan separatist, Veton Vata, who died three months before his son was born. The picture was taken when our Mr. Vata was an early member of the KLA, around 1993.”

  “KLA?”

  “Kosovan Liberation Army. After Tito, when Yugoslavia fell apart, and then—”

  “It’s fine, Lara. I don’t need the modern-history lesson. The short version is, he followed in his father’s footsteps.”

  “It looks that way,” said Lara. “But it doesn’t appear to connect to our site.”

  “He’s paramilitary. Perhaps that’s as far as his interest goes. Maybe it’s personal.”

  “Back to the drawing board,” said Lara. “Let’s start with the key features of the site.”

  “You saw it yourself, Lara.”

  “Okay. The sword. One very special sword, a double-edged sword—obsidian, not metal—made for one warrior. Why obsidian? A mystical material. And the proportions. It fit my hand, and my reach. It was small. Small for a man.”

  “Men were smaller then. Everyone was smaller then.”

  “That’s not necessarily true. Well-nourished individuals in sparsely populated areas tended to be as big at any time in history as they are now, allowing for genetic differences. People got shorter when they crowded into smaller areas and ate less well. The industrial revolution literally stunted the population’s growth, in urban areas at least.”

  “So the sword was made for a small man.”

  “Or a woman,” said Lara. “A warrior woman. What cultures, what legends relate to warrior women?”

  “Boudica in Britain.”

  “Cleopatra in Egypt. That’s a start. Nefertiti?”

  “The Minoan Egyptian.”

  “And the famous Cleopatra wa
s Hellenic. Are we widening the net, or are we confusing the issue?”

  “We can’t be sure this is about a woman,” said Carter.

  “What can we be sure of?” asked Lara. “We can be sure that the sword exists and that it’s right. And, we both saw the site. The obelisk. It was classic Egyptian, eighteenth, maybe nineteenth dynasty. How much do you remember of the iconography?”

  “The hieroglyphics hadn’t been deciphered, just some of the basic imagery.”

  “And?”

  “It fits neatly with the obelisk, as you describe it, but early indications were that it was specific to one period. Strange really.”

  “Explain.”

  “It was single-deity stuff,” said Carter, “monotheistic.”

  “It’s the right period for Amenhotep, the pharaoh who renamed himself Akhenaten. ‘Of great use to the God Aten.’ The follower of one god.”

  “Yes, but there was no cartouche for Akhenaten, just the imagery.”

  “But you’re happy to date it to eighteenth dynasty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said Lara. “It’s not a connection yet, but maybe we have an Egyptian-style or Egyptian-influenced culture in Britain around the time of the eighteenth dynasty. At the same time, we have a heretic pharaoh in Egypt worshipping one god, and we have the most revered consort in the history of Egyptology. Nefertiti, the most beautiful woman in the world, and Minoan.”

  “She couldn’t have been in Britain,” said Carter.

  “No,” said Lara. “But what if she was a model, a paragon? Boudica’s dates are first-century Common Era. Britain’s legendary warrior queen, and we don’t have dates for the sword.”

  “The sword fit the niche in the stone. You saw the stone, Lara. I saw the sword in situ. It was a perfect fit.”

  “And the sword was in perfect condition. It might have lain in that niche for three-and-a-half thousand years. But how long has the site been buried? When did the last hands before ours handle the sword?”

  “We can’t know that, Lara.”

  “You brought up the possibility of Boudica. You must have known the dates were completely wrong.”

  “It was a reflex, a response to the romance of the warrior-queen idea. How many women have been written out of history over the millennia, Lara?”