by Alex Archer
Tell me something I don't know, she thought. After a breath she realized he was waiting for some kind of confirmation she had heard and understood.
"I copy," she said, feeling lame. "How are you getting us out of the country?"
It was his turn to let her hear dead air. "What are you talking about?" he said incredulously.
"I mean, how are you getting us clear? The expedition's over. We need to save our hides."
"Leave Turkey? Not going to happen. We drive on," Baron said.
"You've got to be…kidding me."
"Negative. This mission's a go."
"That's—"
She stopped herself. She was going to say bat-shit crazy. But she didn't talk that way. And she was sure nobody talked that way to Leif Baron.
Nor did she want to, truth to tell. Not after he'd gotten her friends and companions safely away from the Sheraton. She knew far too well how many ways their mysterious enemies could have turned that gleaming white tower into a death trap. She'd dreamed of at least half a dozen of them.
"You're not thinking of backing out on us, are you, Creed?" Baron's voice was harsh.
"No. Uh…no."
It was a lie, of course. She was thinking about it. But she wasn't about to admit it.
Because she wasn't about to do it.
I can't abandon Tommy, Trish and Jason. Or Levi. Nor did she like to think of herself as a quitter. And anyway, the Anomaly was still waiting, fifteen and a half thousand feet up a frozen mountain. It had gotten into her brain like a burr beneath a saddle. It would itch her until she learned the truth. Whatever that was.
She pulled in a deep breath. "Tell me how to rendezvous with you," she said.
"That's more like it," Baron said. "I didn't think you'd wimp out on us."
* * *
ANNJA HADN'T BROUGHT MORE possessions to the hotel than she carried on her. She didn't exactly have any packing to do. Not vain, she still spent some time in front of the mirror trying to comb her hair out with her fingers. She figured it wouldn't be too discreet wandering the streets and subway looking like Medusa.
She had the TV on as background, a sort of synthetic company. The hotel had a CNN Headline News feed in English. The volume was turned low so as not to distract her.
Words nonetheless penetrated her subconscious. "—second car bomb, near the Haci Bayram Mosque in Ankara's Ulus district, awakened new fears of a resurgent of terrorist activity…"
Heart in throat, Annja spun. Ulus lay west of the castle, to the north across the city center from where the hit on Orga had taken place. And coincidentally, from the hotel where her group was staying. She saw somewhat washed-out news footage of a compact car burning fiercely with whitish-looking flames and surrounded by rescue vehicles with flashing lights and heavily armed men in camouflaged battle dress.
"Two people are known dead in the attack at this hour," the television told her. The screen showed a gurney carrying a poison-green body bag being wheeled toward an ambulance. "Another dozen have been injured."
Head spinning, stomach suddenly surging with bile, she sat heavily on the bed. It's just a coincidence, she told herself sternly. There can't possibly be any connection.
But the little voice at the back of her skull kept reminding her in an insidious whisper what a clever diversion a bombing like that would make for a mass escape. Just the sort of trick a seasoned special-operations vet might pull.
No proof, she thought. No proof. Her stomach wasn't waiting for more proof. She had to struggle to keep the bile down. A bitter taste and stinging sensation filled her mouth.
"I don't have time for this," she said aloud. She pushed herself off the bed and headed for the door.
She left the TV on, offering its unseen witness to an empty room behind her.
* * *
"LOOK! THERE'S ANNJA!"
Trish Baxter came running down a motley line of parked vehicles to hit Annja in a surprisingly strong hug next to an elderly schoolbus, sagging on its springs, with sun-burned white paint flaking away from its metal. Tommy and Jason followed, Tommy in his usual sturdy walk-through-a-wall way, Jason seeming to saunter as usual even though his long legs ate up ground at a good rate. Their breath steamed in the chilly air.
It was about ten in the morning. The sky overhead was blue, whisked by horsetail clouds. By Metro and city bus Annja had made it clear across Ankara, from the western suburbs to the development strung along the road to Kirikkale. On the way she had watched through grime-streaked windows as what seemed like mile after mile of ramshackle squats, some three stories tall, huddled close together as if leaning together for support. It gave her a fresh cause of discomfort along with the free-floating misgivings she had about the whole Ararat expedition.
Now, having coordinated with Leif Baron by phone—fortunately without need of talking in improvised codes, as Baron had assured her they could safely do now—she had made it to the truck stop on the road from Ankara to Kirikkale, in mountainous country a few miles short of the town of Elmada.
Annja hugged Jason and Tommy in turn.
An eighteen-wheeler with German flags flying from two aerials drove slowly past in a cloud of fumes and headed out on the highway. Some of the rest of the expedition came striding back, soles crunching on the white pumice gravel that covered most of the parking lot.
With his long legs the out-of-shape-looking Charlie Bostitch moved faster than he looked able to. He forged out front, pushing forward a hand and a big old smile. Leif Baron strode purposefully beside him. Larry Taitt, wearing a dark blue Rehoboam Academy windbreaker over white shirt and dark tie, came loping eagerly after them.
"The lost lamb returns to the fold!" Charlie said. "Welcome back, Ms. Creed. I understand we owe you quite a debt."
She shook his hand as perfunctorily as she could. "I thought I'd better let you know what happened."
"Good thing you did," Tommy said. "We'd've been stuck in that tower."
"You should've seen the way my man Leif got us out of there," Jason said.
"Yeah," Trish said, laughing. "We went out in these big rolling bins under piles of old sheets."
"It was so cool," Tommy said. "Slick."
"Little bit nasty, actually," Jason said. "Way better than the alternative, though."
"Yeah. The place was swarming with these goons in bad-fitting suits and shades," Tommy said.
Annja's mouth tightened. That description matched the three men she'd left dead in the Mercedes in Kavaklidere. Of course, it matched innumerable thugs she had known all throughout the world. She didn't disbelieve in coincidence, but she didn't believe in it that much.
Annja shook Baron's hand, and Larry's. Evidently the godless television crew and their godly cohorts on the expedition were all good buddies now, comrades of shared danger and a shared escapade. She hoped that would endure. She didn't like the suspicions rolling around in the dark depths of her mind concerning Baron's methods of pulling her friends and associates out of danger. Nor the way his eyes, barely visible behind his own Oakley sunglasses, seemed to linger on her after he released her hand.
"So where's our transport?" she asked.
Baron slapped the peeling white paint of the battered schoolbus. "Right here," he said.
* * *
"I FEEL LIKE SINGING BAND CAMP SONGS," Tommy said as they jounced along a questionable stretch of highway. It was a fairly major road here between Kirikkale and Sivas, four lanes wide and newish-looking blacktop despite the rough ride. It got a lot of traffic, including many burly eighteen-wheelers roaring both ways. Annja suspected the contractors of skimping on rebar.
The wide, flat-angled snowfields of the eastern Anatolian Plateau stretched out around them. Mountains like walls of white ice rose to the left and right. They seemed set to converge somewhere beyond sight ahead of the unlikely procession.
There lay their destination.
Ankara to Ararat wasn't much more than three hundred miles as an airplane might fly. Terrain and road
s added plenty of distance to that, not just horizontally but vertically. Out front rode a glossy new Mercedes SUV, carrying Bostitch, Baron, Larry Taitt and their new local facilitator. Next came the weary white schoolbus that carried Annja, the Chasing History's Monsters trio, most of Bostitch's acolytes, Wilfork and the ever-amiable but bemused Rabbi Leibowitz, along with their personal luggage. Bringing up the rear rolled a pickup truck, once red, now faded pink, and piled with the rest of the expedition gear.
Tommy was playing an electronic game. Trish texted her friends. Jason sat reading a paperback novel.
Annja sat in the window seat next to the rabbi. Levi read some kind of book in Hebrew. Annja fretted, which she usually didn't do. It was cold in the bus, and noisy. She thought that if this vehicle had really served as a schoolbus, Turkish schoolkids smoked way too many cigarettes. The residual emanations from the upholstery made her eyes water.
"We can teach you some hymns," said Josh Fairlie, one of the bulk of the expedition graduates of various levels of the Rehoboam Christian Leadership Academy, along for whatever tasks needed to be done. "Would that do for you?"
He was built spare, older than the others, with a shock of thick, dark brown hair worn a little longer, and fair skin. He'd apparently served with the army in Iraq. He made no claim to have been Special Forces, and Annja, who knew a bit about the breed, guessed he wasn't.
Sometimes, as now, he seemed to kid around. Annja wasn't sure if she liked that better than the near-overt hostility of blond ex-marine Zach Thompson or even the suspicious cheerfulness of the twins Zeb and Jeb, whose last name was Higgins.
"Naw, really man," Tommy said. "It was only a joke, you know."
Josh got up and started walking forward, swaying and catching himself on the fraying seat backs as the bus lurched over frost heaves in the pavement.
"What," he said, a smile on his lips but his hazel eyes narrowed, "you don't like hymns? They're not good enough for you, maybe?"
"Easy, man. They're just not my thing."
Jason tucked his book away and sat up a bit straighter. The tension was getting thicker than the residual cigarette stink.
Robyn Wilfork, who'd been sitting by himself across from Rabbi Leibowitz staring moodily out at the snow-scape with a half-open fist to his chin, brayed laughter. Josh almost jumped away from him, clearly offended. He was generally circumspect in dealing with the bulky New Zealander; Wilfork was in tight with the Man, Charlie Bostitch, and one of the foremost leadership values the academy taught was evidently unquestioning respect for the chain of command. It didn't mean these fit young men had to like Wilfork. Although most of them treated him as if they were more scared of him than anything else.
"Band camp songs, is it? Capital idea!" Wilfork's hair was a nest of disarray. The cream-colored tropic-weight suit he bizarrely still wore despite the intense and deepening winter outside the windows—with little delicate webs of frost beginning to form at their condensation-fogged edges—was rumpled, as if he'd slept in it. "I know a splendid one."
Tossing back his wild mane, he sang, "Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire. Bring me my spear—oh, clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire—"
This time Josh recoiled from Wilfork as if he'd turned into a king cobra, reared up with hood extended. Thompson came up out of his seat as if it had suddenly gotten hot.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he roared. "What is that, some kind of devil stuff?"
Josh spun on him. "Language."
Thompson tried to lunge at Wilfork, who gazed at him with pie-eyed unconcern. Fred Mallory, an olive-skinned kid with black hair cut very short and even more muscular than Thompson, stood up and caught the ex-marine from behind in a quick bear hug.
"It's William Blake," Trish said loudly. Annja glanced toward the front of the bus. She briefly caught the Turkish driver's dark eyes in the big mirror over his seat. He had a bit of panicked-horse look to him. "It's from his poem, 'Jerusalem.' It really is used as a hymn in England."
"Bloody Americans," Wilfork said. "Don't even know their own religion. Aleister Crowley, now, he wrote some ripping hymns."
"Crowley?" Josh Fairlie blinked. "Wasn't he a Satan-worshipper?"
"That came later, or so they said," Wilfork declared grandly. "Although some might say he did the best work for the Prince of Darkness when he was still a faithful follower of the good old Church of England."
By this point Thompson's flash of anger had evaporated. Mallory released him. The three gave Wilfork a deer-in-the-headlights look and retreated again to their impromptu Bible study at the back of the bus.
Through it all Levi continued to read, unconcerned. Annja was almost tempted to envy him his obliviousness. But not quite: she couldn't afford to lead life in that state of severely limited awareness. And truthfully, she didn't really want to.
The driver began to expostulate and wave his arms around. The bus swerved across blacktop dusted with eddies and swirls of blowing powdered snow. Trish gasped and grabbed the rail handhold over the seat in front of her. Zach, who'd been standing obediently by his seat getting a quiet dressing-down from Josh, was thrown on Jeb's lap. Or possibly Zeb's. The blond twin unceremoniously ejected him onto the floor.
Annja's cell phone rang. She flipped it open, held it to her ear. "Yes?"
Leif Baron's clipped voice said, "We have a problem."
Her heart lurched. Because at that moment through the pitted windshield she saw the flashing blue lights of the police roadblock ahead.
Chapter 10
The Turkish National Police wore bulky camouflaged smocks that looked blue-tinged in the weird afternoon light, with sun slanting in bright white slashes through rents in the clouds, only to be diffused by billows of blowing snow. Over them they wore even bulkier dark blue ballistic vests. One or two wore maroon berets. The rest wore small helmets. Annja thought they looked funny, more like batting helmets than combat headgear.
There was nothing remotely comical about the black HK33 assault rifles the troops carried. They milled around the three expedition vehicles, which had pulled to the shoulder short of the roadblock and stopped, but so far had shown no sign of trying to enter or search any of them. Leif Baron and Larry Taitt had gotten out of the lead car to talk to them. Charlie Bostitch was just climbing out.
"Is it time to panic yet?" Jason Pennigrew asked Annja. He smiled, but the smile was tight.
"I'll let you know," Annja said with a lightness she didn't feel. Her main actual objection to panic at this point was that it wouldn't do any good, not that it wasn't called for.
"I'm just trying not to think about Midnight Express," Tommy Wynock said.
"Thanks for that image," Trish replied.
In the back of the bus the Young Wolves were pressing their noses to the windows and looking a lot less certain than they had a little while ago. Even Levi had set down his book and was gazing out with mild interest.
Annja didn't know yet whether anyone on the expedition packed any weapons. It wouldn't bother her if they had, not as much as she was pretty sure it would the television crew; given where they were going, into seriously hostile territory, it would make a good deal of sense. But the problem with weapons was if you needed them, and didn't have them, you were screwed. If they came out at the wrong time—such as in the face of overwhelming firepower, especially overwhelming official firepower in some third-world country whose outlook toward human rights was that there was no such thing—you were also screwed. She hoped the Young Wolves, if they did happen to be packing, had sense to leave the heat in their pants. Or wherever.
She found herself muttering all that to her seatmate. Levi smiled unconcernedly. "As we Jews say, it sucks to be the jug."
The front passenger seat of the lead car opened. "So who gets to sit up front when Himself rides in back, I wonder?" Wilfork murmured. The mystery passenger had entered the vehicle while most of the party were getting hustled onto the bus back at the truck stop.
> What emerged into the uncanny light was a very stout man of medium height, wearing a dark blue business suit with the jacket opened. The wind instantly whipped a dark striped tie over one shoulder. He had on a red fez, which under other circumstances might have amused Annja even though it wasn't an uncommon fashion accessory in Turkey.
He bustled importantly up to where one of the maroon berets was standing with hands on hips scowling at Bostitch and his chief enforcer, Baron. At the sight of the tubby guy in the fez he straightened at once.
"Oh-ho," Jason said. "What have we here?"
"Must be some kind of major dude," Tommy said. "Otherwise the cops'd hand him a beat-down for stepping up to them like that."
