by Alex Archer
Damn. That Lambert had knowledge of her every move disturbed her on a level she couldn’t even comprehend.
Ignoring her silent horror, Lambert slid inside the nook and nestled his body close, his thigh fitting against hers. “So, what do we have here?”
She hated that this awful man knew so much about her every move.
“Seems a secret room,” she commented. “Possibly it was bricked up with the skulls shortly after the treasure was hidden here. Of course, the plaque dates to the wrong century.”
“We’ve come to the X on the map—or rather, the fleur-delis. It’s the right place,” Lambert said.
“I can’t imagine why Mansart would make it so difficult.”
“Ah, you hit on the Mansart connection.”
“Thanks to your map.”
“Glad to be of assistance. You are keen and perceptive. You know, Annja, we would work well together.”
“I don’t work for madmen.”
“Ouch.”
She tried to move her leg away from his, but there was nowhere else to put it.
Annja scanned the room, lined with skeletons. Like a tiny cove that might have once been designed as a rest stop within the greater labyrinth? The tenor of her heartbeat grew more apparent. The air, a mixture of dirt particles and desiccated bone dust, formed a cloud at the back of her throat. Muffling. Not a place she wanted to stay in too long.
Most especially not with Jacques Lambert crouching too close for comfort.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to place the treasure below the Louvre,” she wondered aloud, “in the aqueducts?”
“Very busy waterways, those aqueducts. Especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I’ve no idea, myself, why the great secrecy and ridiculous treasure hunt, but obviously someone wanted to make it difficult. Perhaps so the reward might be appreciated all the more?”
Annja sighed and pressed the back of her head against the wall of skulls. Her eyes circling the space, she tried to envision a drunken crew of musketeers tramping about beneath the city, oil lamps held high and boisterous laughter echoing off the stone walls. It would have been an adventure that should have appealed to d’Artagnan. And perhaps that was what the queen intended.
Lambert slapped her thigh. “This is cozy, oui?”
“Take your hand off me.”
He gave her leg a squeeze before clasping his hands together about his knees.
“Let me see that map again,” she said.
If there were any place that might have an X on it, this little nook had to be it.
“I’m surprised at you,” Lambert said with a snap of his finger against the map. “Lamination? That’s not very proper for an archaeologist, is it?”
“Implanting cloned embryos in unassuming mothers’ wombs. That’s not very proper for a geneticist, is it?”
“Touché. But I wager you think you know something that isn’t at all what it really is.”
“I guess differently. Explain the pregnant women in your waiting room?”
“I cannot. Not to you. To explain genetic engineering would make your head spin.”
“I got me some learning in college. I can even balance my checkbook. Try me.”
“Annja.” A tilt of his head flashed a bright beam of light into her face, so he pushed back his helmet to sit at the back of his head. The headlamp splashed light across the ceiling of their intimate cove. “As I’ve already attempted to explain, BHDC offers a very particular service. We trace genetics and family bloodlines through DNA. Most useful in providing proof for claims to family fortunes and treasure.”
“That you then swoop in to steal,” Annja said.
“As any good pirate would, my dear.”
“I don’t get you, Lambert. All this for what?”
He sighed and adjusted his position so he sat in a half turn toward Annja. “All I have ever done in my life has been only for my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“My twin. He died when I was seven.”
“And you think you can bring him back by cloning him?”
“Not at all. It would not be my brother, but a physical copy of him. Mentally, the cloned version would be his own person.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“Had technology been more advanced thirty years ago, the medical community might have been able to grow a new liver for my brother instead of allowing him to suffer and die because my family hadn’t the money to pay for a replacement.”
“People can’t actually buy replacement livers, can they? Most certainly not thirty years ago,” Annja said.
“Technology can do remarkable things, Annja. But no, when we were children, sadly the technological advances were few. Yet, even when I got the money for an operation my father said Toby had to wait on the list. The list! Do you know how long donation lists are? To land at the top of a donor list can take years. Sometimes those waiting for a donated organ never get them. The recipient might die before it happens.”
“But it’s how things are. Did you expect your brother could jump to the top of the list with money?”
“I was only seven, Annja. I expected the world.”
“But you know better now.”
Or perhaps not. The man’s eyes managed to widen and reduce him to a mere boy, staring helplessly at her, awaiting a dream he could never have. Losing a sibling at so young an age must have irreversibly altered his logic.
“We are not God,” Annja said. “Accidents and disease, while tragic, happen for a reason. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to fix everything? It is the way the world is.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way.” Dropping the little-boy facade, and clenching a fist, Lambert’s tone grew sharper. “Therapeutic cloning is a remarkable science. Kidneys can be cloned. Livers, the spleen and skin grafts and bone marrow for implanting. No longer should there be a requirement for a list.”
“I can understand your heartbreak. I really can.” Annja realized she’d placed her hand on his knee. The urge to snap it away was more fleeting than her understanding. “And I can see the value of therapeutic cloning. But that doesn’t justify human cloning. There is no medical necessity to cloning a human being. It’s illegal for a reason.”
“It is a natural progression from the therapeutic cloning. It is the future, Annja. Just think of the factories we could populate with worker drones. We’d no longer have to rely on immigrants and overseas alliances.”
“That’s—” Twisted, she thought.
“Cloning will prove a big moneymaker. You can’t imagine the funds our research sucks up.”
“I can’t and I won’t. There’s only one way to create life, and that’s as it should be. Besides, thus far you’ve only destroyed life and will continue to do so. You must stop.”
“Every new technology takes much experimentation to get things right.”
The evidence of which had been documented in the files back at BHDC.
“How many babies—fully birthed babies—have you destroyed?” she asked angrily.
“You’re not a very friendly woman, are you?”
“Answer the question.”
Lambert sighed. “I have no idea. Is it so wrong to offer hope to a couple who suffer infertility?”
“Hope? I followed a pregnant woman from BHDC. She was so…excited. She called it a treasure.”
“Isn’t a child a treasure?”
“You know that baby won’t live. Then what happens to their hope?”
“Actually, I don’t know that. This could be the time it survives. Our first successful clone. Science is all about trial and error.”
“You’d never allow the mother to keep the child,” Annja said.
He sighed. He was not about to answer that one.
Annja felt sick to her stomach. She tasted dirt in her mouth. A fine perspiration riddled her hairline. Time was going away fast.
“I seek only to right wrongs that could have been avoided,” he said so
ftly.
She felt him settle against the wall beside her. Relaxing. Not a bad position for her enemy to be in. Though she couldn’t draw out the sword in this tight space.
“I began to pursue therapeutic cloning to honor Toby’s death. Genetic cloning naturally followed. I only want to help people, Annja—can’t you understand that?”
“Human cloning helps absolutely no one. It only gives false hope to traumatized parents and ill-informed couples with dreams of designing their own children.”
“If you were given the choice of birthing a child destined to defects that could incapacitate it for life, or one that was perfect and even possessed of genes designed to combat adult illnesses such as cancers and debilitating disease, which would you choose?”
“I’d take the child God decided should be mine,” Annja said.
Lambert chuffed. “You do not strike me as a particularly religious woman, Annja.”
There was no sense in arguing with the criminally insane. Nor in defending her latent religious beliefs.
“Hold the flashlight, will you?” She shuffled to her knees.
Starting by pressing her knuckles against the wall above them, Annja felt for any skull that would give.
“Maybe there’s a secret-passage skull?” Lambert provided in a macabre tone. “You push it and it opens into the treasure.”
“You actually expect we’ll find treasure? It’s been two and a half centuries. If there’s one copy of the map, there may be others.”
The small tinkle of a cell phone alerted Annja. “You actually get service down here?”
“Surprising. We must be close to a buried electrical line.” Lambert flipped open his phone and spoke. “Yes?” A pause. He looked to Annja. Nodding, he replied. “Interesting. And you matched it to the hair sample inside the envelope? The connection is bad. I’ll be in touch.”
He signed off and shuffled his position, moving a foot up along the wall, so it rested right in front of where Annja had planned to next tap.
“Move your foot. Or wait. Press again, against that skull. Yes, right there.”
With pressure from Lambert’s boot the skull shattered, like smashing open a Christmas cracker.
Eager to see what lay beyond, she peered into the hole. Inside was an obvious shelf, or cache to hide something. But her headlamp didn’t beam across shiny gold Louis d’Or coins, or ropes of pearls tangled about glittering diamonds and rubies, and—
“What is it?” Lambert insisted. He nudged closer, trying to get a look, and their heads bonked. “Let me see.”
Not about to give up her spot, Annja reached inside and groped around. The nook went back a way. She couldn’t feel a wall to end it. “I don’t feel anything except dust and rubble.”
“Did you find it?” Ascher shouted from outside the nook. His last word was abruptly cut off.
“Call off your goons,” Annja said. “Haven’t you done the man enough harm already?”
“He is expendable,” Lambert said.
“As I am?”
“Your status has recently changed. I’d like to keep you alive. Ever consider working for a biohistorical research company, Mademoiselle Creed? I employ all sorts, including archaeologists and treasure hunters.”
“And goons and thugs?”
“Your profession is not so free of criminals as you might believe, Annja.”
“I know that. Pirates abound in the archaeological trade. Present company included.”
“I thank you for the consideration. No treasure inside?”
She reached inside again, but pressed her cheek aside the wall of skulls, keeping a keen eye to Lambert.
“Maybe someone has already claimed it?” Lambert offered.
“You mean d’Artagnan? He died a pauper. Though it’s very possible Alexandre Dumas found it.”
“I thought he was quite in debt when he died, as well?”
“Yes, to his partner, Auguste Maquet.” She twisted her arm and patted along the ceiling of the small area. “Wait. I feel something. It’s a box.”
“Maybe a small chest containing diamonds or certificates to land and title and vast riches?”
“To finance your deadly research?”
“It bothers me not at all that you consider me a pirate. It is what I do well, and one should always strive to do that which they excel at.”
For a moment, Annja considered doing what she did well—laying men flat with her sword—but the space was too small to move a three-foot-long battle sword, and honestly, she didn’t want to kill the man. He deserved to be punished by the legal system. And if attention could be shone on his corrupt experimentation, perhaps policing such a crime would be increased.
Her fingers stretched over what felt like a metal box. It was cool and the curved edges felt ornamental. A thick coating of what could only be dust felt like a pelt of fur. Gripping it, she tugged. Initially it didn’t move, but, stretching her arm and squishing her cheek against the wall—make that some medieval villager’s bony cheek—she was able to finally pull it free.
“Pull me out,” she said to Lambert.
He put an arm around her waist. She hadn’t realized how cold she was until she felt the warmth of another hugging her. Lambert pulled her back.
The box, firmly grasped, took out another skull as she tugged it free and settled back against a soft surface to clutch it to her chest.
“This is nice,” Lambert commented. “The two of us, alone in the dark.”
Annja jabbed an elbow backward, catching him in the ribs. His breath chuffed out across the back of her neck. “There’s no lock. I think it’ll open easily.”
23
Clinging desperately to the box as Lambert tried to tug it away from her, Annja realized she acted much like a child struggling to keep a prize from the bully. So she released the box, and Lambert shuffled out into the tunnel.
Ascher’s yelp echoed. Annja crawled from the nook to see her partner in adventure fall to his knees and collapse, arms sprawled before his head. Blood trickled from his skull, but he was moving. His helmet lay on the dirt floor. One of the thugs crushed the headlamp with a thick rubber boot heel.
“You want to walk out of here with me?” Lambert extended a waiting hand to Annja. A twisted messiah of genetically altered future bots, he glowed from the surrounding beams of light.
“Is that some kind of stupid pickup line?”
“Either that or I leave you behind with this one.” He toed Ascher’s rubber boot. “In the dark.”
A glance to the side confirmed her backpack sat untouched where she’d dropped it earlier. But her headlamp was not where she had left it just outside the nook.
“The only darkness I fear is that which shadows your reasoning, Lambert.”
“Very poetic,” Lambert said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and stumble onto the rave. I’m sure a gorgeous young woman is just the thing to get their aggressive male hormones charged.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Annja said.
“I can sweeten the offer.”
“Doubtful.”
Lambert noted the abandoned headlamp near the wall just as Annja did. He signaled to one of his men, and again, a vicious stomp crushed out the light. Now only the beams from Lambert’s goons crisscrossed the cove they stood in.
He approached Annja slowly, treasure box clutched before his waist.
“Whatever is in there?” Annja prompted. “I’m not interested.”
“This? No, this little prize is not up for trade.” His approach blocked the light, shadowing his face. Standing toe-to-toe with Annja, he leaned in to whisper beside her cheek. “What say I tell you some surprising information I’ve learned about your history?”
“My…”
Her history? That she’d been orphaned and had grown up in New Orleans. Hadn’t missed the Catholic school she’d attended since the day she’d walked out, yet still thought of Sister Mary Annabelle, who was tough as nails and had taught Annja a sound mind makes for a sou
nd body. That she wasn’t much for friendships and doubted she’d ever have time for a real family.
“I prefer a cold, dark, creepy tunnel to your company,” she said.
Annja stood before the opening of the nook. Foremost was Ascher’s safety. No treasure was worth a man’s life.
Lambert leaned in, the box clasped to his chest. “Where did you get that sword, Annja? The one I saw you draw from out of nowhere in the file room to threaten Theo? Did she will it to you? Or…are you she?”
It was chillingly apparent to Annja who Lambert thought she was.
“I’ve got no relatives to will me a thing. And you must have been hallucinating. There are dozens of swords in your office building. You didn’t see me steal the one from your display?”
“Why do you lie? To protect that?” He looked to Ascher, still prone, and who groaned but, wisely, didn’t make any sudden moves.
“Why do you run, Lambert? You think there’s treasure in that box? Open it now and let us all take a look.”
“Ha, ha. You are curious.” Lambert shook the box near his ear. Nothing rattled from inside. He then pressed it to his cheek. Predatory eyes sought Annja’s compliance. “But not curious enough to join me?”
“Guess not.” She made show of leaning over Ascher to inspect for wounds.
“What if I make it your only choice?” Lambert snapped a finger. One of his men placed a small-caliber pistol into his waiting palm. “Move aside, Mademoiselle Creed.”
He was going to shoot Ascher. And Annja reacted in a different manner than the bearer of Joan’s sword should. She threw herself across Ascher, putting her hand on his shoulder and protecting his body with her own.
“Well, that rules out a kill shot. Not to be dissuaded…” Lambert pulled the trigger.
Ascher let out a yelp. His body clenched, but Annja held firm, not about to give Lambert a better target. He must have taken a bullet in the leg, from what she could determine.
“Stupid woman.” Lambert gestured to his troops. “Kill him!”
Torn from Ascher’s prone body, Annja kicked at her attacker’s hands and managed to toe a pistol grip and send it flying.
