by E. E. Knight
Her shoulders ached from all the shooting she’d done and the long ride into London. The Triumph was a lightning-quick bike, but the stiff suspension had taken its toll. She tied a Sudanese scarf loosely about her throat—its sandy color complemented the greens and browns in the sports coat nicely—and surveyed the results.
Now she could get away with clomping about in high boots. She looked more Ralph Lauren than Road Warrior.
“We’re fifteen minutes past now,” Miss Wallesley reminded her as she left the WC.
She handed the woman her motorcycle jacket.
If anyone knew the value of time, it was Lara Croft. Her life had hung on seconds more times than she cared to think about. And if there was one thing being a tiger’s whisker from death had taught her, it was to filter the essentials of life from the trivial.
Tonight was trivial.
Besides, she’d already apologized, and the participants knew she was on the way.
She strode to the front of the lecture hall to a smattering of applause. The shell-shaped hall was a mixture of old and new: new technology grafted onto blackboards, stairs, and walls as old as the college itself. The audience, ranked stadium style in their fixed plastic chairs, was a mixture of college students and adults. The background chatter quieted as soon as she entered.
Miss Wallesley, for all her fussiness, knew how to set up a computer. Lara worked the presentation slides from her lectern, going point by point through her lecture. Geography, history, ethnography, some interesting myths of the Sudanese…
She knew from her recent experiences with the Mahdists that some of those myths weren’t myths at all. But she kept those memories to herself.
“—and let me end this presentation with a plea. Though it sounds like something from two centuries ago, the Sudan, and indeed the entire horn of Africa, is still a center of what’s left of the international slave trade, not to mention the trafficking in women that still takes place from Indochina to the European Union. Great Britain led the world once in a crusade to lift the burdens forced on innocent shoulders. I ask that your voices persuade her to do so again.”
She turned to her final slide, a photograph she’d placed after her summary. It was a telephoto of a line of black figures—men, women, and children chained neck-to-neck in bonds that had changed little since the days of the Romans—being marched in a line down a dirt road in Somalia.
The students looked at the picture with frowning, lip-biting, brow-furrowing concern. She would have preferred anger. Of course, they hadn’t her experience.
The question-and-answer session was short. There was only one adolescent crack about her love life, instantly booed down by the rest of the audience. She fended off a question about the Paris “Monstrum” murders with a frown and a prepared spiel: “Much of the press is wrong, as usual. I had the misfortune of being the only name involved in the investigation that returned a few photos and hits from the archive searches, so my involvement was—how should I put this?—‘sexed up,’ to use the current idiotic idiom. Apologies to any of the Fourth Estate present, of course.
“Any more geographical questions? No? Then I thank King’s College, Strand Campus, the geography department, and all of you for your invitation and interest.”
The applause was warm, which she preferred to enthusiastic. Enthusiastic was for celebrities—and she hated celebrity.
Naturally, a few diehards clustered about the lectern as she packed up. Are you going to write a book? What’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever been? Where’s your favorite place to dive? Are you going to accept the invitation to try out for Britain’s biathlon team?
The last she answered with something other than a shrug.
“If I were to be an Olympian, I’d want to be in a combined event. You get to compete against men. But I don’t have the time, or a good enough horse.” She noticed a woman with a camel hair coat over her arm tape-recording her answer, but before she could say anything, a magazine was thrust toward her.
“Please, Lady Croft, would you sign this?” A pretty girl who looked a bit too young for college, Lara judged from her accent that she was a Hong Kong native, was holding out a road rally magazine with a shot of Lara at the end of her punishing race from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska.
“Where did you dig up this old thing?” Lara asked. The magazine was from six years ago.
“I’m a huge fan,” the girl gushed. “I bought it on the Internet.”
The idea of having fans struck Lara as a bit absurd—she wasn’t a pop star, after all—but people sometimes picked strange idols. She signed the magazine, and the girl snatched it out of her hands with a squeal and rushed off.
Next up was the woman with the camel hair coat and the tape recorder. “Lara Croft?” she asked with an American accent. “I’m Heather Rourke. It’s great to finally meet you.”
Heather Rourke was close to Lara in height and frame. While she was not a beauty, her immaculate makeup made the most of her blue eyes and Celtic cheekbones.
“Yes, Heather? I hope you enjoyed the lecture. I have a rule against tape-recording, however. As I believe I stated clearly at the outset.”
The woman looked disappointed, as though she’d expected to be recognized. “Yes, but surely that doesn’t apply to me.”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Haven’t you received my letters and calls?” she asked in turn.
Lara searched her memory. Rourke … Rourke… “You’re some kind of journalist, aren’t you? With a magazine?”
“I’ve written for several. And appeared on TV. I was hoping to do a story on you.”
“Sorry, not interested. I do apologize for not recognizing your name. My reading only occasionally gets past the fifteenth century, and I rarely watch television.”
“Perhaps we could—”
“I’m afraid not. I haven’t had much luck with journalists.”
“I’d still like—”
But Lara had already turned to the next person in line. The press frenzy following Von Croy’s murder had only made her more determined than ever to steer clear of reporters.
The man she had turned to in escaping Heather Rourke was built like a security wall. He wore a cable-knit sweater over a turtleneck. His chest and shoulders resembled a modern art sculpture made out of cannonballs and structural steel pillars. Shaggy—not artfully shaggy, but wet-weather-on-an-oil-rig shaggy—honey blond hair brushed Nordic features. He had black leather gloves on his hands and a matching black waist pouch large enough to carry a knife or a gun.
Lara felt a tiny alarm go off in her nervous system and involuntarily tensed. Only men who didn’t want to leave fingerprints wore gloves indoors.
But his soft blue eyes didn’t belong to a killer.
“Please, Miss Croft,” he said. He was bulky, and awkward about it. She realized he hadn’t been at the lecture; a man his size would have been impossible to miss.
His accent placed him as Norwegian or Danish. Not her night to talk to Londoners, evidently. There was a stiffness about him; he held his arms pressed to his sides like a soldier standing to attention.
“No way!” a student said.
“Quick, get a picture. Lara Croft and the Borg. Beyond cool,” another added.
A flash went off. She was tired and hungry; everything was going out of balance and fuzzy.
“I am Nils Bjorkstrom. May we speak together?” the giant asked. He had anxious anguish in his eyes. “It is important.”
She’d never heard of him. He looked stolid, but didn’t have the feel of a military type, and no agency would employ him as a field operative. He stood out too much.
“Let’s step into the hall.”
“XXXtreme rules!” one of the students yelled as she shut the door behind them.
The hallway was no good either, with students stepping up and back like nervous pigeons.
“Lady Croft, would you sign my program?” a very correct jacket-and-tie type asked.
; Lara signed it absently. Another college boy wanted a picture with her.
“I’m sony, the flashes are giving me a headache,” she said. She shrugged away the students and ducked around the corner that was the Norwegian and pulled him to the stairs. He had strong arms; they felt like banisters.
“What is it, Mr. Bjorkstrom?”
“An hour of your time is all I ask.”
He didn’t look like he was selling anything, and the marketing stick-at-noughts who wanted her to be pictured with their dreck always brandished presentation folios. “What is this about?”
With some difficulty, he retrieved a photograph from his waist pouch. Lara realized that the stiffness she’d noticed in his arms came from the fact that they were both artificial. He had artificial hands, the thumb and forefinger working like pliers within the leather gloves.
Heather Rourke chose that moment to appear at the top of the stairs, card in hand. Lara glared at her, and the journalist shrank away. When she glanced back, she was looking at a photograph of the man before her standing on an Alpine prominence with his arm—flesh and blood, by the look of it—around…
Lara felt an emotional stab. A piece of her youth stood grinning into the camera. Blond hair, high cheekbones, frosted blue eyes, and creamy white skin red from windburn, it could only be Alison Jane Harfleur. She looked up at the man. “You’re a friend of Alison’s? I haven’t seen her in years. How is she?”
“I do not know; Ajay has disappeared,” he said, using her old nickname. “I am afraid she may be in danger. Please, Miss Croft. I need your help.”
Lara nodded. Ajay, her old friend, in danger… “We could grab a bite, if you like, and discuss this in more detail.”
He smiled with a nice set of teeth, whitened in the American fashion. “I do not know London well, but I saw some places between the tube station and here.”
“London food’s terrible unless you know where to eat. I’ll give you a ride, if you don’t mind a motorcycle.”
“I will follow you. I have a car—specially made.”
The ice broken, Lara let her curiosity out.
“What’s Ajay plunged herself into now?”
“If I knew for certain, I would go myself and not … trouble you. She is my intended … my fiancee.”
Good for you, Alison. He seems an interesting man … I bet your parents hate him!
“Congratulations, Mr. Bjorkstrom.”
He winced. “Please, Nils will do. My friends call me Borg. Something of a joke. I do not mind, and I would be honored to call Lara Croft my friend.”
“Then it’s Lara, Borg.” She offered her hand.
“No, please.”
She kept her hand out. Finally, he extended the artificial limb. She grasped the gloved fingers and they shook.
“Now that the formalities are over, let’s eat.”
***
Heather Rourke watched her prospect leave the building with the himbo. Correction: celebrity himbo.
If Lady Croft thought Heather Rourke could be brushed off so easily, she would soon learn otherwise. She spotted one of the students who’d cheered for “the Borg” and taken pictures; he looked to be no more than seventeen. She checked her hair and lipstick in the door glass, put on her best smile, and approached the young man.
***
Nils Bjorkstrom followed Lara in his car as she made her way through London’s eternal traffic stoppages. As she drove, Lara turned the name, the association, over in her mind. Ajay. Alison Jane Harfleur. She’d entered Gordonstoun a year behind Lara.
Like Lara, Alison had been something of an outsider, but while in Lara’s case it was because of her interest in archaeology and history, in Alison’s it was because of her family’s financial circumstances. The Harfleurs were an old name without any of the old money, reduced to living in a decrepit Regency manor house. What funds they had went toward getting their only child a proper education.
The friendship had begun when Lara returned for her second year. At mealtimes, while the other girls chatted about Saint-Tropez or Marbella or Corfu, sixteen-year-old Lara spoke of Angkor Wat and showed off a backpack she’d discovered there. On a corpse!
“Not even Coach,” Elizabeth Lloyd-Patterson sniffed.
“Where were you in August, Alison?” another girl asked.
The Harfleur girl lowered her eyes. “Back home.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth said, attaching immense significance and condescension to the single syllable.
“Is your mother feeling better?” Lara broke in. She remembered Alison mentioning that her mother had been in the hospital for a foot operation. Minor surgery, but the others didn’t bother with details unless they came off a Paris runway.
Relief flooded sixteen years of keeping up appearances. “Much better. Very kind of you to ask, Lara.”
Alison was interested in the backpack story, Von Croy, Angkor Wat. Lara had started calling her Ajay because there was another Allison at Gordonstoun, and in return Ajay called Lara “LC.”
Lara had liked her in an older sister sort of way. She’d known all too well what it was like to be at the bottom of a feminine pecking order. It had been the same for her when she arrived at Gordonstoun. But unlike her, Ajay lacked the spirit to fight back. When Ajay—something of a late bloomer—burst into a woman’s figure, Lara had happily donated some of the “prissy” outfits she hated to Ajay.
The friendship wasn’t all one-sided. Ajay was brilliant at chemistry and knew how to parse a literature paper to garner top marks. Lara didn’t bother with flowery phraseology; she tended to say what she thought in three brief paragraphs. Drove her lecturers batty. What do you mean, “Hamlet whines like a desperate, self-centered drip,” Miss Croft?
Lara had exchanged letters and an occasional call with Ajay after she’d moved on to finishing school in Switzerland, but they’d seen less of each other. Lara spent her summers in Greece, Italy, and Egypt. Once in a while they reunited, but they were like two allies who no longer shared a joint war, speaking more of old times than the future. What Ajay provided for Lara as she matured was an appreciative audience for her vacation exploits, something that Lord Croft went out of his way to deny her.
The girls were reunited when Ajay won a scholarship from a science foundation and joined Lara at the same Swiss finishing school that Lara so despised. Lara hated to even remember its name; she had spent as much time as she could sneaking off the grounds. The skills, habits, and forms the school tried to instill had struck Lara as anachronistic. Though looking back now, she supposed she’d mellowed—a little. At least, the lessons in fencing and horsemanship that she’d taken had come in handy more than once in the years since.
Ajay had been a breath of fresh air in that stuffy atmosphere. They became roommates, and their friendship rekindled. Until Mexico.
It had seemed a simple enough trip at first, a between semesters jaunt to Cancun. The two friends had had fun in the airport, fun on the plane, fun at the hotel, and then fun on the jungle’s step pyramids. But then Lara had decided to wander away from the tourist paths, looking for some Olmec burial mounds she’d seen mentioned in an old conquistador diary. Instead of burial mounds, they’d stumbled onto an airstrip with camouflaged bush hoppers.
Drug runners … or so they assumed. They never got near enough to the cargo to check before the shooting started. Lara had been in danger before—perhaps without quite so many bullets flying around—but she knew how to handle herself. Not so Ajay. The girl had panicked, run screaming into the jungle. It had taken Lara hours to find her. They had been lucky the drug runners hadn’t found either of them first.
Back in Switzerland, Ajay started reading Lara’s archaeology books, determined to redeem herself in her friend’s eyes by becoming as much like Lara as she could. Ajay’s precise mind, superb memory, and indefatigable energy now turned toward the arcana of lost civilizations that Lara found so fascinating. Suddenly Lara found that instead of having a friend, she had a disciple.
/> They’d finished school and gone their separate ways for a time. Lara had suffered her disastrous’ accident in the Himalayas and through it found the strength to chart her own course—even at the cost of being disowned by her father. And then Ajay had contacted her about an expedition to the Black Sea that she’d heard Lara was planning. She wanted in.
On paper, it made sense. Lara had her eye on a Sarmatian artifact—the Pearl Breastplate. She felt a tickling affinity for the old barbarian tribe, terror of Rome’s eastern frontier and allegedly the descendents of the Amazons—and Ajay could speak Russian better than she. Not only that, but Ajay had been studying archaeology and anthropology on a Cambridge Fellows scholarship, specializing in ancient Sarmatia, of all things. Lara put her memories of Mexico aside and welcomed her old friend on board.
Together, they pieced together a map from details in an old Roman geography treatise by Strabo, then headed into the Caucasus Mountains, looking for the ruins of an all-but-forgotten Sarmatian temple. Despite the trouble in Chechnya, it was a strangely peaceful expedition. Lara didn’t use her guns once, though she kept them ready beneath the cloaks and scarves of the native dress. The temple turned out to be mostly collapsed and emptied on the surface, but it extended deep below the ground and required a good deal of spelunking to explore. Not a problem for Lara.
But once again, Ajay fell short. Lara’s would-be protégé managed to get lost while crawling through the catacombs. First her light had failed. Then she burned herself with a flare and dropped it down a fissure. Finally, alone in the dark, she hadn’t had the sense to use the backup chemical lights that Lara had demanded she carry, and instead had started screaming.
By the time Lara dragged her out, Ajay was quiet, ashen-faced, and trembling with fear and humiliation. But moments later, she insisted on going back in. Lara, who had been ready to send her home, melted a little at that: She liked a “get back on the horse” attitude and was impressed with Ajay’s courage. But the rest of the expedition turned out to be as tiresome as a date gone wrong. Lara spent too much time nannying Ajay and not enough thinking about the temple. She felt as though she’d missed something.
