Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Lost Cult

by E. E. Knight

  His lordship blew a lungful of carcinogens out the window. “And whose fault is that?”

  Lara sighed. “Look, Lord Harfleur, I don’t know what Alison may have been telling you about the two of us, but—”

  “Lies,” said Lord Harfleur bitterly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me. She made it all up, or most of it, anyway. A father knows.” He gazed sadly at Lara. “Alison … is not quite right.” He tapped the side of his head. “Took a wrong turn somewhere. Known for years. It’s the money, you see. Don’t give a tinker’s cuss about it myself, but it matters to her more than anything. I tried to get her help, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Stormed out. Haven’t seen her since. Just letters. Letters filled with lies about the two of you going off on your expeditions together. A lot of rubbish about restoring the family fortune, the family name.”

  “I-I’m sorry,” Lara said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Not your fault,” Lord Harfleur said, but he looked at her as if he didn’t quite believe that. “Lady Harfieur doesn’t suspect a thing,” he added, dropping his voice to a whisper. “And I prefer to keep it that way. It would break her heart if she knew.”

  “I understand. I won’t say anything. But if Alison has written you lately, there may be a clue in those letters about what she’s up to.”

  Before Lord Harfleur could reply, his wife arrived with tea on a tray. She poured a cup for her husband.

  “Thank you, dear,” he said. “Lara was just telling me about her latest project with Alison.”

  Lady Harfieur smiled. “I expect you’ll be going down to join them soon. Buenos Aires is beautiful this time of year! And that doctor friend of yours, the jungle surgeon: What a brilliant man! So thoughtful, too. He autographed one of his books for us, didn’t he, dear?”

  “That he did,” said Lord Harfleur.

  Lady Harfleur crossed the room to a coffee table cluttered with an assortment of magazines and books. She picked up a large book and brought it to Lara.

  Lara took it. The book was titled Rare Flora of the Amazon Basin. The name of the author was Dr. Tejo Kunai. There was something familiar about that name, but Lara couldn’t place it at first.

  “He’s Portuguese, I believe,” Lady Harfleur rattled on. “Studies native medicines and all that. Quite famous in his field, apparently. Been in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. But then, you know all that!”

  Then she had it. Kunai … Not Urdmann’s Kunai?

  Lara opened the book at random. Photographs of silver white blossoms in close-up against a dark background filled the page. “Beautiful,” she said.

  “Yes, isn’t it?”

  Lara turned to the back flap and looked at the picture of Dr. Tejo Kunai. An older man with delicate, dark features looked back at her in black-and-white sagacity. She’d never seen him before.

  “Perhaps you’d like to see Alison’s old room, dear?” Lady Harfleur asked.

  “I’d love to,” Lara said, putting the book down on the edge of Lord Harfleur’s desk.

  “I’ll leave you women to it,” Lord Harfleur grunted. “Think I’ll join Roddy in the garden.”

  ***

  Upstairs, Lady Harfleur opened the door to Ajay’s room and ushered Lara inside. It hadn’t changed much in the years since Lara had last seen it. Pictures of out-of-date pop idols were on the walls, along with some framed photographs of Lara and Ajay from their various schools and the trips to Mexico and the Caucasus. But there were none more recent.

  “Lara, I brought you up here so we could speak privately,” Lady Harfleur said after she’d shut the door behind them. “Just between you and me, I realize that much of what Alison has told us over the years about your partnership is, shall we say, an exaggeration.”

  Lara couldn’t hide her surprise. “You know?”

  “A mother always knows. But Lord Harfleur, bless his trusting heart, doesn’t suspect a thing. For his sake, I pretend to believe all that she writes us.”

  “But Alison went to Buenos Aires for a reason,” Lara pointed out. “She didn’t make that up.”

  “No, she didn’t. And to be perfectly frank, I’m worried about her.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a bit of her grandfather in Alison. Not my father, but his lordship’s. He was a gambler, liked long odds, didn’t know when to quit. He kept trying to win back the family fortune. Wound up squandering what little was left of it.”

  Lara nodded. “There’s a bit of that in the Croft family tree, too. And now you think that Alison is following his example?”

  Lady Harfleur nodded grimly. “Only it’s her own life she’s gambling with. Or that is my fear.” She fixed a steely gaze on Lara. “Tell me the truth, Lara. Is she after some bit of jewel that you are, too? Is that why you’ve come to see us?”

  “No.” For a moment, she considered telling her about Borg, but then decided to keep silent about his involvement for now. “I heard from mutual friends that Alison might have gotten into something over her head. My sole concern is for her well-being. You have my word on that, Lady Harfleur.”

  Lady Harfleur nodded and glanced out the window, where Lord Harfleur could be seen talking to the man whom Lara had taken for the gardener. “Alison idolizes you, Lara. She’s tried to remake herself in your image. I saw it happening, tried to get her to see what she was doing, but she wouldn’t listen. And now, these letters and postcards from Buenos Aires, all filled with promises of a rosy future, the family fortune restored. You don’t suppose she’s been brainwashed, like that Hearst woman, do you?”

  “Brainwashed by whom? Judging from his book, Dr. Kunai doesn’t seem like the type to go in for that sort of thing.”

  “No, I suppose not…” Lady Harfleur bent to straighten a tousled comforter that lay at the foot of Ajay’s bed. “Oh, how did this get here?”

  Lara leaned closer.

  Lady Harfleur pulled a thick and obviously ancient leather-bound Bible from beneath the comforter. “Been in the family for centuries. All sorts of notations about the Harfleurs, going back to Henry VIII.”

  “What’s bookmarked?” asked Lara, interested as always in old things. The tip of a satin ribbon, faded to the color of thin tea, peeked from between the closed pages.

  “It’s bookmarked? Why, so it is. I don’t have my glasses; would you mind?”

  Lara took the Bible and opened it to the marked page. It was in the Book of Daniel. A line of italicized text caught her eye, the fearful magic words that foretold doom for a nation:

  Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

  “Numbered, numbered…,” she translated the phrase from the Aramaic.

  What had Borg said? The Many? The Mene? The Numbered?

  “What’s this?” Lady Harfleur pulled at the edge of a piece of paper that had emerged from between two pages when Lara opened the book.

  On the paper was a pencil-rubbed etching that reminded Lara of the Greek letter Omega: Ω.

  Written beside it, in Ajay’s precise handwriting, were the date and location of the rubbing: the ruins of Smyrna, sixteen months ago.

  “Why, look at that date!” Lady Harfleur exclaimed. “Lara, she must have been here! Snuck in and out without ever telling us, like a common thief!”

  “Except she didn’t take anything,” Lara said. “Instead, she left this behind. Almost as if she wanted you to find it.” Or wanted me to find it, she added silently to herself.

  “But why would she do such a thing?” Lady Harfleur asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Omega was the last letter in the Greek alphabet; it often had the metaphorical connotation of the end, an ending … In electrical engineering terms, omega signified resistance. Might Ajay’s mysterious new associates in Buenos Aires have a political agenda, a resistance movement dedicated to ending the current Argentine government? But then again, the symbol wasn’t even a proper omega. It was thicker in the center, like a worm, and thin at the tips—which
curled up slightly, something Lara had never seen in representations of the Greek letter.

  So perhaps it wasn’t Greek. She recalled that Urdmann had told her Kunai had asked him about an ancient Babylonian text. Did the Babylonians employ a similar character?

  There were too many possibilities. She didn’t even know if it was the same Kunai.

  “Lady Harfleur, did Alison ever mention a group called ‘The Many’ or something similar in any of her letters?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Lady Harfleur replied after a moment’s thought. “Why? Is it important?”

  “It may be. I just don’t know.” She glanced again at the symbol. “Do you mind if I keep this?”

  “Take it, please. Whatever you need to find Alison and bring her home. You are going after her, aren’t you?”

  “I’m going to do what I can,” Lara promised. “Ajay and I were best friends once. I still care about her.”

  “Bless you, dear. If you find her, will you give her a message from me?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Tell her, ‘Bugger the money, bugger the family name, bugger whatever destiny she thinks she has to fulfill … Bugger all of it. Just come back home.’”

  5

  “Give me a few days to run all this down,” Lara said over the phone to Borg as she told him about her interview with Lord and Lady Harfleur. “It’s got to fit together somehow. We might do better to chase this Tejo Kunai than Ajay. If we find him, we’ll probably find her.”

  “I want to go with you, if you’re going after her.”

  Lara turned it over in her head. She preferred to work alone, but then she tried to put herself in Borg’s shoes. “Don’t leave or switch hotels without calling me, okay?” she directed. God, she was sounding like Dools.

  “Of course.”

  Back at the manor, she breezed in and immediately gave Winston the rest of the day off. The last thing she needed were wheezy exhortations to be more careful on London’s streets. She almost missed her days as a recluse.

  She needed some time in her library and archives.

  Croft manor had, deep within its foundation, a secret room that dated back to the English Civil War. One reached it through a wall panel and a narrow staircase; it was easy to imagine Cavaliers sitting there over a candle plotting confusion to the Roundheads. In the springtime quiet before the Blitz of 1940, her grandfather had turned it into a bomb shelter, adding a better ventilation system and electric lighting. About the time of the Berlin Uprising in the early fifties, it was upgraded again with its own stove, a diesel generator in a separate room, a thicker security door, and additional storage space for the household staff, which, at that time, numbered six people.

  Lara made the next modifications, adding fiber-optic lines for a security system and converting the whole thing into a four-room, walk-in safe. Cold-forged steel cages held the treasures she’d picked up around the world.

  The ones that were too dangerous, or too valuable, for public display.

  The two larger, better-lit rooms held her private library. Well, not all of it was hers: Von Croy had willed her his collection, acquired in turn from other sources. She checked her index—an Oxford postgrad student had helped her with the dreary task of cataloguing—and found what she wanted, Von Croy’s old copy of the Dawn Roundtable Record.

  She brought up a folio containing letters from Frys to Von Croy. Lara had mixed feelings about Von Croy. She owed much of her identity to him; he had awakened her desire to rediscover what was lost to the world. Under his guidance, she’d looked at 100,000-year-old skulls in the Klasies River Mouth Caves in South Africa and found imprints of an ear of wheat from the seventh millennium B.C. at the Mehrgarh dig in Pakistan. He’d told her stories about the real-life King Pakal, elevated by the Mayan to the rank of maize god after his death and shown, on the imposing, carved lid of his sarcophagus, surrounded by elaborate, stylized religious icons. Great people, long forgotten and waiting to be rediscovered by the intrepid and intellectually curious.

  But Von Croy could be so damned obtuse at times—a source of wisdom but full of concealed knowledge and uncertain motivations, like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. He’d often dropped dark hints that the world was not what Homo sapiens thought it to be. “There are powers and histories beyond our poor, insignificant perception,” he used to croak, sounding like some leathery old crocodile god from the upper Nile. “Probe too far, and we may be swallowed up like a fish so intent on a wriggling worm that it doesn’t see the snapping turtle coming up behind it.”

  The letters from Frys to Von Croy were in the same vein. Apparently, a paper titled “The Méne and Other Faiths of Proto-Ur” had troubled both of them in its original form. Von Croy had suggested at first that they publish everything their research had uncovered, holding nothing back, but Dr. Frys had responded from Scotland with alarm:

  Madness, Werner. Either we’ll be accused of a hoax—the Piltdown man of the archaeological world—or, God forbid (ha!), we’ll be taken seriously. It would be a revelation that could cause an intellectual cataclysm. What is man, that they aren’t now mindful of him? If I may quote the gentleman from Providence: “The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

  Von Croy’s next letter must have agreed, for Dr. Frys had calmed down by the following correspondence, dated a week later.

  I believe the new version, with just the sampling of proto-Ur text (we really must come up with a name for this language; how does Froyan sound?) is satisfactory. Just the suggestion that another civilization, advanced at least to the level of Rome’s, existed prior to the last ice age will cause us more than enough grief. With the texts gone, we needn’t worry that others will look into the guessed-at web that held together a civilization encompassing the entire Pacific Rim and beyond, even unto Arabia and Africa.

  But in the letter after that, only a week later, Frys was hysterical again.

  No! No! and a thousand times No! We can’t mention them. Not a footnote, or I’ll destroy the collection.

  Lara read it twice. There was no mention of what Frys meant by “them.” But it was like listening to one end of a phone conversation. She wished she had Frys’s half of the correspondence, the letters that Von Croy had sent to him, but Von Croy evidently didn’t keep copies of friendly collegial correspondence.

  Had this old research cost Frys his life?

  And where did Ajay and Kunai fit in? She did a LEXIS-NEXIS search for the name Tejo Kunai, and variations thereof, but found no evidence of anyone by that name other than the author of the book that Lady Harfleur had shown her.

  ***

  After dinner, Lara went to the indoor pool to relax. Her grandfather had built the pool to be big and deep, but inspiration from her mother had made it beautiful after Lara had inherited it.

  Visitors always thought that Lara had designed the mosaics of Artemis and Helen, the dolphins and the seabirds, the soothing aqua, gray, and sea-foam tones contrasted with deeper browns. But she’d taken the images from a painting her mother had done while bedridden during pregnancy—her mother had been subject to miscarriages. Mum had once theorized that Lara’s passion for the classical world was the outcome of her poring through books of Greek, Roman, and Levantine art for inspiration.

  The water felt like melted snow. She didn’t heat the pool; its chill gave her body a wake-up call. There were a number of questions she had to consider. She dove and swam laps and finally framed the questions properly.

  1. What was it about the Méne that had so frightened Professor Frys and Von Croy?

  2. Why did Tejo Kunai, and presumably Alison Harfieur, want this frightening piece of knowledge or information, presumably in the possession
of Frys?

  3. Why had Kunai gone to see Urdmann?

  It was clear to her that Kunai wanted something having to do with the Méne cult. She listed the possibilities: an artifact; the reputation that would come with publication of the discoveries Frys and Von Croy had feared to reveal; even, perhaps, the resurrection of the cult itself. That was why Kunai had gone to see Urdmann: for his expertise, yes, but also because of his reputation as someone who could be trusted not to involve the police in anything illegal.

  Afterward, he must have threatened Frys, and Frys had tried to contact her for help. But Kunai had gotten to him first.

  And very nearly gotten to her as well.

  Clearly, Kunai was a dangerous man. It was hard to square these actions with the dignified portrait of an elderly gentleman on the back flap of the book that Lady Harfleur had shown her. Still, Lara knew very well that appearances could be deceiving. How often had men underestimated her simply because she happened to be attractive?

  But where did Ajay fit into everything? Why had she secretly returned to Harfleur House? And why had she left that strange symbol for Lara to find? Was it a clue, a cry for help? Or a taunt?

  Was Ajay the innocent, brainwashed victim that Borg imagined her to be? Lara didn’t share his confidence in that explanation. Her history with Ajay wouldn’t permit it. She had to consider the possibility that Ajay was Kunai’s willing accomplice.

  It struck her suddenly that Borg might be part of the plot; How much did she know about him, really?

  Sighing, Lara pulled herself from the pool. There were too many questions and not enough answers. But she had an idea where she might be able to find some.

  First, though, she needed to call Dools and get the stop taken off her passport.

  6

  The sun and surf of Mauritius made a welcome break from England’s dreary December.

  Lara’s reconnaissance of Lancaster Urdmann’s estate from the wheel of a rented Land Rover found no obvious gaps in security. She parked the Rover where it couldn’t be seen from the road and observed the gatehouse through binoculars. Anyone who approached the formidable closed gates had to pull up next to a bunkerlike station that housed a single guard.