by E. E. Knight
The courier pouch had originated in Peru. It contained a letter, some photos, and a map. She read the letter first.
Lady Croft,
It was with a species of relief that I received your letter. It took some time to find me; I have given the university a delivery-service address.
I would be happy to meet with you, but I fear your journey may involve more distance than your proposed visit to me in Dublin. It may involve physical danger as well, but I get ahead of myself.
Let me begin by saying you were correct to call Dad’s death “untimely,” but only partially so. In the months before his demise, anxiety had been growing in him. I’ve since learned that Dad had bought a new security system for his house and made a number of reports to the police about prowlers, and even one that said he’d been followed on the very road where he met his death! He gave me reason to fear for his safety not four days before his accident, during a phone conversation late at night. Dad was not a man to drink, so a slurred conversation shortly after midnight, complete with whispered warnings of a “conspiracy” against him (all this from a teetotaler whom I had only seen drunk once before, upon the death of my mother), caused me to worry.
I confess that I moved too slowly. I called his assistant at the university, fearing either rapid onset of senile dementia or trouble with students from a country Dad had removed artifacts from—there have been the odd threats before. The police met me at the plane, having been told by Dad’s assistant that I was on the way.
They wished me to identify his body, or what the car crash left of it.
Among his papers I found your number. The police said that he’d called you on the last day of his life. I heard a report that you might be mixed up with his murderers, or I would have called you then. I’ve just now learned that you’ve been cleared, so I have decided to contact you.
I found the most astonishing note tucked in the kitchen drain when I was doing dishes and had a stoppage. Apparently Dad had reason to believe something was going on at an old dig of his in Peru involving research he’d done years ago. Frankly, I thought that he might have been slipping at the last and imagined the whole thing. I decided to fly down here and investigate on my own and take a look around. But what I found … It is beyond me.
Please come at once. As I write this, I am observing the old site at a distance with the aid of a Peruvian park ranger named Fenni at the ruins of Ukju Pacha, in the eastern beginnings of the Andes. There is a river man named Paulo Williams you may trust; he works out of Puerto Maldonado, though if you have your own method of getting to the location I’ve highlighted on the enclosed 1:10,000 scale map, do so.
I shall give you more details when we meet.
As to Dad’s notes concerning the Méne, which you inquired about, they have entirely disappeared. He burned them at the last.
Come soon!
Alex Frys
Lara looked at the black-and-white photos printed on copier paper. Paulo Williams squinted out from a forest of lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth; he had the bleary, narrow-eyed look of a man who enjoyed his tequila. Juan Fermi stared proudly into the camera; a grin split the wide face of an upper Amazon native.
The photo of Alex Frys wasn’t framed very well; he only took up half the print. Lara saw a river behind him, thick jungle vegetation at its banks. He was older than Lara had pictured, a middle-aged man with smooth skin, a narrow, pointed chin, and receding hairline. He looked at the camera out of the sides of his eyes. His face rather reminded her of a portrait of William Shakespeare … had Shakespeare worn a Vandyke beard and cotton khakis.
Peru. Serious terrain. Tough enough without a potentially murderous cult to deal with. She should call Djbril and ask about the VADS rig.
Kunai might be at Ukju Pacha. Ajay was probably with him. Her last known address had been Buenos Aires.
It was time to call Borg.
“So nice to see you again, Lady Croft,” said the British Airways flight attendant as Lara took her seat aboard the flight to Peru.
“Hello, Mishez.” She’d flown before with Mishez, an archetypical first-class attendant with mannequin-perfect looks and an even, white-toothed smile.
Mishez reached into the first-class cooler. “Your usual big bottle of water?”
“Yes, please.”
Mishez’s pretty eyes widened as Borg crammed himself into the seat next to Lara. “Oh, my,” she said. “Aren’t you?…”
Lara was amused. It took a lot to fluster a professional like Mishez. The woman was actually blushing. “Mishez, this is my friend, Nils Bjorkstrom.”
“Please, call me Borg,” said Nils to Mishez with a smile.
“I’ll be happy to get you anything you like, Borg,” Mishez said.
I’ll just bet you would, thought Lara. She tuned out the preflight bustle and pulled the volume by Von Junst out of her carry-on.
***
There’d been on-again, off-again debates among archaeologists for years about just when civilization had started during the last Ice Age. A few obscure artifacts going back 100,000 years or more were the source of much controversy. Von Croy had been one of the proponents of a “proto-Ur” civilization that had come into existence during a warm period of a few tens of thousands of years during the last glaciation. A few wilder souls claimed there’d been a fairly advanced civilization up the Pacific Rim from the subcontinent and Indochina, perhaps even stretching to the Americas, and that it was this civilization, or the dim memories of it, that had given rise to ancient legends of Atlantis and Lemuria.
Lara never dismissed anything out of hand; she’d seen too many impossibilities walking the earth.
Professors Von Croy and Frys believed that they’d discovered the religion of the proto-Ur civilization, or rather inferred its existence, mostly through laws amongst the earliest recorded civilizations barring its practice. Symbols, prayers, gods, rituals … It appeared that the rites of the Méne, going under a variety of names, had been banned everywhere, from predynastic Egypt to the early Shang dynasty in China.
Of course, it was all conjecture. Supposition was the inevitable result of patched-together written records thousands of years old which were themselves based on oral history stretching back many thousands of years earlier. The common thread was the image Lara had first seen in Ajay’s bedroom, the distinctively shaped omega symbol.
Anyone found carrying that symbol was to be killed by a variety of methods that in themselves cast an interesting light on the respective cultures involved. Burning alive, bloodletting, crushing … There was no shortage of ways to kill someone, Lara reflected. In all the data, she found only one explanation for the harsh policy: a Chinese fragment maintaining that “evil wizards” used the omega mark to summon up and control murderous floods and storms.
Lara paged through the Von Junst until she came to his discussion of the glyph. Beside her, Borg drowsed, his eyes closed, headphones over his ears.
Certain ancient insignia inexplicably exist worldwide. Like the turned cross, or the swastika, the snaked omega of the Méne has been found from the Americas to Siam to the Horn of Africa. Some maintain that this is a vestige of an ancient worldwide culture, possibly advanced. Others claim it only proves that the Red Indians of the American frontier brought familiar symbols with them along with their families and flocks as they crossed the ancient polar land bridge. But the snaked omega was thought by these ancient peoples such an ill-favored design that they went out of their way to efface it wherever it was found, though its former presence can sometimes be ascertained by the designs around it. Only the most remote monuments still bear it. I have seen with my own eyes on the paradise-isle of Bali brave scouts turn pale and tribal elders grow taciturn when shown the design, the best rubbing of which was acquired from a half-sunken temple in the Selat Surabaya at the east end of Java…
Lara traced the sinuous design with her finger.
“I hate that thing,” Borg said in her ear.
She looked
up. “What’s that?”
“That omega thing. Alison had an obsession with it.”
“Obsession?”
“Is this the right word? Fixation. It reminded me of that movie about the UFOs with Steven Spielberg’s direction. The character who made the volcanic upthrust his idée fixe. He would create it out of mashed potatoes and mud and so on. Alison would do the same. One time I spilled sugar as we had coffee. I came back with a paper towel and found she’d etched it in the sugar. She hadn’t even been aware of doing it.”
“What did she say about it?”
Borg’s eyes shifted to Mishez as she walked past, down the aisle. “She said she dreamed it.”
“Was it like this?” She tapped the image in the book. “Or different?”
“I’m not sure.” Borg used one of his artificial fingers to change the channel on his in-seat screen.
“Well, look at it more closely.”
“I would rather not. It—it gives me nightmares.”
“A symbol? You mean it’s appeared in your nightmares?”
“No, Lara.” He looked at her, and his eyes were deadly serious. “The symbol gives me nightmares. I see it, and then in the night I have nightmares. I dream of suffocating, of a mass pressing down on my chest. I wake and gasp for air. I do not like this nightmare. I am not looking forward to sleeping tonight.”
Lara thought back to her own recently troubled sleep and dreams of suffocating. Could the symbol have given them both identical uncomfortable dreams? Could it be so deeply embedded in the collective human unconscious Jung had postulated?
Mishez replaced Lara’s empty water bottle without being asked. Borg turned down the offer of a beverage and put his headphones back on.
Lara envied Mishez for a moment. No worries beyond her career, dates, and how to spend a layover in Lima. The last time Lara had flown with Mishez, she’d been nursing bruises on both knees and her left elbow after her experiences in the Nevada desert.
Lara realized she was tired.
Strange … Usually at the start of a trip she was as antsy as a mongoose hearing a rustle in the grass. It was only after the battles against exhaustion and pain had been won, and the trip was over, that her mood sometimes darkened and she found herself wishing for a simpler life.
She closed Von Junst, took a swallow of the chilled water, and felt better immediately. No point letting that 19th century theosophist get the better of her. She lifted her eye mask and snapped the soothing gel pads over her face.
But she fell into a strange dream, where the omega design of the Méne grew and grew and expanded and expanded into an umbrella hovering over her until it dropped and engulfed her in its dark, smothering mouth.
***
After they arrived in Peru, there was a day’s delay in Iquitos, with Borg fretting over his climbing equipment, which was supposed to have been shipped to him from the States but had yet to arrive.
“I’ve got plenty of gear,” Lara said, fuming at the delay and keeping an eye on the bags with her guns and VADS gear. There were also parachutes. Her research into Ukju Pacha had mentioned that the ruins centered around a gigantic chasm called the Whispering Abyss. One legend said that sacrifices were thrown down it to prevent earthquakes, and priests descended an endless staircase to speak to gods who lived deep within the earth.
“This is … specialized. A different set of arms. I did not wish to haul them all over London; they’re only useful for climbing. You never saw my TV program?”
“No. Television’s just living vicariously. I’d rather have the real thing.”
The courier arrived, sweat and apologies pouring out of him in equal quantities.
“There was some trouble at customs,” the driver said. “The delivery fee will of course be refunded to you.”
“Not me. My producer.” Another man—and a certain Tomb Raider—might have bawled out the courier over something that wasn’t his fault. Lara felt a tingle of admiration.
“Back in the good graces of your cable network?” Lara asked.
“Fortune turns again my way. The new host of my show is not working out, it seems. I have heard him called ‘wannabe,’ which, I understand, is bad. They want me to return.”
Borg opened the cases, high-impact plastic equipment boxes with steel edges. Lara walked around behind him to look but only saw packing material before Borg closed them again.
“Now we are ready to find this boatman of yours,” he said.
“Not mine. The young professor’s.”
They took a smaller plane, an old De Havilland floatplane, to the next stop. Their final flight destination was Puerto Maldonado, at the edge of the Madre de Dios rain forest.
“Ecologists?” the pilot asked.
“Si, photojournalist,” Lara answered in Spanish.
“You travel with many cameras. All those boxes,” the pilot said, referring to the cargo filling his bay and the third row of seats at the back of the plane.
“We brought our own darkroom,” she said.
He landed the plane with the gentle touch Lara was used to in an aircraft owner-operator. “Upriver she saw a catamaran-style barge, the Tank Girl, as the plane taxied across the water to the dock. Good; Williams was awaiting them, as planned.
A shirtless Peruvian native—a member of the Machinguenga tribe, to judge by his tattoos—looped lines around one of the plane’s pontoons and secured it to one of several docks projecting from the riverfront. Lara and Borg climbed out of the plane, and the pilot opened the cargo doors. Lara gave the dockhand two dollars—she usually traveled with American currency—and he helped them unload.
Puerto Maldonado was one of those whitewashed South American towns where the age of a building could be determined by its distance from the stone mission church. It lived at the pace of an earlier century. Old men watched them from storefront benches; old women leaned on their elbows from wide-open windows. Children wore only underwear in the heat.
A vintage Chevy Blazer roared up to the dock in a blue haze of oily exhaust, just beating a tiny Volkswagen. The driver jumped out, landing on neon-colored athletic shoes endorsed by Michael Jordan. “Taxi? Taxi?”
The Volkswagen driver pounded his steering wheel in frustration, then frowned at the amount of gear coming out of the now-moored plane. He didn’t bother to climb out of his cab.
“Taxi, sir?” he called to Borg out the window. “Very cheapest rates.”
The Blazer’s driver hurried over and grabbed one of Borg’s cases. “Air-conditioned ride! Ten dollars American!”
Lara ignored him, pointed to a flat-bottomed canoe tied up at the dock. “Yours?” she asked the shirtless dockhand in Spanish.
“Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Julio, señorita.”
She handed him a bill. “Take us out to that boat.”
“Tank Girl, si,” the native said, smiling.
“We’re going in the canoe,” she told Borg, then turned to the driver of the Blazer. “Sorry, no taxi.”
The man continued to pull at Borg’s case, until the Norwegian put his weight into the tug-of-war. Then the driver shifted gear and began to help Julio load the long canoe with their gear. Lara handed a pair of dollars to the enterprising taxi driver. He accepted the money, then pressed a brochure into her hand in return. “Many good trips. Rain forest, bird-watching, Inca ruins. Air-conditioned ride.” Then he was gone.
Borg wiped the sweat from his face with one sleeve. “I hope there is air-conditioning aboard the Tank Girl.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Lara said.
They climbed down the short ladder into the canoe, and Lara helped Julio cast off.
A wide-eyed, mud-splattered boy watched them from the riverbank. Borg and the boy swapped silly faces. Lara gave in to a giggle. It occurred to her that she liked having Borg along; she seldom laughed when she was alone in the field.
Other boys in short smocks probed the muddy riverside with nets, occasional
ly lifting fish into tin buckets. Beyond them the town slept in the afternoon sun, its structures hidden behind a hedge of balconies. Clouds were already piling up for the daily rainstorm. The sputtering sound of motorbikes carried from across the muddy riverside.
***
The Tank Girl was a river catamaran nearly twenty meters long with short deck space at the bow and stern. The rest was boxy superstructure in front and the silver fuel tanks at the stern that gave the boat her name. Atop the mobile-home-like superstructure was a flying bridge, protected from the sun by an awning stretched on squared loops of steel and accessible by ladders fore and aft.
Julio waved to another native on deck, who prodded a figure drowsing out the afternoon in a hammock slung across the back of the flying bridge.
Lara recognized Paulo Williams. He was two meters tall and thin. His collar bones showed at his crewneck T-shirt, and his legs were like bronze toothpicks, as though his NBA-sized body had shed every ounce of fat to protect itself from the heat.
“You must be Croft,” he called as the canoe tied up. His was a strange accent, a combination of American drawl and Portuguese consonants.
Lara picked up her backpack and the duffel bag containing her guns and the VADS hardware. “And you’re Paulo Williams. I’m sorry we’re late.”
“No complaints from me. A man can have a good time in Puerto Maldonado.”
Lara didn’t wait for him to elaborate, but pitched in to get the canoe unloaded. With Borg’s assistance, the job went quickly.
“That’s everything,” she said at last, clapping her Machinguenga chauffeur on the shoulder. “Thank you, Julio.”
Julio didn’t say good-bye. Among his people farewells were only said to the dead. He shoved off and paddled away from the Tank Girl.
