by E. E. Knight
Worrying about it wouldn’t change the future. Verbally fencing with Heather about her background provided some mental diversion.
“What are you writing?” Lara asked from her perch, seeing Heather taking notes in a spiral notebook. It was the cheap sort of thing a student might carry, a strange accessory for a woman who could afford a tailored camel hair coat.
The journalist turned back a page. “‘.As I watch Lara Croft read atop the riverboat tank, she puts to mind one of the jaguars lurking in the Peruvian jungle. In repose she sits perfectly still, save for a wiggling foot that betrays her working mind, the way that same cat might twitch his tail as he watches the game trail from a bough above. Her hair matches her brown eyes, her portrait-perfect skin goes with her swimsuit model’s body, she might be reading Vogue while the photographer sets up his lights and equipment. But her military-cut shorts, hiking boots elaborately laced and tied, and black sleeveless top suggests she’s prepared for a run to the heights of Machu Picchu instead of the makeup artist. Then there’s her weapons—matched pistols in a two-gun rig of black canvas holsters—worn gunfighter style. Whatever mysteries of the past she might probe, she is ready to face danger in the present…’ Shall I go on? It’s just impressions.”
“Does it bother you that they’re wrong?”
“What do you mean by that? You object to the cat metaphor? I thought I was being flattering.”
Lara closed her book. “Flattery doesn’t enter into it. You want to describe me to the world, right? Or I should say describe me to the world and get it right.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“It’s impossible to depict reality.”
“I do the best I can.”
“This is why I don’t like journalists. The act itself transforms.”
Heather made a swishing sound and passed her hand over her head.
“Look, you’ve heard of those African natives who think taking a picture steals part of their soul.”
“Yeah. Is it the Bushmen?”
“There are many different groups that feel that way. It doesn’t matter. We laugh at it, but I’ve come to the conclusion they’re right. Celebrity alters. It can’t be helped. It’s not your fault, of course. As soon as you write a sentence about me and someone reads it, that puts an image in the reader’s head, an image that’s nothing like me. I’ve been altered. A piece of my soul is gone.”
“Why do you care what people think?”
“Why do you try to shape their thoughts?”
Heather tapped her pen against the wire spiral. “I don’t.”
“Strange thing for a journalist with your reputation to say.”
“Why?”
“What you choose to make a story and what you choose to leave unexamined determines the political agenda. Is that journalism or advocacy?”
“I tell the truth.”
Lara was tempted to tell her that there was no such thing. The fact that she didn’t believe it kept her silent. “Find another subject.”
“Like your friend with the artificial arms?”
“Your readers might like it better. Look at him with this boat. Determination. That’s an example to write about. I’m not that interesting.”
Heather cocked her head. “I’ve known you for all of a day, and I already think you’re the most interesting woman I’ve met in years. Since you brought up determination…”
“Save the flattery for the next celeb you target.”
“Small potatoes,” Heather said quietly.
“What does that mean?” Lara asked.
“You want my cards on the table?”
Lara hopped down from the tank. “Absolutely. You’ll find I respond to honesty.”
She closed her notebook. “You won’t think I’m mad? No matter what I say?”
Lara crossed her arms, waited as ten more meters of rain forest slid by.
“Ever since I ‘made it’ into big-league journalism, I’ve become part of those Washington clubs and circles that people like to call the elite. Some of the power-broker glitter disappointed; I learned that more public policy is created in corporate boardrooms than in congressional debates. Same story in London, and Beijing, for that matter. At the parties, at the meetings, at the conferences, I didn’t talk much. I listened. Maybe it’s part of being a woman, but when you’re an outsider with your nose pressed up against the glass for most of your life, you get pretty good at reading lips and body language.”
If you’re waiting for an us-girls-against-the-world expression of sympathy, Lara thought, you’ll still be sitting there when we arrive upriver.
Heather looked over her shoulder, then back at Lara. “I started to wonder if I was really moving among the elite. I got the feeling that I was talking to middle managers and PR flacks. But every now and then, key people would just be gone for a week or two. And when they returned, it was like some decision had been made. A story changed, perhaps, or a policy dropped off the radar screen. I started looking into secret societies. I got an interview with a man. Even now I can’t say his name—he’s still in a hospital bed, dying—and he told me a story about his role in the Illuminati. And you.”
“The Illuminati? He was hospitalized with senile dementia, I take it.”
“He had captained a nuclear submarine before he ran one of the largest charitable foundations in the world. Straight and stable and sharp as a diamond drill bit.”
“So you think I can give you insight into secret societies?”
“I’m pretty sure you work for one.”
Lara laughed. “Despite my title, I’m too much the anarchist for oaths and countersigns and secret ceremonies.”
“When the gentleman in the hospital dies, I’m going to tell his story. I’d like to tell yours. Call me an anarchist, too, but I don’t like the idea of my life being influenced by twenty-one men meeting on some estate outside of Rome, or Sydney, or Denver.”
“If that’s what you want, I’ll tell all, and then you can take this boat back to the airstrip at Puerto Maldonado.”
Heather clicked her pen.
“There are secret societies. There are not-so-secret ones. Some have more money than they know what to do with. Others operate out of the back room of a Coventry laundry. People are social creatures. They work together to get things done. Most of these societies are just that: groups of men and women with an agenda. The world is full of powerful entities: corporations, government agencies, cartels, even the broadcasting network that I’m guessing is paying your expenses now. Once in a while it will seem that one rises to prominence, but none of them become predominant because there are so many other competing ideologies, religions, political movements, what-have-you. The world is a big, fractious place. Secret societies just sound scary because they’re secret. There are a few that are malevolent, but then there are drug cartels and terrorist groups motivated by religion, too. But no one group runs everything.”
“But you’ve fought them.”
“I’ve defended myself. I’ve been shot at and chased by everything from poppy plantation guards to slavers.”
“So you really just like archaeology? It’s not a cover? I’ll keep it off the record.”
“Even if it were ‘just a cover,’ it wouldn’t be very smart to mention that to the press, now would it? But, no, it’s not a cover. It’s a calling. Churchill said the further you can see into the past, the better you can predict the future, or words to that effect. Everything that’s happened has happened before; we just keep remaking it with a different cast. Like all the film versions of Dracula floating around out there. Since nothing particularly new or interesting happens today, I try to learn more about how it fit together three thousand years ago.”
Heather scrunched her eyebrows. “That simple? What about that ‘spirit warrior’ stuff the old monk said?”
Lara laughed. “Just because someone speaks with a bunch of incense burning in the background doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about.”
“I promise you, off the record.”
What could she tell her that wouldn’t be a lie?
“Heather, I neither work for a secret society, nor am I Lady Croft, cultbuster. I like to think of myself as a twenty-first-century version of Walter Raleigh. I like to explore. There are still many, many places on this planet where ‘no man has gone before,’ or at least not for a hatful of centuries. There have been times when I’ve learned that some icon, which perhaps possesses no more power than that which people choose to invest in it due to their own beliefs, is about to fall into the wrong hands—according to my judgment and sensibilities, anyway. I see to it that said object ends up where it won’t be a harm to anyone.”
“And you decide all this on your own?”
“No, the voices in my head get their say, too. I’ve been out-voted a few times.” She drew her guns with a rip of Velcro, twirled them, and put them back in their holsters.
Heather blinked rapidly. She glanced over at Francisco, idling on the deck.
“That’s a joke, Heather.”
“You’re very sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“I’ve learned there’s precious little else I can be sure of.”
“So what are you after on this trip? And why have you brought that giant along? You said you worked alone.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Then it’s not for me to say, either.”
“Who can I ask then?”
“You’ll meet him when I do. As to whether he’ll be any more forthcoming with answers, your guess is as good as mine.”
***
The next day the ship’s whistle alerted Lara to trouble. It was just after the regular afternoon downpour, with the deck still awash in rainfall on its way over the side, that a second riverboat made its appearance.
It was long and narrow, and if it had had dragon heads fore and aft, Lara would have taken it for a screw-driven Viking longship. Instead, a long awning stretched from stem to stem, covering wheelhouse, cargo, and open deck space.
“That crazy bastard!” Williams shouted as Lara joined him at the wheel. “He’s coming right for us. Outta the way, Dominguez!” Then quietly, “What’s he playing at this time?”
“Trouble?” Lara asked.
“A new game.”
“Your rival, I assume.”
“Yes, the Plato.”
Williams edged a little closer to the bank. Lara heard something scrape along the bottom of the pontoon. The Plato gave a derisive hoot of its air horn.
“Cisco!” Williams shouted. The Tank Girl’s captain opened a cabinet next to his knee. Lara spotted the red shape of a fire extinguisher. Williams pulled a shotgun out from behind it.
The mate hurried in, his hair slick from the rain.
“Take the wheel. Keep her straight.”
She smelled the gun oil from the pump-action. Her hands went to her guns by themselves.
Williams dashed out onto the front of the catamaran. Lara followed him as far as the door. She leaned out and saw him put the shogun to his shoulder.
“Stay off, Dominguez!”
In the Plato’s wheelhouse, a pot-bellied man under a wide straw hat pinched thumb and finger.
“Bastard! Keep off!” Williams shouted.
The Plato’s captain edged his ship over as the two riverboats came alongside. Lara caught a flash of a wide-faced man in a camouflage-pattered T-shirt reclining against burlap bags with a book open on his lap, before another man, shirtless, stood up and flung a skin of something at the cabin of the Tank Girl.
“Go back to Dallas, gringo!”
Lara, again on instinct, drew, flicked off her safety, and fired her right hand pistol at the cartwheeling shape. Liquid sprayed. Her shots deflected the skin just enough so that, instead of crashing through the cabin window, it hit the pontoon with a wet slap before falling into the river.
The Tomb Raider half expected a Molotov cocktail. Instead, she caught the smell of something noxious, like American skunk.
The Plato passed with nothing more threatening than the sight of the shirtless man’s buttocks pointed out over the side.
“You don’t wear those just for show,” Williams said as she lowered her gun. “I didn’t know people could draw and shoot like that outside of a rodeo gun show.”
Williams went to the pontoon, covered his nose and mouth.
“Animal entrails,” he said from behind his hand. He grabbed a bucket from the side, dipped it in the river, and poured water over the deck and pontoon. Borg and Heather approached from the stern, smelled the splatter, and retreated to windward. “It’s always something.”
“So that’s your rival for the river trade?” Lara asked, flicking the safety back on her gun and holstering it again. Monkeys hooted at them from the forest as Francisco turned the boat away from the riverbank and back into the channel.
“It’s stupid. He’s not even outfitted to haul fuel.”
“Then why?”
“I forget. A woman. A case of bourbon. Maybe it was a song on the stereo in the cantina. He lost a tooth, and I detached a retina. Turns out men don’t just shake hands and make up down here.”
***
The Tank Girl changed directions with the river irmumerable times as they moved between higher and higher hills, all coated with thick, multicanopied jungle. When they stopped for the night, they were in the cloud forest proper for the first time. Thick bands of white and gray hung about the hilltops like vaporous mushroom caps.
Monkeys and birds screeched and squawked and hollered, exchanging noises from riverbank to riverbank like opposing armies trading artillery shells.
“If man leaves the forest, does it still make a sound?” Lara asked.
“I like it,” Borg said. “It is … it is untouched. No, what is the word? Like primitive?”
“Primeval,” Lara said.
“I could take off my clothes and plunge into the water and cover myself with mud to keep off the insects. Become a wild man. Pound my chest when I find the right mate to keep the other males away.”
She smiled at the image. Perhaps she’d slip into a leopard-skin bikini and a sloth-claw necklace and join him in howling at the moon.
He looked at the misty green hilltops. “What is she doing here, I wonder?”
Lara felt a twinge somewhere just behind her breastbone. There was only one “she” in Borg’s life: Ajay. “I’ve wondered that myself. I’ve got a theory now. You want to hear it?”
“Anything.”
“Some say the Inca weren’t the first civilization here, but just built upon the foundations of an older one, one swallowed by the jungle but not quite digested.”
“Older?”
“A theory. It’s called proto-Ur, for lack of a better term. They crossed oceans; it’s thought that they extended from the Mideast and then around the Pacific Rim. The protos worshipped gods, but they were strange sorts of gods, gods that dwelled here on earth, or perhaps beneath it, like the Polynesians with their volcanoes.”
“Yes. They worshipped places?”
“No. Gods of places. Deep places, the bottom of caverns, the ocean. This religion was apparently ordered to an extent that wasn’t seen again until the Confucians or the medieval Catholic church. Everyone in the faith was ranked by a number. They were called the Méne, the numbered. They had an important temple here, if I’ve done my research correctly. I think Ajay is after some kind of sacred Méne artifacts.”
The ancient trees at the banks, weighed down with creeper, moss, and vine, black-trunked where the river touched them, extended sun-chasing boughs out over the river as though they were cupped ears listening to the conversation.
“In the ruins?”
“Below them. In a shaft, a deep pit. It translates as the ‘Whispering Abyss.’ That’s why I brought the parachutes. At the bottom—”
“Uff, look at those,” Bo
rg exclaimed, lifting his mechanical arm. Something the size of a pointer trotted off a downed trunk and plunged into the river.
“Giant otters,” Captain Williams called down from the flying bridge. “They’re called river wolves in this part of the headwaters.”
“Is everything around here of that size?” Borg asked.
Williams started counting on his fingers as he steered with his elbow. “Spiders that can cover a cantaloupe. River fish weighing hundreds of pounds. Snakes about as long as this boat. Funny thing, though: It’s the small stuff that’ll kill you out here. Bugs and fevers and intestinal parasites and so on. Snakes got nothing on them.”
“Do you think she is all right, Lara?” Borg’s voice wasn’t any louder than the sound of the river passing over the catamaran’s pontoons.
Lara put her hand on his bowling-ball-like shoulder. There was nothing to regret; he was never hers to begin with. “We’ll know in a day or two.”
***
Green, cloud-cloaked mountains filled the eastern horizon. A stream joined the river at a stretch of grassland, and behind the grassland a small mountain of a thousand meters or so rose above the adjoining hills.
“End of the line,” Williams said. “Old Girl can’t navigate much further upstream. Rapids.”
“Where are we?” Borg asked as Lara checked the gear.
“An old coffee plantation,” Williams said. “The would-be coffee man who built the place went out of business decades ago. The Peruvian government seized the property over taxes and decided to try to cater to the eco-tourist trade. They built a canopy observation tower and ranger station in the old plantation house. But there were plenty of birds and animals to see in easier-to-reach areas of the Madre de Dios preserve where the guerrillas didn’t operate.”
Lara could make out moss-covered pilings where the dock had once stood. Now only a series of rocks jutted out from them, with a cable to use as a handrail.
Francisco threw a lasso over one of the pilings and pulled the boat to the rocks. “There is the canopy tower on that mountain; you can just see it above the trees. See the wood?” Lara followed Francisco’s pointing finger and saw it, a rounded hut colored to blend in with the treetops.
“What happened to this place?” Heather asked.
