12.21.12: The Vessel (The Altunai Annals)

by Killian McRae

  “Are you outbound yet?”

  Victoria put her ear briefly to the door to be certain no one was on the other side. “Shortly. Alex was able to get me a ticket on a direct London flight, but I’m going to Cairo alone after I address The Order.”

  “I would prefer you let The Order assist you. Traveling alone so close to the end of the baktun isn’t—”

  She abruptly cut him off. “Bite your tongue, Priest. I’ve been preparing for this for far longer than you or anyone in The Order, and I know well what is required and what is best.”

  “Of course. It wasn’t my intention ...” His voice, a mixture of apology and humility, trailed off. “If you should require anything ...”

  “Then I know whom to contact. I assure you, I’ll be fine. Just keep a close eye on things on your end, and let me know if anything with the boys happens. If I can keep clear of certain mobsters, and if you get your hands on the amulet, everything should be fine.” She found her mind drifting as Kronastia’s face flooded her memories. In a voice far smaller than her experience, she asked, “How is he, by the way?”

  She could almost hear Priest’s teeth clamp in frustration. If there was one thing he did not understand, it was her complex history with, and lingering attachment to, Kronastia. It made no sense to him.

  “He is well enough,” Priest answered stoically, though a little sigh of frustration passed in his pausing. “A little peeved that you were able to make off with the goods, though. Milady, I hope I’m not being too improper, but how long has it been since the two of you—”

  “Long enough that I have clarity about why it can’t work, Priest, and don’t inquire further. The nature of my relationship with Dmitri—or anyone else, for that matter—is none of your concern.”

  She looked at the clock on the wall; it would be time to board soon.

  “I need to go,” she announced. “Alex will be meeting me in London. Good luck.”

  “Same.”

  She closed the cell with a click and stared at it until the display went into sleep mode. Despite the telephone bravado, she couldn’t explain her nerves or the butterflies in her stomach. It had never been her intention when she started this life to end up as a smuggler. But, as it turned out, it was good work for those with the tenacity and talent. She possessed both in spades, as well as certain other skills which only added to her superiority at her accidental trade.

  However, this was different. This time wasn’t for practice, thrills, or revenge. It wasn’t just about her or a client with deep pockets and lower morals. It wasn’t even for the sake of evidence, as she led the members of The Order to believe. This time, it was critical for her own ability to go on.

  Of all the concerns she had ever had, survival had never been one of them. In a first for her, Victoria contemplated the possibility of meeting her own death. As yet, she hadn’t decided whether or not it would be a welcome fate. It all depended on what happened next week.

  Breaking from her reverie, Victoria ran her fingers through her hair before placing the cell on the table next to the monitor. The device wasn’t secure. Alex had picked it up from some random vendor in Veracruz. It was too risky to keep it. Swiftly, her palm alighted toward the target, destroying the object beyond any reasonable measure of repair or reclamation. Using stationary provided by the airline lounge, Victoria crumpled up several sheets of paper and covered over the fragments of electronic strudel she had thrown in the waste bin. A glance at the clock told her she should get going, but she had a moment still, and she’d waited long enough.

  Placing the tote on the table, she unbuttoned the flap and pulled out the statuette, removing the protective layer of bubble wrap. Even after all this time, its condition was impeccable. It stood proudly erect, a visage of a queen once worshipped or loathed—and really, how much of a difference was there—by all who had encountered her.

  “You’d find this funny, wouldn’t you, Cleo?” she asked aloud, as though she expected the alabaster, carved face to respond. “I used to think you were selfish and insolent for putting your love of Anthony before Egypt’s interests. I understand now how hard those decisions were for you. ‘Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, and we are for the dark’.”

  With a kiss on its brow, she restored the treasure and was off.

  A quick, determined pace through the terminal brought her to her gate. Her tote stayed strapped to her side as she took her seat. A stewardess offered hospitality and champagne, but Victoria refused both as she took out her notebook from the side pocket of her bag. The A4 folio fell open on her tray table, and she pulled from it a parchment made not of paper, but of papyrus. Gingerly, she opened it and splayed it flat, the glistening red and blue pigments reflecting the LED-reading lights overhead.

  With a sigh, she leaned back. Hopefully she could get some sleep soon. Her batteries were running low, and the encounter with José didn’t help much. Maybe she should just put away the scroll, close her eyes, and ...

  “That’s some fancy calligraphy.”

  The voice caught her off guard. She looked to her side to see a finely attired business man—no doubt his suit was designer—looking at the parchment. She gave a polite nod to acknowledge his comment before leaning back again.

  “Sort of looks like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.”

  The final coach class passengers filed past.

  “It’s Egyptian,” Victoria added without turning toward him. “Ptolemaic era hieroglyphs, though it wasn’t written until years later.”

  “Can you read it?”

  Victoria smirked smugly. Turning her head, she could almost have sworn she saw him quiver when she answered, “Of course. I wrote it, after all.”

  The Brit nearly gagged on the champagne he had been sipping. “You wrote it?”

  He eyed her warily, as though sizing her up for evidence of mental disease. Victoria leaned in over the divide between them, looking him squarely in the eye.

  “Yup.” He looked anxiously back, but when her lips curled into a smile, then a laugh, he relaxed. “I copied it from the original written about two thousand years ago. This copy is … substantially newer.”

  She took in this inquisitive being with a wayward glance. Thirty, thirty-five perhaps? Old enough to have done well enough for himself, but his roughened knuckles suggested that he’d performed some manual labor in his short life. Or, perhaps, he just had a hobby of working with his hands. His skin was fair, and his accent placed him in upper class South England. Still, he had an air of informality about him; he had been educated in the States, maybe Canada. Ah, UCLA—the class ring gave him away.

  A class ring, but no wedding band.

  Her eyes twinkled and the corners of her mouth rose. He loosened his blue-striped tie, perhaps unconsciously.

  “Hieroglyphs?” he asked as his mouth went dry. “Doesn’t look like the kind you see in museums and the such. Seems ...”

  She completed his sentence. “Simpler?” He nodded. “Well, most of the hieroglyphs you see in museums were in the possession of the affluent or royalty. Image is all the thing when you’re trying to preserve your reputation for posterity or make a bold statement to your contemporaries. This kind, however, is a sort of shorthand. These types of glyphs are more about content than character, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

  What was he after? If only she could read his mind. Should she? It would require extreme concentration and energy, both of which she was coming up short on after the previous night. Luckily, she was fluent in body language. When he smiled back at her, she knew she was reeling him in. A highly placed business man had a lot to offer her at the moment; a secure, comfortable place to stay where she had no previous ties, if nothing else. A place to hide out between the few hours of landing at Heathrow and meeting Alex.

  His finger reached over a
nd traced along the edge of the scroll, brushing over the hilt of her hand. She faked a tremor.

  “What does that say?”

  His voice was low, husky. She had succeeded in the first step of any seduction: letting him think he was in control.

  The papyrus cracked in the echoes of its age as she delicately traced her fingers over the characters. The plane pulled away from the gate and taxied. “It starts, ‘I killed her’.”

  “Please note, the nearest exit may be behind you ...”

  Victoria competed with the sound of the flight crew’s safety instructions.

  He leaned in even further, though his attention was wholly focused now on the parchment. “It’s a murder confession?”

  Victoria nodded.

  “In the event of a water landing ...”

  She moved her finger to the next set of glyphs. “But, it continues, ‘It was not my intent, and in that I can claim innocence of wrong. May Isis judge me fairly when I stand before her once more’.”

  “... use caution as items may shift during takeoff ...”

  “‘Could that I give my life to replace hers, it would be done. But I wish only to say, I loved her, and my regrets will flow as long as the Nile. I vow as my penance, her blood under my crest shall shelter find.’ That’s it, that’s all it says, except ...”

  “... sit back and enjoy your ...”

  A crooked grin spread across his face. “There’s more?”

  Her finger pointed at a specific glyph at the top, its pictorial representation far more elaborate than those surrounding it, highlighted with golden-hued accents.

  “She, they, her … Meaningless insertions I’m making for your benefit. No pronouns in this particular dialect. This is the name of the victim, and this,” she moved to a different glyph, this one traced over in red, “is the name of the murderer.”

  He sat back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest as the plane reached the end of its taxi and the engines begin to rev.

  “How about that?” he mused. “An ancient, signed murder confession. Wonder how long a sentence he got?”

  Victoria scoffed. “He?”

  He seemed very certain of himself as they both were pressed back in their seats, the pull of the speeding jetliner forcing them to submit.

  “‘I loved her’?” he repeated back. “Clear case of a guy offing the woman he loves because he can’t have her. Kings may fall and nations may rise, but some things remain the same.”

  So like the rich to indulge in their arrogance, Victoria thought to herself. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the land miniaturizing underneath them, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She actually managed a clean get away.

  She said only “I suppose” as she maneuvered their conversation to other topics.

  She learned his name was Terrance, and he had been in Mexico working on behalf of a British oil firm. He was thirty-six, lived alone in a West Side Flat, and drove a Bentley. With each piece of information he revealed, she feigned interest and even awe.

  They sat in silence as the movie started, though Victoria assured the “accidental” touch of their hands several times during the epically long picture. When dinner was served, she made sure that the fork was pulled alluringly from her mouth with each tiny, symbolic bite. The feel of the food on her tongue nearly broke her concentration. She couldn’t recall the last time she had been forced to consume so much for appearance’s sake, and shuddered when she considered how much “food” was seated around her, and how she hadn’t fed properly in a few days.

  Finally, an hour or so before their scheduled arrival, Terrance turned his interest to her. Victoria presented herself as a graduate student in ancient civilizations at Cambridge. It wasn’t wholly a lie; she had been once. A difference of verb tense hardly qualified as lying. Terrance asked what had brought an Egyptologist to Mexico.

  “Why, the pyramids, silly,” she giggled back, her fingers traipsing over his wrist and her eyelashes batting just enough. “I was engaging in some interdisciplinary studies.”

  He smiled coyly at her, returning the feather-light movement by tracing the contours of her wrist. “You came from Egypt to see pyramids? Isn’t that like being from Paris and going to China to eat brioche?”

  “Common misconception,” she answered. “Actually, the pyramids of Central America rival those in Egypt in size and age. Some would even argue, depending how you measure, that the Aztecs built the largest pyramids, out scaling Giza easily.”

  “Is that so?”

  She practically beamed as she allowed him to believe she was flattered by his interest.

  “Indeed. And the pyramids in Caral, Peru predate the oldest in Egypt by nearly a century,” she added.

  However, he had clearly had enough of the topic. “Where are you bound in London?”

  “Well, we land early in the a.m., and I have a meeting later in the evening, so I was planning on just hanging out at the airport for a few hours.”

  “Perhaps I can buy you breakfast or an early lunch?”

  Snagged.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.”

  The voice over the announcement system frustrated her. Once she had a rhythm established, she hated interruptions. Trying not to let her aggravation outwardly show, she let out a tempered sigh and fell back against her seat.

  The voice over continued, “Just to keep you in the loop, folks, I wanted to let you know that we are experiencing a slight malfunction of one of our onboard navigation systems.” A muffled gasp arose from the passengers, but Victoria only rolled her eyes at the expected news. “Not to worry, we’ve got eyes on the ground watching out for us, and our secondary systems are coming online as we speak. Just as a precaution, you may see off either side of the aircraft two smaller planes. No reason for concern; they’re just walking us home.”

  Victoria leaned over Terrance, rolled back the window shade, and focused her gaze on the hazy horizon. Letting out a curse that regrettably was in English, she felt the eyes of those around land squarely on her. She ignored them and undid her seatbelt, leaping up just as the ping from above reflected the switching on of the Fasten Seatbelts sign.

  The first class flight attendant stepped forward. “Miss, I’ll need you to remain in your ... Where are you going?”

  Victoria was at the pilot’s door in a moment. The flight attendant found it useless to pull her back; despite her feminine frame, Victoria proved too strong to budge.

  Burying her fingers into the stewardess’s chest, she pushed her firmly against the wall of the galley. “Listen, sweetie, this can go down in one of two ways. Either you can tell the captain to open up these doors nicely and go back to your job, or I can break the door down and start mass panic.”

  The flight attendant’s voice broke with fear, though she at least tried to appear confident in her warning. “Under international law, you are now disobeying the direct order of cabin crew and—”

  “Can it!” Victoria shouted. “Do you know something, Frida Flighty? Navigation equipment screws up no matter what flight I’m on. Call it a gift. This is the first flight, however, where that results in fighter jets being scrambled, and don’t think I don’t know why.”

  Terrance was the last person she expected to see come to the stewardess’s aid.

  “Now, now,” he almost cooed, his hands held out in the international sign for ‘calm down.’ “I think you’re taking things a little too harshly. You’re scaring everyone. Why don’t you just come and we can talk this out.”

  His tone and demeanor had transformed, and the coy and flirtatious man she’d been manipulating a few minutes before took on an air of severity and authority.

  Something was off. Something was terribly, phenomenally off with this picture.

  �
��What’s it to you?” Victoria’s voice was soft, but her tone was oh so snippy.

  Terrance cracked a smile and pulled back his jacket. The holstered Taser reflected the cabin lights, and complimented perfectly the lion and unicorn staring at her from his left suspender.

  “As I was saying, Miss Kent, why not just come sit down? And it’s more than merely a suggestion.”

  “Would you like to cuff me then?” Victoria presented her wrists out. Terrance said nothing, but his smirk was all the affirmation she needed. Rather than the old fashioned metallic manacles, the MI-6 agent threaded two plastic strips around her wrists. “You know who I am?”

  “Victoria Kent, archaeology student,” he played along. “I’d love to know your real name, Jaguar. Perhaps your prints when we get you processed will finally solve that.”

  Victoria said nothing, only allowed herself to be more-than-suggestively led to her seat. This time, Terrance shoved her in first so she was against the window as he claimed the aisle. With a grin, he picked up the sack that had slipped from Victoria’s lap when she’d jumped up and began fishing items out. The wooden box and statuette he eyed with only amusement before returning them, but the knife with the jewel-encrusted handle, he turned over in his hand again and again.

  “You knew it was me the whole time,” Victoria stated. Terrance didn’t try to deny it. “Who tipped you off?”

  “Come now, Miss Kent. You know I can’t divulge that information.”

  “An anonymous call?” she asked. Again, no answer.