The Vanishing Tribe

by Alex Archer

  So far, so good.

  There was another explosion from somewhere out front—Griggs’s second, and last, rocket.

  That should keep them busy for a bit, Annja thought.

  She reached into her pack and pulled out a device that looked like a sawed-off shotgun with a three-pronged hook stuck down the barrel. Annja pointed the weapon at the balcony above her and pulled the trigger.

  There was a small hiss and the hook shot out of the barrel of the grapple gun, trailing a thin nylon climbing rope behind it. It shot up and over the balcony’s railing. When she heard a dull thunk, Annja tapped a button on the weapon’s grip that caused it to release the line, leaving her with a rope secured to the balcony above.

  She grabbed the rope and swarmed up it, hand over hand.

  As she climbed over the balcony railing less than two minutes later, Annja could hear gunfire coming from the front of the house. Porter’s security team had finally gotten into the act, it seemed.

  Annja didn’t waste any time, just stepped to the sliding glass door and tried the handle.

  It slid open.

  She gave her eyes a moment to adjust. She had expected to enter the house through Porter’s bedroom and she took a second to verify that as soon as she could see clearly.

  Unfortunately, the room was empty.

  His study, she told herself, naming the next likely place she’d find him.

  She crossed the room, slowly opened the door and then slipped out into the hallway, looking for her target.

  * * *

  PORTER NEARLY DUMPED his drink in his lap at the sound of the explosion. He stalked over to the intercom on his desk and hit the button.

  “What’s going on out there?” he barked.

  He didn’t get an answer.

  “Bryant! What’s going on?”

  Still no reply, but he could hear small-arms fire coming over the circuit now in addition to another explosion.

  “Answer me!” he yelled, and then, when no one did, he threw his glass of Scotch across the room.

  “Tsk, tsk. Someone’s got a temper.”

  Porter spun around, his eyes wide as he spotted Annja Creed standing in the doorway, dressed in black.

  “You!” he said.

  She smiled but it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “Yes, me. Were you expecting someone else?”

  “What do you want?”

  Creed laughed. “Only a buffoon like you would ask a question like that. What do you think I want?”

  Porter didn’t answer, but his gaze drifted to the diamond.

  Creed didn’t even glance in that direction. “Is that what you think? That I want the diamond?”

  “Why else would you come here?”

  She looked at him, her expression unreadable, and all of a sudden Porter felt like a bug under a microscope.

  “Did you think you’d get away with it, Porter?” she asked. “Did you think I wouldn’t come for you?”

  * * *

  ANNJA WATCHED HIM carefully. If he was going to try something, now would be the moment. She wasn’t sure if he was stupid enough, but...

  As it turned out, he was.

  His gaze flicked to his desk for the second time and Annja realized he wasn’t looking at the diamond at all. Must have a gun in the drawer.

  But for all his faults, Porter was a clever bastard and when he made his move he didn’t go for the desk. The looks in that direction had been a diversion, cover for his real target, which was the drawer of the liquor cabinet directly in front of him.

  He was fast, too. He had his hand in the drawer and the gun out before Annja had realized the true extent of the threat.

  As he spun back toward her she did the only thing she could think of to stop him.

  Her hand came up past her ear, as if she were winding up to throw a pitch, her sword materializing in her grip at the top of the arc, and then flying straight and true when she released it as her hand came hurling forward again.

  The sword flashed across the space separating them at the same moment Porter pulled the trigger, the bullet whipping past Annja as she dove to the floor.

  She rolled to the side and came up in a crouch, but her caution was unnecessary. Porter stared across the room with unseeing eyes, the blade of her sword buried hilt-deep in his chest.

  That had been closer than she liked.

  Annja released her sword back to the otherwhere, letting Porter’s body slump to the floor in the process, and then stepped over to the desk for the Heartstone. A pile of wrappings lay nearby, and Annja appropriated them for her own use. She wrapped the stone and then stashed it inside her backpack.

  A check of the watch told her she’d been inside for six and a half minutes.

  Time to go.

  She gave one last glance to the body on the floor and then slipped out of the room, retracing her steps to the balcony and then back across the lawn to the wall without being seen.

  Ten minutes later she was in the clearing, climbing into the helicopter next to Griggs.

  “Any problems?” he asked once she had her headset on.

  She shook her head. “Nothing I couldn’t handle,” she replied, and left it at that.

  46

  Early the next morning, they returned to the Lost City.

  At any other time Annja would have gone alone. Maintaining the Sho way of life meant keeping the location hidden from the public eye, just as it had been for the past several hundred years. Given the size and value of the Heartstone, it was particularly important to keep it a secret.

  But Annja was worried. The elder’s prophecy, if you could call it that, had set her teeth on edge and she was growing increasingly more nervous that something would go wrong if she didn’t return the Heartstone fast.

  She had therefore planned ahead, requiring Garin to swear on his honor that he would not personally attempt to recover the diamond from !Ksanna, send another individual on his behalf to do it for him or disturb the Sho people in any way.

  Annja knew Garin would rather die than break a sworn oath like the one she made him give, so she felt safe in asking Griggs to take her back.

  Because of the height of the crater, which blocked the sun in the early part of the morning, most of the city was still in shadow when Griggs brought the chopper over the walls and down into the valley. Annja was looking out the window as they descended, searching for survivors. She couldn’t see anyone.

  The streets were empty.

  Deserted.

  Maybe the sound of the helicopter has scared them into hiding?

  She didn’t think so. Griggs’s chopper was much quieter than Porter’s had been and they wouldn’t have been able to get everyone undercover that quickly.

  Annja felt a deep sense of unease. Something was wrong; she could feel it in her bones.

  “Circle the palace once, will you?”

  “The palace?”

  “Yeah, that building over there,” she said, pointing.

  “Got it.”

  He did as she asked, taking them in low and slow. The wreckage of Porter’s helicopters lay right where they’d been abandoned, though the bodies of the dead had been removed from in front of the palace steps.

  That, at least, was a good sign.

  And yet no one came outdoors to see what the noise was about.

  “There’s another clearing on the other side of the palace. Why don’t you set it down there?”

  “Roger that.”

  Griggs brought the chopper over the roof, giving Annja a view of the riverbank where she’d seen the elephants bathing in the shallows. There was no sign of them now.

  That, more than anything else, convinced her that something was wrong.

  The garden was their home; the elephants should be there.

  Griggs set the chopper down without so much as a bump. They waited until the rotors were silent and had stopped moving before disembarking. Annja was carrying the Heartstone in a small backpack slung over one shoulder, leaving her hands f
ree for her sword if she needed it. Griggs held an automatic rifle, scanning the building before them.

  “Hello?” Annja shouted. “Nagamush? Hello?”

  No answer.

  “Now that you’ve let everyone from here to South Africa know that we’ve arrived, why don’t we see if anyone is home?”

  Annja glanced at Griggs.

  “Did I tell you about the poisoned arrows?”

  The smart-ass smile on Griggs’s face died. “Poisoned arrows?”

  “Nah, didn’t think I had,” Annja said with a grin of her own. Then she walked away from the chopper, headed for the door at the back of the palace she’d used last time she was here.

  “Just a moment, Ms. Creed,” Griggs said, hurrying to catch up. “What’s this about poisoned arrows?”

  Annja glanced back over her shoulder. “Just don’t get hit with one and you won’t have anything to worry about, all right?”

  Griggs went back to scowling at her, not knowing if she was serious or not.

  Teach him to smart-mouth me.

  They reached the door and stopped, listening.

  Nothing but the whisper of the wind.

  “Where did they all go?” Griggs asked, looking around as if at any moment said tribe was going to jump out of the woodwork.

  “I wish I knew.”

  They entered the building and cautiously made their way through the halls to the audience chamber. That was where she was supposed to return the diamond and that, more than any other place, was where she expected to find someone who could tell her what was going on.

  But the audience chamber was as empty and silent as the rest of the city.

  The elder’s voice seemed to echo through her mind.

  I saw you standing alone in the ruins of !Ksanna, a look of sorrow and dismay on your face....

  Annja shook herself, trying to get rid of the chills that swept over her as she stared at the empty throne room.

  Could the legends have been true? Could the Heartstone have been responsible in some strange and unusual way for the Sho’s well-being and safety?

  If so, what would happen if she put it back?

  Only one way to find out.

  She crossed the dais, stepped around the throne and stopped in front of the empty socket on the wall where the diamond had rested for centuries. She slipped the pack off her shoulder and laid it on the floor. Kneeling next to it, she unzipped it and slid the diamond out.

  “Give me a hand with this, will you?” she said over her shoulder.

  Griggs grumbled but did as he was asked. Together they carefully lifted the diamond and held it up to the socket, then rotated it until it slid into place with a distinct click.

  “We good?” Griggs asked.

  “I think so.”

  Annja kept her hands close as they let go, just in case the diamond wasn’t secured properly, but it stayed where they had put it.

  She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. She had expected to feel better at this point, to feel some sense of relief now that she’d fulfilled her promise and returned the Heartstone to its rightful place, but all she felt was empty.

  She suspected she was too late.

  “This place is giving me the creeps,” Griggs said. “How about we get out of here?”

  She had to admit she felt the same way.

  She turned, saying, “All right, let me just...”

  Her voice trailed off in midsentence as her gaze fell on the images painted on the dais to the right of the throne.

  Painted where they would only be seen by someone standing where she stood.

  As if in a trance, she stepped forward so she could see them better.

  Just as in the canyon temple, there were several different frames, all telling a sequential story. They appeared to have been drawn with a stick of charcoal. In some places, the image was already starting to smear or fade.

  The first panels detailed the attack on the city by Porter’s men. Oval shapes with lines above them represented the helicopters and they could be seen swooping over the buildings that made up the city. The stick figures lying in front of the palace steps represented the last stand made by the elder’s guards, and the two stick figures on the elephant had to represent her and Nagamush.

  But, as before, it was the last image that made her eyes widen.

  The picture was larger than the others, as if the artist wanted to draw her attention to it immediately. It showed a long line of people, stick figures again, passing through the rush of the waterfall and disappearing from view.

  Beside her, Griggs cleared his throat. “You don’t think...”

  He didn’t finish the question.

  But Annja didn’t need him to. She knew what he was going to ask.

  “Only one way to find out, really.”

  They searched the area around and behind the waterfall for more than two hours, but they didn’t find any cave mouths or other locations where the city’s inhabitants could have gone.

  They wound up sitting on the riverbank, wet, tired and wondering just what the artist had been trying to tell them.

  Once before, the Sho had disappeared from history’s notice, slipping through the “hole in the world,” as they called it, to find a new home here in the Lost City. Now it seemed they had done it again.

  Annja didn’t know how it was possible, but then again, she’d encountered more than her fair share of unexplained events over the past several years and decided that, maybe just this once, she didn’t need to understand.

  It seemed that the Sho were safe, wherever they might be, and for now, that was good enough for her.

  She and Griggs returned to the chopper and were soon airborne over the city once more. As they lifted out of the crater and turned the nose of the aircraft toward home, Annja looked back down at the city below her and wondered if she’d ever see the Sho again.

  Somehow, she thought she might.

  * * * * *

  We hope you enjoyed this Harlequin ebook. Connect with us for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!

  Subscribe to our newsletter: Harlequin.com/newsletters

  Visit Harlequin.com

  We like you—why not like us on Facebook: Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks

  Follow us on Twitter: Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks

  Read our blog for all the latest news on our authors and books: HarlequinBlog.com

  ISBN: 9781460312667

  Copyright © 2013 by Worldwide Library

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com

 

 

 
yscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share