The Lost Scrolls

by Alex Archer

  She sat and did not cause trouble. She regretted it anyway.

  She wept. Hysterically at first. Then as she got tired, she subsided into whimpering. That in turn dwindled as she got control of herself and she realized it wasn't doing any good and it was making the sack enclosing her head wet and hard to breathe through.

  By the time she got that all sorted out in her head the helicopter had touched down. Hard hands hustled her out into the afternoon heat. The pavement beneath the soles of her Converse All-Star knockoffs was so hot she could feel it through the cheap rubber. When she left the circle of ominous sounds made by the idling rotor blades she was unsurprised to hear rising around her a screaming hurricane roar from a horde of jet engines.

  A few stumbling steps and she was being half dragged, half pushed up stairs that rang metallic beneath her feet. Jadzia didn't even dare hope someone would spot her, an obvious victim, being hustled aboard some kind of private jet. Likely this was a secluded hangar at Naples airport, probably belonging to her abductor – could it be any other than one or another Satanic limb of Big Oil? – where no one would see.

  Even if anyone saw, this was Italy, land of the red Brigades and the Mafia, and more particularly Naples, which, like Marseilles, boasted a record of piratical skullduggery dating back to approximately the dawn of writing. Anyone who spotted her being kidnapped would simply pass it off as business as usual.

  "Dude? What the fuck?" an American-accented voice asked from up the ramp.

  "Ran into some problems," the guy pushing her up on her left said with a French accent. "Change of plans."

  "Dude! We're supposed to take delivery of, like, two chicks and a bag."

  "Shut up!" rapped a German voice, apparently from the guy who was towing Jadzia up the ramp by her right biceps. "We speak more inside."

  She hit a barrier of cool air and was swallowed within. A new hand took her right arm. The French guy released her left. The new hand urged her back and into a comfortable chair. As muffled sounds of argument came from the front of the aircraft she was buckled in. Immediately the engine scream began to rise to a piercing mosquito whine.

  Jadzia felt a stab of optimism. Maybe it's a Gulf stream, she thought. She had always wanted to ride in a Gulf stream, a big expensive executive jet she had often read about in Tom Clancy novels.

  The airplane taxied for a time then took off. Some time later the dark cloth hood was removed. When her vision coalesced from random fields of fuzz, there in the middle of it was a narrow, handsome young Asian face, crinkled slightly with concern.

  "You okay?" the man asked in American-accented English. "They didn't, like, hurt you or anything?"

  Jadzia had already determined to change her angle of attack. Physical resistance was clearly not going to work. So she blinked her big cornflower-blue eyes at him and gave him her most seductive smile.

  He turned and fled toward the front of the aircraft.

  "What is the matter, Lee?" the lanky Russian asked. "You look as if you have just seen ghost."

  "That girl," the Asian kid said. "She, like, smiled at me."

  The Russian cocked a ginger-colored eyebrow. "So? You may look but not touch. Or Gus Marshall takes your man-junk off with belt sander, maybe." He laughed and laughed as if this were the greatest joke of all.

  Lee shook his head emphatically, whipping his luxurious ponytail around his shoulders. "No, man. She's totally hot. But the way she looked at me – I'd rather hook up with a barracuda. You can see it in her eyes. She's scary crazy, man."

  "Is slang?" the Russian asked.

  "What?" Lee asked blankly. "No, man. It's slang for she's, like, Angelina-Jolie-in-her-Billy-Bob-Thornton-phase crazy. Drink-each-other's-blood crazy."

  "Oh," the Russian said, slightly crestfallen. "I guess is not good."

  Her attempt at gaining the cooperation of her captors through her seductive wiles having failed miserably, Jadzia sulked for hours, refusing food or drink, as the airplane flew north. Then the organism made its demands known. She started screaming for attention.

  A tall, goony-looking guy with prominent ears and a bad ginger crewcut came loping down the aisle in response. He wouldn't meet her eyes and seemed to be sweating. She knew the look and addressed him in peremptory Russian.

  He unbuckled her from her seat and escorted her to a dark-stained walnut-paneled door.

  "Untie my hands," she commanded in the haughty tone appropriate to a proud Pole addressing a Russian lout.

  He turned and called a nervous query in English.

  "So cut her loose, idiot," came a command through a closed curtain.

  "No-culture German fascist," the Russian muttered in his own language as he produced a blade to cut the plastic restraint.

  The bathroom was comparatively large and luxuriously appointed in brushed brass and cream tones. She was fairly sure now this really was a Gulf stream. She took her time and used the privacy to think about ways to disable the aircraft. Some ideas promptly came to her quick, capacious mind.

  And were just as promptly dismissed. She was, it occurred to her, flying in said aircraft. Disabling it suddenly seemed like not such a hot idea. She wasn't ready to admit these clowns had gotten the better of her, the certified girl genius.

  Thinking about Annja calmed her. Annoying though she was, the woman did show remarkable abilities. She was almost like a real-life version of her favorite adventure-novel heroines.

  More to the point, she seemed to have decided she was personally responsible for Jadzia's welfare. And though she was maybe not as bright as Jadzia – but then, who was? – she did seem the sort to take her responsibilities seriously.

  Jadzia decided to allow the plane to continue on its flight. She would return to her seat and make the jug-eared Russian bring her the food and drink she had been promised earlier. And she would rely on the mysterious Ms. Creed to come to rescue her.

  The gulf stream flew out over a sizable body of water. It was either the Baltic or the North Sea, Jadzia knew, pretty much by default. The springday, short at such northerly latitudes, was already ending in a pool of fire out the port-side windows, and gilt clouds of gray and lavender velvet out the starboard side where Jadzia sat.

  Almost apologetically, the handsome American Asian in the dark suit and the Russian in the yellow polyester shirt and faded dungarees came back to hood her again.

  As they tried to pull the bag over her head, without conscious decision, Jadzia abandoned her strategy of cooperation and started screaming. She didn't target the Asian kid particularly, because he was actually quite cute, which convinced her he couldn't be all bad. But she nailed the Russian in the crotch with a rising instep that lifted him up a good inch, caused his little watery blue boar eyes to bug out and his ears to burn red as he doubled over.

  The Asian kid was fast as a rattler. He took advantage of Jadzia's reflexive pause in frantic activity to admire the effect her kick hit had on the Russian – she'd never actually kicked anyone in the nuts before – to whip the hood right over her head. Unable to target effectively, she felt her wrists seized and strapped together again with a nasty plastic strip that bit into her skin when she fought against it.

  She cursed her captors enthusiastically in several languages.

  Her oppressors fled.

  She settled back to sulk some more.

  When the aircraft touched down, someone un-snapped her from her seat, urged her up and guided her forward along the aisle to the front of the aircraft, then out into a brisk, saltwater-scented breeze.

  She stayed on autopilot and let the world happen around her. It wasn't as if she was unaccustomed to zoning out into a private world of intellectual reverie.

  She was escorted across the apron and handed into a new craft. When the engines spun up with a turbine whine and unmistakable chop she knew it for another helicopter. It leaped in the air, angled, and was away.

  How long it flew she didn't try to track. From a general impression of light through the cloth h
ood and decreasing temperature she gathered the sun was setting.

  The chopper rose, then settled to a landing. Still hooded and with her wrists still bound before her, she was unstrapped from the seat and gently but insistently urged out of the aircraft.

  Cold spray-freighted wind struck her like a slap. She was led at a brisk pace into clammy darkness, up echoing metal stairs.

  She knew where she was.

  Not specifically. But she knew quite well what kind of place it was.

  The question that rang in her mind, was, How will Annja Creed find me here?

  Chapter 9

  As soon as Annja's eyes adjusted to the tavern's gloom, her heart plummeted straight to the soles of her shoes.

  The man she had come to Germany to seek out was here, all right, just as she'd been told. He sat behind a rampart of empty upturned one-liter beer steins like some kind of ancient monolith. Totally hammerheaded drunk.

  It was a cozy tavern outside a cozy little village in a cozy little valley tributary to the Rhine near the city of Darmstadt in Hessen. The setting was quite bucolic, complete with its castle on an overlording hilltop. It all oozed picturesque.

  Across from Annja's target a young local in a wool sweater sat hunched slightly forward beneath the square roof timbers that hung dark and low. He had rumpled brown hair and round-rimmed spectacles and looked fourteen at the way outside. He smiled dreamily across his own set of upturned steins at Annja's quarry. They looked as if they were playing megalithic chess.

  "Your turn," the young man said in English. His lips were loose and moist.

  The other blinked at him. He pushed his trademark white Stetson cowboy hat back on his lank blond hair. "You're on, partner," he said in a broad Western American drawl.

  A last stein stood in the middle of the table between them. It was filled with a liquid that looked amber in the doubtful light. He reached for it. His hand trembled. He looked at it with bright blue eyes and frowned. The hand stopped trembling.

  He picked up the big mug.

  The tavern had burbled with conversation and barked with mirth. Now it fell still, except for the odd creak and scrape of a table leg on the floor and a loud, fruity belch, quickly stifled. The locals were crowded behind the German kid to egg him on. By the bar behind the man in the hat a bunch of Americans and Canadians stood, with one or two Brits evident among them by their accents. These seemed mostly crew for the show Past Master, a stablemate of Annja's own Chasing History's Monsters, which had just wrapped up shooting. The castle by the village enjoyed a certain notoriety, Annja knew, for all the wrong reasons.

  The man in the hat had come to help clear up that confusion. His name was Tex Winston and he was the program's star and guiding light. Although she had never met him, rumor around the network claimed he was a real-life adventurer, not just a television special effect. Of course, Annja was skeptical. She knew the claims the network publicity department made about her.

  He looked the part, she had to admit. He was tall, tanned, blond and lanky. But she had known most of that from seeing him on the tube. Except for the tall part, since a great many TV and movie personalities, she knew from firsthand observation, were surprisingly short. He could do anything, rumor said – had done everything, twice. He knew everybody worth knowing on both sides of every ocean and every law. It was whispered he had served as a U.S. Army Ranger, had seen action in Central America, Africa and the Far East.

  She hoped the stories were true. Because Annja looked on him as, just possibly, her one and only hope.

  It rankled her beyond belief to have to throw herself upon the good graces of a stranger – to have to ask this man for help, she who had always been so self-sufficient. But more lay at stake than her pride, or even her life. Somewhere out in that night a vulnerable young girl was lost and afraid and alone. Annja knew she was all the hope Jadzia had.

  With a big old Texas smile Winston sat back. Confidently he raised the glass mug to his lips. He tipped his head back and chugged the dense local brew with startling alacrity. He lowered the mug to the table with an authoritative thump and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  He then fell face forward onto the table with a thump and a crash of upset beer steins, and emitted a wood-rasp snore.

  The Germans went crazy, shouting and clapping their young champion on his narrow shoulders. He blinked at them as if unsure to which species they belonged. A short, skinny, bandy-legged crew member with a shaved, tattooed head and three rings in his right ear moved hastily to Tex Winston's side, possibly to see if he was still alive.

  A short and stout local with a bristling black mustache and a fuzzy green vest turned from the black-stained oak bar at Annja's elbow and thrust a full stein into her hand.

  "Welcome to Frankenstein, Fräulein Annja Creed," he said.

  Tex Winston sang in a clear but fairly tone-deaf tenor voice.

  "Come on," Annja said, half under her breath, half to the man whose arm she had wound around her shoulder. He was taller than she was, and despite the relaxation induced by alcohol and conviviality the arm felt like steel cable wrapped around rebar, and the body slumped against hers was as firm as a well-packed bag of cement. If she hadn't been in a state of internal warfare between being disconsolate and really pissed off, it might have been interesting. Instead she urged him along through the dark with the roadbed cinder crunching beneath their feet. "Walk it off," she said.

  The old-fashioned tavern sign clapped behind them in the wind like a wooden bell. A big square head was painted on it, complexion greenish in the light from a streetlight up the narrow country lane. Stitches spread across its forehead and a bolt stuck out of its neck like a piercing gone terribly awry.

  From the respectful attention the assembled crowd had given Tex Winston as she steered him up the short tavern steps and out into the coolly humid night, he was pretty popular with locals and crew. That, at least, was a good sign. In Annja's experience the way people treated you when you were drunk showed how they really felt about you.

  But the tavern-goers' attitude had annoyed her, as well. Everybody seemed to recognize her, too, from her own show. And they all seemed to think Tex had just gotten really lucky.

  She attributed that to her mild celebrity. When she looked in the mirror Annja didn't see the tall, lean, leggy and drop-dead gorgeous woman, her chestnut hair that could never stay restrained, challenging amber-green eyes, and face whose length and strong cheekbones all contributed to a striking appearance. In her own eyes Annja was eternally the gawky adolescent with the ridiculously long stick legs and all the grace of a new-born foal who had yet to get the hang of walking.

  "'S wrong, you know," Winston told her, letting his head loll on his neck, gesturing vaguely back toward the tavern. The road bent left into shadow, winding its way between green fields and darkly forested hills. Ahead of them the tower of the infamous castle rose above the trees. "The sign. That's not the monster. Oh, no. Not the real monster of Frankenstein. Just something Hollywood made up outta Mary Shelley's book."

  "I do know," Annja said. She wasn't feeling too indulgent.

  He looked at her again, squeezing his brows over his pale blue eyes with such cartoon-intense scrutiny Annja couldn't help laughing aloud.

  "Thassright," he said. "You're Annja Creed. You know a thing or two about monsters. You tracked down that critter in France."

  "The Beast of Gevaudan," she said, grimacing slightly.

  "Yeah. So I'm preachin' to the choir here, aren't I? You prolly know the real story."

  She nodded. "A knight returning from the Crusades found an ogre, or possibly a dragon, terrorizing the villagers," she said. "He slew it and was ennobled as Baron von Frankenstein, and given the village as a fief. Keep moving."

  He nodded loopily. "Closhe enough." He was a sloppy drunk, but fortunately an amiable one. He had a reputation for being a genuinely nice guy – which in the entertainment world either meant oceans or nothing at all. "Tavern name is Monster's
Cellar. But they got the wrong monster."

  "That figures," she said.

  He laughed, head bobbing again. Then he stopped and turned a worried frown to her.

  "What are you doing here, anyway?" His eyes narrowed. "This isn't some stunt dreamed up by those network flacks, is it?"

  "I need your help," she said.

  His gaze slid past her. Suddenly his eyes went wide. He shoved her away from him hard.

  The hardwood club swished down between them, cleaving the space her skull had occupied an instant before.

  Chapter 10

  The club-wielder cursed. As he tried to recover, Annja snapped a backfist around into his face. He sat down hard in the road.

  A wheel of movement drew Annja's eyes back to Winston in time to see him bending forward with a pair of somebody else's legs sticking straight up in the air above him. The inebriated show host tucked the man's shaved head against his own chest as he carried through with his shoulder throw. The man slammed down on his back in the road with an impact Annja felt. She heard an explosion of breath.

  Winston straightened. He looked around. His manner was alert, elastic; the loosy-goosy drunkenness of a few heartbeats before had snapped as taut as if it had never been. Annja saw a flicker of motion right behind him, heard a nasty crack. He dropped to his knees, moaning and grabbing for the back of his head with both hands.

  Annja took two running steps, leaped over the kneeling Winston, and dealt a flying side kick to the man who had clubbed him from behind. She caught the man in the sternum as he raised his ax handle for a swing at her. She felt bone give beneath her heel, heard a sound like a pistol shot as ribs broke. The man flew backward into darkness.

  Annja landed easily on her feet. Instantly two more black-clad men rushed her from right and left. She turned to her right, jumped straight up. Her right leg shot out in a front kick, her left straight back. She felt two impacts, heard two grunts as her assailants were knocked back by her double kick.