Seeker's Curse

It didn’t matter. As the man reached for her she knew she had no options. She closed her eyes and saw her sword clearly. When she opened them, the weapon was in her hand. The sword gleamed dully in the smoky light. She reversed it and plunged it down between the man’s shoulder blades. It bound, not wanting to withdraw. She let it go and it vanished back to the other where.

The echoes of angry shouts and random shots flew around the rafters. The horde of pigeons that had been rousted by the enormous uproar now fluttered around in the shadowed eaves like smoke trying to escape a burning building. Annja started to run. If I follow the walls, she reasoned, eventually I’ll find a way out of here.

Shapes appeared ahead of her. She pushed off the wall with her right hand as she spun, adding momentum as she tried to dart into another aisle. A burst of full-auto gunfire ripped the air behind her.

Becoming aware that the rack of shelves to her right ran only about ten feet before another one began, Annja stopped and grabbed the uprights farther from the outer wall. She prayed that whatever was stored on them, too dust caked and cobwebbed for her to identify in the light and urgency, weren’t priceless relics. Or if they were, that they weren’t fragile.

Adrenaline gave her extra strength. With a couple of quick shakes the whole thing came toppling down across the aisle just as a couple of pursuers appeared. One of them threw up an arm before disappearing with a wail of despair beneath several hundred pounds of plundered antiquities and massive shelves. The other vanished behind a solid wall of dust, his path blocked by the shelves now propped at an angle across the narrow passage.

Annja ran on. A man dashed into the aisle ahead of her. Without time to think she swept her arm along the shelf beside her at a foot or so below her shoulder level. Another big dust cloud swirled out; at least one large pot flew through the clouded air right at the smuggler’s head even as he raised a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

He fired a burst straight up into the rafters, causing a brief shower of bloody feathers to fall on him as he warded off the pot with an upflung left elbow. Annja’s peripheral vision caught another pot lying on its side right in front of her just before she stepped on it, twisted her ankle and went down. Instead she rushed it with a swift soccer kick. It shot up at an angle and caught the gunman by evil chance, square in the crotch.

He started to jackknife. The sword appeared in Annja’s hand. She slashed down right to left, met brief resistance and raised a quick spray, black in the gloom. The man dropped onto his face to rise no more.

She vaulted the body and found herself back in the middle of the cleared space. Golden debris littered the floor. And facing her across twenty-five feet of fallen antiquity stood Bajraktari, his good eye and his bad wide.

He smiled and raised his gun two-handed. “Prisoner!” he exclaimed.

Above her Annja heard a crash, the tinkle of falling glass. Something sailed over the terrorist leader’s head to bounce with several dwindling thuds on the floorboards between them.

It looked like a short length of pipe with holes drilled in the sides and big hex nuts screwed onto either end. As it happened Annja knew at once what it was, having seen them demonstrated by some of her friends in Special Forces once upon a time. It was a U.S.-made M-84 stun grenade, commonly known as a flash-bang.

By reflex Annja had turned away, covering her face in her arms and just dropping. Bajraktari, she noted in the instant before she shielded her eyes, just stood there gaping at the grenade. He didn’t seem to recognize it. Then again, relatively few people who saw them in use close up and personal like that lived to recall the experience.

The blinding flash neither blinded nor stunned Annja, although she was temporarily deafened by the blast, which was beyond loud and hit her body like a big bat.

Survival urged her to pop right up again and run. Already feeling the effects of stimulus overload, her body was slow to respond. She got up to one knee with a high-pitched tone singing through her skull, aural aftermath of the shattering noise, and looked around. Maybe I’m a little stunned after all, she thought.

The tableau took her breath away. Sunlight of a sort, grayish and feeble by the standards of the outside world but almost dazzling in this dim hell, poured through a busted skylight. Men in black masks and bulky black suits slid down ropes from the gaping hole. One of them fired a machine pistol one-handed. The walls and rafters danced with muzzle-flames in all directions.

With the attackers, almost certainly Greek police or army special forces, and the Kosovars blazing enthusiastically away at each other, and dust and smoke everywhere, and pigeons flapping through the mayhem in frantic attempts to find their way out, the disoriented Annja felt for a dizzy instant as if she was starring in her own personal movie.

She glimpsed a big black-clad arm reach around Bajraktari’s neck from the rear, dragging the thoroughly dazzled gang leader back into shadow. Duka was doing his bodyguardly duty. Then two things kick-started her body and her brain back into lightning action. First, the sheer animal desire to survive, the same thing that had the pigeons so agitated. Her scattered wits had coalesced enough to grasp that lingering in the midst of a firefight in a darkened warehouse was no way to stay breathing.

The second was her intellect re-evolving toward human intelligence from about the level of moss. She realized that getting caught either by the smugglers, who would now believe beyond a doubt she had set them up even though it wasn’t true, and the authorities, who would know beyond a doubt she was trafficking stolen antiquities with well-armed criminals, which would be little better and possibly worse than catching a stray round.

She knew neither side was going to feel like listening to her explanations.

She darted into the nearest welcoming dark aisle as a random burst took out the lone light bulb hanging over the cleared space, adding to the darkness and confusion. Bad guys abounded, and if the cops had anything on the ball, there were going to be plenty of them, too.

Annja reckoned that increased her chances of escape. Everybody was so busy killing each other and trying not to get killed they likely had little attention to spare for a lone, apparently unarmed woman.

Hold that thought, she told herself, racing for the outer wall. She burst out into the corridor between it and the shelves.

A smuggler stood not twenty feet from her, holding an assault rifle. His eyes went wide when he saw her. He raised the rifle as she started to turn for a desperation dive back into the doubtful sanctuary of the aisle she’d just left.

A black-clad knee came up right between the gunman’s wide-braced legs from behind. The impact raised him onto his toes. His rifle came down and to his right and went off, a short burst kicking up long splinters from the floor and blasting another cloud of dust from the shelves.

The leg straightened, then slammed back diagonally across the gunman’s right shin, sweeping it out from under him. Pivoting from the hips, the man behind slammed him face first into the floor. Annja felt the impact through the soles of her feet. The smuggler made a quick grab behind him with his left hand. As he went down he clawed the black balaclava off his assailant’s head.

For a moment Annja and the counterterror operator, or whatever he was, stared at each other. He had a long, dark olive face and his curly hair was sweat plastered to his skull. His eyes were dark and piercing and very wide at the unexpected sight of a Western woman in tattered business clothes in the middle of a warehouse takedown in the back of beyond.

Annja’s gaze slipped past him and her eyes went wide. From the corner of her vision she saw a look of skepticism cross the operator’s face: You think I’m gonna fall for that old trick, lady?

As she opened her mouth to shout a warning, she knew she would be too late.

Either instinct or her genuine fear saved the operator. Twisting his upper torso, he threw himself down. As he did he yanked a handgun from his thigh-tied quick-draw. Two shots flamed out before he landed on the prone, motionless body of his first opponent.

Behind him a shadow form fell to the floor. Annja wheeled and ran straight away from them. Coming up fast on her left she saw a rude oblong of boards nailed to the wall, as if covering a window. When she was outside she’d hadn’t seen any bars on the windows, and the wood looked rotten.

If it’s good wood I am going to break myself, she thought. Taking a running jump, she threw her shoulder into it.

Rotten was right. The planks disintegrated into dust and whirling lightweight flotsam. Annja toppled through the window. For a moment she lay there in cold rain that had begun to fall sometime during the fiasco in the warehouse.

From her right gunfire blasted. Somehow she got her feet beneath her and came up to a crouch.

A man in a long black coat was turning toward her with an assault rifle in his hands. A similarly clad man lay facedown in a puddle beside him. Annja glimpsed two other fallen figures, both wearing black outfits, masks and no coats, on the cobbles beyond him. Apparently a pair of bolting smugglers had run into a pair of operators trying to prevent escapes. One of the smugglers had gotten lucky.

But only briefly. Annja formed her hand into an open fist. The sword filled it. She slashed him across the shins.

He fell over backward shrieking in agony.

She turned and took off up the hill toward some trees that stood flanking the block’s upper end.

3

Squinting in the dim light of a green-visored reading lamp, Annja looked from the huge book spread open on the table before her to the tiny golden disk she had propped against a stack of other volumes for comparison. The world-renowned National Archaeological Museum in Athens made brightly lit, modern reading rooms available to the public. But Annja felt more in the mood for the confines of the special-collections stacks. Especially since she was a little leery of getting too much exposure to the public after her recent adventure.

She couldn’t think of a better place to bone up on ancient Greek history than the museum’s Alexander S. Onassis Library, named for the shipping tycoon’s son who had died in a plane crash. The subject fell far afield of her specialty, the European Renaissance. She knew the basics about Classical Greece, but nothing that seemed useful in explaining how Classical-era Greek coins could conceivably turn up amid plunder from a looted Buddhist shrine in Nepal.

Actually she could research ancient Greece at any library anywhere, more or less, and turn up plenty of material. But libraries or museum collections always gave Annja a certain sense of serenity. She loved the feel and look and smell of books. Especially old books—much of her more orthodox work involved original manuscripts in sixteenth-century French or Portuguese. And here in the Onassis Library she found abundant material in English, French and Italian, as well as a discreetly helpful staff, most of whom spoke English.

After the warehouse dust-up she had left Greece in a hurry. She then re-entered under her own name, bearing her own academic credentials. Besides which, everyone was happy to oblige the famous American TV star. Even if the show was on a cable network and her role was to play token skeptic, basically the academic foil to the comely Kristie Chatham on Chasing History’s Monsters.

While Greece was not a large country by North American standards, Athens felt comfortingly distant from Macedonia. Events in Kastoria had rattled her pretty severely. Not the Kosovars’ treachery—two days later she was still chastising herself for not having anticipated it in the first place.

Nor did the fact she had killed several of them bother her too much. She realized that with her possession of Joan’s sword came a whole different reality. She wasn’t happy about it but she was becoming quite accustomed to killing people in self-defense. She supposed her mentality was like that of a cop or soldier. Someone had to fight the bad guys even if that meant lethal encounters.

Nor was Annja overwrought about her narrow escape from what had turned into a pitched battle in the old warehouse. Narrow escapes had become commonplace in her life since she had gotten tangled up with Roux and Garin and the sword. They weren’t the sort of thing you got used to, exactly. But if she went to pieces every time one happened she’d just be a total wreck and never get anything done.

What bothered her was the brush with authority. Aside from the chance of harming an innocent person, which she couldn’t stand, tangling with law enforcement carried the risk of bringing her to official attention. That could prove disastrous. Even deadly.

She sighed. The books weren’t yielding any helpful hints of connections between ancient Greece and Nepal. None of the ones she’d pored through so far so much as mentioned Nepal. It just wasn’t a place you thought of in conjunction with Greece. Rome, Persia, Turkey, Egypt—but Nepal? Sure, they occupied the same continental landmass, and not even its extremities. But it was a big landmass.

A hand suddenly reached past Annja into the yellow spill of light. Strong-looking fingers plucked up the coin, turned it obverse and reverse in the light of the reading lamp. The hand engulfed it and withdrew.

“It is ancient Macedonian,” a baritone voice said in Greek-accented English. “It bears the likeness of Alexander the Great, Ms. Creed.”

Heart in throat, she turned. And found herself looking into a pair of piercing dark eyes.

She seemed to just sort of swirl right into them. Her stomach did a slow roll. She heard a buzzing in her ears.

It was the special operator she had seen in the Kastoria warehouse.

Though her body felt frozen she took in details. Up close he was even more breathtakingly handsome than he had been in the smoky, dusty, ill-lit warehouse. Curly black hair framed a face at once rugged and youthful, with a strong aquiline nose. His rangy athletic form was clad in a light gray houndstooth jacket over what seemed to be a dark gray shirt with an open collar.

“I am Sergeant Pantheras Katramados,” he said. “I am with EKAM, special forces of the Hellenic police. And you are under arrest for trafficking in illicit antiquities.”

“I haven’t done any such thing,” Annja said, fighting to keep her composure.

“You were seen in the company of the notorious antiquities smuggler Enver Bajraktari and his gang during a warehouse raid in Kastoria, in northern Greece,” he said. He smiled grimly. “Not to put too fine an edge on it, I was the one who saw you. And then there’s this.”

She turned in her chair as he held up the coin. It glinted in the lamplight. “You are in possession of a stolen artifact. That may prove the least of your difficulties from a legal standpoint.”

Questions crowded in her mind, jostling each other along with protestations of outraged innocence. Well, she felt outraged, and knew that in any meaningful sense she was innocent. Whether she could convince the handsome sergeant of the fact was a different issue.

What popped out first was, “How did you identify me?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “You will not attempt to convince me it is a case of mistaken identity?”

She shook her head. “On the contrary. I want to impress you with my good faith so you’ll listen to what I have to say.”

“You looked familiar,” he said. “Later it struck me I had come face to face with the famous Annja Creed, of the American television program Chasing History’s Monsters .”

He grinned. “I’ve always been something of a fan,” he said. “I am an archaeologist, too, as it happens.”

She sighed. Under other circumstances her heart would be fluttering at the announcement by this gorgeous young man that he was a fan of hers.

Instead she felt as if she teetered on a tightrope, with flames to one side and spikes on the other. On the one hand she feared disclosure—discovery. Getting arrested and publicly tried, even if acquitted, would attract attention that might make doing her work—her real work, both as an archaeologist and as the not-altogether-willing successor to Joan of Arc—impossible. A conviction would certainly sink her, both with the television show and as an academically respected archaeologist.

On the other hand was the dread that the Greek national cops might just disappear her. They hadn’t always had the best reputation where torture was concerned. There was always a chance that this smiling man’s employers might simply stash her away somewhere until she told them what they wanted to hear.

She figured her only chance of making it across that chasm was to convince handsome Sergeant Katramados that she was more use to him and his bosses at large than in a cell somewhere.

All this flashed through her mind in a desperate instant. “All right,” she said. “Don’t take me in yet. I’ll tell you what I know. Then you can decide what action to take.”

He looked doubtful. “You’re not going to bluster?” he asked, his tone gently humorous. “Not threaten me with lawyers and the U.S. Embassy?”

She shook her head. “To be candid with you, Sergeant, I think the goodwill I’d give up by playing it that way is more important than any of those other things.”

“You are probably wise,” he said, “to trust neither our judicial system nor your ambassador. But let me advise you not to try to bolt on me. You seem to be very fleet. I could not afford to take it easy on you if you did so.”

“I won’t,” she promised.

“Very well. Let us go somewhere private and you can tell me everything.”

“N OW ,” HE SAID , settling in on a backward-turned chair. “What is it you wish to say to me, Ms. Creed?”

Annja would’ve thought the largely deserted reading room of the library was as private as it got. But with a word to a passing assistant, backed up by a flash of his credentials, Sergeant Katramados had gotten exclusive use of a small room with chairs, a table and lockable doors that was probably used for meetings and classes.

Now the doors were locked. It was just the two of them.

“You must understand you hold no strong position here,” the officer said gravely. “We have no record of Annja Creed entering Greece legally at the time of the Kastoria raid. And with my own eyes I saw you meeting with former Kosovo Liberation Army members affiliated with al-Qaeda.”

He crossed his arms on the chair back and regarded her for a moment. “Along with being familiar with your TV work, I hear rumors that you are known to quietly take on certain commissions outside the orbit of conventional academic archaeological fieldwork.”

Outrage overcame Annja’s fears. “I would never do anything unethical from an archaeological standpoint.”

“Your name has been connected to certain suspect parties. Before Bajraktari.”

“To preserve archaeological treasures—or human lives—I’d deal with the Devil himself,” she said.

That got a brief laugh.

“Sometimes one must indeed do so,” he said.

Annja drew a deep breath. “I was hired by the Japan Buddhist Federation,” she said, “to survey and preserve Buddhist shrines in Nepal.”

The truth, she had decided, was her best weapon under the circumstances. Or her best chance.

While Sergeant Pantheras Katramados had started out stern, if scrupulously polite, what struck Annja as a natural affability began to shine through. She also felt a definite chemistry between them. She doubted he would let it affect his judgment. Nor would she. But she couldn’t deny it.

So she told him the truth, with just a few select omissions. Such as anything to do with her mentor Roux. And most especially the sword.

“Is that the best story you can come up with?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “It’s the truth. Truth doesn’t always make the best story. Or even the most plausible sounding one.”

“You might claim to be working undercover as a reporter investigating the international trade in plundered antiquities for your program,” he pointed out.

Look, you’re confusing me, she wanted to say. Whose side are you on, anyway?

“I could. But my best chance of walking out of here as anything but a prisoner is to stay on your good side. If you catch me in a lie, I don’t think you’ll feel like cutting me any slack.”

He grinned. “You’re right.”

She knew the Japan Buddhist Federation hadn’t passed on the Bajraktari lead to police yet because they wanted to follow up on it first. Annja was fine with that. She had nothing against the police, although she lacked the reflex trust of anything in a uniform so many people displayed.

In general Annja felt more concerned about what was good and right than what was legal. Or not.

Sergeant Katramados knit his fingers together and rubbed his chin and lower lip absentmindedly with a thumb.

“You were either very brave or very foolish, Ms. Creed,” he said, “to put yourself in such a situation.”

She scowled and shook her head. “I guess on evidence it turned out to be foolish. Much as I hate to admit it, it never occurred to me they might decide to grab me for ransom.”

“Kidnapping is a growth industry in the Balkans these days.”

“Evidently I should have done a bit more research on the modern era.”

“You were lucky to escape with your life.”

She frowned slightly. “I’m resourceful,” she said, “and I’m totally determined to be nobody’s victim.”

He cocked a brow again. She shrugged.

“And sure, I was lucky. Especially when you and your friends came busting through the skylight,” she admitted.

“Speaking of the warehouse battle,” he said, “some mysteries exist which I hope you might be able to clarify for me.”

The subtext that it could help her case remained unspoken, though unmistakable. She gave him points for not saying it aloud, though.

“Which ones?” she asked.

“One of the bodies bore severe stabbing or slashing wounds. Have you any idea how that came about in the midst of a gun battle?”

“Some of the gang members wore knives, I noticed,” Annja said. “They might’ve fallen out, blaming each other for betrayal. Or perhaps the attack provided the pretext to work out internal gang politics, personal rivalries, even take revenge. Who knows, with violent criminal types?”

“Kosovar and Albanian gangs tend to be both violent and unpredictable, it’s true,” he said, looking and sounding as if he didn’t like the taste in his mouth. “But these wounds were inflicted by a weapon with a very long blade. Not pocket knives or even belt knives.”

She smiled and shrugged. “Surely you don’t suspect me of packing a concealed sword? I wasn’t even wearing a coat.”

He looked at her, his long handsome face unreadable in the questionable dim light. Long strong fingers drummed the tabletop briefly.

“No,” he said. “I suppose not. It would seem impractical at best.”

He showed his teeth in a grin. It was an infectious smile. Annja was too savvy to let it put her off her guard.

She felt a certain smugness over the sword ploy. When you said it flat out like that, it sounded so completely absurd that it would weaken any suspicions he harbored about the dead men’s wounds. She hoped, anyway.

“So, what are you researching here?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Classical Greece isn’t really my area. I’m trying to refresh my knowledge. Particularly I’m looking for anything that can help me figure out why Greek coins are turning up in plunder from a Buddhist shrine in Nepal.”

“Macedonian,” he corrected.

“Macedonian. Right. You mentioned that. Might that have something to do with it?”

He stood up and smiled at her. “I’ll let you pursue that on your own,” he said.

“This means I’m not arrested, yes?”