Anasazi Exile. Eric G. Swedin

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СКАЧАТЬ had brought four rangers with him. One stayed with Harry all the time—not a form of arrest, since Brenda and Harry were the victims, but just to be sure. Another ranger went over the car the bad men had arrived in. The last investigated the second body and the camp. Eventually, Harry sat down at the table and just watched and listened. The other would-be murderer also had a New York driver’s license—Alfredo Travaglio, forty-one years old.

      After posing for pictures, both men were rolled into body bags and taken away. The rangers carefully took apart Brenda’s tent, taking more pictures, finding the bullets, and taking samples of her dried blood. Harry allowed himself a small amused smile. This was probably the most exciting event that had ever happened in their professional lives, and the rangers were going to do everything by the numbers, as befitted their federal training.

      The rangers who took the bodies away to be stored in a freezer at the Visitor’s Center returned with news of their computer searches. The car had been rented that morning at two a.m. in the Albuquerque airport—just enough time to drive to Chaco Canyon. A search of the car produced a map of the canyon, along with a map of the dig, apparently copied from Dr. Bancroft’s request for a digging permit. A GPS receiver made it easy to drive right to Casa Ángeles. Simon told the archaeologist that the digging request was a public document and available on the web.

      A search of the federal and New York law enforcement databases showed that Edward Ashur and Alfredo Travaglio were not model citizens. Ashur had arrests for loan sharking, financial fraud, and possession of an illegal firearm on his record, along with a three-year stretch in prison for armed robbery. Alfredo Travaglio had served six years for manslaughter and also had arrests, without any convictions, for loan sharking and procuring prostitution.

      “These guys sound like soldiers for organized crime,” the chief ranger said. “Especially the loan sharking.” Ashbridge was a short, stout man, with muscles that demonstrated many hours lifting weights. Harry didn’t know the chief ranger well, but had talked to him for a while once, and thought he was a pleasant enough fellow.

      “You ever pissed anyone off in the mob, Harry?” one of the other rangers asked.

      “Not that I know of. Any word on Brenda?”

      “She’s in the operating room. They think she’ll be okay.”

      “I want to go to her. And I’d like to take some of her stuff—clothes, her cell phone, you know, so I can call her parents. Toothbrush and stuff like that, too.”

      The chief ranger scratched his head. His brown hair still stuck out in odd directions from being woken up, and he had not paid enough attention to himself to be embarrassed. “Everything here matches your story, Harry. We just have no motive or any reason for this. Why would mobsters come out here to kill you and that girl?”

      “I don’t know, but maybe it has something to do with Dr. Bancroft. Have you found out more about that?”

      No new information from Scotland.

      “Did you find any plane tickets?” Harry asked.

      “No.”

      “What does that mean?”

      “That they got to the airport by some other method?” Ashbridge said. “That they aren’t going to fly back? That they came on a private plane? Take your pick.”

      “Are you going to find out?”

      Ashbridge shook his head. “That’s for the FBI to follow up. They are sending someone later today, I hope. The feds used to have an office in Farmington, but budget cuts closed that, so now they have to come from Albuquerque.”

      “None of this makes sense,” one of the rangers said. “These guys didn’t even try to hide their identity.”

      Harry laughed bitterly. “Of course not. They never expected anything to go wrong.”

      CHAPTER NINE

      TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN

      A tall, blonde-haired women with strong features looked at the pictures with clinical detachment. Too many years of life had taught her to create a barrier in her mind, the kind that doctors and police officers and other people who become too intimate with death are forced to create. The photos were digital, of course, easily displayed on her computer screen, and the digital watermark on them gave her some confidence that they had not been faked. The two men in the photo lay in the grotesque way that bodies in rigor mortis often did, with their lips pulled back and limbs stiff. The men were naked, and if one looked closely, as she had to, the bruises around the wrists and legs showed that they had been shackled. The burns on their chests, working down their stomachs, and on their genitals, showed that the torturers had wanted them to talk. She typed notes of her analysis into her laptop, including vague details of the source who had smuggled the pictures out of the notorious Mustiu prison in a mountain valley outside of Tashkent.

      She knew herself as Amanda, but everyone in Tashkent knew her as Anika Prokofiev, a human rights activist with a Russian passport that listed her city of birth as St. Petersburg. If asked, she described her grandparents as German communists who had fought the Nazis, then emigrated to the Soviet Union, which explained an accent that no one could place.

      For a moment, anger surged inside her, bile rising in her throat. She wanted those men whom Uzbekistan employed to torture their fellow countrymen to feel the same pain that they caused others. She wanted to administer punishment. The moment passed quickly; she had found through bitter experience that she personally disliked killing or even hurting other people. But one had to act, and she had found her role: she believed in the power of speaking the truth, of bearing witness against those who did evil.

      Her cell phone beeped and she glanced at the palm-sized screen. The message was short:

      Need you in New Mexico now. Priority One—Franklin

      Amanda blinked in surprise. She hadn’t heard from Franklin for three years, and that time it was only to get a new infusion of funds for her human rights foundation. Switching to another computer in her small office, she brought up the web and checked for airline tickets. She knew that the Uzbek security services were monitoring every byte that flowed in and out of the office; that’s why her laptop never touched a network and everything on it was encrypted. Strong encryption was a blessing for human rights crusaders everywhere, as well as other subversives of the established order, such as anarchists, hackers, criminals, and even terrorists.

      There were only four international flights a day out of the country. She bought a ticket to San Francisco through Beijing. In a safe deposit box in San Francisco was stored her American identity, papers giving her name as Anna Mauss, as well as credit cards and tens of thousands of dollars in cash. She would buy a ticket for Albuquerque when she had changed names. No doubt Franklin would have further details for her when she got to the United States.

      She tapped in a quick message to Franklin:

      On my way—A

      The flight left in five hours, just enough time to tidy up any loose ends and prepare for an extended absence. Putting away her laptop, Amanda went into the next room. Living space was at a premium in the capital of Uzbekistan, and she worked out of her apartment, as many people did. She lived in a simple room. The bed had a metal frame that she had spray-painted black, and the quilt on it was one of her treasured possessions, handmade many years ago by a good friend in Bangalore who had run an orphanage. The word for peace in thirty languages had been carefully stitched СКАЧАТЬ