The Golden Elephant. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ when she came into a hemispherical chamber at what must have been the actual top. A hole in the ceiling let in vague, milky light from an appropriately overcast sky.

      Annja stopped, panting. Though she knew it was a bad way to recover she bent over to rest hands on thighs. For the first time she realized she still clutched the imperial seal in a death grip. The expedition wasn’t a total write-off.

      Provided I live, she thought.

      Forcing herself to straighten and draw deep abdominal breaths, she looked up at the hole. It was small. She guessed she could get through. But only just. She would never pass while she wore her day pack. And she wasn’t going to risk wriggling through with the seal in a cargo pocket. The fit was tight enough it would almost certainly break.

      “Darn,” she said. She swung off her pack. Wrapping the seal in a handkerchief, she stuck it in a Ziploc bag she had brought for protecting artifacts. She stowed it carefully in her pack and set off back down the corridor to find the real way out.

      She was stopped within a few steps. The water had caught her.

      “Oh, dear,” she said faintly as it surged toward her. The valley was flooding fast.

      She ran back up to the apex chamber. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she shouted, “Hello? Can you hear me? I need a little help here!”

      She did so without much hope. The pilot and copilot would be sitting in the cockpit with both engines running. With the waters rising so fast they had to be ready for a quick getaway. In fact, Annja had no particularly good reason to believe they hadn’t already flown away.

      To her surprise she was answered almost at once.

      “Hello down there,” a voice called back through the hole. “I’ll lend you a hand.”

      Annja stared at the hole for a moment, although she could see nothing but grey cloud. She had no idea who her rescuer was. It sure wasn’t the pilot or the copilot—they weren’t young women with what sounded for all the world like an Oxford accent.

      “Um—hello?” Annja called out.

      “I’m throwing down a rope,” the young woman said. A pale blue nylon line uncoiled from the ceiling.

      “I’ve got a pack,” Annja called up, looking nervously back over her shoulder at the chamber’s entrance. She could hear the slosh of rising water just outside. “It’s got important artifacts in it. Extremely delicate. I’ll have to ask you to pull the pack up first. I can’t fit through the hole while carrying it.”

      She expected her unseen benefactor to argue—the primary value of human life and all that. But instead she replied, “Very well. Tie it on and I’ll pull it up straightaway.”

      Annja did so. When she called out that it was secure, it rose rapidly toward the ceiling. She frowned, but the woman slowed it down when it neared the top. She extracted it without its synthetic fabric touching the sides of the hole.

      “Thanks,” Annja called. “Good job.”

      After an anxious moment the rope came through the ceiling again. Except not far enough.

      Not nearly far enough. Annja reckoned she could just barely brush it with her fingertips if she jumped as high as she could. She could never get a grip on it.

      “Uh, hey,” she called. “I’m afraid it’s not far enough. I need a little more rope here.”

      She heard a musical laugh. It made its owner sound about fourteen. “So sorry,” the unseen voice said. “No can do.”

      “What do you mean?” Annja almost screamed the words as water burst into the room to eddy around her shoes. “You aren’t going to leave me to drown?”

      “Of course not. In a matter of a very few minutes the water will rise enough to float you up to where you can grasp the rope and climb out. A bit damp, perhaps, but none the worse for wear.”

      Annja stared. The astonishing words actually distracted her from the floodwaters until they rose above the tops of her waterproofed shoes and sloshed inside them. Their touch was cold as the long-dead emperor’s.

      “At least leave me my pack!” Annja shouted, jumping up and swiping ineffectually at the dangling rope. She only succeeded in making it swing. She fell back with a considerable splash.

      “I’m afraid not,” the woman called. “You have to understand, Ms. Creed. There’re two ways to do things—the hard way and the easy way.”

      Annja stood a moment with the water streaming past her ankles. The words were so ridiculous that her mind, already considerably stressed by the moment, simply refused to process them.

      Then reality struck her. “Easy?” she screamed. “Not Easy Ngwenya?”

      “The same. Farewell, Annja Creed!”

      Annja stared. The chill water reached her knees. She stood, utterly overwhelmed by the realization that she had just been victimized by the world’s most notorious tomb robber.

       2

       Paris, France

      “You’re kidding,” Annja said. “Who doesn’t like the Eiffel Tower?”

      “It’s an excrescence,” Roux replied.

      “Right,” she said. “So you preferred it when all you had to watch for in the sky was chamber pots being emptied on your head from the upper stories?”

      “You moderns. You have lost touch with your natures. Ah, back in those days we appreciated simple pleasures.”

      “Not including hygiene.”

      Roux regarded her from beneath a critically arched white brow. “You display a most remarkably crabbed attitude for an antiquarian.”

      “I study the period,” she said. “I’m fascinated by the period. But I don’t romanticize it. I know way too much about it for that. I wouldn’t want to live in the Renaissance.”

      “Bah,” the old man said. But he spoke without heat. “There is something to this progress, I do not deny. But often I miss the old days.”

      “And you’ve plenty of old days to miss,” Annja said. Which was, if anything, an understatement. When he spoke about the Renaissance, he did so from actual experience.

      Roux was dressed like what he was—an extremely wealthy old man–in an elegantly tailored dove-gray suit and a white straw hat, his white hair and beard considerably more neatly barbered than his ferocious brows.

      Annja had set down her cup. She sat with her elbows on the metal mesh tabletop, fingers interlaced and chin propped on the backs of her hands. She wore a sweater with wide horizontal stripes of red, yellow and blue over her well-worn blue jeans. A pair of sunglasses was pushed up onto the front of her hair, which she wore in a ponytail.

      Autumn had begun to bite. The leaves on the trees along the Seine were turning yellow around the edges, and the air was tinged with a hint of wood smoke. But Paris café society was of sterner stuff СКАЧАТЬ