The Lost Scrolls. Alex Archer
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Название: The Lost Scrolls
Автор: Alex Archer
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Морские приключения
Серия: Gold Eagle Rogue Angel
isbn: 9781472085863
isbn:
For all her rigorous training in cryptology, which Annja knew was no soft science, involving some of the most abstruse and demanding maths around, Jadzia clung to the role of true believer in Atlantis mysteries and doubtless a thousand other conspiracy theories. She wasn’t the first person Annja had bumped up against who harbored both serious scientific credentials and crackpot beliefs. She sometimes suspected that really high-level scientists could only be expected to be sane and knowledgeable in their own field of expertise, and anything else was fair game.
So maybe Jadzia’s hostility arose from antipathy toward the role Annja played, authentically enough, of house skeptic and counterpoint to Kristie Chatham, who believed in everything.
Annja had certainly suffered many flame attacks from such antifans before she quit visiting the show’s message boards, despite the insistent entreaties of her producer, Doug Morrell, that she do so. But that virulence didn’t spill out of cyberspace into her lap.
She suddenly remembered something odd said in passing the day before. “Why do they call Jadzia the anticomputer geek?” she asked Maria. Very softly, she thought.
But apparently among Jadzia’s attributes was a very keen sense of hearing. “I kill computers,” she announced proudly, her voice sharp edged.
“How?” Annja asked. “With a sledgehammer?”
She hadn’t meant to say that—really. But instead of flaring up at the comment, or the laughter it evoked from the eight or so other team members in the large room, Jadzia laughed louder and more brazenly than the others.
“Just by touching,” she said proudly.
Annja cocked an eyebrow at Pilitowski, who shrugged a big sloped shoulder. “It is true,” he said. “We cannot let her handle anything electronic. In seconds—” he snapped his fingers “—pfft!”
“It has to do with my personal magnetic field,” Jadzia said. She wore schoolgirl blue and white, with knee-high white stockings instead of the thigh-highs she’d had on the day before. Her skirt wasn’t any longer. “It disrupts electronic devices.”
“I don’t buy that,” Annja said. “Things like that don’t happen in the real world.”
“Lend me your cell phone?” the blond woman purred.
The gong sounded so loudly Annja jumped.
ONLY TWO OF THE team members were on duty down in the current excavation—a short, stocky Polish man named Tadeusz and a willowy Egyptian woman a head taller named Haditha, who wore what looked like a ruby in her pierced left nostril. The pair had trouble communicating verbally, since neither’s English was the strongest. Haditha spoke beautiful French. Tadeusz was a bit hard of hearing into the bargain. Yet they worked well together, seeming to have evolved some brand of nonverbal communication.
Everyone tacitly assumed they were sleeping together, although they never seemed to seek each other out off-hours. The consensus held that this was a cunning pose. Annja, knowing what a hotbed of intrigue and gossip the best-ordered dig could turn into after only a couple of weeks, reserved judgment. Like everyone else archaeologists loved a good story, and were reluctant to let facts spoil it—outside their chosen area of expertise, of course.
They came out of the bubble tent on the run. A few bright lights shone randomly from the nearby buildings, casting jagged patterns of light and shadow across the demolition rubble. As they went in the door of the former warehouse, Haditha heard a peculiar double cough from behind. The noises had an edge, reminiscent of knuckles on hardwood.
Tadeusz pitched forward on his face on the floor beside her. She stared at him in astonishment. The back of his pale head was stained dark and wet.
3
A sound behind Haditha made her turn. She gasped at a black insectile figure looming over her.
The man in the night-vision goggles and blackout gear stuck the thick muzzle of his sound-suppressed machine pistol against her sternum and fired the same precise 2-round burst his partner had used on the Polish archaeologist an instant before. Haditha recoiled, then simply collapsed, her dark almond eyes rolling up in her head.
From high above and in front of the black-clad pair came small muffled crashes, themselves hardly louder than coughs. Shards of glass descended from above, swooping like falling leaves, breaking to smaller pieces on the black rubber runner that ran along the central aisle. More black-clad figures rappelled from the broken skylights.
WITH A FROWN Annja snapped her head up from where she leaned close to the big flat-screen monitor. “What was that noise?”
Most of the team members ignored her. A number of new images were coming in from scrolls shipped intact to the jet propulsion laboratory, where layered MRI scans were used to extract the writing from within the rolled papyri.
A couple of the Egyptian team members murmured briefly in Arabic.
“Probably just some homeless,” Naser said.
However, Ismail, who had just come in, turned and started back out the door into the darkened aisle.
“Wait!” Annja heard him cry in English. “You cannot come in here!”
She heard two sounds like blows of a distant tack hammer.
THROUGH THE USE of handheld terahertz radar units, which enabled them to see right through walls, the raiders knew precisely where every member of the Polish-Egyptian dig team was located.
As more of their fellows dropped in, the pair who had taken down the first two targets spread out to secure the entryway. The rest slipped in quick, silent pairs into the side cubicles. More double thumps sounded as they cleared them.
The Nomex-clad raiders in their goggles and face masks knew there was no escape from the large room at the end of the aisle. The big windows throughout the structure had all been bricked shut long ago.
It would be the perfect killing floor.
“GET DOWN!” Annja shouted.
Recent experience had brought her to the conclusion that people dressed in black Nomex and masks and carrying automatic weapons were not in a state of mind to be reasoned with.
Jadzia was already in motion, grabbing the blackened-log papyri from the table and stuffing them in a large lime-green-and-purple gym bag that was used to ferry bagged artifacts.
Ismail staggered a step back into the lab. Then he rallied and lurched forward to stand with arms braced in the door. He called something defiant sounding in Arabic that ended in an agonized cough.
Annja circled rapidly to her right. She knew they were trapped. Her only hope of saving any of the team from the attack she already knew was in progress was to get out of the immediate line of fire and hope to ambush intruders as they entered.
They were too far ahead of her.
Ismail reeled into a table and spun, the front of his shirt and white coat seemingly tie-dyed in florets of red. He pitched onto his face as a pair of men in black stepped through the door and then to opposite sides. They held 2-round machine pistols to their shoulders.
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