Seeker's Curse

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.”