Solomon's Jar (18 page)

Emotion choked him. He tipped his head and drank
again. As he lowered the bottle, Annja saw firelight glisten in a tear track down his cheek.

“It happened just offshore,” he said, “when
Athanasia
returned with the catch that evening and dropped anchor. It killed them all. Akakios, Ioannis, Vasilios, Pavlos, Stamatios, Georgios the captain. It took them all.”

“It?” Aidan asked gently.

Spyros wept openly now. He shook his head as he spoke—as if denying himself hope, not denying the tragedy that had haunted his every waking thought, his every dream, since it happened. That was something he had no power to deny.

“A devil,” he sobbed. “A devil killed them.”

Glancing aside, Annja saw Aidan's face working in an effort to restrain his skepticism from emitting a sarcastic blurt. “Surely it was a man. Or men,” he said.

“A man who did such a thing,” Spyros said, “must be a devil. Or have a devil in him.”

A driftwood chunk shifted, fell into the fire. Yellow sparks flew up. Aidan jumped, then cursed under his breath.

Annja leaned forward. “Why do you blame yourself, Spyridon?”

Disconsolately he shook his shaggy head. “I should have been there to meet my fate with them. Instead my nephew died in my place. And I must live knowing that
I have cheated death—cheated the devil. And death and the devil, they always collect their due.”

They sat a moment in silence. The night had settled in around them. Tree frogs trilled softly. The stars shone overhead.

“I have one question, Spyridon,” Pascoe said. “How did word of your discovery get out? This Dr. Dror certainly made no official announcement.”

“Oh, no. It was my nephew. Akakios used the Internet. He wrote about it there after some of the other crew bragged to him. I think his friends online thought he make it all up.”

“But somebody took him seriously,” Annja said.

Miserably, Spyridon nodded. “May the saints forgive me,” he whispered brokenly. “I never believe in them. Saints. But they are all I have now.”

“But what happened wasn't your fault,” Annja said.

“We were cursed,” the young man said almost matter-of-factly. “It was a holy artifact, but not meant to be…troubled. We did wrong to bring it up. And I did wrong by escaping punishment.” His voice sounded hollow.

“And soon the devil who took my friends will find me!” He upended his bottle and emptied it with a gurgle. Then he threw it into the night. It smashed on the shingle.

Annja rose and moved toward him. He stared up at her with empty eyes. She took his hands.

“Spyros, listen to me. You can't hide from evil in a bottle. You know that, don't you?”

He looked away. “Man cannot hide from devil at all.”

“But the evil has passed you by! Don't do the devil's work for him by drinking yourself to death,” she said.

He looked up at her. She took his face in both hands. “Don't you see? You were spared for some purpose. You're alive.
Stay
alive. Find your purpose. Follow it. Shame the devil and honor your friends and relatives.”

Sincere as she was, her words sounded lame in her own ears. Yet a strange thing happened. She felt a sense of strength, as if a golden radiance shone within her. She felt a tingling, then, in her palms, a sense of flow as from her to him.

He stared at her a moment longer. He sighed, and she had to steel herself not to grimace at the rush of breath redolent of stale wine and long uncleaned teeth. At last he began to weep, great heaving sobs. She hunkered down beside him and put her arm around his shoulder, feeling awkward.

Aidan sat across the fire from them, gazing at her, blue eyes thoughtful. She mentally dared him to say something flippant, modern, cynical and biting. But he didn't. He only watched.

At length Spyros cried himself out. Annja held him a few minutes longer as he relaxed against her. Eventually he began to snore.

She eased him down beside the fire and pulled a blanket over him. The night was still warm but she had no idea whether it would stay that way. Better a filthy blanket—the same one he used every night, anyway, it seemed—than to let him get cold. She stood and kicked the small fire apart and smothered the embers as best she could with brittle plates of shingle and some dirt she was able to scrape from beneath it. Aidan came to help. She brushed back a stray lock of hair and smiled at him.

Then they stood away from the gently snoring Spyros. “You think he'll be okay out here?” she asked.

“He's done well enough so far,” Aidan said. “And anyway, would
you
want to try something with him, after what happened to us earlier? I don't doubt someone's been watching the whole time.”

“Oh.”

He looked up at the stars. “Do you really think it'll work?”

“What?”

“What you said to him.
Did
to him. There was something that passed between you. I felt it, but I don't know what it was. Do you think it'll help him, then?”

“I have no idea,” she said. In thoughtful silence they walked back toward their rented car.

“Do you know,” Aidan said as rain pattered down on the broad-brimmed hats he and Annja wore, “there are some most splendid Neanderthal sites in the region of Mount Carmel?”

Haifa was a somewhat gray industrial city in north Israel, tucked between the mass of Mount Carmel and busy Haifa Bay. An overcast sky occasionally spitting rain onto steaming streets may have unfairly emphasized the grayness. If the city lacked the melodrama of Jerusalem and the self-conscious quaintness of Jaffa, it felt less sterile than Tel Aviv. And it also lacked something of the tension you felt in the air like an unseasonable chill in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, despite the city's proximity to Lebanon and the Golan Heights. Its resi
dents, Jewish, Arab and foreign, seemed to have their minds mainly on business.

Although she knew the Old Testament used the fifteen-hundred-foot Mount Carmel as something of a standard of beauty, Annja found its gray limestone palisades a bit on the forbidding side. The green terraces of the Baha'i World Center overlooking the town were nice, though.

It was late in the morning. Wearing their usual inconspicuous garb, Aidan a blue chambray shirt and jeans, Annja a light tan cotton blouse with black-and-white streaks like Japanese brushstrokes and khaki cargo pants, they walked a little-trafficked street on the northern side of the industrial and waterfront district known as the lower city. The buildings were mostly one-story offices and shops. Though they had the low, boxy profile and dust-colored stucco of the basic adobe structures you saw at these latitudes around the world, they looked like modern cinder-block construction, with edges too raw and angles too sharp for mud brick.

“It's a little hard to believe,” she said to him. “It's just, on the whole, we could be on the outskirts of Phoenix right now, if it weren't for the humidity. And come to think of it, Phoenix is pretty humid, thanks to irrigation and all those swimming pools.”

“I'll take your word for it.” He had a Borsalino hat or a good imitation on to protect against the weather, the
brim low over his blue eyes—a pricey-looking hat, and if real, possibly one of the few affectations she'd been able to discern. His eyes lacked something of their customary glitter today, she'd noticed. He had been subdued since the campfire conference with Spyridon on Corfu.

He stopped and nodded his head. “I think we're here.”

A discreet bronze plaque beside a door read Israel Antiquities Authority in English and Hebrew with a logo that looked like a stylized menorah. Annja looked over the building, which appeared no different from the others on the block, and frowned.

“I thought with all their terrorism troubles, Israeli public buildings would be well fortified,” she said.

“Undoubtedly the high muckety-mucks don't think the place is worth defending,” Aidan said. “You know how governments feel—archaeologists are expendable.” He was making no effort to hide his bitterness.

Annja laughed because she was pleased to see him get a bit of his sparkle back. Actually, if she understood correctly, Pascoe was wrong. Israel was obsessed with archaeology. From the earliest days of its existence as a modern state some of its most prominent political and even military figures had displayed fanatic interest in antiquity, at levels ranging from impassioned amateurs to world-renowned archaeologists.

She knew Israel was also a heavily socialist country that loved its bureaucracy. And it had revered sites
galore. You couldn't sink a spade in the soil without disturbing ground walked on by some notable personage from the Mideast's long and somewhat depressing history. As a consequence of all these things, a
lot
of Israel Antiquities Authority buildings dotted the landscape. But she supposed it may not have been especially useful or even affordable to defend them all like Cheyenne Mountain.

“Shall we?” Aidan asked.

They pushed in through the white-painted door. Inside it was cool and fluorescent bright. The dark-wood-and-metal desk in the reception area was unoccupied. It sported a computer, a phone and a half-full mug of coffee, showing a cartoon boy and girl leaning against each other with moonily romantic expressions. Hebrew characters were indecipherable above their heads. The air was tart with an astringent smell of dust and cleaning chemicals.

“Ah,” said Aidan, sniffing. “Smells like they do archaeology here.”

“Strange there's nobody here,” Annja said. A door opened into a brightly lit hall behind the unoccupied desk.

“But that means there's no one to tell us not to go on back,” Aidan said with a twinkle. “Easier to get forgiveness than permission, as you Yanks say.”

They took off their damp hats and placed them on the desk. She walked past him through the door. The hall
way beyond consisted of half walls, with glass from waist height to ceiling on either side. To the right was an office with a bookcase on the far wall stocked with books with thick, age-cracked and darkened spines.

In the larger room to the left a long table had a chunk of sandstone lying on it. An obviously ancient human rib cage and what appeared to be a curved reddish surface, apparently part of an earthenware pot or vase, had been painstaking half-liberated from a slab of sandstone. Tools—magnifying glass, steel pick like a dentist's, a cordless Makita drill with a cotton disk buffer mounted in the chuck—lay next to the slab.

Gradually Annja was becoming aware of a strange, cloying odor underlying the dust and disinfectant. At the same time she realized the tip of her left walking shoe seemed to be sticking to the floor. She looked down.

A face looked up at her from a pool of blood spilling through the doorway.

Aidan came into the anteroom door behind her and saw what she saw.

It was a head of almost stupefying normality—if you left aside the expression. And the fact it was by itself—there was that, of course. It was the head of an elderly woman, with waved gray-white hair surrounding a plumpish face, the cheeks rouged, the lips painted.

The eyes were wide in horror. The tongue, bluish, protruding from a lipstick-smeared hole of a mouth.
The skin was sallow from the loss of the blood that had drained from the head to the vinyl floor.

With the pallid jowls sagging into the wide pool of blood—shockingly red with bluish undertints in the uneasy light of the overheads—it was impossible to tell how the head had been removed from the body.
Violently
seemed a good guess.

For a moment Annja's vision—her whole existence, really—was tightly focused onto the severed head of what she presumed had been a receptionist or secretary. Drawing in a deep breath through her mouth, to avoid smelling more than necessary, she widened her vision field enough to take in the fact that visible not far beyond the head, a pair of thick, dough-pale legs protruded into view on the floor between worktable and half-window front wall. They ended in sagging wool socks and stodgy black shoes. Toes down. Annja swallowed hard at the realization that the body, presuming it belonged to the head, was pointing
away
from the door. Whatever had removed the head had carried it a short distance before depositing it near the door.

She felt a chill.

Suddenly, from the corridor's far end came a wild cry of panic. Annja focused her will. The sword came into her hand as a man burst through the door at the end of the hall, emerging from a darkness that suggested a poorly illuminated stairway. The man was tall and
gaunt, with gray hair streaming in a wild nimbus to either side of a dome of olive skull. He wore a lab coat over a shirt and tie. The tie was askew. The lab coat was spattered in red.

He skidded as he broke from the doorway. He saw Annja and Aidan and called out to them in Hebrew, half-slumped against the wall as if trying to catch his breath. His eyes, already standing out of his head in terror, seemed to focus. For a moment Annja saw an expression of something like hope flicker across his face.

A growl from the stairway washed it away. He bolted toward them, arms and legs flying in a transport of panic.

A black shape shot from the doorway behind him, already waist high when it came into view, and rising. Light seemed to be sucked into it. It struck him on the left shoulder and slammed him back into the wall, pressing the side of his face into the glass. He screamed shrilly as he was dragged down to the floor.

It was a dog, huge, 120 pounds at least. Against its matte-black hide its eyes were visibly outlined in red, rolling in its big broad head. Its teeth were brilliant white.

Blood fountained around its muzzle, driven under high pressure from a severed carotid artery. The man's outcries abruptly ceased.

The dog let its prey fall to lie twitching on the speckled gray-white tiles. It raised its burning eyes to Annja. They almost seemed to widen when they saw the
sword. Then they narrowed with a hatred so intelligent, so human seeming, that it struck Annja like a blow. The dog growled again.

To the depths of her being she was stricken with the most total horror she had ever known. Fear clamped like asthma on her windpipe and threatened to let go the set screws of her knees, drop her choking and weeping and crippled to the floor. She had never imagined such fear.

“Annja,” Aidan said from behind her.

She made herself step forward and to her right to put herself in the middle of the corridor, squarely between the hellish creature with the gore-dripping muzzle and Aidan. “Stay back,” she said without turning her head.

It seemed for a moment that she saw ghost shapes, shimmers in air above the dog's shoulders. Like a pair of shadowy wings. She did not dare even blink, but shook her head violently. The shadows vanished.

The dog darted forward. Its claws clacked on the vinyl flooring. Its snarling rose in a crescendo as it galloped toward Annja with tremendous speed, looking huge. Its upper lip was pulled back from its teeth, white swimming in red.

It was as terrifying a sight as anything Annja had seen in her life. Yet the blinding-fast attack released her from the fear that threatened to disable her. She steeled herself to face it. I've got to trust the sword, she thought. And myself, she thought.

Halfway down the hall and still a dozen feet away, the beast sprang for her. She met it with a diagonal step forward to her right and a two-handed cut that began behind her right shoulder.

She feared to strike the thing head-on. That huge sloped skull would shed a blow that didn't hit squarely, even from a preternaturally sharp blade.

Fanged jaws flew at her face, spread wide. Her stroke took the creature at the juncture of left shoulder and trunk-thick neck, angling inward toward the center of its chest.

The jaws clashed futilely beside her left ear.

Blood spurted over Annja's face. It seemed unnaturally hot. Her gut revolted. She had bared her teeth as she cut. Blood had sprayed into her mouth.

But she followed through, turning her hips, driving from her powerful legs.

She felt the sword spring free. She saw the beast strike the floor with a sodden thump.

Annja kept herself from going over backward but had to drop to a knee to do so. She held the sword raised before her.

The animal lay thrashing on the floor, one lung a deflated ruin, the other pumping its final breaths. Its other organs spilled out on the floor. Impossibly it lifted its head from the floor to stare at her. Its teeth chattered horribly in its blood-slavering jaws.

For an instant Annja had the horrific sense it was
trying to
speak
to her. Then the light went out from its eyes and the head fell to the floor with a thump, the tongue lolling motionless over the teeth of the lower jaw.

She felt as if a hideous presence had vanished—and an enormous weight had lifted from her soul.

“My God,” Aidan said quietly.

Slowly Annja rose. She felt the blood drying on her face, getting tacky, starting to itch. The front of her blouse and pants were sodden; she could feel the dampness against her breasts and belly and the fronts of her thighs. She became aware of a salty taste in her mouth and spit violently. It took an effort of will not to vomit.

“You killed a dog,” Aidan said accusingly.

“Yes,” she said. She felt a stab of remorse for the animal. “It killed that man,” she said, sounding more defensive than she intended.

He shook his head. “Isn't that a bit thick?” he asked. “It was just a dog.”

She drew a deep breath. He's shaken, she realized. And no surprise. It's made him irrational.

Sword in hand, she moved cautiously into the lab to the left. It was a bloody shambles. She avoided looking at the dead woman. There wasn't anything to do for her. And whatever had killed her had made a ragged job of decapitating her.

The lab was splashed liberally with blood. More surprising, notebooks had been torn and a stool and a
chrome-and-leather chair had been slashed open so that stuffing swelled from them like puffy white excrescences. This scene is starting to look familiar, she thought.

Aidan stood in the hall staring in through the window at her. She backed out, moved quickly to the door across the way. “Keep an eye on that door,” she suggested, nodding as she passed to the end of the hallway. “We don't know what else might come through it.”

Aidan's normally pink complexion had gone ashen and green around the edges. He was breathing rapidly through his mouth. “And take deep breaths,” she added. “Into the abdomen.”

The office on the far side looked curiously untouched. She backed out of there and went to kneel gingerly by the side of the man who lay slumped against the corridor wall. Still keeping the sword in her right hand, she went quickly through his pockets, feeling more than a bit like a ghoul.

“It's Dror,” she said, holding up a wallet unfolded to show a credit card in a plastic carrier with the archaeologist's name embossed on it.

“Hmm,” Aidan grunted. His eyes weren't quite tracking. Even after all he'd been through in the past week, what he had witnessed since entering the corridor had shaken him like a fist wrapped around his spine.