Authors: Alex Archer
The cabbie had argued fiercely for a generous tip after he’d seen Annja was dripping wet and smelled like something he’d dumped out of his rain gutter last week. Good thing the twenty she’d stuffed in her back pocket had survived the swim.
Much as Annja wanted to unzip the backpack and discover what she’d almost drowned for, the call of a hot shower denied that curious need.
Dropping the backpack inside the door of her loft, Annja made a beeline through the living room for the bathroom. Twisting the spigot, she would let the shower run for a few minutes to warm up.
Stripping away her wet clothes, she caught a glance of herself in the vanity mirror. Her lips were blue, as was the fine skin under her eyes. Tilting her head up she stroked the bruised skin on her neck. An abrasion tormented the base of her earlobe. The bullet had skimmed her flesh, but hadn’t drawn blood.
“Lucky girl.”
To touch it hurt worse than actually getting the wound.
She pressed a palm over her gut. She could still feel the bald guy’s knuckles there. He’d packed a force. But she’d gotten lucky when the hilt had clocked him on the temple. A blow to that sweet spot joggled a man’s brain inside his skull and instantly knocked him out.
“Should have searched him for ID,” she said to her sodden reflection. “You weren’t thinking straight, Creed.” Due to her frozen brain. “Who was watching us that would rather kill the one who holds the artifact than see it retrieved?”
Because the shooter had to have known if he did kill one or the both of them, the backpack would be irretrievable.
Had Sneak expected a tail? He’d been nervous. Probably a thief. Might explain why someone was following him.
Twisting the water faucet adjusted the temperature and she climbed into the shower, but was too weak to stand any longer. Settling into the tub in a self-hug, she let the warmth spill over her aching half-frozen muscles.
Annja had learned long ago comfort was never freely given. If she needed a hug or a reassuring word, it had to come from herself. She was fine with that. If you couldn’t pick yourself up after a trying challenge, then you’d better get out of the game because life wasn’t designed for sissies or wimps. Mostly.
She laughed into her elbow. “You must still have brain freeze. The game? Whatever.”
A half hour later, with a mug of hot chocolate in hand and some warm flannel pajama bottoms and her Dodgers sweatshirt on, the final shivers tickled her spine.
Annja squatted on the floor before the waterlogged backpack. It reeked of things she’d rather not consider. Things she had washed down the shower drain. Toxins in the Gowanus Canal? Big-time.
This is a complete loss, she said to herself. Good thing it wasn’t hers.
Setting the mug on the hardwood floor, she then unzipped the pack. Water dripped out from the inside, but not a lot. Inspecting the tag on the outer rim of the zipper teeth she read it was designed for hiking and was waterproof.
“Good deal.”
Tools and a metal-edged leather box were tucked inside. The tools she took out and examined, placing them on the floor in a line. Not like carpenter’s tools. A small screwdriver slightly larger than something a person would use to fix eyeglasses was the only one she thought fit for a house builder.
The assortment included a handheld drill with a battery pack dripping water. A glass cutter. A few flash drives. A wide-blade utility knife. Soft cotton gloves, only slightly wet. A stethoscope. And a small set of lock picks in a folding black leather case.
She blew on the flash drives, wondering if they would dry out enough to attempt to read. She wasn’t sure she wanted to risk an electrical failure by inserting the memory sticks into her laptop.
“Who would use stuff like this?”
She looked over the array on the floor. An interesting mix. An archaeologist might use the gloves, but she preferred latex gloves herself. Never left home without a pair.
Instinct said
thief.
But why would a thief steal something like an ancient skull if they had little idea of its value?
Though Sneak had said he’d been hired to bring this to someone. And he feared that someone.
Too tired to push her reasoning beyond simple deductions, Annja decided to sleep on it. But not until she’d opened the box. She’d sucked in half the Gowanus Canal to get the thing and had taken a bullet. Kind of. It sounded more dramatic than it was, she admitted to herself.
Secured with a small padlock, the box was made of a hardwood edged in thin metal. The wood was covered with pounded black leather, impressed with a houndstooth design. It didn’t look old, only expensive. It resembled a reliquary, though on the plain side.
Annja eyed the lock picks tucked inside the leather pouch. She’d never used anything like them before, but had read a few Internet articles on how to manipulate the pins inside a lock with a pick. A girl could use a set like this. Definitely something to hang on to.
The padlock was simple enough, though it was heavy, made of stacked steel plates. She might fiddle around with the picks, but would get nowhere.
The wood box was hard, like ironwood, and she was glad for that. Hopefully it had kept the water from seeping inside.
Foregoing any burgeoning lock-picking skills, she picked up the knife and rocked the tip of it around the metal edging. Small finishing nails secured each end of the metal strips. She managed to pry off two sides, and another, until the entire top square of wood could be removed.
“So much for the security of a padlock.”
A fluff of sheep’s wool poufed out of the open box.
“Good,” she muttered. “Still dry.”
Carefully plucking out the packing revealed the top of a skull. Annja drew it out and held it upon both palms. The eye sockets observed her curiosity without judgment.
Immediately aware of what she held, Annja gasped. “An infant’s skull.”
It wasn’t uncommon to unearth infants’ and children’s skulls on a dig. She did it all the time. But it didn’t make holding something so small, and so precious—obviously dead before it had a chance to live—less agonizing.
Switching to the analytical and less emotional side of her brain, Annja inspected the prize. The bone had a nice polish to it. The cranium was overlarge compared to the facial bones, as infant skulls were. Large eye sockets mastered the face. The lower jaw bone, the mandible, was not intact.
The parietal and frontal bones, normally fused with various sutures, were instead joined by thin strips of gold placed between them, much like glue, to hold it together. The anterior and posterior fontanels were also joined with those sutures. Each fontanel, normally the soft spot on an infant’s skull, was smooth and shiny gold.
“Fancy. I wonder whose living room shelf this has gone missing from?”
Turning it over and taking her time, Annja smoothed her fingers over the surface, feeling for abrasions or gouges. There were no markings on the exterior bone that she could find. Sometimes knife marks remained after a ceremonial removing of the scalp. The gold lining the plates was fascinating enough.
No dirt. It didn’t smell as if it had been freshly unearthed. It was musty but clean.
It looked an average skull, stained with age enough she’d place it a few centuries old, at the least. There were no teeth in the upper maxilla, nor did it look as though there ever had been teeth. Could it be newborn?
“So sad,” she muttered.
And yet, the elaborate gold decoration might prove it was an important person. Perhaps a child born to a royal or great warrior.
Retrieving a digital camera from the catastrophe she called a desktop, Annja then placed the skull on top of a stack of hardcover research books. She snapped shots of the skull from all angles. When the flash caught the small gold triangular posterior fontanel section, she noticed the anomaly in the smooth metal.
“So there is a mark.”
Sneak had mentioned a curious marking in his e-mail. Holding the skull close to the desk light, she squinted to view the small impression in the shiny gold.
“A cross? Looks familiar.”
She had seen it many times researching renaissance and medieval battles, religions and even jewelry.
A cross pattée was impressed in the gold. It was a square cross capped with triangular ends. An oft-used symbol in medieval times. It did not always signify a religious connection, and some even associated it with fairies or pirates. The Knights Templar had worn a similar cross on their tabards.
The cross pattée was more a Teutonic symbol than Templar, she knew that. The Templar’s red cross on white background tended to vary in design. That set her original guess of a few centuries back, perhaps to the thirteenth or fourteenth century.
Sneak had thought it twelfth century. It was possible, she acknowledged.
Hell, the skull could be contemporary. She wouldn’t know until she could get it properly dated. And Annja knew the professor who could help. But first, she’d send out feelers to her own network. If the skull had been stolen from a dig, someone would be looking for it.
Powering up her laptop, she inserted the digital card from the camera into the card reader to load the photos she’d taken.
As she waited for the program to open, Annja wondered again about the man on the bridge. Dead now. Yet, a part of his life sat scattered beside a puddle on her floor. A foul-smelling puddle. That canal water was something else.
At the time, she’d suspected he’d been frightened. But now she altered that assessment to worried. Fear would have kept him from approaching her. Worry had kept his eyes shifting about, wondering what, if anything, could go wrong.
Had he been aware he was being watched? By a sniper? Perhaps by the buyer who didn’t trust the thief would bring the prize right to him?
What about the bald man who must have followed her swim through the waters and waited for her to surface? Same guy as the sniper? Or an ally tracking the target by foot? Was he allied with the sniper or Sneak?
Something Sneak said now niggled at her. He’d been hired to hand this over to—how had he put it?—
a specific individual,
and had a bad feeling about it.
So who was Sneak? An archaeologist? He’d only claimed to work on digs over summers, and that was part-time. Could have just been a lark, joining friends to see if he liked the job. He hadn’t struck her as someone in the know. If he had rudimentary knowledge on skulls, such as she, he could have puzzled its origins out.
Maybe. She hadn’t figured the thing out yet, so what made her believe anyone else could?
Online, Sneak had sounded like a layman who stumbled across an artifact while hiking with friends near a defunct dig site in Spain. And yet, that explanation didn’t feel right to Annja.
Add to the leery feeling the fact a lock-pick kit, drill and glass cutter had been on his person…
Annja knew when people hired others to handle artifacts and hand them over it was never on the up-and-up. Whoever had hired the sneaky guy may have also killed him.
But why? If the sniper had known the man carried the artifact on him, why then kill him and risk losing the skull in the river?
Annja envisioned a body found floating in the Gowanus Canal come morning. It wasn’t as though it never happened. Heck, the canal was rumored to have once been the Mafia’s favorite dumping grounds. But it had been cleaned up quite a bit since the Mafia’s heydays.
Annja considered her options.
Bart McGilly was a friend who served on the NYPD as a detective. He knew trouble followed Annja far more closely than she desired, and was accustomed to calls from her at odd hours of the night.
He didn’t know everything about her. Like at certain times she could be found defending herself with a kick-ass medieval sword. And after successfully dispatching the threat, the sword would then simply disappear into a strange otherwhere Annja still couldn’t describe or place.
What was it about the sword? Since she’d taken claim to it, weird stuff happened to knock on her door weekly. It was as if the sword attracted things to her. Things she needed to change. Things that required investigation. Things that could not always be determined good or evil, but, Annja knew innately, mustn’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.
It was as if she’d become the crusader for lost artifacts and weird occurrences. World-changing occurrences. And that put a heavy weight on her shoulders.
Bart was also unaware she really could use a good hug every once in a while. With the sword came challenge and hard work and, oftentimes, danger. Survival and strength could only be maintained with good old-fashioned friendship. Of which, she had a few, but not a single person she could call a BFF.
Did she need a BFF? Probably not. Then again, probably.
With a sigh, Annja retrieved her mug from the floor and took a sip. Cold. But still, it was chocolate. Propping a hand at her flannel-covered hip, she leaned over the laptop.
The photo program allowed her to choose a few good shots of the anterior and lateral views, and close-ups of the gold on the fontanels. She cropped them to remove the background. Didn’t need anyone knowing her curtains were badly in need of dusting or that her desk was a disaster.
Signing on to her favorite archaeology site, Annja posted the pictures along with a note about a friend showing her the skull. She wouldn’t make up a story about finding it on a dig, because that could get her in trouble. She had no idea where this had come from, and if she guessed a wrong location, well, then.
She’d check back in the morning.
Before signing off, she searched the Carroll Street Bridge to see if it had security cameras. It didn’t. Which wouldn’t help her sleuth out who she’d spoken to, but proved excellent should the sniper want to track her.
On the other hand, if the sniper and the bald guy were indeed two different people, the sniper may have tracked her home.
Flicking aside the curtain, Annja scanned the street below. Car headlights blurred in the snow that had turned to sleet and rain. No mysterious figures lurking.
She picked up the phone to call Bart. It was past midnight, but she dialed, anyway. Bart’s answering machine took her cryptic message about swimming the canal with a stranger. He’d call her in the morning, for sure.