Tomb Raider: The Ten Thousand Immortals (11 page)

Chapter 14

L
ara felt a little more secure at her hotel. She locked herself in her room and decided to remain there until she visited Menelaou the following morning. She also checked several routes from the hotel to his office, which was mercifully close by.

The hotel was discreet. There was no reason to think that Ares would find her there. She needed to rest and eat after the day’s adventures, but she was more determined than ever to find out more about the Golden Fleece. If a man like Ares was interested in it, if he was interested in killing her...

Lara spoke to the duty manager at the hotel. He was remarkably accommodating and, within half an hour, she was not only supplied with a meal, but also with a laptop. The Wi-Fi connection was fast and free.

The Book was a great resource. It was Lara’s go-to for all things relating to history and archaeology, but it didn’t give her the answers she needed about Ares and the Ten Thousand Immortals. All it did was raise questions. Now that she had met Ares, questions weren’t enough.

Lara spent the next four hours trawling the web for answers. She began by searching keyword “Ares”, and got more information about the Greek god of war. Then, she went back to the two pages she’d bookmarked on her own laptop at the flat. She skim read the wiki entry. The other site appeared to be a home page for some sort of company or organisation calling itself The Ten Thousand Immortals, but it contained only a banner. There were no links or other pages, and there was no address or contact information. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t what she was looking for.

Then Lara began to look at the problem from a different angle. She began with the address on the Champs-Élysées. She began with the place where she had been held captive, where she had met the man who had called himself Ares. No attempt had been made to keep the address from her. It was not difficult to find the name of the business registered to that address.

Things began to unravel from there.

Protecteurs de Compagnie was the name of the company registered to the address on the Champs-Élysées. The director of the company was listed as Dalir Arshad. The company profile was brief, and Lara could find no photographs of Arshad or any reference to other company employees.

“Companion protectors,” said Lara. “What is a companion protector?” She typed the English words into the search field and immediately came up with another registered company. This one had addresses in New York and London. She looked for translations of the words and found companies in Spain, Italy, Germany… The list went on. Every company director had an eastern sounding name. Lara collated the names and looked them up. They took her to a site that listed Persian forenames and surnames. Every name related to war or the virtues of strength or courage. It wasn’t a coincidence. The names had to be made up.

Then, Lara gathered the addresses of all the companies with the name “Companion Protectors” in all the countries, and started to track down a parent company. They had to be connected.

The search took some time and all of Lara’s mental resources. She had to be clever, but she started to make significant inroads after the first couple of hours.

“Companion protectors,” said Lara, again. “They’re bodyguards… mercenaries. Ares is the Greek
god
of war. Ares is at the head of all of this. If I can just find out who he is!”

Lara had reached a dead end. She sat at the laptop, eating the last of her meal. The cassoulet, brought in from a local restaurant, had gone cold, but she dipped the bread into it anyway, scooping up the rich sauce. It was delicious, hot or cold. She chewed and pondered, and then, left-handed, she typed “wiki Ten Thousand Immortals” into the search field. She’d been to the site before, but she began reading again.

She had nothing to lose.

When she got to the bottom of the page, Lara scrolled back up. Then she typed “Anusiya”
into the search field. She was running out of keywords, and this was one of the very few she hadn’t yet used, the Ten Thousand Immortals other name. She didn’t hold out much hope of it leading anywhere. Lara dunked another hunk of good bread into the cassoulet while she scrolled down the results. When she got to the bottom of the page, she hit “Next.” Nothing. She did this two or three more times. There was nothing. Then, on page five of the results, something caught her eye.

Lara hit the link. It took her to a company website about arms and armaments. There was no address. There were no contact details, no external links, no apparent way to progress any further to find out who ran the company, where it was, or what its connection might be to her search. But Lara was sure there
was
a connection.

There was a banner at the top of the page with the word “Anusiya
.
”
There was text about the company, which turned out to be one of the biggest and oldest arms dealers in the world, and there were photographs… photographs dating back to the beginning of photography, photographs of paintings of weapons pre-dating firearms.

Lara looked around.

Then, she looked back at the screen.

“There’s no one here, Lara. Why are you looking over your shoulder?” she said. She shivered. The room was quiet. She listened for a moment. She could hear faint sounds from the street outside. It was almost
too
quiet. Lara thought about finding a podcast, playing some music. She stopped herself. She needed to be alert. She needed to hear if someone was coming. She needed to feel safe. Ares was beginning to seem very frightening.

Lara clicked on one of the photographs. The screen blacked out for a microsecond, making Lara jump. Then, it filled with a black-and-white image. It consisted of a background of carts and wagons, the sort you might see in a movie about the Wild West, with hoops and waxed canvas covers. The wagons and much of the ground were covered in crates, some of them opened to display rifles. A line of men, wearing American military uniforms, stood in a row in the foreground of the picture.

“The American Civil War,” said Lara. “They supplied arms during the American Civil War.” She was about to close the photograph and look at another when she stopped. She put her cursor over the two men at the centre of the picture, and clicked. Again, the screen blacked out for a moment. When the image came back into focus, it had zoomed in on the central figures. One wore the uniform of a Confederate general, and the other wore a civilian suit and a hat in the European style. He looked out of place among the soldiers. He was also the only man in the lineup who was not smiling.

Lara gasped. The civilian, the man that Lara assumed from the photograph must be the arms dealer, bore an uncanny resemblance to the man she knew as Ares. Lara studied the picture for a few seconds and then zoomed out. The photograph was captioned “Virginia 1863.” No one in the photograph was named.

Lara clicked on another photograph. This one was captioned “South Africa 1880.” The format was remarkably similar, except that the men were sitting on the veranda of a sort of pavilion with the crates of weapons stacked around them. Lara zoomed in. The man in the linen suit looked exactly like Ares. In the twenty years since the Virginia photograph, he had not seemed to age at all. His body seemed bulkier, but his face looked virtually the same.

Lara closed the picture and opened a third, captioned “Hungary 1940.” There he was again. He was leaner and taller, or at least he appeared to be next to the row of men he was standing among. Nevertheless, his face was the same, his expression as implacable as it always was. Lara had seen photographs from three major wars over eighty years, and the same face had appeared in all of them. Today she had seen the same face on a living man that she had also seen in photographs dating back to the 1860s.

“How is this even possible?” she said.

It was getting late, but Lara couldn’t stop there. She grabbed the Book and turned back to the pages where she had found the references to Ares and the Ten Thousand Immortals.

“Shit!” she said. “The notes weren’t misfiled. It wasn’t an anomaly. They were there for a reason.” The margin notes about Ares and the Ten Thousand Immortals had been made in the section on immortality and spiritual transference. There was also reference to a secret society that Lara had overlooked almost entirely.

“Who the hell are you, Ares? What do you know about the Golden Fleece? Is it real? Is that why you were so keen to get rid of me? To get me out of the way? You’ve got competition, Ares. If the Fleece is real, I can use it to bring Sam back, to save her from Himiko’s influence.”

Chapter 15

L
ara breakfasted in her room. She checked in with Sam’s hospital ward, by phone, and then took the five-minute walk to Menelaou’s office in the Rue du Canivet. It was a little after nine, and the shops and businesses were opening. The streets were not busy, but there was a steady trickle of people. Lara kept her head up, making sure she knew who was around her at all times. She felt no need to deviate from her chosen route.

There was a buzzer next to Menelaou’s name at the street door, but no intercom system. Lara pressed the buzzer, but heard no sound inside the building. There was no corresponding buzz at her end, so she waited. She was about to press the buzzer again when the street door opened. A short, round, ancient man appeared at the door. He had a full head of grizzled hair that must once have been black, and he was mopping the sweat from his ruddy face and puffing slightly.

“Oui?” he said in an accent that was not French.

“Monsieur Menelaou?” asked Lara.

“Ah!” exclaimed the man, smiling. “English. Much better.” He mopped and puffed some more.

“My name’s Lara Croft, I’m a student of archaeology.”

“You must come in then,” said Menelaou.

The time, sweat and breathlessness were explained by the four flights of stairs that Menelaou now had to climb to get back to his office. When he arrived at the door, he took out a bunch of keys with his right hand and mopped his face with the large patterned handkerchief in his left. It took him a minute or two to find the right key, and when he did, he was unable to push the door more than a couple of feet open. He slid through the gap, which was barely big enough to allow him entry into the rooms beyond, and beckoned Lara to follow him.

It immediately became clear why the door wouldn’t open. The room beyond was not small, but it was full of shelves, cabinets, trunks, boxes and objects. They were arranged from floor to ceiling, on every surface, and in every nook, niche and corner. The sheer volume of stuff was utterly overwhelming.

Lara could see everything from household objects and utensils to chunks of masonry and roof tiles, from items of traditional dress to masks and jewelry, from armour to javelins, spears, arrows and blades, and from cannon balls to musket balls, from scrolls to books, and from religious icons to fertility symbols. She could see antiquities from all the classical civilisations from South America to Africa, from Europe to Asia. She had never seen a room like it in her life.

Babbington’s collection had been impressive, but this was extraordinary. The room in Oxford was sterile, sanitised, driven by order. This room was alive with the souls of kings.

Lara’s eyes widened, and she could hardly catch her breath. She didn’t know if she’d ever felt so excited about history before.

“See something you like?” asked Menelaou. He sat down heavily in a vast leather chair, its surface cracked and split with age and wear, and pulled the handkerchief away from his face to reveal a mischievous grin.

Lara turned to look at him, and the expression on her face made him break into a belly laugh that reddened his face even more.

“Go ahead,” he said when he was done. “Pick something out, examine it, hold it in your hands, smell it.”

Lara reached out for a drinking vessel. It was shiny black with age and as hard as stone.

“English blackjack. Late sixteenth century. Made of leather. Beautiful thing and a very early specimen. Take a really good look at it.”

Lara ran her hands over the tankard, and peered at it, rolling it around to catch the best light. The surface was cracked and crazed, but she soon began to see a pattern in the markings.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “That looks like...”

“The inscription, too,” said Menelaou.

“That’s Shakespeare’s signature,” said Lara.

“And his likeness,” said Menelaou. “A gift from a wealthy patron.”

“To you?” asked Lara. “I wish I received gifts like this.”

Menelaou laughed again, his pleasing rumble.

“A gift
to
Shakespeare
from a wealthy patron, so the story goes.”

“It’s a wonderful story.”

“Every object has a wonderful story,” said Menelaou. “What is your object, Miss...”

“Croft,” said Lara again. “Call me Lara.”

“So, Lara, what is your object? No one comes to see me unless they have an object or are looking for one. What do you have in your bag?”

“Nothing at all,” said Lara. “I’m
looking
for an object.”

“Then you already have a story,” said Menelaou. “What is your story, Lara Croft?”

“If only you knew,” said Lara.

“I have all the time in the world for a beautiful young woman,” said Menelaou. “My visitors are usually rich, bitter, old men.”

“Sadly, I have no time at all.”

“Everyone has time for good Turkish coffee,” said Menelaou. “Now that I have my breath back, I find that I need some.” He rose from his seat and opened another door into an anteroom that served as a kitchen. “Come, talk to me.”

Lara liked Monsieur Menelaou. He was the first person who hadn’t judged her or tried to dissuade her from her course since she had seen Sam. He was the romantic soul that had eluded her so far on this futile quest.

“I was at Yamatai last year,” she found herself saying. She didn’t know why.

Menelaou stopped what he was doing, a tiny ornate coffee glass in his hand. He turned and looked at her.

“That was you?” he asked.

Lara blinked.

“What was me?” she said.

“Poor child,” said Menelaou. “What you must have seen!”

“You know about that?” asked Lara.

“I know the stories,” said Menelaou. “The Sun Queen. The evil she caused. The power of immortality.”

Lara was startled. Her face drained.

Menelaou stepped towards her, concern on his face.

“I am a foolish old man,” he said. “I believe too much in the legends. What can an old man do but believe in life everlasting when he knows he will die soon? We Greeks, we are too romantic.”

“I want to believe in something, too,” said Lara.

Menelaou put his hands on the tops of Lara’s arms and rubbed gently, reassuring her.

“You are troubled. It helps to talk. You came here for something. Tell me what it is.” Then he turned and went back to making Turkish coffee in a tall, slender, ornate pot.

“My friend… she was attacked by Himiko on Yamatai. She cannot get over it,” said Lara.

Menelaou tutted sympathetically as he poured scalding water onto the coffee grounds.

“Physically she’s improving, but mentally… I don’t know… she’s deeply troubled. I want to help her. The doctors are doing everything they can. I’m looking for an amulet, a charm, something I understand… Something she would understand. All I really care about is archaeology.”

“An object of healing, an artifact,” said Menelaou. “I know what you’re looking for. You’ve been doing your research.”

“I have,” said Lara. “And I’m not the only one.”

Menelaou paused and smiled.

“You are not,” he said. “Dare I say the name ‘Ares’?”

Lara tensed. “How do you know about the—”