Paradox. Alex Archer

      “My uncle back in Waco always used to say, ‘Don’t piss down my leg and tell me it’s raining,’” Trish said, allowing a touch of Texas Panhandle she’d obviously been carefully suppressing before to slip into her voice. “It’s like he knew Doug.”

      “Doug did admit this whole trip might be just a tiny bit illegal, once we got to Ararat,” Tommy said. “But he tried to make it seem like it was really all just kind of a joke the locals like to play on tourists. You know how he is.”

      “I sure do,” Annja said grimly. “There’s a real-life war going on in eastern Turkey between the Turks and the Kurds. At the moment it’s sort of…contained. But it could blow up at any minute into a serious conflagration involving Northern Iraq. And if that happens who knows where it’ll go?”

      “To hell in a hurry, sounds like,” Jason said. He didn’t appear overly concerned.

      “So it’s way important that everybody gets along. Let me stress that—everybody. I suspect that’s not going to be easy on either side. So I wanted to get together with you guys off by ourselves, get to know each other, before we all walked into the lion’s den.”

      “Are they that nuts?” Trish asked. “I mean, I thought the big guy, Bostitch, was pretty easygoing. I read up on him a little bit on the way out. Seems like he was the original good-time Charlie—never met a shot of booze or line of coke he didn’t like.”

      “Or a babe,” Jason said.

      “He really isn’t that bad. But he is deadly serious about his beliefs,” Annja said.

      She paused to inhale and marshal her thoughts. In general the crew made a good impression on her. But as she’d suspected, they were of a bent to see right-wing Christians the very same way the right-wing Christians saw them—the embodiment of dangerous evil.

      “Listen. Everybody’s polite as hell. Especially the rank-and-file expedition members, who it turns out all came out of this Rehoboam Christian Leadership Academy Charlie runs. And I’d like to keep things polite as much as possible,” Annja said.

      “How about this Baron guy?” Tommy said. “Even I’ve heard of him. He’s supposed to be implicated in all kinds of war crimes.”

      Annja shrugged. “He’s a bit tightly wrapped, I have to warn you. Seriously, seriously, do not tease the animals. But…please don’t take this the wrong way. I don’t condone war crimes—and I also don’t know enough of the facts to have any idea of what he’s guilty of, or whether he’s guilty of anything at all except pretty vigorously waging an unpopular war. But the places we’re going, he might turn out to be just the kind of guy we need to keep us alive, war crimes or no.”

      “The places we’ll go,” Jason paraphrased. “You make it sound like we’re headed into an evil Dr. Seuss book.”

      “Hold that thought,” Annja said.

      “NOW FROM THE SMALL AMOUNT of research I was able to do before we set out,” Jason Pennigrew said, “I understand that there are at least a couple of alternate sites for the Ark that’ve been proposed recently.”

      Annja was impressed by the crew chief’s professionalism. The loosey-goosey black kid from Memphis and the University of Tennessee was gone. Jason hadn’t quite gone so far as to put on a coat and tie, but he did wear a dark blue shirt and dark pants. His two companions went for a more informal, blue-jeans look. Annja wore her usual cargo khaki trousers, practical rather than fashionable, and a light blouse in abstract streaks of cream and yellow and rust and orange.

      With the sun sinking behind the wooded western hills the view from the expedition’s tower suite was spectacular. Orange light filled the room. Maps had been spread out on the large table. Charlie and most of his posse were there along with Annja and the recently arrived Chasing History’s Monsters crew.

      “That’s right,” Leif Baron said, sitting on the couch. He wore tan trousers, a white polo shirt and tan boots with pale crepe soles. Annja suspected the shirt was deliberately tight to emphasize his ripped physique. It was ripped, no denying—so much so that Annja suspected it wasn’t entirely natural development. “A guy named Ron Wyatt was a big proponent for the so-called Durupinar site, eighteen miles south of Greater Ararat, where our Anomaly lies.”

      “Wyatt’s great discovery is a big boat-shaped object, sure enough. Zeb, can you find us a photograph?”

      Two of Charlie’s Young Wolves—as Annja couldn’t help thinking of them—stood side by side with their backs to one of the big picture windows. They looked as if reality had stuttered and produced the same image twice. Both were an inch shorter than Annja, athletic, their eyes blue in wide fresh faces with freckle-dotted snub noses. Like Baron they currently affected a casual style, salmon-colored shirts and khaki trousers. Everything about them lined up identically, from their blond crew cuts to the creases on their pants. Annja had a horrible sensation that if she examined them under an optical comparator they’d be identical to the microscopic level, as if made by machine instead of nature.

      Since like their packmates the twins responded slavishly to Bostitch and Baron’s every word, the one who came forward to the table was pretty much by definition not Jeb. She suspected uncomfortably that if Baron had said, “Jeb, do you think you can throw yourself into that molten lava?” he’d have complied with the same strutting alacrity.

      Zeb bent over and searched through a number of large photographic prints from a folder. Straightening, he proffered one to Baron with a smile. Then in response to a slight inclination of Baron’s shaved skull he handed it to Annja instead.

      “Ms. Creed, I believe you have some training as a geologist,” Baron said, smiling at her. “Maybe you could tell us what you think?”

      Annja accepted it and scrutinized it under the light of the lamp on the table beside her. After a moment she looked up.

      “That’s a good shot,” she said. “I’d say it’s definitely a natural rock formation that looks a lot like a ship. I’m guessing it’s basalt.”

      “You’re good, Ms. Creed,” Charlie said, nodding his head and smiling his big goofy smile. He sat sprawled comfortably in one of the black leather chairs, almost as if he’d been spilled there. “The samples Leif and I brought back from our little visit there last year have been scientifically confirmed to be basalt. No Ark. Unless it was a mighty heavy one.”

      “About what you’d expect from a nurse-anesthetist,” Baron said. “Which is what Wyatt was.”

      Annja passed the print on to Jason, who pulled a long face and nodded, impressed. “Isn’t there a supposed Ark site in Iran?” Trish asked.

      “Oh, yes,” Larry Taitt said, when Baron and Bostitch said nothing. He was dressed, as he always seemed to be, in a dark suit and tie. “There are several purported sites. We’ve investigated all of them thoroughly.”

      “We did produce some photographs of the site,” Larry said. “Zeb, if you could please find those for Ms. Creed, thanks.”

      The blond twin handed her more prints with what seemed to Annja a lack of grace. The Young Wolves seemed willing enough to accept Bostitch and Baron’s alpha and beta status. But having one of their own jumped over them in pack precedence didn’t seem to be sitting too well.

      “The one on top purports to be a view of the Ark itself,” Larry said. “The other is of bits off stone they cut that some think are petrified wood planks from the Ark.”

      The first photo showed a ridge or saddleback, with snow drifts to one side and cloudy sky to the other, and slanting gently down to the snow a slope dotted with small rocks and dark green bunch grass. Jutting from the middle of the photo, right below the ridge-crest, was a dark outcrop with a pointy top that might have been a single big boulder. Annja made a face.

      “This could be anything,” she said. “Even some kind of hard volcanic extrusion with softer rock eroded away around it.”