Paradox. Alex Archer

      “Look, I can’t pretend to be a fully qualified geologist or anything. I took some courses—I have plenty of experience on digs. But I’m no expert. Still, what these look like to me are just slabs of some kind of fine-grained sedimentary rocks—shale or sandstone. Because of the way they’ve been cut out they look like planks. But see—” she pointed to some detail in the photo “—I think these patterns that look like grain in wood are probably a result of layers of deposition in some kind of marine environment. Like basically, years of silt filtering down out of the water.”

      “Nailed it again,” Bostitch said from his throne. “That’s just what the geologists we hired to look the pictures over said. One said he reckoned the so-called Ark was just a basalt dike—igneous, just like you said.”

      “Maybe we should have contracted with Ms. Creed earlier and saved ourselves some money on consultants,” Baron said with a smile toward Annja.

      “Not a good idea,” Annja said hastily. “If you have real experts in a given field, you should listen to them.”

      “So what makes you think you’ve got a better candidate for Noah’s boat?” Tommy asked, sitting perched on a table with his elbows propped on his knees.

      The twins and the other two Young Wolves in the room, who’d been introduced as Josh and Eli, gave him slit-eyed looks as if not appreciating an outsider butting in. Annja was about to leap to his defense when Charlie spoke up.

      “Well, that’s a right good question there, Mr. Wynock. Luckily, we got us some good answers. And we’d better—otherwise we’d look like a bunch of damn fools coming over here and spending all this money.”

      At the pained looks that flitted across his acolytes’ faces he blushed and added, “If you’ll pardon my French.”

      Annja quickly outlined the evidence as they had presented to her. When called upon, Levi, who had gotten interested and sat leaning forward with his clasped hands between his wide-splayed knees, agreed that, at the very least, there might be a very valuable historical site on Ararat.

      Jason looked to his companions. Annja caught a bit of an eye-roll from Tommy, but the others didn’t notice. She hoped.

      The television crew chief slapped his hands down on his thighs. “Well,” he said, standing, “it does look as if we’re in for some interesting times.”

      The intonation he gave the last two words suggested to Annja that any resemblance to a mythical Chinese curse was strictly intentional.

      6

      “It’s bat-shit crazy,” Tommy said. “But no worse than most of the wild-goose chases we get sent on.”

      “If the Kurds don’t kill us,” Trish said. “Or the right-wing fundamentalists.”

      They had gathered in Annja’s room in the Sheraton Tower, just around the curving corridor from the suite where they held their meetings—or “briefings,” as Bostitch preferred to call them. Annja wasn’t sure whether he was following Baron’s ex-military lead or his own inclinations. For all that Bostitch presented himself as an aw-shucks folksy businessman, the graduates of his leadership academy sure seemed to see themselves as holy warriors.

      Though smaller than the suite, Annja’s room was hardly less luxurious. She sat cross-legged on the wide bed. Tommy perched on the desk. Trish sat in one of the comfy chairs while Jason alternately paced like a caged leopard and stood gazing moodily out at the lights of the city.

      “Might that mean it’s a good idea to try our best to get along with the others, then?” Annja asked.

      “Hey, we weren’t that bad,” Tommy said. “Don’t bust our balls.”

      “I don’t know whether to thank you or call you a pig,” Trish said, laughing.

      “Whatev. You know what I mean.”

      “Actually, you did fine,” Annja said. “I just want to encourage us all to keep that up. You guys have been in the field. You know how once you start getting tired and thirsty and sick of being either too hot or too cold all the time, tensions tend to rise. So either we need to just bail on this or do our best to keep things from getting too tense.”

      “You’d do that, Annja?” Trish asked. “You seem to have, like, the most at stake here.” She seemed honestly surprised.

      In a heartbeat, Annja almost said. She decided it would be unwise. And anyway it wasn’t really true. Although what Trish probably thought she had at stake in this expedition—the prospect of her own show on the network—barely registered in Annja’s determination to see this through if possible.

      “If I thought it was the right thing to do, yes,” Annja said and that was true. Annja always did what she thought was right, whatever it cost her. And there had been times when it cost her greatly.

      “What I don’t see,” Tommy said, “is how they can take all this Creation shit seriously.”

      “No kidding,” Jason said. “Was it a pair of each kind of animal that went onto the Ark? Or seven of some and two of others? Doesn’t Genesis do it both ways?”

      “Yes,” Annja said.

      “Isn’t the Bible, like, full of contradictions?” Trish said.

      “It is. And I have to hand the literalists credit for their ingenuity in dreaming up explanations for a lot of them. Or maybe intellectual double-jointedness.”

      “I thought a lot of the fundamentalists just got by with announcing every word of the Old Testament is true, without actually reading much of it,” Tommy grumbled.

      “That’s true, too. I don’t know how well that applies to our employer and his associates, though. They seem to be a studious bunch.”

      “Huh,” Tommy said. “Maybe they should study the evidence a little closer. I mean, look at the pictures they got.”

      He pulled his phone from its hip holster. “I was looking at some of the pictures online on my own. Take this oblique shot here from 1949. Tell me it doesn’t totally look like somebody used Photoshop to add a toy tugboat in among some rocks. Badly.”

      “Dude,” Jason said. “I could be wrong, here, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have Photoshop in ’49.”

      “Whatever. You know what I mean. Cut-and-paste job with scissors and glue then. And what about this overhead from a satellite, with the so-called ‘Anomaly’ conveniently outlined in red pen? Give me a break. This just looks like someone took a picture of a random ridge and drew a boat shape around it. It looks like a fucking whale. Using that technique you could demonstrate that anything longer than it is wide is Noah’s Ark.”

      “All right, you’re right,” Annja said. “All this is true. We do still have some fairly good artifacts that somebody close to Charlie brought back. And Levi—Rabbi Leibowitz—thinks there’s something up there, if not a stranded ship.”

      “Yeah,” Jason said. “But what about this rabbi guy, anyway? What’s his story?”

      “I think that’s more a marriage of convenience. But Levi’s based in Brooklyn. I think he’s basically apolitical. He’s into this because he thinks there is a mystery up here that could be really, really important to history. And I do, too.”

      “Whoa,” Tommy breathed, mock-reverent. “Annja Creed, Chasing History’s Monsters’ resident buzz-kill specialist with all her skepticism, thinks there’s really something there?”

      Trish hooted. “Could you try to be more insulting, Tommy?”

      He huffed and shook his head. Annja found herself just naturally envisioning him with a baseball cap turned backward on his head. “Sorry,” he said.

      “Speaking of climbing to the top,” Jason said, “what do you make of the chances of