Paradox. Alex Archer

of jovial indifference to the stares of the other diners on his big, florid fleshy face. His hair was brown and graying at the temples; it looked natural to Annja, not that she was any judge. Seams of his well-rumpled face, exaggerated by his big grin, almost concealed his brown eyes.

      As she approached she realized he was very tall. He towered over her, which was rare: he had to be six-four or thereabouts, probably crowding three hundred pounds. He had the look of a former star college quarterback who hadn’t quite had the NFL stuff, and whose career and physique had begun their downhill slide about the same time as graduation and continued until his fifties.

      He was a billionaire who had made his money the old-fashioned way—inherited it from his Oklahoma oilman daddy. But, according to the information Roux had given to Annja, he had more than doubled the family fortune despite frequent bouts with expensive bad habits. He’d supposedly cleaned himself up and was now a vigorous proponent of muscular right-wing Christianity.

      Bostitch’s handshake was firm and dry and all-enveloping. Annja could feel at once how he could overpower most people without consciously trying. But Annja was not most people and she was hard to intimidate.

      “It’s an honor to meet you at last, Ms. Creed,” he boomed. Two of the other men at the table had risen politely. The third sat hunched over and peered myopically at an electronic reader.

      “Please allow me to introduce my good friend and associate, Leif Baron.”

      “A pleasure.” Baron smiled and nodded. The smile didn’t reach his gray eyes. He was Annja’s height. He had the broad shoulders that tapered through well-developed trapezoid muscles and thick neck to the almost pointed-looking crown of his shaven head of an aging but still formidable mixed martial arts prizefighter. His suit was expensively tailored to a form as compulsively fit as Bostitch’s was sloppy, his tie muted. She could feel the callus on his trigger finger when she shook his hand. The guy was ex-military, she had no doubt.

      “And this is my aide-de-camp, if you’ll pardon my French, Larry Taitt.”

      This was a jockish bunch, Annja thought. Taitt was a gangly brown-haired man who was not quite tall enough for basketball and not quite burly enough for football. Maybe baseball was his game in college. Or, she couldn’t help thinking, high school; he looked seventeen, despite the ultraconservative dark suit and tie, even though he must have been in his early twenties at least.

      “It’s great to meet you, ma’am,” he said, big floppy-dog amiability warring with painfully proper upbringing.

      He worked her hand like a pump handle until his boss dryly said, “You can let go anytime now, Larry.” He dropped her hand and blushed.

      “And you’ll have to excuse the rabbi,” Bostitch said pointedly. “He couldn’t bring any real books to bury his nose in, so he’s settling for second best.”

      “Oh,” the fourth man said. “Please forgive me. I was just catching up on the latest digest from Biblical Archaeology Online. I got engrossed and forgot my manners.”

      Momentarily he got crossed up as to which hand he was going to shake Annja’s with, and which he was going to use to straighten his yarmulke, which had begun to stray from the crown of his head of curly brown, somewhat scraggly hair. He had an ascetic’s face, bone-thin and pale olive, a disorderly beard and brown eyes that looked enormous behind round lenses so thick he should have been able to see the rings of Saturn with them. He looked to be in his early to mid-thirties. Finally sorting the unfamiliar mundane details out, he shook Annja’s hand as eagerly as Taitt had, if with a far less authoritative grip.

      “I’m Rabbi Leibowitz,” he said. “It’s wonderful to meet you. I’m a big fan.”

      “Thanks,” Annja said with a thin smile as Bostitch pulled out her chair. She sat. She was secure enough in her own strength of character not to resent what others would probably take as a male-chauvinist gesture. Even if, considering the source, it probably was one.

      “You may or may not have heard of me before,” Bostitch said, seating himself. “What really matters is that I’m a rich guy who finally got serious and accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior kinda late in the game. And I’m dedicated to proving the exact, literal truth of the Bible to help save a skeptical world.”

      Annja looked at him over the top of the menu. “Not just the truth, then.”

      He laughed. He seemed to do that easily. “Of course I’m interested in the truth, Ms. Creed. I say we go take a look and let the chips fall where they may.”

      He leaned forward. “In this case, though, I’m pretty confident what we’re going to find will confirm the Book of Genesis. And blow the world away.”

      Annja glanced at the rabbi. He was lost in his reading again. Annja wondered what his role was in the expedition.

      “We’ll see,” she said.

      “Let me tell you a little bit about myself and my associates,” Bostitch said. “I inherited a bit of money from my dear old daddy. I did the college thing, majored in partying. Got serious enough to get my MBA and come back to the family business, which was mostly oil. We expanded into agribusiness and, eventually, into defense.

      “I was a pretty wild colt as a young man, Ms. Creed. Until, as I said, I was saved. Since then I’ve been mindful of giving back. I founded and fund the Rehoboam Christian Leadership Academy for young men in Virginia, near Quantico.”

      He nodded to Baron, who sat to his right. “Mr. Baron here came through that program. That’s how we met. After he went through he consented to become a volunteer instructor. Leif was quite a bit older than our usual students, actually—he’d served as a Navy SEAL and then built his own security firm into quite a successful operation.”

      “Security?” Annja asked.

      “Private security contracting, Ms. Creed,” Baron said. “I own China Grove Consultants.”

      “Oh. Mercenaries,” Annja said, nodding.

      He smiled humorlessly. “That’s not a term we’re particularly fond of. In fact we’ve devoted a substantial amount of money to lobbying the UN to closely regulate the international private security and private defense contracting business. We’d like to see the UN move away from their conventional Blue Helmet peacekeepers, who tend to be brave but ineffectual, to contracting with private agencies to conduct peacekeeping operations.”

      “And you’d be the contractor, I’m guessing?” Annja asked.

      He shrugged his massive shoulders. “We’d be there bidding along with the others. And we do a good job. At a lower cost to our principals than conventional military forces.”

      “Leif’s taken a leave of absence in order to help with our expedition,” Bostitch said. “He’s our organizer and expediter. He’ll run the show on the expedition. And Larry, here, went through the academy. He was a star pupil and I decided to take him under my wing, once he got his law degree.”

      Larry grinned and bobbed his head. “It’s a real honor,” his said, “getting to work with such great men and great Christians as Mr. Bostitch and Mr. Baron.”

      Annja couldn’t help but like the enthusiastic young man.

      “And Rabbi Leibowitz is a rising star at the Israeli Archaeological Institute,” Bostitch added. The man in question looked up, blinked, grinned shyly and promptly went back to his reading. Annja had known some compulsive readers in her life—she came close at times—but the rabbi definitely took best in show.

      Their waiter arrived and asked her for her order first.

      “How rare is your prime rib?” she asked.

      “Almost bleeding, ma’am.”

      “Great. I’ll take the sixteen-ounce cut with the rice pilaf and steamed broccoli. Tossed salad with vinaigrette, no croutons. And iced tea and ice water, please.” She thought about ordering wine to see