Cradle Of Solitude. Alex Archer

she found.

      “See the rounded edges of the bullet hole?” she asked, pointing with the end of the pen. “And the way the fabric is still intact all around it, rather than stretched or torn?”

      Bernard nodded. “The musket ball was moving so fast that it didn’t have time to do much damage to the material as it passed through. Must have been close range, then.”

      “Just what I was thinking, as well.”

      She sat back on her haunches and stared at the dead man in front of her. “He wasn’t here by accident. We’re too far away from any easily accessible entrance for that to be the case. He came here deliberately, perhaps to meet someone…”

      “And whoever it was gunned him down where he stood,” Bernard finished for her.

      “It’s no longer an interesting archaeological puzzle,” Annja said as she climbed to her feet. “Now it’s a homicide investigation.”

      The police, however, wanted nothing to do with such an old murder. After a few quick calls back to headquarters, Laroche approached and informed Annja and Bernard that they were still in charge of the investigation, that their skills were going to be more valuable in terms of identifying the victim and perhaps even his murderer than anything the police could bring to bear on the problem.

      Homicide or not, it was their problem to solve.

      Several technicians from the museum arrived, summoned earlier by Bernard when he’d realized what it was they were dealing with. The technicians had a portable specimen case with them, essentially a long, flat box that looked like the case for an electric keyboard, and carried several toolkits of different shapes and sizes. Annja stepped out of the way to give them room to work in the narrow confines of the antechamber.

      One of the technicians withdrew a video camera from the case he carried and, switching on the high-powered light attached to it, began to pan his way around the entire room in unwitting mimicry of what she had done earlier with the still camera.

      When he was finished, he nodded at one of the other team members, who opened another case and began assembling an odd-looking device from the parts inside.

      Annja was expecting the skeletal removal to be a long, drawn-out process of removing each bone piece by piece and then placing them into the specimen case, so she was surprised when the man she was watching picked up the device he’d been assembling and moved over to stand next to the skeleton. The device looked like a fire extinguisher, though the canister was blue rather than red, and the operator wore it hanging from his shoulder on a strap. The other end of the hose running out of the top of the cylinder was attached to a gunlike device in his right hand. He turned and aimed the gun at the skeleton.

      “Hey! Wait a min—”

      She didn’t get any further. The technician squeezed the trigger and began spraying a fine white mist over their mystery man. The mist settled on the skeleton for a moment and then ballooned up into a white foamlike substance that hardened in seconds. Less than five minutes later the entire skeleton was wrapped in a cocoon of hardened foam.

      Annja turned to Bernard and asked, “What, exactly, is that stuff?”

      The older man smiled. “Do you like it? It’s a new tool my staff and I have come up with in order to transport delicate artifacts.”

      He stepped over to the skeleton. “The foam is genetically engineered and completely biodegradable. Flash a UV light on it and it fades away to literally nothing.

      But in the meantime—” he reached down and rapped on the foam with his knuckles “—knock, knock, it’s as hard as steel.”

      Something that hard must weigh a ton, Annja thought.

      “How are you going to move it?”

      Bernard eyed the cocooned skeleton with something like genuine affection. “That’s the beautiful part. It’s light as a feather.”

      It was, too. With one technician at the feet and another at the head, the skeleton was gently lifted off the ground and placed inside the specimen box with barely an effort.

      “Will wonders never cease?”

      She was impressed. That foam could have saved her hundreds of hours of effort on earlier digs.

      “How long have you been using it?”

      Bernard’s expression went sheepish and he mumbled something under his breath.

      “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,” Annja said.

      “That was our, um, first field test.”

      If he hadn’t been on the other side of the specimen case, she would have throttled him where he stood. As it was she had to settle for giving him her best glare and vowing to make him pay for using one of her digs as his guinea pig.

      They closed up the specimen case and, with one person on either end, carefully lifted it up and carried it out of the room. It wasn’t heavy, but the close confines of the tunnel made it awkward and they took turns carrying it back out to where the catacombs intersected the Metro line. Bernard spent a few minutes talking with Laroche before returning to Annja’s side.

      “Help will be here shortly,” he told her.

      Ten minutes later a pair of Metro workers arrived, pushing a small handcart along the subway tracks. The newcomers showed one of the museum techs how to operate the cart, the specimen box was loaded on it and, as a group, they set off on the last leg of the walk back to the surface.

      As they emerged from the steps leading to the underground, they found a small crowd had gathered around the station entrance, attracted by the museum van that was parked haphazardly on the curb. A few people pointed in her direction and more than one began taking pictures with their cell phones.

      As she glanced away, Annja thought, These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along. The memory brought a smile to her face.

      Bernard must have noticed, for he asked, “What’s so funny?”

      Trying to explain Star Wars humor to a French archaeologist was an exercise in futility so she just shook her head. Thankfully, Bernard let it go, as he was needed to help get the specimen case properly situated into the rack designed to hold it inside the van. Annja glanced once more at the crowd nearby, wondered just what it was that had drawn them and then climbed into the front seat to wait for the others to finish.

      A DARK-HAIRED MAN in his mid-forties, dressed in blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, glanced at the picture he’d just taken with his cell phone from across the street. He grunted in satisfaction. It wasn’t the best image, but it was good enough. The woman’s companion, Professor Bernard Reinhardt, was well known to them, but she was a mystery. The photo would help them identify her and from there they could assess just what kind of threat she posed to their plans.

      Satisfied, he sent the image as part of a text message, dropped his phone into his pocket and started walking down the street.

      He hadn’t gone more than a few blocks before the phone rang in response.

      “Michaels,” he said, answering it.

      The voice on the other end was younger, full of cockiness. “Next time give me something difficult, will ya? Her name’s Annja Creed. She entered France on the fourteenth with an American passport.”

      American? Interesting, Michaels thought.

      “What’s she doing in Paris?”

      “She’s the host of a cable television show that features monsters, myths and legends entitled, appropriately enough, Chasing History’s Monsters.”

      Myths and legends. Michaels didn’t like the sound of that. Their contact in the police department had tipped them off that Reinhardt had been called in to examine something discovered during the excavation of the new Metro line. That had brought Michaels down there this morning. His organization had protected certain secrets