The Lost Scrolls. Alex Archer

that was just okay.

      “All right,” she said, “I’ll grant the possibility. On a purely hypothetical basis. But so what?”

      “The scrolls could prove alternate energy sources were available,” Jadzia said, “without the inefficiencies of wind or solar power, or the risks of nuclear.”

      Annja shook her head and laughed. “It’s not as if they contain a set of blueprints for harnessing that power.”

      Jadzia’s smile widened until she reminded Annja forcibly of a cat who’d just discovered how to work the catch on the birdcage. “But maybe that’s—” she patted the green-and-purple synthetic bag plumped beside her on the wall “—still in here.”

      “SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” the young woman asked.

      Jadzia sat on a wall again, drumming her heels against it. This time it was a short retaining wall high up on the town’s ancient acropolis, looking out over the strip of city lights running along the darkness of the Mediterranean. Above her left shoulder, illuminated by floodlights at the base, rose the shiny red granite obelisk miscalled Pompey’s Pillar. Annja knew it was actually built by Diocletian on the ruins of the Temple of Serapis in 297 A.D. Off to her right a smallish sort of Sphinx lay pensive on its pedestal.

      Annja paced downslope of her this time, without great energy but still driven. Reaction had set in. They had passed the afternoon wandering in and out of shops in a daze. Annja could remember nothing specific of what they had seen.

      They had dinner at a couscous restaurant. Even with ample doses of hot sauce it tasted like wood chips to Annja. They had talked some, sporadically, in muted voices. That was how shock-fatigued they had become. Jadzia was too wasted to be either loud or nasty.

      She had told Annja some of her story. She proudly claimed descent from Mozart, which struck Annja as implausible. To Annja’s surprise the girl had been born in the United States, eighteen years before, meaning she carried dual citizenship. Her father, a mathematics professor at the University of Krakow, had been a vocal supporter of the Solidarity labor-union movement. When the Soviet-backed Polish regime had cracked down on Solidarity and arrested its leader, Lech Walesa, Jadzia’s father had fled to the U.S. Sobieslaw Arkadczyk moved in with cousins in Chicago and took a job as a plumber.

      While there he had met, through friends, a young Polish woman finishing her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago. They had fallen in love and married.

      After political reform brought an effective end to the Communist regime, the couple returned to their homeland. With them went their two-year-old daughter, Jadzia. They were soon both teaching at Krakow University. Sobieslaw’s having been exiled for supporting Walesa, who became the nation’s president in 1990, probably hadn’t hurt their opportunities.

      Jadzia had shown signs of extraordinary gifts at a young age. Annja got the impression Sobieslaw and Roksana, Jadzia’s mother, were probably looking pretty hard. Parents did that, Annja knew from observing her contemporaries who had produced offspring. She had no direct experience with parents of her own that she could remember.

      In Jadzia’s case, genius wasn’t all in her parents’ eyes, it seemed. Tests demonstrated that she had an astonishing facility for languages, as well as a talent for mathematics.

      She was, perhaps inevitably, relentlessly indulged from a very early age.

      Jadzia learned to read at the advanced age of three. She did so voraciously. As Annja had, she quickly fell in love with the intrigue and adventure and romance of history. That led to a near obsession with ancient languages.

      Oddly, she chose not to study specific languages at school. “Why?” Annja asked.

      “I learn them perfectly well by myself,” she replied matter-of-factly.

      Instead she studied linguistics and cryptology, the better to decipher unknown languages and tantalizing fragments.

      As the sun set and Jadzia finished her story, they had drifted up the hill. Wandering the tourist attractions had kept them masked by crowds during the day. They had already checked out of the hotel where they had spent half of last night, and locked their baggage, except for the scrolls, in lockers at the train station. Tonight they would check into a new hotel as late as possible. Hostelries had to report all foreign guests to the police. The later the pair showed their passports, though, the more likely the hotel staff was to wait until morning to pass the information along to the police. And the less likely the police were to actually notice them at all. Just because their pursuers could readily bribe the Alexandrian police didn’t mean they could make them efficient.

      And now at last Jadzia had asked the question, literally, of life and death: What do we do now?

      “We have to find a way to get whoever is hunting us off our backs,” Annja answered.

      “How can we do that?”

      “We could give them what they want.”

      “Sure,” Jadzia sneered. “And then they kill us anyway.”

      She had gotten so lethargic Annja was almost relieved to see her get snotty again. Almost.

      “That’s true,” she said.

      “What? You aren’t going to accuse me of conspiracy theories?”

      Annja laughed without a lot of humor. “As you pointed out, somebody really is conspiring against us. But what if we were to negate the value of what you’re carrying?”

      The girl’s eyes turned to blue slits of suspicion. “What do you mean?”

      “Release the information the scrolls contain,” Annja said. “If whoever’s after us is willing to kill to keep the information secret, and I confess I can’t think of any other reason they attacked you, then it stands to reason that if we make the information public, they’ll have no more incentive to kill us. Doesn’t it?”

      “What if they still want to kill us for revenge?”

      Annja shrugged. “It’s possible. But murder is an expensive proposition, even for the rich and well-connected. Continuing a vendetta against a couple of young women—who have incidentally become world-famous figures—might not make a whole lot of sense when vast profit or power no longer lie at stake. Whoever ordered the hit on your dig team, whether it was a corporate executive or government minister, probably has powerful rivals who aren’t any more scrupulous than he is. Wasting resources closing the barn door after the horse has escaped might be all the pretext such rivals might need to make a move against him.”

      She held her breath then, uncertain of whether the girl was going to go off on her or not. She was like nitroglycerin.

      But Jadzia smiled, then laughed. “Twisted,” she said. “I like the way you think.”

      And what would worldwide notoriety do for my career? Annja wondered. As an archaeologist, as a consultant for Chasing History’s Monsters , as champion of good?

      She shrugged. A lot less harm than getting abruptly dead in the next few days, she conceded to herself.

      “But what about revenge? ” Jadzia asked.

      Annja did not particularly care for the gleam she saw in the young Polish linguist’s eyes. In part that was because she wasn’t so sure it wasn’t shining from her own.

      She found herself smiling. “Can you think of anything better,” she asked, “than revealing the secret they want so very badly to keep?”