NNJA EMERGED from the bathroom wearing a long bathrobe swirled in patterns of green, yellow and blue. Her long hair was wrapped in a towel. She heated a cup of cocoa in the microwave and looked around her loft. While jobs were scarce for a freelance archaeologist, she had lucked into enough supplementary income from her television gig and some publishing deals to afford the space.
With Roux’s assistance she sometimes accepted commissions to do special archaeological assignments around the globe—always consistent with her strict sense of scientific ethics—for employers who wanted them kept discreet. They tended to be a lot more perilous than the usual university dig, and accordingly well compensated. Sometimes only just slightly over the considerable expense such missions tended to incur.
Flopping on her couch in the space left by several piles of manuscripts various contacts had sent her, mostly dealing with her side interest in fringe archaeology, she made the key mistake of clicking on the television.
She was hoping for a distraction. What she got was Kristie Chatham, on location with some kind of cockamamy Knowledge Channel crossover production in England. Annja was all too aware of not having been invited to take part.
“…standing here in front of Stonehenge,” Kristie was saying brightly, “which as we all know was built by the Druids…”
Annja emitted a strangled scream and threw a cushion at the screen. “No, you bimbo,” she shouted. “No, no, no. Stonehenge was built thousands of years before the Druids. Don’t you bother to research anything?” A better question might’ve been, didn’t the Knowledge Channel fact-check anything? But she knew the answer to that one, too.
“I’m here with Reggie Whitcomb of the South England Pagan Federation,” Kristie bubbled on, “who’s going to explain how the Druids levitated the huge cross-pieces, called sarsen stones, into place using their advanced psychic powers.”
Annja grabbed the remote and clicked off the set just as Kristie turned her microphone toward a chinless guy wearing a white robe with a peaked hood that made him look as if he belonged to a middle-school auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan. The skies were black over Salisbury Plain, and the wind cracked like wet sheets whipping on a clothesline. Annja hoped Kristie would get struck by lightning. Or at least soaked to the skin.
Of course that would make Kristie’s sheer white blouse transparent. And Kristie would score another top-viewed video on You Tube. Unlike a lot of its media rivals, the Knowledge Channel never set its legal hounds to pull such videos down—the producers had noticed how ratings spiked for their repeats after one went online.
Annja slammed her remote on top of a stack of printouts on the couch beside her.
“It’s not like I’m Ms. Establishment Science or anything,” she muttered, with her chin down to her clavicle. “It’s just that I don’t open my mind so wide my brain rolls out my mouth.”
Her cell phone rang and she frowned at it in suspicion. If that’s Doug Morrell, his head’s coming right off, she thought.
She picked it up, flipped it open. “Hello.”
“Annja Creed?”
Whomever the voice belonged to, it was not her producer from Chasing History’s Monsters. The voice was like liquid amber poured over gravel—deep, rugged, yet somehow flowing.
Her eyes narrowed. I know that voice, she thought. It sounds so familiar.
“Ms. Creed?” She was certain of the Irish accent.
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. This is Annja.”
“Ms. Creed, my name is Iain Moran. I’m a musician. You may have heard of me.”
“ Sir Iain Moran?” Annja asked. It couldn’t be.
“The same.” Her mind’s eye could see that famous smile, at once roguish and world-weary.
“Publico? Lead singer for T-34?”
“The very one.”
“Right,” Annja was in no mood for pranks.
“Don’t hang up! Please. I really am Sir Iain Moran.”
“Sure. Multibillionaire rock stars call me every day. If Doug Morrell put you up to this, you’re both way overdue for a good swift kick to the—”
“Please. I’d very much like to consult you on a professional matter, concerning your expertise. Would it help to assuage your doubts if my helicopter collected you on the roof of your flat in fifteen minutes?”
It was original, as pranks go. She had to give her caller that. “You’re on,” Annja said, daring her caller to push this as far as it would go.
Fifteen minutes later she stared openmouthed into the brownish haze of a hot Brooklyn day. Her face and hair were whipped by the downblast as a Bell 429 helicopter descended to the roof.
2
A man with long dark blond hair blowing out behind his craggy face was striding toward the helicopter as its landing gear bumped down into the yellow painted circle of the skyscraper’s helipad. He wore a tan suit with a dark chocolate tie blown back over his shoulder.
Two men stood flanking the doorway the long-haired man had emerged from. Their hands were folded before them and they looked like slabs in black suits. Even from a distance Annja got the impression their musculature was the force-fed beef characteristic of U.S. ground-force soldiers, not the torturously detailed sculpting of weight-room juicers.
The pleasant young Asian woman in a blue-gray business suit who had originally squired Annja aboard the helicopter, and smilingly evaded the questions Annja peppered her with, helped Annja into the heat of the Manhattan summer morning. The man in the pale suit neared. His face split in a smile.
“I’m Sir Iain,” he said, raising his voice to carry over the dying whine of the engine and the slowing blades. “Or Publico, if you prefer.” He took the hand Annja extended in a dry, strong grip.
“It was good of you to accept my invitation on such short notice,” he said. He put fingertips behind Annja’s shoulder and applied gentle pressure. “I’m a huge fan of your work. Your writing, as well as your television career. Please, come with me.”
She found, as he guided her toward the doorway, that she did not resent the physical contact. He was around her height, five-ten maybe five-eleven. His shoulders and chest seemed massive, which seemed unusual for a rock musician; she had them pegged as mostly on the weedy side. But his sense of presence loomed like a skyscraper and warmed like the sun.
There was no mistaking that this really was the famous Publico. There were those blue eyes, pale as the northern Irish sky beneath which he’d grown up. There was the famous craggy profile, looking more like a prizefighter’s than a rock and roller’s, thanks to the nose famously smashed by a British paratrooper’s rifle butt during a Dublin demonstration. The voice, gravelly yet the more compelling for it, was compliments of an Ulster policeman’s baton that nearly crushed his larynx.
Unlike a lot of celebrities, neither Moran nor his two longtime bandmates had any whiff of the poseur about them. They had been there and done that, protesting the English occupation of Northern Ireland, as well as the bloody
