Rogue Angel - Polar Quest Part 25

"Little program I wrote some time back. It can crunch numbers and letters roughly ten thousand times faster than I can. In a single minute it can sometimes break a computer code. Cool, huh?"

"Very," Annja admitted.

Knightmare slapped a new CD into the computer. "Hold on just a second..."

Annja looked at the door. Did someone just walk by outside? She thought she could see a shadow in the light silhouetted against the wall of the shelter. Was it Dave? Or maybe Garin?

"Knight, any luck on that?" she asked urgently.

"I need another minute, Annja. I'm going as fast as I can."

"Go faster. My cover might be blown here at any second."

"Your cover?"

Annja sighed. "You know what I mean."

"Someone's been watching too many spy movies."

"Yeah," Annja said. "That's exactly right."

"Hold on, I think I got something."

Annja leaned closer to the computer, as if she wanted to be right there looking over Knight's shoulder as he read his screen.

"Yep, I think I've got it. I'm in his hard drive."

Annja rubbed her hands together. "I need a certain file."

"Which one, there are a lot of them here...looks like the colonel likes his p.o.r.nography, too."

Annja shook her head. "I don't need that."

"What's the name of the file?"

She could hear laughing now. Someone was outside her shelter. "Look for something labeled something like Laboratory Report or something similar."

"Hang on."

The walls of the shelter kept the noise to a minimum and it was difficult trying to figure out if the voices she heard were of Dave and someone else talking or not. She couldn't afford to take the risk. She might need to use the sat phone again.

"Look, Knight, I need that file."

"There's nothing here, Annja. No files like that one."

"Nothing?"

"No."

"Can you send me any doc.u.ments on the hard drive?"

Knight looked at her. "Well, yeah, but you're on a dial-up connection, right? It would take a while."

"Send me anything from the past week or so."

Knightmare typed a few keys. "That's much better. Just three files. I'm sending them to you now."

Annja hit Refresh and then after another grueling minute, saw her green light flash. She had mail.

"I think that's it, Annja. I've got to get off the line now. They've detected me on the system."

"They have?" Annja asked, alarmed.

"Yeah, be careful. There's a chance they could work it back to you if they know you've got a sat phone."

"They don't."

"Be careful anyway. I'm out."

Annja's screen went dark and she quickly unplugged the sat phone and put it back in Dave's backpack. She rushed back to her bed and sat down with her laptop as the door to the shelter opened and Dave walked in.

"Hey."

Annja looked up and smiled. "Hey yourself."

"Any luck with Thomson?"

Annja shook her head. "Nah, he wasn't in so I just left and came back here. I wanted to jot down a few ideas I had in my journal. Nothing too elaborate, but you know..."

Dave came closer to her. "Listen, sorry about how Zach and I got all over you at the cafeteria."

"It's all right."

He shook his head. "No, it's not. You've obviously got some thoughts on this and we didn't respect them. I'm sorry for my part and I hope you weren't too offended."

Annja smiled. "Thanks. I appreciate it."

Dave nodded. "You coming to the dig site? I was just on my way down there when I thought I'd stop by and see if you were here."

Annja glanced at her laptop. She wanted to read that file now.

Badly.

But staying might look suspicious. Instead, she closed her laptop and smiled. "Yeah, I'm coming. Just let me get my stuff."

25.

Dave and Annja walked through the wind toward the dig site. Dave kept his head down, trying to ward off the cold as much as possible. Annja followed in his wake, using his larger body as a shield.

When they reached the entrance, Dave held the door and Annja ducked inside. The warm air greeted them and she breathed easier now that they were out of the cold. "All this exposure to extremes of temperature can't be good for my health," Annja said. "Anyone ever do any research to see how that affects the human body?"

Dave shrugged. "I don't know. But I'd rather be warm than cold."

Annja smiled. "At this point, I think that's a rather foregone conclusion. Don't you?"

"Well, maybe." Dave pointed at the entrance to the caverns. "You going down?"

"Yeah." Annja showed her identification to the armed guards and then led the way down the sloping walkway to the tunnel. As she walked, she was aware of Dave behind her. He wasn't saying anything.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Huh? Yeah, fine. I was just thinking about something, that's all."

"What about?" Annja asked. "It's weird not hearing much of anything down here. It's like we could get lost and scream and no one would hear us."

"We are basically inside a mountain, if you think about it," Dave said. "Surrounded on all sides by rock and dirt. All that weight above and below us, pushing in on all sides like some giant vise."

Annja glanced back at him. "Are you trying to make me claustrophobic?"

"Is it working?"

Annja shook her head. "Remind me to tell you about the time I was locked in a coffin for several hours."

"Underground?"

"No, in a funeral home. But the effect was the same. I had to make peace with being in that tight spot. And those caskets are remarkably airtight. I barely made it out of there alive."

Dave chuckled. "That must have been one for the journal."

"The what?"

"Journal. What you were working on when I came back to the shelter."

Annja nodded quickly. "Well, yeah, it would have been, but I wasn't keeping a journal back then. That's only something I took up recently when my life started taking strange twists and turns that even I can't figure out."

"Like coming down to the bottom of the world?"

"Exactly."

Dave smiled and Annja turned back around. "What about you? Do you ever write things down?"

"Never."

"So secretive, huh?" Annja laughed. "Got all sorts of things no one should ever know about rattling around in your head?"

"Something like that. Turn here," Dave said.

Annja turned at the fork in the tunnel. Far off, she could hear the telltale clangs of shovels sinking into dirt, followed by the sound of dirt being thrown into piles. "Is Zach already down here?"

"Yeah. He said he was going straight from breakfast."

"Cool." Annja kept walking. Ahead of her she could see more light coming from stationary lamps set up at the dig site. She heard voices, as well.

When she walked through the cavern opening, she was surprised to see Colonel Thomson standing there. Garin stood nearby. Zach was in one of the holes still working his shovel furiously. Dirt and grime stained his face and his coveralls.

Colonel Thomson looked up. "h.e.l.lo, Miss Creed. Nice of you to come on down at last."

"Sorry, I had to finish up a few things in my shelter."

"Oh?"

"Just some notes."

Colonel Thomson smiled. "I believe you know Major Braden?"

Annja looked at Garin and smiled. He nodded back. Thomson kept speaking. "So Zachary here tells me that you're a bit obsessed with the laboratory a.n.a.lysis report regarding the necklace."

"I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with it," Annja protested.

"But you think there might be something valuable to be gleaned from it, if you were allowed access to it," he said.

"I think so, yes."

Thomson smiled. "Well, I'm afraid you're not allowed to see that report. You see, it's cla.s.sified. There are other things going on here besides your scientific study of this area and the dig for various artifacts."

"Such as?"

"Such as I'm not going to get into it with you at the moment. Surely, you can appreciate the need for the strictest confidence in this regard," he said.

Annja frowned. "To some extent, yes. But it seems like the security of this place is stifling the search for the truth."

"It's doing no such thing," the colonel stated.

"Isn't it? That report might shed some light on where these relics come from. We can't fathom them being created here on Earth around the time the carbon dating stamp supposedly says they were made. Nor is the metal alloy apparently something that was created here. But all of that is secondhand information. You told the scientists that, rather than letting them see the report."

Thomson's expression darkened. "It seems to me that you might be implying that I lied about the a.n.a.lysis results," he said angrily.

"I'm not implying that. I'm merely pointing out how strange it seems that we wouldn't be allowed to see it," Annja said.

"I'm sure there are lots of things you haven't been privy to in the past, Miss Creed. Another report shouldn't make that much of a difference to you, should it?"

Annja glanced at Garin, who kept his eyes focused on the wall of the cavern. "It shouldn't, no. But it does. I want to know what I'm dealing with here. What we're dealing with. And not having all of the information makes it that much harder to come to a conclusion about this. Which is, I thought, why I'm down here in the first place," she said.