Owl and the City of Angels (11 page)

Perhaps? What kind of statement was that?

Before I could probe further, Mr. Kurosawa snapped his fingers, and I heard the click of heels somewhere back behind the recesses of the slot machine maze.

“You have the Medusa head?” Mr. Kurosawa asked.

I nodded and wrapped my fingers around the gold-and-emerald figurehead in my pocket. I’d spent some time examining the Medusa head on the plane ride back. Out of all the things to go after in Egypt, why the hell this had piqued Mr. Kurosawa’s interest escaped me. There was equivalent stuff to be found on the black market, worth more money and easier to get hold of. Maybe Mr. Kurosawa would actually tell me what he wanted with this round of artifacts. I didn’t hold my breath on that though.

“Two acquisitions in one trip, both the Medusa head and the Moroccan death mask. I am impressed.”

Yeah, he’d said that already . . . this time I felt the “but” sliding in there.

“The incubus reports he was not happy with your alteration of plans.”

There it was. “He usually isn’t,” I said.

Mr. Kurosawa gave me a measured stare before retrieving a tablet from the mirrored coffee table I hadn’t seen before. “In this case, I agree with his assessment. As much as I appreciate your independence as a contractor, you will notify him from now on with any changes to your plans.”

Great, Rynn had looped Mr. Kurosawa into this. Fantastic . . .

I opened my mouth to argue, but before I could say anything, Mr. Kurosawa glanced back up from the coffee table, his black eyes carrying a warning. “Consider this a protection of assets, not meddling in your affairs. You ending up dead from your own recklessness is bad for business.”

I bit my tongue. He might look human, but he wasn’t. Dragons were volatile, powerful supernatural entities prone to eating people who pissed them off—especially thieves. This was not the battle to draw my lines over, even though this felt less like a security concern and more like a land grab for my autonomy. And, as Rynn demonstrated, my friends were getting in on it too.

The click of Lady Siyu’s heels filled the room as she rounded the row of slot machines, balancing a silver tray, which she extended towards me.

Mr. Kurosawa arched an eyebrow at me, his black eyes lending the gesture an ominous effect. “I believe you have Caracalla’s Medusa head for me.”

One minute I was being chastised for going to Alexandria, the next I was being asked to hand over the treasure . . .

Sometimes there’s only one way to make a client happy: give them whatever the hell they want.

I stuffed my pride and handed over the gold Medusa head to Lady Siyu on a silver platter. Assholes . . .

“Not a scratch,” I said, dropping it onto the silver tray so it made a soft clank.

Lady Siyu arched an eyebrow, and the corner of her mouth twitched before she turned on her heels and disappeared back into the casino’s dark recesses.

“In answer to your question about the photographs,” Mr. Kurosawa said, pulling me back from fantasizing about Lady Siyu tripping headlong over her stiletto heels and swallowing the damn gold head. “We intercepted a third party working on behalf of the IAA.”

That didn’t sound right. The IAA was a clandestine network with its very own spy ring. I’d never heard of them hiring third-party clandestine organizations to do their work for them. “Who?” I said.

“That is a very good question. Lady Siyu is still investigating. They are very adept at covering their tracks. We only intercepted these through the IAA communication lines.”

“As you can imagine, this raises concern for us. Mr. Kurosawa’s job offer made allowances for the vampires, not the IAA,” Lady Siyu said, slinking back out of the shadows. The silver tray was gone, but this time she held a larger, thicker folder between her red lacquered nails, which she handed to Mr. Kurosawa with a light bow before taking up station back by the bar.

I felt a chill run down my spine. If they terminated our contract because I was a fuckup, my protection from Alexander and the Paris boys was over. Lady Siyu would probably give Alexander a heads-up too.

Mr. Kurosawa held out the file and nodded for me to take it. “I believe the IAA’s renewed interest in you has something to do with this. Please take a look and tell me if any of it looks familiar,” he said, and I noted his skin had turned a deep shade of red, and smoke now rolled off his skin and poured out through his nose.

I opened the file. The first page was an aerial photograph of a mountainous desert region, with a single location outlined in red, accompanied by a series of numbers and letters etched along the side in handwriting. Satellite pictures . . . I wondered whether Mr. Kurosawa’s casino empire branched into media and communications. I flipped to the next page and found the legend to the letters and numbers. Coordinates for burial sites and time-line references. A second photograph was clipped to that, showing a pixelated close-up of the region circled in red.

“Wait a minute,” I said. It was a little out of focus, but the structure and cave-spotted cliff were familiar—there were only a handful of places with settlements like that on the planet. I glanced up at Mr. Kurosawa and tapped the stone buildings jutting out of the side of the cliff like some forlorn ruined castle. “This is Deir Mar Musa, the Monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian, outside Damascus in Syria. It’s named after an Ethiopian prince who ran away from home to become a monk during the sixth century.”

Lady Siyu snorted. “He was sainted for running away?”

“No, you don’t get sainted for running away from your problems—otherwise everybody’d be a saint. You get sainted for getting
killed
running away from your problems. Slight distinction, I know, but it’s the Catholics’ way of appreciating real commitment. In this case, it was the Byzantines who helped martyr him, and even that changes depending on which legend you buy into. Half of them say Moses was Ethiopian royalty and the other half claim he was an escaped Egyptian slave turned thief. Depends who’s telling and which version suits their moral agenda.”

Mr. Kurosawa cleared his voice. I took that as a hint to get back on track.

I flipped a few more pages to see what the hell else had been jammed in there. Dig site records going back to the early 1950s, when the site had been discovered, printouts of reports, inventory of the murals . . . Jesus, these were the original IAA records, stamp and all. IAA archives were notorious to get into—like a Fort Knox for dig site files. Nadya and I stuck to the outer university department databases if we needed records, and even that came with pretty significant risks.

“Where and how did you get your hands on their archives—” I started to ask, then shook my head. “Scratch that, I don’t want to know the answer, do I?”

Following the photographs of the Syria dig site were lists of IAA inventory, mostly photographs of the medieval murals dating back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Interesting stuff, but not worth the time of most real collectors . . . unless they were after the actual murals.

Difficult but doable.

I came across the most recent set of dig notes and photographs. Their dates indicated they’d been taken in the last few months.

I glanced up. Mr. Kurosawa was watching me impassively. “This can’t be right. The IAA pulled out of the monastery two years ago when the Syrian civil war sparked.” Supernatural entities were one thing—that went with the territory—but wars and politics were things the IAA avoided. Better to leave supernatural things buried so they didn’t get caught in the crossfire.

Mr. Kurosawa’s black eyes regarded me, and his mouth set in an unreadable expression. “I assure you, those are accurate. We are not in the habit of acquiring false documentation.”

What the hell had brought them back to the monastery in the middle of the Syrian civil war? Besides a few frescoes painted by Christian priests, there wasn’t anything of value. Hell, if it was frescoes you wanted, I had a line on some of Michelangelo’s submerged under Venice, buried when they filled up all the wells during World War II.

There had to be something more to reopening the dig than a couple of twelfth-century Catholic frescoes . . .

The next set of photographs wasn’t of the monastery, though. They were close-ups of the surrounding hillside, with hollows and rock formations highlighted in color-coded ink, probably for cross-checking in someone’s legend. I found a collection of recent sketches of the surrounding hills, indicating a collection of stone circles that hadn’t been visible in earlier photos. Tombs or burial sites maybe.

The next few pages read like an IAA handbook example on how to document a site, mapping the tunnels and caves that ran underneath the monastery. Items had been pulled out of the tunnels recently and were catalogued—stone tools, flint pieces, stone bowls, even a carved fertility idol or two. My throat went dry as I noted the carbon dating on the stone tools and rock structures . . . 10,000 BC. Neolithic. They’d uncovered another Neolithic site—an advanced one. If the flint tools and bowls were any indication, very advanced, considering the initial carbon dating.

“Son of a bitch, the bastards found something.” I held out the dig diagram and photos for Mr. Kurosawa. He glanced at them, then back up at me, awaiting an explanation.

“They aren’t interested in the monastery,” I said. “Those tunnels and stone structures? That’s what they’re really after. They’re Neolithic, over ten thousand years old. That region of the Levant would make them the Qaraoun, an advanced culture of the late Stone Age. Think after we figured out farming, but before we traded in the chipped stone tools for bronze weapons.” Though for all I knew about the life span of dragons, Mr. Kurosawa might have been around for that.

No wonder the IAA had wandered back into a war zone to excavate. They weren’t looking at the stone circles either; they were excavating the tombs. And from the sketches and photos, there had to be hundreds of them. . . .

A pit formed in the bottom of my stomach. Something I’d read about the monastery being abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century, and details over the deaths of a 1950s archaeology expedition reared its ugly head from the recesses of my buried grad school memories . . .

I started flipping through the pages at a faster rate. It had to be in here somewhere. Part of me hoped it was just my imagination and lack of sleep playing tricks on me.

There it was, buried halfway through the bulky folder, little more than a footnote copied from a textbook. A brief history of the dig site and a nickname taken from a piece of Arabic graffiti carved into the stone over one of the archways back in the 1950s, when it’d first been discovered: City of the Dead.

Shit.

Both Mr. Kurosawa and Lady Siyu were still regarding me, as if I were a rat in a maze. “Look, if they found what I think they’ve found, this is bad.” As in stay the hell away from the Middle East for a while bad. “They shouldn’t even be there. Even if they’ve uncovered Neolithic remains, every tenured professor in the IAA knows the Syrian monastery is off-limits for extensive digs.”

“And why exactly is that,
thief
?” Lady Siyu said, taking a step closer. It wasn’t my imagination; both Lady Siyu and Mr. Kurosawa were studying me a little too closely. I brushed the observation off—
one thing at a time, Owl.

“Because it’s too dangerous.” I spread some sheets out across the bar. “What’s missing from all these files is the recent history of the monastery. Either whoever you had steal these files missed them, or some idiot in the IAA misplaced them. In 1850, the monastery was suddenly abandoned by all its inhabitants. Every monk, every person in the neighboring village, vanished.”

“The area has been war torn for many centuries. Abandoning a remote location is nothing of value,” Mr. Kurosawa said.

“Except that people didn’t leave because of war. Every last one died of an unknown plague that wasted its victims until they were little more than breathless, sweating husks. Which, if whoever got you these files had bothered to do their homework, you’d know from the church records.”

Mr. Kurosawa inclined his head and exchanged a glance with Lady Siyu before nodding for me to continue.

“The disease started in the monastery and spread to the surrounding village. The monks tried to flee at first, but out of fear villagers forced them back, locking them inside, never to reopen. A hundred years later, when visiting archaeologists heard the story, they started to poke around and went looking for the tunnels the dying priests raved about on their deathbeds. Every last one of them died as well.”

“The imaginations and ravings of madmen are not proof. People die all the time. It’s one of the many weaknesses of your species—the most exploitable, in my opinion,” Mr. Kurosawa said.

Was I ever glad I paid attention in history class. Thank a morbid fascination with ancient things that can kill me so I can stay away from them.

“Well, you’ll be happy to know the next team who came along in the early eighties agreed with you. Until they fell sick and the researcher in charge had time to make one very delirious phone call about temples and sacrilege before they all died.
Right
after coming into contact with the Neolithic pieces brought up from the tunnels by the monks and left by the altar.” I rifled through the photographs until I found what I was looking for. “The City of the Dead was one of the first documented cases of a modern-day supernatural plague.” I held up the photograph showing the pieces the 1980 team had come into contact with. “The place is cursed.”

Lady Siyu stopped me with a sharp hiss and strode over. I noticed she was carrying a digital tablet. “We do not care about the site or what the IAA cares to waste its archaeologists’ lives on. What we do care about is why pieces from the city are turning up in private collections.”

“That’s . . . impossible,” I said. My issues with the IAA could fill a book, but they knew how to keep a lid on dangerous artifacts.

She handed me the tablet. “See for yourself,” she said.

Two images were already open on the screen. The first was a head shot of an attractive redheaded woman whom I recognized as Daphne Sylph, an actress from the early ’80s who was more famous for looking like she hadn’t aged a day than for any of her forgettable films; the second was a clip from an article covering an L.A. charity party Daphne held for helping communities in the developing worlds, and which featured her own private collection of artifacts.