Lara Croft and the Blade of Gwynnever Read online

  Lara headed straight for the door. She had no intention of hanging around while trouble piled up.

  The man grabbed her bodily from behind. Her deft technique would normally have disorientated a person for a moment, and certainly would have put most people off further engagement. But he came at her.

  The impact propelled her forwards into the half-open door, which slammed shut. He had a choke hold on her, an expert grip. It was professional. It was military.

  He wasn’t talking anymore. He was simply going all out to subdue her.

  If Lara resisted, he’d tighten his grip, and she’d black out fast. Lara went limp instead, forcing him to bear her weight as she slumped back, and making his grip a little slacker.

  This took him by surprise. Natural instinct was to resist. He tried to recompose his grip.

  Then Lara resisted.

  She slammed an elbow back into his gut. The man barked in pain, and his grip lost focus. Lara reached up and wrenched his arms away with her hands. She turned to face him fast and found him already coming at her. She placed two forearm blocks in quick succession, which deflected his blows, and then jabbed a punch that caught him in the cheek.

  He shouted something. The noise of the altercation was going to bring others. Annie had drawn her feet up onto her seat cushion and was cowering in the armchair, looking on in distress.

  The orderly swung a punch, which Lara dodged, and then rotated into a kick.

  “Kickboxing. Okay,” said Lara, “if that’s where you want to go.” She grabbed the ankle of the leg that swung at her, pivoted, and threw. The orderly hurtled away, bounced off the side of the bed, and fell on the floor. He got up, spitting curses, and she let him get on his feet before she demonstrated how kickboxing really worked.

  The spin-kick took him hard in the chest and threw him into the door of the bathroom cubicle. The door smashed open, and the man fell awkwardly between the toilet bowl and the hand basin.

  He started to get up again. It was time to leave.

  Lara ran out of the room. In the hallway outside, members of staff had begun to approach, both curious and concerned.

  She pushed through them and headed for the exit. No one tried to get in her way.

  As she hit the stairs, she heard the orderly’s voice behind her, yelling.

  “Stop her!”

  CHAPTER THREE:

  UNDERGROUND

  London

  Lara fled down the stairs. She heard the doors bang open above her, and the orderly shouting. She banister-slid the last flight and exited into the ground-floor hallway.

  Someone must have pressed a silent alarm. She saw two uniformed hospital security men milling around the nurses’ station. No going out the way she’d come in, not without creating an even bigger scene.

  Lara headed for the main entrance, dashing along the hallway, trying to look more like a doctor in a hurry than a person fleeing. Nobody paid her particular heed. There was a general bustle.

  The scrubs-clad orderly burst out of the stairwell and looked both ways. He saw the back of her hurrying off along the hall and yelled out, giving chase. The two security men by the station heard the cry and began to run after him. One reached for the radio set clipped to his shoulder.

  Lara glanced back, saw them in pursuit, and broke into a run. Now people noticed her. Tall, athletic, and extremely fast, she sprinted down the hallway, and heads turned.

  The orderly was no slouch. He was almost gaining.

  Lara wondered why the hell they were after her. Apart from the obvious—she wasn’t supposed to be there—the effort was fiercely specific. The orderly was no orderly. His manner, his decent training, and his fitness in a sprint spoke of current or recent service activity. He was anonymous military, just like the unhelpful guard at the dig site. If someone was employing private contractors, they were first class.

  What were they protecting?

  And what the hell had poor Annie Hawkes seen?

  Lara reached the foyer. The double glazed doors were dead ahead of her. Staff jumped out of her path in surprise, and a nurse with a file cart was forced to swerve.

  Between Lara and the exit, two more uniformed security men ambled forwards to intercept her.

  “Right, then, Miss,” one began, holding up his hands to herd her back. He was big, but chubby and slow. Lara dodged him easily. The second man, younger, lunged for her, and she skidded into a sidestep, deflected the lunge of his outstretched arm with her shoulder, and barged him away. Winded, the man stumbled, fell into the nurse’s cart, and overturned it. It fell with a crash, spewing patient notes and files across the tiled floor.

  The orderly, still running at full stretch, vaulted the fallen cart with a bound, and caught her at the doors. Lara had her hand on one of the brass handles, and was pulling the heavy door open when he slammed into her, pressing the door shut again. The orderly grabbed for her, and got hold of her white coat. Lara turned inside it, letting it pull free and drag off her arms. He tossed the empty coat aside, and threw himself at her.

  Lara slapped his grasping hands aside, backing away fast. The heavy glass doors were right behind her. The orderly threw a punch, and she ducked hard. His fist hit the glass with a dull impact like a muffled gong. The plate glass appeared to flex, but did not break. The orderly’s hand, however, was not so durable. He howled in pain, and dropped to his knees, clutching his broken fingers.

  Lara flung open the doors, and raced outside. The security men were still giving chase, but she was much faster than they were. She leapt down the front steps, and sprinted up the drive towards the gate. Voices behind her yelled for her to stop.

  Lara ran out into the street, stopping hard to let a black cab go by, and then ran behind it as it sounded its horn and took off down a side street opposite.

  At the end of the road, she doubled back, and ran into the square where she had parked her roadster. The keys were already in her hand.

  When the security men, out of breath and struggling, entered the square, they were in time to see the little roadster pull out of its parking space and roar away.

  It was one in the morning when Lara arrived back at Candle Lane. The night was hot and still, the sky an orange glare of sodium lights. She’d driven home, prepared some kit and changed her clothes, and then gone out again by cab.

  Candle Lane: if she was going to get any answers, it would be at the site.

  Lara asked the taxi driver to drop her off a street away and then covered the final distance on foot. There was a bustle of activity around the entrance of a late-opening club, but otherwise the area was quiet.

  Lara had put on black boots, black combat pants, a dark T-shirt, and a black leather bomber jacket. She’d pinned her hair up and was carrying a small, black, nylon rucksack.

  Just shy of the lane, she pulled black gloves and a dark beanie from her rucksack and put them on. Then she rummaged to take out a pair of good-quality night-vision goggles, but thought better of it. She wasn’t going for all-out stealth. The street was poorly lit, but not pitch-dark, and she hoped that her plain attire would keep her as anonymous as possible to any CCTV. The night-vision goggles would be a dead giveaway, and they were in the rucksack if she absolutely needed them.

  The lane was shadows, with a pool of light cast by the single street lamp that was still operational. Lara hugged the shadows along the walls until she reached the skips, and then climbed up and moved across the backs of them to the wire fence. She checked that she was out of range of the cameras, and put on the goggles. The world changed to a pale green underwater scene. Using the goggles, she checked for the beams of laser sensors and the heat of pressure pads. Nothing. The site had been secured, but conventionally so.

  She swung over the fence and dropped down the other side, landing on rubble. It was quiet, apart from the distant thump of music coming from the nightclub half a
street away. She heard water dripping.

  She moved around to the site entrance and used the bolt cutters in her rucksack to remove the padlock from the weather doors. She went inside.

  Lara was on the ground floor of a derelict mail-sorting office. Duckboarding along the floor and a string of lamps showed her the route to the site along a side corridor. The air was dry, but she could smell a persistent damp.

  At the end of the corridor was the mouth of the site, an excavated pit about ten yards square. It was lined with scaffolding, and ladders led down from one platform to the next, deep into the ground. Empty spoil trays and specimen cartons were stacked up on shelves beside the pit, and benches were piled with equipment: plastic bags, brushes, lamps, hand tools, and water bottles.

  Lara clambered down the scaffolding ladders. The smell of damp was stronger below ground level. The dig had sliced clean down through the depot’s basement structure into the sub-soil and the layers beneath. Heavy reinforcement posts had been put in to hold the pit up and open.

  Three ladders down, Lara took off her goggles to preserve power, put them away, and switched to a flashlight. The powerful pearl-white beam probed the way ahead of her.

  She went down about twenty metres and found herself in an artificial cave, a dug-out cavity of considerable size. More site equipment was stored here, with sorting tables, heavier tools, and racks of hard hats.

  Following the beam of her torch, Lara entered the main tunnel.

  The tunnel was wide and lined with duckboarding. It sloped down. About twenty metres along, a side shaft opened to her right, and she peered into what was clearly part of the abandoned Underground station. She saw white tiling and the remains of a platform bench. Lara pushed on and soon felt a draught on her face. She was passing under one of the vent shafts constructed to keep the air circulating.

  Beyond the vent, the tunnel opened up into a broad chamber that showed extensive excavation work. The floor had been dug to various levels, revealing old postholes and timbers. The area had been gridded out with coloured tape attached to pegs. There was more equipment here, and more strings of lights.

  To the left of the chamber, metal ladders led down into a larger chamber twenty feet below. Lara passed an area of mangled wall that was partially wrapped in heavy plastic sheeting. She saw traces of metal through the sheeting, heavy, dark, and angular. Was that the buried plane wreck Annie had mentioned? It didn’t look like much, just a layer of compressed, time-stained wreckage sandwiched between layers of earth and rubble.

  The lower chamber was more impressive. The floor had been dug away, and Lara’s torch beam revealed traces of tiles that had once formed a Roman hypocaust, the under-floor heating system. Then she saw the floor, a tiled mosaic. It was beautiful and almost complete, a scene of Imperial domestic life created from thousands of tiny tile shards. Household gods and a benign paternal face looked up at her from the floor. It was one of the best Roman survivals she had ever seen on the UK mainland, as important as anything at Fishbourne Palace, or Dernavorum, or Ilchester Villa.

  Lara looked at it for a long time, studying the flow and composition by the light of her torch. This kind of relic was the reason she did what she did. It was beautiful and fragile, a direct connection to the past. It had been hidden from human eyes for eighteen hundred years.

  Annie’s team had done an amazing job exposing and preserving it. Why had they stopped?

  Lara froze. She thought she heard a noise. She waited, but no one appeared and nothing stirred.

  She felt a breeze again, like a soft sigh. There was another excavation beyond the Roman floor. She followed the duckboard walkway around the mosaic and found the head of another metal ladder. It disappeared down into an earth-cut shaft.

  Lara started the descent. Two rungs down, she froze again. She kept hearing noises. Was there something down there with her?

  Nothing.

  Just her imagination, perhaps. And if it wasn’t her imagination, she’d deal with whatever it was. With Carter Bell missing, and Annie Hawkes incapacitated and held captive in a psychiatric unit, Lara was spoiling for a fight.

  Lara continued down. The walls of the shaft were stone after the first few feet of earth: old and well-worked slabs that suggested to Lara something ancient, really ancient.

  It looked like a cyst chamber, an ancient tomb cut into the earth to take a burial. It looked almost Neolithic.

  If that were true, the deepest parts of the site weren’t eighteen hundred years old. They were more like three or four thousand years old. Annie Hawkes’s team had stumbled upon something very rare and truly incredible.

  The shaft was deep. A single ladder wouldn’t reach all the way to the bottom, and a second one had been lashed to the first. Lara moved from one ladder to the next carefully, aware of how directional her light was and how easily one misstep could end her visit disastrously.

  She wondered, again, whether she was alone. It was as if there was someone or something right there with her, as if something in the shaft was clinging to the wall behind her in the darkness. She wasn’t given to paranoia; it wasn’t in her nature.

  Lara shook off the feeling, and panned her torch around. There was nothing but bare stone.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she said into the darkness.

  At the bottom of the ladder, Lara found herself in a broad, low chamber lined with stone slabs. It was eerie, and her slightest movement made odd, reflected sounds. It was damp and hot, and the air was stale.

  The chamber was incredible. They had discovered a Neolithic cyst buried deep under the heart of London. This was perhaps the earliest evidence yet of occupation or habitation in the tract of river basin that would one day become one of the most famous cities in the world.

  Lara moved around the chamber slowly, taking it all in. The stonework was extraordinary, perfectly worked by hand and antler tool and perfectly fitted together. She wondered if it had been a tomb, but there was no sign of graves.

  Then she saw the altar.

  It filled the far end of the chamber. A stone plinth, rectangular and made of what looked like sarsen stone, was set in front of a single standing stone about nine feet high. The plinth was clearly what Annie had called the table. There was a long, shallow groove in it, perhaps for offerings. Numbered markers had been left where objects had been found and removed.

  The standing stone was even more extraordinary. It was engraved, cut with bas-relief figures, and the shape, very geometric, was—

  Lara stopped. She took a deep breath.

  What she was seeing was impossible, unbelievable.

  She took a step closer, and played her torch beam up and down the stone.

  It wasn’t a Neolithic standing stone at all. The shape, construction, and design were unmistakable, as was the style of the inscriptions covering its face.

  The standing stone was, in fact, an obelisk of the Egyptian New Kingdom period.

  Almost trembling with astonishment, questions whirling in her head, Lara took out her compact digital camera and began to take pictures of the obelisk from all angles. No wonder Carter Bell had been so troubled and concerned. This object had absolutely no business being here. Who had made this crypt? It couldn’t be Neolithic. Had some secret society of Victorian eccentrics dug the place and furnished it with a relic they had shipped back from Luxor? It was a confection, an artificial creation put together by the idle and the rich. It had to be. The ancient Egyptians had never come to the British Isles. They had never been guests of the Neolithic Britons.

  Lara thought she heard movement again, and then quickly remembered the intense disquiet she kept feeling, the sensation that she was not alone.

  But this time it was real.

  Powerful torch beams caught her. She turned, blinded, and half-saw two or three silhouettes behind the glare.

  “Raise your hand
s,” a man’s voice ordered.

  “Who are you?” Lara asked, squinting.

  “Raise your damn hands.”

  The torch beams pinning her did not waver. She heard the click of safety catches sliding off.

  “Raise your hands now, or we fire,” said the voice.

  Lara Croft raised her hands in surrender.

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  IDENTIFICATION PURPOSES

  London

  The room was small and very plain: brick walls, a cast concrete floor, a single door, and a small barred window, high up. The single fluorescent-light fitting emitted a harsh glare. Two chairs sat on either side of a simple metal table.

  Lara sat on one of the chairs, facing the table, waiting. She figured she was still somewhere in the central London area. The drive in the plain van had only lasted fifteen minutes.

  The anonymous men in dark clothes had left her waiting in the room for three times that long.

  A man stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He was just under six feet tall and solidly built. Lara estimated he was in his late thirties. He was dark-haired, and quite good-looking, if you liked the rugby-player thing. He had a small scar running down from the side of his nose to his upper lip.

  The man was carrying Lara’s jacket and her rucksack. He put them down on the table.

  “Who are you?” Lara asked.

  The man did not answer. He unzipped the rucksack and spilled the contents out onto the table.

  “Where am I?” Lara asked.

  Again, the man didn’t reply. He moved the items that had fallen from the rucksack around, sorting through them: flashlight, penlight, a fold of notes and some loose change, digital camera, utility tool.

  He picked up the utility tool, slid it open until it was in its knife format, and then slowly began to cut out the lining of Lara’s bomber jacket.

  He did it skillfully. He’d done it before.