Eye In The Pyramid

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual persons, places, or events are a mistake; I meant for it to be pure B.S. The name Lara Croft is the intellectual property (©) of Eidos Interactive. Please don’t sue me. I don’t have enough property to justify the legal expenses.

EYE IN THE PYRAMID

© Bowen H. Greenwood, 1998

One Fall day, when the air was just cold enough to bite but not quite cold enough to wear a heavy coat, Penelope Black put down her feather duster, straightened her clothing, and went to answer the door. The postman gave her a box which turned out to contain a whole new life, although on the surface it looked like a package from her husband.

The package, at least, was an improvement on what she’d heard from him lately: absolutely nothing.

She’d had a note, a week ago, that he was on the trail of the most incredible story he – or anyone else – had ever covered. Penelope wrote that off to his inflated sense of self worth. Her husband, Timothy Black, was quite convinced he was God’s gift to everything on the planet.

And he went everywhere on the planet trying to prove it, too. Tim was a reporter for the Herald-Post, a daily with relatively low standards for news. Tim’s work consisted primarily of writing stories about who Politician X was sleeping with, or which clinic Movie Star Y had just enrolled in. Seven years ago, when she had been 18, Penelope thought his work was glamorous, and she thought Tim himself was very important. He must be, she had thought, since he writes about so many important people. He was also much richer than the working-class girl had ever dreamed of. She’d been so flattered when the older, worldly reporter took an interest in her.

At 25, older and wiser, Penelope now thought Tim’s work was silly and pandering, and the man who did it immature and uncaring

Tim himself hadn’t been there, that night in Paris two years ago, but his colleagues had. And Tim’s first reaction had been to call himself stupid for coming home for the anniversary of his wedding when he could have stayed in Paris and written about the death of the Princess.

Before 1997, he had traveled a lot. Since then, he had traveled almost exclusively, and was almost never home with his wife. She didn’t even really care, any more. She’d realized her mistake a long time ago. But still, it got lonely at home some nights, and she wished Tim were with her. Especially on nights like this one promised to be: cold and foggy and easy to feel lonely in.

Tim won’t be having a night like mine, Penelope thought to herself. He’ll be having a warm night, in a beautiful place. She almost started crying when the worst of her fears resurfaced: Probably a warm night in a beautiful place with a pretty girl. Probably that one he wrote about last month – the gorgeous archaeologist he interviewed.

Penelope suspected her because it was the only article Tim had ever written about a rich person in which he used only admiring words.

Penelope eased her petite frame into a chair, ran the fingers of her right hand through her neck-length blond hair, and examined the package from Tim. "Well, it’s not posted from the Riviera," she muttered, "so if he’s having an affair, it can’t be a very grand one."

No, the package came from Iraq, which at least seemed to Penelope like the kind of place that reporters wrote about these days. Of course, it’s also the kind of place one finds gorgeous archeologists. She opened it, wondering what on Earth her husband would send to her from Iraq. He had never once brought her a souvenir from his travels, and to send one by post in advance of his return would be simply ridiculous.

She opened the box and out came a great deal of bubble-wrap packaging, a sealed steel tube, and a note from Tim.

Penelope looked up from the letter with alarm and anger. The first line sounded like he was leaving her. Fine! Fine! Let’s just end the charade. Leave me, see if I care! She shook off the thought and read the rest of the letter.

Blackford (his editor at the paper) is surely one of them, so I cannot send this to him. I hate to send it to you, because I know it’s dangerous to have this and you have no experience in such things. My only hope is that you will find a way to get this document to Lara Croft

Penelope stopped again, catching her breath. That woman again! He was having an affair with her! She gritted her teeth, and read on:

Penelope took a deep breath and sat down. She felt tears of anger and shame welling up in her eyes, and since no one was around to see, she let them fall. I’m probably the only wife I know of who’s been dumped for an older woman. And the cheek of that man! Asking me to take this package to his lover! How could he?

She examined the metal tube, and looked for a way to open it. She found none. "I wonder what it is," she said aloud, her voice unstable from the crying.

Penelope went to Tim’s study (actually a converted bedroom), and opened his filing cabinet. She shuffled through the manila folders until she found the one labeled, "Croft, Lara." In that folder were pages and pages of interview notes, clips of articles other publications had written about her, some articles Croft herself had written, and finally a tear-sheet from the Herald-Post, with Tim’s profile of her on it.

Penelope didn’t bother to read it, because she knew the article by heart, it had made her so jealous. Her eyes found the appropriate phrases all too easily on the page: "A strikingly beautiful woman . . . obviously intelligent . . . a cutting wit . . ." Penelope stopped skimming, and sighed. Tim had never said any of those things about her.

Her eyes came back to the article, and she stared at the picture. "Professor Lara Croft on the banks of the Euphrates," read the caption. It was posed, with the subject leaning on a boulder and smiling at the camera. The smile was one of indulgence, as if she were doing a favor for the photographer. Penelope sighed again, gazing at the photo. She was wearing tight little shorts, a turquoise leotard, and holsters with two pistols on her hips, of all things. The outfit wasn’t what had Penelope worried, though. It was the beautiful, braided, long brown hair – so much nicer than her own stringy locks. That and the bust that just wasn’t fair to other women. That figure . . . That smile . . . No wonder Tim prefers her.

She looked out the window at the drizzling rain, and tried to shake the jealous depression off. You don’t know he’s having an affair with her. Why would he ask you to find her, if they were lovers?

. So, she was to find this Croft woman — and how am I to manage that, she thought, when Tim couldn’t find her himself? — give her this steel tube, presumably with a document in it, and then just sit here and wait until either Tim comes home or she heard that he was dead.

She definitely wished she hadn’t gotten the package.

Penelope sat in Tim’s desk, and reached into the drawer for one of his cigarettes. She only smoked when he wasn’t home – which was most of the time -- because he would never have approved of her sharing his bad habit. After a moment to think and puff on the Dunhill, she picked up the telephone and dialed. She waited through an automatic answering menu which thanked her for calling the British Museum, then pushed the button to speak to an operator. A long wait, and then she asked for Lara Croft. She was transferred twice before talking to a secretary in Croft’s department in the museum.

"I’m sorry, Dr. Croft is away in the field indefinitely. Her trips often get rather lengthy. She does call in for messages from time to time, though, may I take one for her?"

And what, Penelope asked herself silently, would I say in a message? My husband sent me a package saying he was about to die and wanted you to have some random document or another? I think not. "No, thank you," she said aloud. "Where is she in the field?"

"We have an expedition in the Tatawin province in Tunisia, which Dr. Croft is with, but she often moves about quite a bit."

Well, she’s not in Iraq, so maybe they’re not having an affair. Of course, Tim did say he didn’t know where she was right now. Penelope thanked the woman, and hung up the phone. She stuck Tim’s note in her purse, set the metal tube on top of that, and leaned back in the chair, lighting another Dunhill. Well, this will simply have to wait until Tim comes home, she thought, already sinking into denial about the import of the letter. I have no intention of traipsing off to Africa in search of the woman who’s probably my husband’s lover.

She fixed — yet another — dinner for one, and then undressed to go to bed. She looked wistfully at the elaborate silk and lace nightie she’d bought a week ago to impress her husband, then sighed again. Not much point in that, was there? Shrugging, she just climbed under the covers wearing only an oversize pink T-shirt. Penelope went to sleep, convinced that Tim was just a bit off his chum from too much desert heat.

The reek of smoke in her nostrils woke her.

Penelope sat bolt upright in her bed, instantly afraid. She glanced around the king sized bed – which always seemed much too big, since most often it was only her sleeping in it – but she knew she hadn’t smoked in here, and couldn’t have dropped a cigarette on the sheets.

She ran to her bedroom door, and pressed her hand against it. It was not yet warm, so she opened it. Out she went into the hallway, where she saw that, although the fire was at this point mostly in the living room, it was on its way to the bedroom fast.

Penelope ran back into the bedroom and looked hesitantly out the window. Do I really have to go out that way?

But she knew that she did. From beyond her door, she could hear the crackle of flames eating her home. She walked up to the window, opened it, and looked down at the ground. That’s when she noticed the rain. It was a good London rain, with heavy, fat drops of water that made a thwacking sound when they hit the glass.

She and Tim rented the second floor flat in a small apartment building. Penelope saw her downstairs neighbors, the Churches, on the street below, huddling in the rain in their nightclothes. Mrs. Church saw her, and waved for her to jump. A curious on-looker, who had stopped to watch the fire, ran forward to catch her when she made the leap.

Penelope stuck her head out the window quite a ways before figuring out that that wasn’t quite the proper way to jump out. I’ll land head first, and we don’t want that.

She pulled her head back in, started to stick a leg out, realized that she was only wearing a T-shirt, and stopped, wincing at the indignity of it all. But a crash from the direction of the living room, as some part of the building’s structure collapsed, spurred her on. She swallowed her pride and stuck one leg out. She had angled her second foot out the window, and sitting on the pane, when she remembered: Tim’s package! She wasn’t too sure she cared about his document or whatever, but he had seemed very insistent.

Over the roaring sound of the fire, she heard cries of, "No, jump!" from the rapidly growing crowd below as she pulled herself back inside. She wasted a precious second to stick her head out again and yell, "I’ll be right back!"

Hearing the wail of sirens in the background, she ran to the bedroom door and laid her hand against it. It was warm now, but she foolishly opened it a crack to peek out. Fortunately, the fire was mostly along the opposite side of the hallway, and her bedroom door was clear. So far.

She opened the door all the way and felt the full blast of the heat. Keeping herself pressed flat against the wall that wasn’t burning, Penelope inched down the hall to Tim’s study, and dashed in the door. There was the metal tube with that silly document in it, sitting right on top of her purse, where she had set it earlier.

She grabbed both, then ran to the window in the study and opened it. Looking out, she could see a gathered crowd pointing at her bedroom window, urging firefighters to get a ladder to it. But then one man spotted her looking out the study window, and ran over there. Over the cackle of the fire she heard him yell, "One more second, and they’ll have a ladder here!"

But Penelope didn’t have one more second. With a crash and a roar, the study wall collapsed, and flames splattered into the room, catching some paper on the desk on fire. She shrieked, and began clambering out the window. She was hanging on, with her gut perched on the window pane, trying to worm out to where she could hold on and drop, when she slipped, knocked her head on the raised window, and fell to the earth.

The passer-by broke her fall.

It was the same man who had earlier been below her bedroom window, encouraging her to jump. He’d run over to help her down just as she fell, and Penelope landed in a heap on top of him. He fell to the ground as well, absorbing most of her impact, but Penelope’s head, unfortunately, was in the wrong position. She got a good whack on the pavement.

She saw stars, shook her head a bit, and managed to avoid passing out. Clutching her purse and the tube in one hand, she climbed off her would-be rescuer and pulled her T-shirt back into place with the other.

The man stood up, brushed himself off, and looked at her. "Are you all right?" he asked.

Penelope shook her head, feeling the effects of her fall. There seemed to be two of him, although they both looked handsome enough. Dark hair, angular features, and a wide smile were what she noticed most. "I’m fine," she replied, shaking her head again.

A harried fireman ran over to see to her condition. She repeated that she was fine. A trained emergency medical technician, the fireman should probably have checked her pupils for dilation, and her ears for bleeding, since she’d just whacked her head. But there was a fire going on, and although the apartment building was already a total loss, he was primarily concerned with preventing the fire from spreading. After a quick inquiry about whether anyone else was in her flat, which Penelope answered with a shake of the head, he ran back to help his fellows fight the blaze, leaving her in the care of the passer-by.

"That looked like a nasty thump you took on the head," the man said. "I think we ought to get you to a hospital."

Penelope was now beginning to feel really dizzy, and had trouble keeping her image of the man from dividing in two. She nodded faintly at the sensible suggestion, and took his hand when he led off to his car. As she climbed into the passenger seat next to her rescuer, part of Penelope’s mind even noticed the ambulance waiting by the curb to treat any injuries. But she just wasn’t thinking straight.

Still clutching her purse and the odd metal tube, she sat quietly with her eyes closed as the man drove off. But she didn’t go to sleep. Penelope just rested, trying to give her brain a chance to recover from the bounce off the pavement, and in general recovering her wits. Soon, her faculties began to reassert themselves.

When her companion turned left, instead of going straight as she expected, things began to drop into place, like the wheels on a slot machine.

This wasn’t the way to Saint Thomas’s Hospital.

There had been an ambulance waiting to treat people on the scene.

And she was more than half-naked in a car with a man she’d never met, who was supposedly a passer-by who stopped to help, but had his car parked right in front of her building.

She risked a glance at him while he was watching traffic, this time looking more attentively, and with her vision no longer doubling. Poking out just a little from under the man’s blazer was what could only be the end of a pistol.

Penelope quickly looked away when the man’s eyes came back to her. As best she could she feigned semi-consciousness, as her mind screamed about all the horrible things that could be happening to her. She could be raped. She could be murdered. She could be kidnapped and sold into white slavery.

When the car stopped at another traffic light, Penelope grabbed for the door handle, tore it open, and yelled, "What are you, some kind of pervert rapist?" as she leapt out, still clutching her bundle. The man reached for her as she jumped. In her heightened state of awareness Penelope finally noticed that when he grabbed the man aimed not for her, but for the metal tube clutched in her hand.

But he missed, and she hit the ground rolling. She clambered to her feet screaming, and ran for the nearest alley she could. She didn’t recognize any of the shops on this street, and didn’t see a policeman she could alert, so she just ran and ran, yelling at the top of her lungs. In the dark of night, if anyone noticed that she was running down the street wearing only a T-shirt, they knew enough about the part of town they lived in not to pay much attention.

Oblivious to honks at his stopped car, the man leapt out to pursue her, even though the light had turned green again. Looking back to see that she was being followed, it occurred to Penelope that maybe screaming wasn’t helping, and was only leading the man to her. She emerged from the alley on another street, and fled down it as fast as she could until she reached a run down, seedy hotel. She ran in the front door, past a desk clerk who called something after her about clothes being necessary once you left your room, found a stairway, ran down it to a basement, and didn’t stop there. Across the room was another door, which she took, and discovered another stairway. Up she ran and emerged into the same alley she had just come from. No one was in sight, especially not her pursuer, so Penelope climbed behind a dumpster, sat on the hard concrete, and pulled her knees up to her chest, trying to cover herself more.

Very quietly, afraid to make a sound, Penelope began to cry.

That lasted about hour, during which no one disturbed her and the sun finally rose. Drying her eyes and peeking out from her smelly hiding place, Penelope remembered her escape. It had been fast, almost in the blink of an eye, but there had been no mistaking it. The man had grabbed for Tim’s package, not for her. And he had been waiting there for her to jump out of the burning apartment, a car at the ready. And why had the building burned so quickly anyway, in the heavy rain?

It just didn’t seem real. Reporters dashing around the middle east uncovering conspiracies that people got killed over, secret documents in sealed tubes — it was all too abnormal for Penelope. Such things just didn’t happen, and if they did, then certainly not to people like her. She was a housewife who’d never even gone to college. She didn’t even read the newspapers that much. She certainly wasn’t rich or powerful. How could any of this happen to her?

But she couldn’t ignore the evidence of her own senses. Here she was, sitting nearly naked behind a dumpster in the parts of London the tourists never saw.

So, what do I do about this? I could go home, but it’s burned down. Besides, whoever that guy was, he probably went back there to wait for me. I could just go check into a hotel, but how would Tim know where to find me? I could call the paper and tell them, but Tim was afraid of telling the paper. And besides, even if I pay for the hotel with a credit card, eventually the bill is going to come due, and how on earth will I pay it, if Tim really doesn’t come back? In her twenty-five years of life, Penelope had never held a job, and didn’t even know where to get one, let alone what she was competent to do.

The words of Tim’s letter came back to her as she forced herself to confront the possibility that he might be right; he might not be coming back, ever. Get this document to Lara Croft.

Penelope picked herself up, and headed out of the alley. Sticking her nose in the air and ignoring the stares from other early morning pedestrians, she walked down the street, looking for any kind of clothing store to get dressed in. She stumbled across one that looked half-way prosperous, a military surplus store that sold cast-off British Army equipment.

Penelope perked up. If I’m going off to Tunisia, I could use Army clothes. I’ll bet you’re not supposed to run around the desert in Chanel slacks.

She walked in the door, looked at the surprised clerk, and said, "I need some clothes."

The portly old man with a kindly face stared at her for a second, and said, "I should say so." He waved her in the general direction of some clothing racks. Since Marrying Tim, Penelope had gotten used to shopping in places where the help went and got the clothing you asked for, but she took it in stride and walked to a rack with khaki army fatigue pants hanging from it. Shuffling through them, she learned that almost all were too big for her size-four frame. She grabbed the smallest pair of pants she could find, then spotted a one-size-fits-all adjustable belt. She snapped that up too, and walked back up to the counter.

"I’ll be buying more," she said, "but I’d like to put these on now. Do you have a dressing room?" She put her credit card down on the counter.

The man waved towards the back of the store, where Penelope saw several booths with slatted doors, just lined up against the back wall. Again, not quite the style of dressing room to which she was accustomed, but it would do. She walked back, went into one of the booths, and slid into the pants. Once the belt was on and adjusted for her waist size, she bent over -- no seats in these dressing rooms – and rolled the cuffs up a bit, so they didn’t get under her heels. Coming back out in her pink night T-shirt and the new green pants, she felt like a fashion earthquake, but at least she wasn’t indecently exposed anymore.

Shopping some more, her eye fell on a rack of army boots. Growing accustomed to her vision of herself slogging through the deserts of Africa with a secret document, she actually chuckled, and picked up a pair in something close to her size. When she put them on, she discovered that the cuffs of the pants could be tucked into the boots, rather than rolled up. Feeling dashing and adventurous, Penelope added a waterproof knapsack, aviator-type sunglasses, a survival kit with first aid stuff and some flares which she didn’t know how to use, and two black T-shirts, which would go with the whole kit better than her pink one would. Once she had two more pairs of pants, she packed the whole bundle up to the counter.

Penelope felt like she was in disguise, that in fact this was not really Penelope Black. Even her family wouldn’t recognize her if they saw her like this. And with that came a certain sense of liberation. Who cares what people think of me? They’re not actually seeing Penelope Black, anyway. They’re seeing some tough broad who carries an army knapsack over her shoulder and wears combat boots.

She walked out of the store, a new confidence in her stride, secure behind the mirror glasses and the baggy pants. She hailed a cab, and used the only actual cash in her wallet to pay for the ride. When she said, "Heathrow, please, and make it snappy," the voice was firmer, and the tone a bit deeper, than they had ever been before. Penelope had never said "Make it snappy" before in her life.

Her old personality reasserted itself briefly at the British Airways ticket counter. How could she ever pay for a plane ticket bought on this kind of last minute notice. Why, the bill would be more than a thousand pounds! Tim might never come back, and then she could never pay that bill.

But then her new voice spoke inside her head. That’s not your credit card, that’s Penelope Black’s. You’re going to be in Africa, and what’s the bank going to do to you there? She gave the clerk the plastic card and bought a first class ticket on the first plane to Tunis. Then she walked to an automatic teller machine and ran the card’s balance up as high as it would go, taking out a thousand pounds in cash. She briefly thanked God for Tim’s long history at a steady job with a high wage, which had persuaded the bank to give them a card with such a high limit, and then she went to a pay telephone. A brief call to the British Museum yielded the approximate location of the dig they had going on in Tunisia. She paused at a kiosk and, forgoing the Dunhills she had always snuck from Tim’s desk, bought a package of American Marlboros. Finally, Penelope was ready.

Passing a giant picture window that looked out on the runway, Penelope caught her reflection in the glass. Mussed blond hair, anonymous mirrors where her eyes should be, cheeks red from excitement rather than blush, baggy pants with too many pockets cinched in tight at her small waist, and a tucked in T-shirt the stretched up and out until . . .Oh my, I do believe this is the first time since puberty that I’ve been out in public without a bra.

In style if not in appearance, Penelope decided, she looked strikingly like the picture of Dr. Croft that went with Tim’s story. Of course, She’s so much better endowed . . . and with that her bravado faded a bit, and some of the old feelings of inferiority came back.

She took a seat at the appropriate gate and waited patiently through the three hours until her flight began boarding, never even realizing that, to those who have the proper resources, tracking people through their credit card purchases is as easy as looking in the phone book.

Penelope boarded the airplane and waited for it to take off. The flight was full, and there wasn’t a spare seat aboard, not even in first class. True that the seats here were big enough that she wasn’t pressed for space, but she had wanted the solitude that came with an empty seat next to her.

Matters grew especially annoying when the man who took the next seat started trying to hit on her. He asked why she was going to Africa ("To visit a friend"), he complimented her hair ("Oh, really, it’s such a mess today"), and in general tried to talk her out of her clothes. Even as she was flashing the wedding ring, trying to find a subtle way to say, "Bugger off," Penelope smiled inwardly. Well, at least the new kit fooled this guy. He thinks I’m sexy.

"I’m Aaron Walters," he told her, extending a hand.

Penelope shook it delicately, then laughed out loud and said, "I’m Penny." Penelope just sounds too proper for a woman who’s out in public without a bra.

Mr. Walters was a very short man, not even taller than Penny. His blond hair looked like it could use a good shampooing, He kept up an incessant patter until the plane reached cruising altitude and the stewardess came by offering drinks. It was only one o’clock, and Penelope never drank before five, but she decided to order a glass of wine. Then, at the last minute, she asked herself, Screw wine. What would the new you drink?

"I’ll have some American bourbon, please. On the rocks."

When the drink came, with Aaron’s patter going on in the background, Penelope steeled herself and took a big sip. She’d had hard liquor before, so she knew what was coming. Locking her facial muscles in place, she endured the fire of the whisky without wincing, and felt the warmth hit her stomach like a paint bomb and coat her all over inside. Should’ve waited till after lunch, she admonished herself, knowing she’d soon be feeling lightheaded.

She polished off two more glasses of whisky before the plane landed in Tunisia, telling herself that she wouldn’t get another chance at alcohol as long as she was in an Arabic country. When the aircraft touched down, and the passengers began to deplane, only her determination to be this new person she was dressed like kept Penelope from stumbling. Penny doesn’t get drunk, she told herself. Penny could have had three more, and would still be fine.

Her only luggage was the army-issue backpack, with her purse and the metal tube tucked safely inside. Carrying it with only a slight, occasional wobble in her step, Penelope debarked from the plane and was given a swift passage through customs.

If she had known she was smuggling a foreign antiquity into the country, she would have been afraid to even approach the inspector. If she had any experience with foreign travel to those countries less fortunate than her own, she would have known that all the other passengers had to fork over a small bribe just to avoid being detained while their luggage was thoroughly searched. But she didn’t know, and so she didn’t worry.

The British Museum had told her they had an expedition in the south of Tunisia, in the Tatawin Wilayah, which as far as Penelope could make out was an administrative division roughly like an American state. Her basic plan was to rent a good all terrain car – hopefully a Land Rover or some such – and drive down there and ask around until she found it. She took her place in the queue at the rental car counter and waited.

The bustle of a busy third world airport swirled around her, and the cries and shouts in a foreign language assaulted her ears. It was all so totally different than anything she had ever done before, Penelope found herself forgetting her former life, and just absorbing the experience, letting it settle inside her and become part of this new personality of which she was so fond. She was jostled by women who were covered from head to toe in shawls, by ancient men who looked like they had never shaved once in their life, and in general by the people of a totally different culture.

One of the jostles was a bit sharper edged than the rest.

"Okay, now, Penny, I don’t know how extensive your knowledge of such things is, but that cold metal stick you feel at the small of your back is a gun. I’d rather not have to shoot you here in front of all these people, so hopefully you’ll do the smart thing and go where I tell you to go."

She froze, as her mind locked up temporarily. At first the entire sequence of events was too unexpected even to ask questions about it, but slowly she began to process the information. Someone’s holding a gun on me. Someone who knows my name. Someone who hasn’t asked for my money. It must be them again! The same people who want Tim’s package. But how did they know I would be here? How did they know to follow me?

With a mighty effort of will, she got enough control of her muscles to speak clearly. "What do you want?"

"Some associates of mine want what you have. They would like to discuss it with you in private. Please, begin walking away from the counter, and back toward the boarding gates."

Without looking back, Penelope did as she was told. The gun left her back as she walked, and she was afraid to look back, but she knew that the man was still behind her, ready to shoot on a moment’s notice. She was back in the hallway that led to the various boarding ramps when the man said, "Take this door on your right, Penelope. It leads to a stairwell. Go down the stairs."

She did as instructed, not even thinking to try slamming the door in the follower’s face until she was already halfway down the stairs. Guess you’re not as tough as you thought, she fumed at herself.

At the bottom of the stairs they went out another door and emerged on the runway tarmac. The scream of jet engines hurt her ears, and the smell of aviation kerosene assaulted her nostrils. Combined with the alcohol, she missed a step and nearly fell down. Her abductor caught her arm, and pulled her to her feet. In the confusion, she turned slightly and got her first glimpse of the man who was taking her captive. It was Aaron Walters, from the plane.

He smiled at her, but it was the kind of smile that didn’t include his eyes. "Flying with you was so wonderful, Penny, I thought maybe we’d take another flight together." He pointed at a sleek, dark green helicopter sitting on the runway a short distance away. "Let’s have at it, shall we? Head for the chopper."

Penelope could not believe she’d been so bloody dumb. No wonder flashing the big ol’ diamond didn’t put him off. I’m so stupid! One of them was sitting right next to me through the whole flight, and I never even knew it! She looked down at her feet, walking toward the helicopter. Was this whole-new-person stuff just a fake? Were those combat boots she was looking at a costume, fancy clothes around a housewife who was out of her depth?

She didn’t want that to be true. She liked feeling like Penny the adventuress. She liked being Penny the adventuress. She liked not caring what other people thought of her. She liked the confident feeling she’d had earlier – even if it was just foolish daydreaming – that she could waltz off into the middle of the Sahara, track down Lara Croft the famous archeologist, tell her that if she liked that bum reporter Tim Black so much she could go ahead and marry him since Penny certainly didn’t want him anymore, and then just walk away.

But in reality, while she’d been telling herself that because she had on baggy pants and boots the whole world was hers for the asking, these people who wanted Tim’s package so bad had been one step ahead of her the whole way. They’d followed her to Africa when she herself hadn’t even known she was going there until earlier that morning. One of them had sat right next to her and chatted her up for the whole flight, while she was behaving like a silly socialite and trying to put him off by waving her ring under his nose.

So which one was she, Penny or Penelope? Which life was real life? Penelope had no job, no skills, no friends of her own, a husband who probably didn’t love her anymore -- and whom she certainly didn’t love anymore -- and who was probably dead anyway. On the other hand, Penny had very few possessions, but she had attitude and she had courage. On the whole, Penny’s life looked preferable.

The dark green helicopter was suddenly in front of her, gaping doors on either side wide open to the elements, waiting for her to step in. Aaron prodded her with a gun in the back. She picked up her boots, and in her mind a decision was made. Penny got on the chopper and Penelope stayed behind.

It was hard to hear, let alone carry on a conversation, as the helo’s engine spooled up and they lifted off the ground. But Penny yelled, "Where are you taking me?" at the man who sat beside her with the gun.

He didn’t answer, though, except to wave the gun at her. Looking at it closely for the first time, Penny saw that it was an ugly gun, and a strange one. The back of it looked normal, with a black handle and a trigger, but where the barrel should have been was a giant steel tube about a foot long. Penny had never seen a silencer before, of course.

The helicopter flew away from the airport, and Penny looked forward, over the pilot’s shoulder and through the windshield. The city of Tunis was falling away behind them. Penny looked out the side door – it seemed pretty dangerous to fly with the doors open, but she was firmly committed to not showing that she was scared. Out the right side door, she saw the sun heading for the horizon. It was getting toward evening.

Sun sets in the West, it’s on my right hand, that must mean we’re travelling South. Penny was quite proud of herself for figuring out the general direction of travel on her own, elementary though it was.

Her determination not to show fear was seriously challenged when the helicopter passed over the first series of sand dunes. She felt the chopper take a dive, seemingly straight for the ground. She shrieked involuntarily, but then the craft leveled off, apparently only feet above the earth.

Her captor laughed. She could barely hear the noise, but the smirk on his face was unmistakable. He leaned in close to her as the chopper took another gut-churning jag, this time upwards. "This is Africa, Penelope. It’s easy for pampered housewives to forget this, but it’s not too fucking peaceful here! There’s radars everywhere, each of them looking for intruding aircraft to shoot down. This little puppy," here he patted the seat of the helicopter, "ain’t on their approved list. That means they shoot us if they see us. And that means we fly low, to stay under the radar. You’re gonna puke, then you do it out the door there!" He jabbed his finger toward the open side door to her right.

The flight went on like that for more than an hour, with sudden drops after passing a dune and then bone-rattling climbs only moments before hitting the next one. And then they zipped up to go over one particular dune, started dropping back down afterwards only to discover there was another dune right in their path. Penny screamed again.

The craft was too far committed to the dive to pull its nose back up, so with a grunt the pilot yanked the stick to the right, banking the helicopter to go around the dune instead of over.

The sudden, radical change of direction threw Penny into Aaron, and the two lodged precariously near the open side door. As the pilot slowly righted the craft, Penny was yelling in terror, watching the sand race by below at over a hundred miles per hour, only thirty feet in front of her face. Aaron was squirming under her, more concerned with getting back properly into his seat than with watching the scenery. He gave her a push and yelled, "Get the hell off me, you bitch!"

Penny looked down at the ground below her, and realized that Aaron was between her and the Earth.

She took another look out the door, at the desert zipping by so close below, then looked back at Aaron. Although she desperately wanted to think of a wise crack, since it seemed the appropriate thing for the moment, there was just nothing to say. She braced one foot against the seat and applied the other one very firmly to Aaron’s crotch, sending him plummeting to the Earth below. At the level the helicopter flew at, the fall might not even have been enough to kill him. But he was soon far behind.

Penelope clambered back up into the seat, to see the pilot looking back over his shoulder at her. "You may want to keep your eyes on the road, sport," she told him, pointing ahead. The pilot franticly yanked back on his stick to avoid another approaching dune as Penny planted her rear very firmly in the seat. That’s when she discovered that Aaron’s gun was still aboard. He must have dropped it when we fell out of our chairs.

She picked it up, felt its lethal weight in her palm, and aimed it at the back of the pilot’s head. An amazing rush came over her at the power in her hand. It was like holding the man’s life. He wasn’t even looking back; he was too busy flying. He lives or dies as I will it, she told herself.

But then the feeling passed. The power to kill a man wasn’t anything special, she realized. People did it on the streets of London every day. But still, a gun meant you got listened to. She took a moment to think of a wisecrack first, then got up out of her seat, and went to stand directly behind the pilot. "What’s the usual phrase?" she asked, placing her lips right next to his helmeted ear. "Take this plane to Cuba?"

The pilot turned back to her and shouted, "Don’t be stupid!" He looked forward again before adding, "You can’t fly this, so you can’t kill me! And you probably don’t even know how to use that!"

At that, seeing a clear stretch of sky in front of him with no interfering landscape, the pilot whipped around and got his hand around the long, wide barrel of the gun. Penny wrestled with him. She was weaker, but she was also better positioned, and had her hands on the grip, rather than the barrel, which was easier to hold on to. In the end, though, the pilot died because he was right. She didn’t know how to work the gun. Wrestling for it, trying to get a better grip, Penny accidentally pulled the trigger and put a bullet right through the pilot’s visor.

With him no longer actively holding the controls, the helicopter ceased its forward motion and began to fall. The airframe began to twirl around clockwise, auto-rotating in response to the sudden reduction in pressure on the control surfaces. Penny, of course, knew nothing about any of this, but this was a military helicopter, designed to land in one piece after being seriously shot up. The auto-rotating was a deliberate piece of engineering, supposed to control a crash landing.

All she knew was that if she thought she’d been woozy before, seeing the landscape twirl around her eyes like a merry-go-round was too much. Swallowing an urge to gag, she clambered back to her seat, grabbed her satchel with her money, clothes, and Tim’s document, and leapt out the door moments before the chopper slammed into the earth. She hit the sand with a thud that knocked the breath out of her. Penny never remembered dragging herself the fifty feet away from the helicopter. When it exploded, she was unconscious.

She woke up some time later, shivering cold. Her first reaction was to wonder whether Tim had come home and turned down the heat, as he so often did. But when she tried to sit up and felt a pair of hands hold her firmly to the ground, the last day of her life began to come back into focus. She wasn’t at home, and Tim wasn’t coming back.

But she was in the desert. Why should she be cold?

Penny opened her eyes. Another woman was swabbing her face with a washcloth. "I have a headache," was the first thing she could think of to say.

"If you didn’t, you’d be dead," replied the woman. "Pain means you’re alive."

"Ungh. Not for long, once those goons find out what happened to their helicopter." She tried to sit up. "I’d better be going. They’ll come looking for me."

"I wouldn’t do that just yet, if I were you. You’ve suffered a concussion."

"I’ve suffered more than that today," Penny replied, a touch of bitterness in her voice.

"Yes, I’ll bet you have. I don’t even have to hear your story to see that you’ve had a rough day. Why don’t you get some rest?"

In the end, the suggestion was only too easy to follow. Penny laid her head back down, surprised to find something soft under there, rather than just sand. But she was too tired to check what it was. She went back to sleep.

As Penny Black dozed fitfully, her rescuer sat in the sand to think. Ten miles south of here, she was leading a British Museum expedition to look for a supposed Moorish temple. Supposedly, when the Moors had crossed Northern Africa fleeing persecution by the Inquisition in Spain, they had erected some kind of mystical structure in the middle of the desert. Recently discovered documents gave the location, and the British Museum sent Lara Croft to look for it.

But the dig wasn’t going well, and Lara didn’t like that at all. A helicopter crash and a strange woman wearing fatigue pants and a pink T-shirt were actually a hell of a lot more interesting than the endless routine of digging and finding nothing.

When she woke up again, Penny saw her rescuer rummaging through some cargo stowed on the back of a motorcycle. In the darkness, she could only partially make out the woman’s profile. Penny sat up, and looked around her. She was surprised to find herself wrapped in blankets. She looked back and saw another blanket that had been folded under her head. To her right was her knapsack, and sitting right beside that, the gun she’d taken from Aaron in the helicopter. Penny grabbed the backpack and looked inside. Everything looked in place – most importantly Tim’s package and the money. Whoever this woman was, she obviously wasn’t one of the group who were after that document.

"Who are you?" Penny asked, watching the woman walk back towards her, carrying a thermos.

The stranger knelt down and squatted next to her in the desert sand. "My name is Lara Croft."

Penny straightened up, and looked closer at the woman. She hadn’t seen it earlier, because of the darkness, but yes, indeed, this was the same woman from the picture in Tim’s article. She was even wearing the same outfit. That famous brown braided pony tail was draped over her left shoulder.

"Oh. So you are. Wow. I guess my job is finished, then."

"What do you mean your job is finished? Do I know you?"

"I’m Penny Black."

"Have we met?"

Well, thought Penny, surely she must remember being interviewed by Timothy Black, the famous journalist, even if she weren’t having an affair with him. So why pretend like you don’t recognize the name unless you have something to hide? "I’m Tim Black’s wife."

"Black . . . Oh yes, Tim Black the reporter. About a month ago in Iraq, right? He wrote the piece about me. For the Herald-Post, right?"

Faker! "Right,"

"So why is Tim Black’s wife looking for me?" Lara held out a mug of tea to Penny as she spoke.

Penny took it gratefully, although she was trying her best to be mad, having finally met the woman Tim was sleeping with these days. But the fact was, Lara Croft was being very kind to her, which was making it hard for Penny to stay angry. "He’s not here, by any chance, is he?"

"What, here?" Croft’s surprise was evident. "In the Tatawin? Why on Earth would he be here? He didn’t evince the least bit of curiosity about archeology when I met him. No, Tim’s not here. I certainly hope you didn’t fly all the way to Tunisia and then crash that helicopter here, just hoping he’d be at my dig."

"No. No, actually, I came looking for you." Penny sipped at the hot tea, and looked over at Croft, who was now sitting next to her. Penny was cold, even with the blanket, so how Lara could sit there wearing that ridiculous leotard and shorts without shivering was quite beyond her. But then it hit her. "Wait, did you say Tatawin? I didn’t even realize I’d made it here."

"Yes, you are in the Tatawin, although your husband most certainly is not. And, since you say you came looking for me, you must know you’re about ten miles from a small archeological expedition. We saw the crash, and I came out to look for survivors. I found you. But why did you come?"

Croft was sitting between Penny and her satchel, and scooted back in surprise as Penny reached across her lap for the bag. She began rummaging through it until she grabbed hold of the steel tube, then pulled it out. "Here, Tim wanted you to have this. It is now officially your problem."

Lara took the tube, and looked at it. "You’ll have to do better than that. I’ve got plenty of problems already without accepting them as gifts from strangers."

"Tim sent it to me in the mail, from Iraq. He said it was part of the most important news story in the world, and that you were probably the only person he knew who could deal with it but probably weren’t one of them. I don’t know who, precisely, he meant, but I do know that ‘they’ have been putting me through utter hell ever since I got the blasted thing. Tim said it was dangerous, and I can certainly attest to that. I don’t want it any more. It’s yours. It was supposed to go to you anyway."

"Tell me about ‘Them,’" Lara replied.

"Well, I don’t know much about them. One of them was named Aaron, but he’s dead now . . ."

Penny looked away from Lara, into the black desert night. She hadn’t really thought about it. She’d been too busy escaping, and then recovering. But mentioning Walters, she remembered. I killed a man today. Two men, even if the second was an accident. I pushed Aaron Walters out the window of a flying helicopter.

Croft broke the silence. "What is it?"

"I . . I killed the one named Aaron."

Lara looked at her for what seemed a long time, then reached over to touch her shoulder. "I’m sorry. You don’t sound like you’re used to it."

Penny was about to get angry; that remark seemed sarcastic. But then she let her eyes fall down to Croft’s hips, and saw the same pair of pistols she’d seen in the Herald-Post’s picture. She probably is used to it, Penny thought. Maybe she didn’t mean that to be snide.

"I’ve never killed a man before. In my mind, there’s no question: it was him or me. But in my heart, I can’t quite deal with the fact that I killed that man. He sat next to me on the airplane and talked through the whole flight."

Lara smiled gently at her. "Why don’t you start from the beginning. It’s getting hard to follow this story."

So Penny told her everything that had happened since she opened the door for the postman. Her voice broke a bit when she recounted the helicopter flight. "I just saw my chance and I took it. It was as though I felt I had to live up to my promise to myself. I told myself I was going to be new, different. I was a brave, assertive person, and that seemed like the kind of thing a brave, assertive person would do. But it doesn’t feel right, now that I did it, so maybe being brave and strong isn’t right either."

"Being brave is always right, Penny. It just takes some getting used to, sometimes. You strike me as a sensible woman, and a sensible woman knows when to listen to her heart, and when to listen to her head. Your head’s right, this time. It was him or you, and you chose yourself. That was right."

Penny didn’t speak for a while. Finally she shook her head as though to clear it of questions, and said, "I just wonder what that silly package is, that they’re willing to go to so much trouble over it?"

Lara grunted, exhaled, and then agreed, "Hmmm. I do wonder what it is, I must confess. Let’s have a look, shall we?"

"I tried that already," Penny replied, struggling up to an erect sitting position. "I can’t figure out how to open it."

Lara smiled and grabbed a multi-tool from her belt. Flipping out a screwdriver, she wedged the blade under the rim of the lid, used the screwdriver as a lever, and pop – the lid came off. Under the glow of a half moon, she shook the tube upside down. A few little thumbnail-sized scraps of what looked like paper tumbled out of the tube and floated to the ground like leaves in the Fall. Then, in response to her gentle but persistent shaking, a roll of paper fell out. Or more, accurately, a roll of parchment.

"Damn! Penny, your husband is a buffoon," Lara hissed, gently taking the parchment in her hands.

"I know that, but what’s this document he’s so concerned about?"

Lara started to unroll the ancient paper tenderly, but despite her best efforts little flakes continued to chip off and fall to the ground. Lara gave a frustrated grunt. "I can’t believe this! I shouldn’t even be handling this, I should stick it right back into the tube." But she didn’t.

"Why? What is it? What’s it say?"

"How should I know what it says, I haven’t even unrolled it yet. I’m afraid if I do it will crumble completely to pieces. Penny, this thing is a three or four hundred year old parchment – best guess without a real examination by a specialist. It should never have been rolled up and stuck in a tube. That bumbling idiot Black should be slapped. In fact I shall, as soon as we find him."

"I don’t get it."

"I understand, you’re not an archeologist, and neither is he. But paper doesn’t age very well, Penny. It certainly doesn’t stay flexible. Old paper has to be pressed under glass and kept under very specific lighting conditions, or it falls apart. So what does Mr. Timothy Black, intrepid reporter on the track of a story of a lifetime, do? He rolls it up!" Lara was fuming more to herself than at Penny or her husband, though.

Despite her protestations about how the paper ought to be treated, Lara had very gingerly unrolled it to where it could be read. "What language is that?" asked Penny, peering over Lara’s shoulder.

"Arabic. Very old Arabic, probably from the 16^th century." At least, that’s what the heading of it is written in. Underneath the heading is a bunch of names, and some of those are in Cyrillic, in Japanese, and even in Roman characters."

"So what is it?"

"The heading says, "Register of the Illuminated Ones."

"Doesn’t mean anything to me."

"Well," Lara said, turning her head to look at Penny, "it’s probably a reference to the Illuminati."

"Oh, that tells me a lot."

"The Illuminati were – or are, depending on what you believe – an organization …" Croft paused, and cocked her head to the left.

"What?"

"Shhh, listen."

Penny was about to say she didn’t hear anything when Croft swore violently and ran for her motorcycle. "Come on, then!" she yelled at Penny.

Penny extricated herself from the makeshift bed and ran to the motorcycle, carrying her backpack slung over one shoulder. "What! What! Tell me what’s going on?"

"There’s a helicopter coming. Probably looking for that first one you crashed in. If what you say is true about this document, we need to get the hell out of here."

Lara was about to mount the bike, but paused. She looked at the ancient parchment in one hand and the steel tube in another. She certainly wasn’t going to be able to ride with her hands full. She wasted a precious second on the decision as Penny caught up to her, trying to make up her mind about what to do. Finally, she abandoned the proper treatment of antiquities and just rolled the paper back up and stuck it in the tube. "Bloody reporter. I’m going to slap him twice," she muttered. She shoved the steel tube into her backpack, and jumped on the bike.

Starting the engine, Lara said, "Well, get on," to Penny, who gingerly climbed onto the back of the motorcycle.

"Where are we going?" she asked as she got a good firm grip around Lara’s waist.

"Back to the dig! That chopper’s going to have no trouble finding the crashed one, so we can’t stay here. Once we’re there you can fill me in on this boondoggle you’ve dropped in my lap."

With that, Lara started the bike, and roared off to the south.

Very shortly after they left, a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter came into a low hover over the site where the first one had crashed. Not quite touching its wheels to the ground, the chopper waited like a patient bumblebee while two men leapt from the back door to examine the site. They were quick, they were professional, and they were thorough. In a minute, the jumped back aboard.

"It looks like Black survived the crash!" one of the men shouted at his commander. "There’re tracks in the sand where she crawled away from the wreck, a patch where she must have laid for a while, and motorcycle tracks going off to the south. She got away and she had help."

The commander smiled a devilish sort of smile, and clapped the soldier on the shoulder. "Well, this’ll be easy. There’s only one place around here that help could have come from, isn’t there?"

The soldier smiled at his leader and replied, "I never understood why the Magus allowed that dig to set up so close to us anyway!"

The commander frowned back. "The Magus has a reason for everything he does. Don’t presume to question it."

"Yes sir, the soldier nodded contritely. "I suspect we’ll be paying them a visit?"

"Roger that."

The commander turned away from his troop, and leaned up to talk to the pilot. "Take us to the British Museum site south of here. Approach for a hot landing."

"Shouldn’t you turn the light on?" Penny had to shout to make herself heard over the bike. She’d never ridden a motorcycle before, let alone on the back seat where there weren’t any handles to hold.

"There’s nothing to hit between here and the dig! We don’t need the light!"

"Shouldn’t you at least slow down?"

"Look, Penny, it isn’t going to take them long to realize that you survived the crash, and that you had help. There’s only one place near here that could have provided that help, and that’s my dig! I’ve got to get back and warn them!"

Above the women and to the west, six soldiers strained to hear their leader over the sound of the rotor. "All right, men, let’s make this short and sweet. We’ve been ordered to come back with a certain steel tube, reported to be in the hands of one Penny Black – you all saw her picture in the briefing materials. Use a simple search and destroy mission profile: search every tent, and destroy every person in it. We can’t have survivors reporting what happened. You’ve all got AK’s this time because we want this to look like a simple guerilla attack. We’ll leave an RPG or two behind for good measure, so whoever comes looking for us will blame FLN, or one of the nutball groups on this continent. Got it? Let’s break things and hurt people, girls."

Lara skidded to a halt behind a dune just before the expedition’s camp. "Okay, Penny, hop off. I want you to wait here until I come back. Don’t move, and don’t make a sound; I’ll whistle if it’s safe. If you hear someone coming this way but no whistle, use that gun of yours on them."

Penny barely had time to yell, "Wait, don’t leave me . . ." before Lara sped away on the bike, dashing into the camp. Penny clambered up to a place where she could see the camp but still stay hidden behind the crest of the dune. Settling in with her gun in her right hand, Penny watched as Lara hopped off the bike and ran for one of the tents in the camp.

Before she was even inside, though, the Blackhawk swooped in from above at full speed. It paused only briefly in the center of the camp near Lara’s bike while seven armed soldiers leapt out.

Just before the tent’s door, Lara dropped to the ground and rolled to her right. She reached over her shoulder and swung a pump-action Remington shotgun to bear on the soldiers. Lying on her belly, she rolled to the left as the first of the men spotted her. She paused only briefly to sight down the weapon’s barrel, then loosed a blast at the nearest soldier. His head exploded in a fine pink mist.

Lara rolled again quickly, not waiting for the man’s partner to draw a bead on her location. Four feet over she fired again, and another soldier went down. Lara jumped to her feet and ran across the camp, where she could hear screaming.

While the first two soldiers had concentrated on Lara, the other five had fanned out among the tents. Lara heard another deep masculine voice scream, and her vision tracked over to the tent it had come from. Moments later, she let the soldier who walked out have round number three from her Remington. Rather than take the time to reload the shotgun, Lara dashed up to her latest victim and grabbed the AK-47. She swiped a couple clips of ammo from his belt, and then dashed off into the night when she heard another scream.

She was running for the source when a stream of bullets traced across the dirt in front of her feet. She leapt forward, rolled when she came down, and came up looking for the shooter. He was dodging to the left, looking for a clear shot. Lara brought the rifle up and loosed a burst in his direction. She heard a satisfying gurgle, and moved on.

Lara tracked the fourth soldier down in the second tent she checked. She walked through the front flap just as he was rifling through the occupant’s belongings. The woman who had once called the tent her home away from home, a pretty blond intern from Australia, was a bloody mess in her bunk. Lara dispatched the soldier with one round to the head, then walked out of the tent.

Across the camp, she saw two soldiers firing wantonly through the canvas wall of a tent. Bent over at the waist for concealment, she dashed across the camp until she had a clear shot at the two men. From a distance of fifty feet she emptied the AK’s clip, and one soldier died noisily. But the second rolled to the right and returned fire in her direction. Ducking at the whipcrack sound of bullets passing too close for comfort, Lara ducked and looked for her target.

A hundred feet away on the dune, Penny saw the whole battle. She saw Lara and the sixth soldier stalking each other through the ruins of the camp. But what concerned her more than that was the seventh soldier heading right for her dune.

Lieutenant Rick Haynes, on paper an employee of the U.S. Army, scuttled across the desert for the small rise just North of the camp. Not knowing what exactly had hit his men, Lieutenant Haynes assumed that the woman who was raising all hell in the camp must be Penny Black. That bitch is one hell of a lot more dangerous than we were led to expect, he grimaced, heading for the hill.

From his shoulder, Lieutenant Haynes un-slung a Browning Barrett Light Fifty sniper rifle. His orders strictly forbid him or his men from using their standard weaponry, so that the raid would look like a guerilla attack. But my orders didn’t anticipate a one-woman firing squad, he told himself.

To Haynes, the most logical course of action was to withdraw to the hill, wait for this Black woman to finish the fight in the camp, and then snipe her when she thought she had won. Then he could just ride home on the chopper, which hovered a couple hundred meters away, maintaining radio silence as they had been ordered.

He was half-way up the dune, about to turn around and wait for Black to show herself, when he was confronted by the strangest opponent he had ever faced. Rising out of the sand, as if from no where, was a woman wearing a pink T-shirt and pants that were three sizes too big. His last thought, before the bullet entered his brain, was to wonder how the hell Black had managed to make it from the camp to the dune ahead of him.

Back in the camp, Lara was growing tired of the chase. For five minutes she and the last soldier had played hide and seek among the tents and crates of the dig, firing off random shots whenever they caught a fleeting glimpse of each other. Now, she crouched down in a corner between two crates and waited. Her prey would come to her, she assured herself.

She was right, but not in the way she expected.

Penny ran down to the camp, a little bit confused. She’d shot that guy coming up the hill, no doubt about it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of the back of his head coming off. But the gun hadn’t made a sound. She didn’t understand it, but it was obvious the gun worked, so she took it with her when she ran to help Lara.

Penny slowed to a walk, and tried to crouch low as she entered the dig site. She couldn’t see anything, but she thought she heard foot steps off to the right. She went over that way.

Rounding a tent, Penny caught her breath and nearly screamed. Lara was crouched behind two boxes, apparently believing herself to be concealed from the rear. But the boxes had shifted when she wormed into her hiding place, and she was visible from the back. And Penny wasn’t the only one who saw her.

Another soldier had worked his way to where he had a clear shot at the back of Lara’s head. Without thinking, Penny raised her pistol and fired at the man.

He did not, as Penny had expected, keel over and die. But he did yelp in pain, and in the end, that was enough.

Lara rolled head over heels when she heard the sound, brought her AK up, and fired through the same gap in the boxes the soldier had been planning to use. Her first round caught him in the chest, her second under the chin, and the rest sailed over what was once a man’s head.

Penny walked forward with a grin on her face, still feeling the adrenaline rush of combat. She wasn’t yet experienced enough to know that after the emotional high, the roller coaster would take her feelings to new depths of depression. Right now she felt like a superstar. She and Lara had beaten seven better armed, better trained men.

She stumbled on a shell casing laying on the ground and yelped. At the noise, Lara turned her gun on Penny and fired. Penny screamed, and dove for the ground. "Lara! It’s me!"

"Bloody hell!" Penny heard from Lara’s direction. "I thought I told you to stay on the dune!"

"This guy came up there after me. He’s dead."

Lara said, "You always identify yourself in this kind of situation. If you’d have been taller, you’d have died." Lara then reached out to steady Penny by the shoulder. "Good thing I always aim for the head," she said with a smile. "Are you all right, though? Did any of them hit you?"

Penny took a deep breath, as her adrenaline levels came back down to normal. "No, I’m fine. Just a little . . I don’t know, stunned I guess."

"It’ll get worse," Lara replied, squeezing the other woman’s shoulder to comfort her. Just wait until you . . . Oh shit!"

Penny shouted, "What is it?" But Lara was already running off, and Penny had no idea where to.

What Lara saw was the helicopter coming over the camp. The entire team had been under orders to maintain radio silence, so when the pilot saw the gunfire at the dig, he assumed it was the soldiers carrying out their mission. Now that the gunfire had stopped, he swooped in on the camp to pick up the soldiers. What he picked up instead was a lone woman, brown ponytail swaying from side to side, who leapt aboard his craft when he was still seven feet off the ground. He looked back to see what the hell was going on, and without preamble received a bullet in the head.

Lara immediately leaned across him to grab hold of the cyclic stick. With the pilot’s dead feet no longer working the rudder pedals, the craft began to whirl about as Penny’s had earlier. But holding the stick Lara could at least keep it in the air. She clambered over the dead man’s body to sit in the copilot’s seat, and brought the chopper down to the ground.

Penny came running up to the helicopter when it landed, yelling, "Lara, it’s me!" and waving her arms in the air. Croft couldn’t really hear her over the rotor, but it didn’t matter. She’s trying to learn, Lara told herself. That’s a good sign.

She stepped out of the chopper after powering down the engine, and walked up to Penny. "That’s our ride out of here!"

"Where are we going next?" After asking the question, Penny paused a moment to ask herself why she was following Lara anyway, since all she had meant to do was find her and give her the tube. But there didn’t seem much choice – the helicopter was the only realistic way back home.

"I haven’t figured that out yet," Lara replied. "Look, there’s some stuff that has to be taken care of here at the camp. Can you handle cleaning the chopper, while I take care of some unfinished business?"

Penny looked at the bloody mess on the helicopter’s windshield, swallowed hard, then replied, "Uh, sure, I guess. Do you have some Windex?"

Lara grinned at her, but it was clear she was tired. "If you can make jokes, you’ll be all right." She turned and walked toward one of the tents, pony tail swinging back and forth to the rhythm of her stride.

Penny watched her go. Who am I kidding? She beat those soldiers, I just showed up at the last minute to take some of the credit. It’s no wonder Tim likes her. I don’t think I could ever be as tough as her.

When Lara came back, the chopper was mostly clean. She walked up to Penny, and patted her on the shoulder. "Good job. I wasn’t sure you had the stomach for that."

Penny smiled wanly, and pointed off to the left. "I don’t. I puked over there."

Lara managed a little chuckle, then said, "Well, you wouldn’t have wanted my job."

Penny gave an inquiring glance, and Croft continued, "I was gathering up all the bodies. I made the best funeral pyre I could. We’ll set it off before we leave."

Lara paused for a long second before adding, "We really didn’t have time for that. By now they surely realize their team failed. They’ll be coming to look for you again. But the people in this dig – they were coworkers, colleagues . . . friends, some of them. I couldn’t just let them rot in the desert heat."

With a suddenness only possible in the desert or at sea, the sun broke over the horizon. "Well, that’s our cue," Lara said. "Let’s get this show on the road. Here, take one of these. I stripped the soldiers, they won’t be needing this stuff any more." She handed Penny an AK-47.

"I have no idea how to work one."

"Same basic principle as that pistol you’ve got tucked into your belt. Point it at people you don’t like and pull the trigger."

But Penny still wanted help. She gave a plaintive look, and Lara shook her head. "All right, all right. This is the magazine," she said, pointing to the banana-shaped clip. "Bullets come from there. When it stops shooting, you’re out of ammo. You need to replace the clip. Here." She handed over three spare magazines. "Push this button to eject the old one, and push a new one in until you feel it click. Then, yank this lever here," she pointed at the charging handle, "and you’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll. Got it?"

Penny nodded, and Lara headed off for her funeral pyre in the camp.

Penny followed her. "What are you planning?"

Lara didn’t answer at first. They rounded a tent, and Penny saw the pyre – mostly a stack of bodies on top of piled scrap wood from the crates, canvas from the tents, some other kindling, and doused liberally with gas, from the smell. Lara reached into her backpack, drew out a metal canister, and opened it. She took a long stick out, twisted the end, and it burst into glowing, painfully bright light.

"Magnesium flares," she explained to Penny, before throwing that one and two more onto the pyre. The blaze ignited quickly, and soon the whole thing was engulfed. Lara stood there for a moment, watching, then turned away and headed for the helicopter.

As Penny scuttled to catch up, Lara said, "Well, the plan’s a bit complicated from here. But the first step is to take the helicopter some distance north, maybe all the way to the Mediterranean. It is now officially day in the Sahara, and it’s going to get bloody uncomfortable this far south. So we head north to spend the day and get some rest."

Lara took the pilot’s seat, and Penny climbed into the chopper’s co-pilot’s station. Penny had thrown the pilot’s helmet – shattered by Lara’s bullet – away with the body. She hoped Lara didn’t need it to fly.

But Lara didn’t start flying right away. Instead she fiddled with the dashboard for several minutes, finally taking out her multi-tool and unscrewing a panel. Penny watched in silence until Lara came up with a fistful of wires and a circuit board. "Tracking system – so it’s owners always know where the chopper is. They’re about to be fooled into thinking it never left the camp." She threw the electronic mess out the door, and started the engine. "Up, up, and away."

Lara apparently didn’t need the helmet to fly, but without the intercom system that a helmet would have had, it was impossible to communicate over the noise of the rotors. Lara and Penny spent the hour long flight in silence. Lara seemed to be remembering the people who had died at the camp. But Penny didn’t know for sure what the other women was thinking.

For herself, she was wondering where to go from here. She felt like she was adrift on the wind. She had no foundation any more – no home to go back to, no life to go back to, and probably no husband to go back to. There was no turning back, but in front of her was only a hard, dangerous life that seemed a lot scarier now than it had when she’d walked out of the army surplus store in London. When she’d had her grand visions of herself as a heroine, she hadn’t really thought of killing people. But there was quite a trail of dead bodies behind her, and Lara hadn’t been responsible for them all.

And just who was Lara Croft, anyway? It was clear now that those pistols on her hip weren’t just a fashion accessory. What must it be like to be a person who’s as skilled at killing as she is? How can you bond with other human beings, when you kill them so easily? Is it possible to draw a distinction between people you can kill and people you can care about?

It didn’t seem likely to Penny, but if it was, she wanted to ask Lara how she did it.

Alight on a deserted strip of beach, the Blackhawk waited patiently for its new masters. The sea didn’t clean them up much, but it did cool them off a bit, and now, relaxing in the small patch of shade offered by the chopper, Lara poured two cups of water from a canteen, and offered one to Penny.

"So, you said your job was done, now you’ve found me."

Penny paused a long time, her gaze shifting back and forth between Lara and the breaking waves of the ocean. "Well, that’s all I really planned on. I don’t know any more." She took a sip of the water – warm, but refreshing.

Lara touched her on the shoulder. "I ask because, well, what’s in front of me is dangerous. It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever done before. This will be a hell of a lot bigger than rummaging through some dead guy’s belongings and dodging the traps he set to keep them from prying eyes."

"What are you going to do, Lara? Tim said in his letter to me that he thought you could handle this, this . . . this document, or whatever. What does handling it mean? And why is it such a big deal?"

"What Tim sent you, Penny, is purportedly a partial list of the members of the Illuminati. King Richard’s name was on that list. Innocent III and several other popes, explorers, prominent traders of the 1500’s – it was incredible. If it’s genuine, which is hardly proven, then Tim was right, it might just be the story of the century."

"What is this ‘Illuminati’ you keep mentioning, anyway?"

Lara sighed, and looked off at the ocean. "The Illuminati . . . Well, what they are depends greatly on what you believe. The least common denominator definition of the term Illuminati would be ‘An ancient and powerful secret society with spiritual and/or mystical overtones.’ If anybody tells you more than that about the Illuminati, then treat what they say as a Rorschach test – it tells you more about what the speaker believes than about what the Illuminati believe.

"But, for purposes of making conversation, since we have to wait here until dusk, I’ll tell you everything ‘scholars’ know, think they know, or surmise about the Illuminati." Lara paused, shook her head, and took a sip of water. Penny leaned forward, interested in the story.

"Many people trace the origins of the Illuminati to a group called the Hashashim in the middle east during the dark ages. Their name translates very roughly as ‘assassins.’ It is also the root of the modern term ‘hasish,’ as these assassins were said to use mind-altering substances to gain ‘illumination.’ The earliest mention of a group with a name similar to ‘Illuminati’ is in the 11^th century, when one Joachim of Floris founded a supposedly Christian sect by the name of ‘Illuminated Ones’, allegedly dedicated to poverty and equality. But most people point to the late 15^th century, when a group known as the ‘Roshaniya – the Illuminated Ones, again’ -- arose in the mountains of Afghanistan. They claimed to have a direct line to Allah, for whom they were creating a class of perfect people to guide the earth. This group is also considered to be linked with the ‘Alumbrados’ in Spain, whose name also means Illuminated Ones and who were active in Spain in the 16^th century, around the time of the persecution of the Moors."

Lara paused to sip at her water, and gazed into the distance. To Penny, it seemed as though her companion were no longer truly with her, but was instead lost in medieval times, when mystical groups with ties to the Supreme Being were common. Penny gazed at her, impressed by all this arcane, academic knowledge.

"But most people don’t get really interested in the Illuminati until the 18^th century, when they began to make their presence felt in Europe. One Adam Weishaupt, professor of canon law at Ingolstadt University, after supposedly being inducted into the order by a travelling merchant, founded the Bavarian Illuminati, which is the group conspiracy theorists go crazy over today."

She continued, "Weishaupt’s group was supposedly about returning the world to true Christian virtue. They were also supposedly very liberal – believing in liberty, equality, and fraternity – all that stuff. Supposedly on the cutting edge of the enlightenment. What they really intended is not really known, for the group’s ultimate intentions were disclosed only to those who attained the highest ranks of initiation.

"Supposedly those who advanced to the highest ranks of the Illuminati were ‘initiated into mysteries,’ greater or lesser. Those who had been initiated into the greater mysteries were referred to as either Magi or Kings. Although many of the terms are different, the similarity to Freemasonry will be noted in the layering of ranks and degrees."

Penny smiled when she realized that Lara had lapsed into a professorial mode, lecturing as though to a classroom. She listened intently as Lara continued, "Allegedly, these Illuminati rose to be the major motive force behind most of what happened in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The French Revolution, the American Revolution, etc. One guy, Robert Anton Wilson, even wrote a book suggesting that Adam Weishaupt assassinated George Washington and took his place. From there, the so-called history of the Illuminati lapses into conjecture and paranoia which I’m not very keen to go into. The gist of it is that the Illuminati now rule the world and are seeking to either eradicate Christianity and turn the world into a communist playground, or enforce Christianity on everyone and give the world to the capitalists, depending on which paranoid you believe.

"So, there you have it. A not-very-scholarly, probably half-wrong history of the Illuminati. It’s not worth very much, Penny, but perhaps it helps you understand what makes this document you brought me so important, and why I’m concerned about the next phase of our plan. If the document is genuine, and if the people who have been chasing you are some kind of modern-day Illuminati, then looking for them would involve poking my nose into what could be the most powerful organization on Earth."

Lara actually blushed a little as she said that, as if she were ashamed to be speaking in such grandiose terms. "But," she added, "the incentive is also remarkable, isn’t it? A thriving secret society that’s at least 500 years old? What historian wouldn’t like to speak to them? What must their institutional memory be like?"

"I’m certainly curious," Penny replied, "and I’m not even an historian or archeologist. It’s a fascinating story. And what’s this about them being spiritual or mystical?"

"Oh, that. Well, the stories get fantastic, and serious scholars don’t put much faith in them. But the Illuminati do supposedly have a direct link to a supernatural power, and people read that in a dozen different ways – from telepathy and psychokinesis to being able to summon the devil at will. Depending on who you talk to, the Illuminati can do just about anything." She paused, and stared at the sea for a while before turning back to Penny.

"So, are you curious? Because I’m wondering about taking you with me. I’m seriously considering going after them – trying to find out who it is that’s been chasing you, and what they are up to. But I’ll be honest, part of me is afraid. It’s one thing to hunt a mysterious animal in the woods, or fight with an ex-partner, or dig up somebody’s grave and try not to get poisoned by the darts they had buried with them. Those things, I’ve done. But if your husband is serious – and what’s happened today indicates that something is going on – then this is far bigger."

Lara paused, and looked away from Penny. "I . . . I guess I’m afraid to go on alone."

Penny looked at Lara, her eyes widening. She was touched to hear that. Lara didn’t seem like the type who confessed fear easily. She reached over, and patted her hand before speaking.

"That doesn’t sound like the Lara Croft I envisioned meeting when I got this package," Penny said. But saying it brought back the memories from London, and she sighed. "The Lara Croft I went looking for was smart, and daring, and witty, and oh-so-very beautiful. She could have anything in the world she wanted, and she knew it and used it." She paused, and smiled a faint, sad-ish smile at Lara. "You look a lot like her."

Lara wasn’t sure how to take that. It sounded like a compliment, but there was something under the surface . . . "Penny, what’s wrong? You’ve been looking at me funny half the time since we met."

Penny stuck her lower lip out and exhaled, twirling the tangled bangs on her forehead. She stood up and started pacing, moving in and out of the shadow of the helicopter. "Oh, it’s just that you’re so . . ." She stopped, and looked Lara in the eye. "You’re so bloody perfect, Lara Croft. You’re everything a man could possibly want."

"What’s that supposed to mean?"

Penny opened her mouth, closed it, looked away, and then looked back again. Lara could see her gathering courage. Finally, Penny asked, "Are you having an affair with my husband?"

Croft was dumbstruck. She sat up straighter, and her mouth dropped open. "What? With Timothy Black? No! Most certainly not. Is that what you’ve been edgy about?"

"It’s okay, Lara, if you are. I’ve pretty much decided I’d rather leave him anyway."

"Well, that’s all fine and good, Penny, but let me assure you I am most certainly not having an affair with your husband." Lara almost laughed, at the thought of her with the weaselly reporter she remembered from about a month ago. But to laugh would be to belittle Penny’s concern, and she didn’t want to do that. "Whyever would you think that of me?"

"You’re the only rich and famous person he’s ever said anything nice about in his stories."

"That’s it? There are a great deal of people who’ve written something nice about me, Penny. You must have a very low opinion of my virtue." She smiled to show she was joking, and then asked, "Just because he said something nice about me I must be sleeping with him?"

Penny started to reply, stopped, looked at the ground, and said in a small voice, "Well, somebody must, because I never do."

Lara stood up, and walked over to Penny. "If somebody is, Penny, it isn’t me." She put her arm around Penny’s shoulder. The woman needed reassurance, and Lara did the best she could. "He’d be stupid to want anybody besides you."

"He never comes home anymore. He’s always somewhere else. He never calls, he never writes, and he never does anything for me at all. It’s always the next story, it’s never the next time we meet. It’s like I say, I don’t even really want to stay married to him. He’s so bloody involved with a stupid little job that’s really nothing more than muckraking. All he ever does is drag other people down, he never contributes anything to society."

"I can see why you’re upset."

"So, fine, let him be that way. But I don’t have to be involved. I don’t have to sit home and wait, and wait, and wait. I don’t have to be the one who’s always lonely. I’ll be glad if he’s got a girlfriend."

Penny stopped, and wiped an eye. "It’s just, well . . . It’s humiliating, isn’t it?. Even if I won’t miss him, it still hurts to be dumped."

Lara offered her another glass of water, and squeezed her shoulder again. "I understand," she said, which was really only half-way true. Penny didn’t have much to be insecure about. She was pretty and smart and obviously very generous. And Lara had never been married, let alone in a bad marriage, so she didn’t really know what Penny was going through. But she knew the woman was hurting.

Penny pulled free of Lara’s grip, walked over to her knapsack, and extracted the carton of Marlboro’s she’d bought in Heathrow. She lit one with a match, and stared off at the sea.

"You shouldn’t smoke, it’s bad for you," Lara said lightly, trying to brighten the mood. She walked over to stand beside her.

"Yes, well, shooting it out with mysterious men in helicopters isn’t exactly healthy either, and I’ve been doing that for the past two days."

Lara allowed herself a small laugh in reply.

"I don’t know, Lara. I guess ever since Tim wrote that piece about you, and I read all those things he said you were, I’ve been thinking that if only I were like you, my life would be perfect. Men would want to spend time with me, other wives would invite me over for coffee, and my family would be proud of me."

Lara was growing uncomfortable with Penny’s constant idolization. She tried to shrug it off with a self-deprecating joke. "Don’t be too sure about that last part. My family are not my biggest allies."

"Well, I’m just not so sure I was right is all. Here I am following you through the Sahara, living the way you live, and things don’t feel perfect. They were supposed to."

"If you’re looking for perfection, you’re in the wrong life, Penny."

Penny turned around to look at Lara, and threw her cigarette butt aside. "Maybe, maybe not. I’m starting to feel like I’ve found a perfect friend, anyway."

Lara smiled. "Let’s call it friend, anyway, and you can reserve judgement on the perfect part until I ask you for a favor."

"I’ll come. I already decided."

"It’s going to be dangerous. A lot more shooting it out with unknown men."

"Smoking’s dangerous too, and I haven’t quit that yet. So I won’t quit on you. What’s the plan?"

Lara smiled, and walked back over to the helicopter to sit down in the shade beside it. Penny followed her. "The first part of the plan," Lara said, "is to wait here until dusk. Whatever we may have signed on for, I don’t relish flying into it in broad daylight."

"But where are we going to be flying to? If Tim’s document doesn’t tell you where to go, how are you going to figure it out?"

"Ah, I figured that little detail out while flying up here. Our chariot here," she slapped the helicopter affectionately, "has an internal navigation system. It’s pre-programmed with a destination. We’ll just fly there. Wherever it takes us, it’s bound to be associated with the men who attacked the camp in one way or another."

"Just fly right in? Surely there’s got to be an easier way!"

"Well, I think we’ll probably land a ways away, and sneak in, but the principle’s the same. The point is, the next step is to follow the chopper’s computer, and we should learn something."

"Well, before we go, maybe you could explain something to me," Penny said. "I shot that guy on the dune with this pistol, and let me assure you, it obviously worked. But it didn’t make a sound. I mean, guns are supposed to go ‘bang,’ right? Yours do."

"Actually, that gun you’re carrying is a pretty nice piece of equipment. It’s a suppressed Ruger Mark II. Suppressed means it has a silencer. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the barrel is a silencer, but the point’s the same. It doesn’t go ‘bang’ when you shoot it. The Ruger Mark II is actually one of the top weapons in its field. I don’t suppose you swiped any ammo for it when you got the gun?"

Penny flushed. "No, I didn’t. I guess I should have thought of that. There wasn’t time, though. I was too busy pushing the owner out the window."

Lara laughed at her sarcasm "Hey, these things happen. Don’t sweat it. How many rounds are left?"

"I don’t know. How do I check?"

Lara reached over, took the gun from her, and pushed a button on the side. "Same as the AK. Here’s your magazine release. You pull the magazine out . . ." she did so "and you can see that there are eight rounds left in here, plus one in the chamber."

Lara handed the gun back, and continued, "The thing about a Mark II is, you need to be aware of its strengths and its weaknesses. The strengths are silence – obviously – and accuracy. The non-silenced version is actually a target pistol, so if you aim right, count on hitting what you point it at. The weakness is: it’s only a twenty-two. It’s actually very difficult to silence a larger round, so most silenced pistols are .22’s. They don’t pack much stopping power."

"Is that why the guy I shot – the one who was about to shoot you – is that why he didn’t die when I shot him?"

"Well, it’s a big part of it, anyway. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest. Now, it’s a little known fact that a flack jacket won’t stop all bullets. For example, the .30 caliber bullets from an AK will go through one just fine at close range. But a jacket will stop a .22. He probably just got a big bruise where you hit him. In the future, don’t shoot that gun unless you have a clean shot at the head. Anything less won’t do much good, with only a .22."

Penny grimaced at the very precise discussion of how she should go about killing people. But, she had chosen it. If you’re going to do this, Penny, get your heart behind it. You’ll just be a menace to yourself and Lara if you go all squeamish in the middle of a firefight.

"Also," Lara added, "don’t shoot unless you know you can hit. You’ve got only nine shots with that gun, so only use it when you know you’re going to get something for it. Use the AK most of the time."

Penny smiled, and tucked the pistol back into her belt. The foot-long silencer/barrel stuck out like a sword behind her.

"Now," Lara said, "We’ve got at least four hours until dusk. Why don’t you have a nap for two hours, then I’ll wake you and you can watch while I sleep."

Once again, Lara’s suggestion was only too easy to follow. Penny took the backpack and automatic rifle off her shoulder, then the pistol out of her belt, and stretched out on the sand in the shade of the chopper. She woke to Lara shaking her shoulder two hours later, and stood her watch uneventfully.

"Lara," Penny whispered, feeling guilty about waking her. "The sun’s going down."

Croft came awake at the first soft sound of her name, and rolled easily into a sitting position. "Gosh," Penny said, "You sure wake up easy."

"Years of practice," Lara replied, and stood up. "Lets get everything ready for our little trip." She began gathering the canteens and metal cups they had used earlier, and loading everything into the back of the chopper. Penny strapped on her backpack, slung the AK-47 over her shoulder, and tucked her Ruger into her belt. As the sun sunk below the horizon, the temperature headed down too, until Penny felt gooseflesh on her arms.

"We’re in the bloody desert," she complained. "I didn’t expect to need a parka."

"The desert gets very cold at night. The heat during the day is all from the sun. The sand doesn’t retain it well. So when the sun goes, the heat goes with it." Lara looked over at Penny, and shook her head.

"Do you have anything to wear besides that pink T-shirt?"

"Oh, yeah, didn’t think of that. It’s not the best color for being sneaky, is it. Sorry. I’ve got two black ones in my backpack." She un-slung all her gear from her shoulders, rummaged through the pack until she found her two black shirts, turned her back to Lara, and made the switch. Penny replaced the pink shirt with both black ones, hoping for a little more warmth from wearing two layers.

She put all her gear back in place, then turned and grinned at Lara. "Reporting for duty, Captain."

Lara laughed. "Move out, soldier. Board the chopper."

When they were both inside, Lara turned and looked at Penny. "Okay, I checked this out while you were asleep. The INS is set for a point not too far from my dig site. We’ve got enough fuel to get back there, but not any further. This is a one-way trip, at least in this vehicle. You’ve got one last chance to back out."

"I’m with you. Let’s do this thing."

"Right, but lets talk before we lift off, because once the rotor’s turning we won’t be able to hear ourselves think. I’m going to set this down behind the nearest big dune to the destination. We’ll fly right on the deck the whole way, in hopes of not being seen by radar on the way in. Then, when we set down, we’ll be attempting to sneak into whatever place we find there. The mission is simple: avoid detection if possible, kill anybody who does spot you before they can sound an alarm, and if an alarm does go off, start destroying everything you possibly can, because we don’t have any place to run to. The chopper will be out of fuel, and there’s nothing but endless sand and death when the sun rises in the area we’re heading for. You ready?"

"Ready."

Lara reached across to pat her knee, then flipped the turbine. As soon as the rotor spooled up to full speed, Penny couldn’t hear anything else. Lara gave a jerk on the cyclic, and they headed up.

Lara kept the helicopter low to the earth, zipping over dunes with barely feet of clearance. Penny watched out the window, as he sand went by so close she could pick out individual rocks. The rattle of the chopper’s frame was numbing her brain, and it was almost hypnotic to watch the earth slide behind her so fast. Finally she shook her head and looked over at Lara, just to avoid falling into a trance.

Lara smiled at her and nodded, but there was no point in conversation. With the rotor going full bore, they’d have to scream to be heard, and it just wasn’t worth it. Penny closed her eyes and waited.

What seemed like seconds later, Lara jogged her shoulder. Penny looked over, and Lara shouted, "Wake up, sport! I’m setting down soon!"

Penny watched out the window as Lara brought the chopper in for a hard landing. She skipped any pleasantries like hovering over a landing site and easing it down, and instead just brought the craft to earth as quickly as she could without wrecking it. As the engine wound down and the ringing in her ears gradually faded, Penny said, "Boy, I hope you never get a job flying for British Airways. Your landings would drive passengers away in droves."

"Thanks. We are now in hostile territory, Penny, so I wasn’t keen to just lounge about up in the air waiting for somebody to see us."

"Message received. Shall we head in, then?"

"Roger. We get everything we might need out of the chopper, hike up the dune to have a little look see, and then go check out what we can find."

The two women slogged up the hill until they crouched at the top, just below the crest. The moon illuminated the desert with a pale glow. "What the hell?" Lara muttered.

"What?" Penny asked. Then her gaze followed Lara’s, and she saw it too. Or rather, didn’t see it. There was nothing ahead of them but a broad, flat expanse of desert.

"This is the last dune before the destination on the INS," Lara said. "It was programmed to land about a mile directly south of here – right in front of us. But there’s nothing there."

"Could you have followed it wrong?"

"No, the computer sets the course."

"Well, something’s not right," Penny said. "What do we do?"

"The only thing we can do. That helicopter’s damn near out of gas, so we’re not flying anywhere else. Let’s head over there and have a look. Maybe there’s something we can’t see from here."

It didn’t seem likely to Penny, but she didn’t have a better idea, so she set off following Lara. They passed the next ten minutes slogging through sand and looking warily to all sides, wondering where it was. Whatever it was that was supposed to be here.

"Well, Penny, I just don’t know what to tell you. This is where the computer said to come, but there’s nothing here. We’re a hundred miles from civilization, and I just don’t know what we’re . . .What the?"

Lara was gone. She took a step forward and just vanished into thin air. Penny clamped down her teeth to avoid screaming, and instead called out in a harsh whisper, "Lara! Where are you? What happened?"

"That was amazing!" came Lara’s voice, also in a whisper. "I’m right here, Penny, can’t you see me?"

"Nonsense you’re right here. You’re not anywhere near me. What in the . . . "

And then Lara re-appeared. Right in front of Penny’s eyes, at exactly the point she had disappeared, Lara stepped out as if from behind a curtain, and was visible again.

Penny was speechless, and Lara wore a broad smile of incredulity. "That is simply the most astonishing thing I have ever seen," she said to Penny, then turned to look back at the place she had just come from. "Amazing. I can’t see a bloody thing from here. Come on, Penny, hold my hand."

Lara took her companion by the hand, and led her two steps forward. Penny blinked as the scene of a trackless desert shimmered and faded with her first step, and a mighty pyramid rose in front of them with her second. Before her was the kind of structure it was just impossible to hide. At least a hundred feet tall and the same in width and length was a perfectly symmetrical black pyramid, aimed like a dagger at the moon. Penny’s gaze traveled up, up, up, until she stared with wonder at the top.

At the tip of the pyramid, the black structure seemed to end in a squared off top. Where the black point should have been was a perfectly clear triangular structure, and in it floated what looked eerily like a living, seeing human eye – if human eyes were five feet across.

"What in the name of God . . ."

"It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Penny?"

"But what is it?"

"The eye in the pyramid. Novo Ordo Secularum The new order of the secular world. Haven’t you ever seen American currency, Penny?"

"What? Yes, of course I have, but . . ."

"Look on the back of a dollar bill some time. You’ll see a pretty darn good representation of this pyramid. It’s supposedly the symbol of the Illuminati."

"But what’s it doing in the middle of the desert? And why couldn’t we see it from ten feet away?"

"I don’t know the answer to that yet. But I do know that whoever’s inside there is probably the rightful owner of that document Tim sent you, who seems to have been so anxious to get it back. What say we pay them a visit?"

Lara strode confidently for the steps of the pyramid. An Olympian stairway went about a tenth of the way up. At it’s landing was a gaping maw of a door, easily half the width of the pyramid itself. Lara was heading right for it.

Penny swallowed hard, muttered, "I am way, way, out of my depth," and went to catch up to her. It seemed to take much longer than it should have to climb ten or fifteen feet of stairs. They made the whole climb in silence. Lara was gazing about her with hungry eyes, relishing a much more interesting find than she had expected on this expedition. Penny was just staring straight ahead, not wanting to take in more of the unworldly scenery than she had to.

The reached the landing.

"Okay, Penny, from here on in follow me closely and don’t speak unless it’s urgent. This is likely to be trapped pretty heavily, and of course there’re probably guards, too. Be careful." Lara pulled the AK-47 off her shoulder.

Penny just nodded to acknowledge Lara’s warning, and pulled the rifle from her own back. The weight of the AK in her arms comforted her a little, but not as much as she would have liked. Timidly, she stepped forward as Lara walked in the door.

As soon as Lara’s foot passed the threshold, Penny figured any chance of sneaking in unheard was out the window. A deep, resonating gong, like a bell the size of a small town, rang once, and seemed to shake the whole pyramid with its vibration. "Right, they know we’re here already. Keep that gun handy."

They proceeded down the vast hallway in front of them, Penny glancing over her shoulder every few seconds to make sure they weren’t followed. Flickering torches lined the passage at regular intervals, casting sinister shadows at random. Lara held her rifle at the ready, alert for the smallest sign of approaching guards. Suddenly she noticed that the next floor panel was sitting slightly different from the rest.

"Shit! Freeze, Penny!" She turned her next step into a leap just in time, and went flying forward even as she spoke, over a pit that opened at her feet. Lara caught the other edge, and began to pull herself up the far side of the gap.

Penny stood quivering. She stepped up to the hole, and looked down. Whether it was the dim lighting or something else, she could not see a bottom.

From the other side of the pit, Lara called softly, "Jump over here, Penny. We’ve got to stay together."

"No."

"Penny, you have to. There’s nowhere to go but forward."

"I can’t make it."

"It’s an easy jump."

"I’m not as strong as you."

"I made it from a standing stop. Give yourself a run up and you will make it fine. Come on, Penny. There isn’t time for this."

Penny backed up from the gap, waging an internal debate. Her instincts were screaming for her to turn around and run. But the part of her that wanted something more out of life than she’d been getting won out. With a prayer and a gulp, Penny dashed forward, and took off flying at the last second before the floor dropped away to nothingness. Her eyes were closed as soon as her feet left the ground, so she didn’t see how easily she made the jump. Lara, who had been waiting at the edge in case Penny needed help, was bowled over when the smaller woman flew into her.

Lara gave a small, quiet laugh as the two untangled themselves and scrambled up. "Somebody’s a better jumper than she gives herself credit for."

Penny straightened her T-shirt. "I would have preferred to learn that on an athletic field, thank you very much," she replied under her breath.

"Come on, we’ve got to keep going. And don’t be so chicken next time."

As the two women walked quietly forward, two of the torches, on either side of the wall, rotated to where their mouths were facing into the hall, perpendicular to the floor. Without warning a gout of flame shot out. Fully on guard, now, Lara didn’t even swear in surprise this time. She hit the ground and rolled forward, directly under the tongue of flame, until she was on the other side.

Less dramatically, Penny laid down on her tummy and crawled under, dragging her face across the smooth, cold floor. She kept trying to press herself down further as the heat from the blaze warmed her back. When she made it to the other side, she took a moment to gather her breath before getting back to her feet.

"Good show," Lara said, turning back to face her. "You didn’t even complain. I think you’re getting used to it. Good thing, I’m sure there’s more where that came from."

They kept going forward. Lara knew they must have gone fifty feet or so, but it was impossible to see any end to the tunnel. The door they had come in by was still visible a ways behind as a slightly-less-dark rectangle.

Penny actually got the first warning this time. She heard what sounded like a click behind them, and whirled around, calling, "Lara!"

Two armed men clad completely in black emerged from a trap door in the ceiling. Penny was taking aim at the first one, who was leveling a gun at her, when she heard a ripping/clattering noise from behind her. Both men died screaming. Penny looked back to see Lara changing the magazine on her AK. "Thanks for the warning, Penny."

Then Lara headed back toward the dead men, calling for Penny to follow. When they reached the bodies, Lara said, "Look, their trap door’s still open. Come on, let’s try this way." She slung the rifle over her shoulder, jumped up to grab the next floor, and began pulling herself up. Penny watched silently, wondering whether she’d be able to pull herself up like that.

Then the floor opened up beneath her.

Lara pulled herself up and looked back just in time to see it happen. Penny was looking up at her, obviously wondering if she could make the climb, and then her eyes went wide as the pressure on her feet fell away. The trap door dropped open, and Penny disappeared down a black shaft, screaming, "LARA!" Then the door closed again.

Lara dropped back down to the main level and jumped on the trap door. It didn’t budge. She looked all around for a trigger, and couldn’t find one. She stood on it for ten minutes, and nothing happened.

Finally, she didn’t know what else to do. She climbed back up through the hole in the roof, and continued on.

Lara found her concentration was broken by worry about her companion. Where did the trap door lead to? Was it fatal? How could she find Penny again, even assuming she was still alive? She worried so much that she missed a little wire running across the floor she was exploring.

Lara cursed when she tripped over it, and started running. She didn’t know what the wire did, but she knew that tripwires were never healthy. In front of her, she saw a door slowly creaking closed. Behind her, she heard a hissing noise. She ran like the wind for the door, not bothering to look back and investigate the noise.

Which proved to be the right choice, since she wouldn’t have seen anything. From little vents in the wall, the hallway filled inexorably with gas fumes.

At the last second, Lara leapt for the door, and rolled through just as it closed. Behind her, she heard a deep thump as the heavy door seated itself, and a WHUMPF as the gas fumes exploded. Leaning against the door to examine her new surroundings, Lara couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. It was absolutely black. She reached into her backpack, and came out with her box of flares. Lighting one, she took a look around.

She was in an intersection. New passages branched off in a T shape from her location. It would have been a cross, but the door behind her blocked the fourth passage way. Directly in front of her, the hallway continued straight. To her left, she could see that the hall became a staircase going up only a few feet from the intersection. She was curious about that, but even more so about the passage to her right. It angled steeply down.

Penny had gone down.

Lara turned to the right.

Penny fell and fell, through a twisting, seamless metal tube, screaming the whole way. She didn’t stop screaming even when the tube ended, and she dropped the last six feet to land in a pool of water. It took her a second to orient herself up, and then she began struggling to swim up. Gasping desperately, she broke the surface with a splash, and just floated a second before looking around.

When she did, Penny was amazed. The room was decently lit by brass fixtures at regular intervals high on the wall. What was even more stunning, though, was that except for the deep pool she had landed in – about ten feet square – the room looked like an English club. Mustard-colored wing-backed chairs were scattered apparently at random on a deep scarlet carpet. The walls were oaken, a rich brown hue that absorbed the light and kept the room from being too bright. Bookcases lined the walls, filled with handsome leather-bound volumes.

"I’d climb out of there if I were you. You’ll catch cold, the water’s freezing."

Penny screamed. The surprise of hearing the voice was bad enough, but whose voice – that was the kicker. She simply could not believe it.

Timothy Black rose out of his chair, and walked over to help her out of the water.

"Tim!" she shrieked, more terrified by the sight of a familiar face than she had been by all the danger she and Lara had faced in the hallway. She lost her stroke, sank underwater, and came up sputtering. "Tim, what in God’s name are you doing here?"

Wearing a black three-piece suit from Saville Row, Tim Black knelt by the pool, sticking his hand out. From her vantage point in the water, Penny could see the mirror shine on his wingtips. Tim’s close-cut, dark hair was just a shade lighter than his suit, but his eyes, Penny noticed, seemed much darker.

He knelt by the pool, offered his hand, and Penny swam over to take it. "I should think that would be obvious, wouldn’t you, Penelope? I’ve been waiting for you. And your friend Dr. Croft, of course."

Penny climbed out of the pool, pulling herself up by Tim’s arm. She just didn’t know what to say. To come through what she’d come through, see the things she’d seen, and then hear her husband talking as though he was just home from a day at the paper – it was just too much. She felt a buzzing in her brain.

Finally she managed, "If you wanted to talk to me, you could have just come home."

"Ah, well, there I have a confession to make, Darling. It’s not really you we want to talk to at all, but Dr. Croft. But come, you’ll freeze if you stay in those wet clothes. If I’m not mistaken, I believe my agents told me you have some spares in your backpack?"

Penny just stared. His agents? He knows what I have in my backpack? HIS agents? What in the hell . . . Eventually, she just turned away, walked behind one of the chairs for as much privacy as she could get, and changed clothes. Both black T-shirts were soaked through and through, so it was back to the pink.

While she was in the middle of pulling up her pants, Tim walked behind the chair. "Seen it all before, Darling, don’t be shy," he said. "But I haven’t seen these. I think I’ll have a look at them." With that, he picked up her rifle and pistol from the bundle of discarded clothing on the floor, and walked away. Struggling to do up her belt, Penny ran out after him.

"Tim! Give me those back!"

Her husband made no reply, and Penny couldn’t see where he’d put her guns. He had retaken the same seat he’d been in when she fell into the pool. There was a little conversation square, with two wing-chairs and an end-table between them. Tim sat in one, sipped at a snifter of brandy and puffed on one of his Dunhill cigarettes. On the end table, next to the vacant chair, sat a tumbler full of amber liquid and an unopened package of American Marlboro cigarettes.

"I believe we got the new brands right, didn’t we Darling? Come, sit down, have a drink with me."

Penny walked over to the chair, sat down, and stared at her husband intently. She didn’t touch the drink. "You’d better start explaining, Timothy John Black."

He laughed out loud, throwing his head back. "Do you know that you’ve never raised your voice to me before since we’ve known each other?"

"Well, I’ll damned well start today. I’ve gone through a real-life, no-exaggeration hell on earth to deliver that package of yours to Lara Croft, thinking that you were in deadly danger if not already dead the whole time, and then I find you sitting in the middle of some kind of bloody magic pyramid or something, sipping brandy and acting like nothing’s happened. If you don’t have a really good explanation, then the next time we meet it will be in divorce court."

Tim laughed again. "You are so much more interesting! Look at the favor I’ve done you. Running this little errand for me has given you a spine, by Jove!"

Penny rose out of her seat and lifted her hand to slap him. "Tim, you little shit!" she hissed, but his hand caught hers halfway through.

"Sit down, Penelope. You’ll need more sense of humor than that if we’re to carry on in a civil manner."

Seething, she returned her rump to the leather chair and, turning her nose up, said, "I shall not say another word to you until I hear an explanation for why I am here."

"Fine, fine, be impolite. But I wish I could have found a way to give you a spine that preserved your manners. You are here, quite simply, because my associates and I need to talk to Dr. Croft. Using you seemed like the method that would work to bring her here."

"Your associates?"

"Darling, I’m quite sure Dr. Croft has translated our little document for you by now. The Illuminati have a bone to pick with her. We sent you to invite her."

"You’re a part of the Illuminati?"

"Really, I don’t think ‘a part’ covers it quite accurately. You might call me the Magus – initiate into the greater mysteries, and all that."

"You? You’re claiming to be the head of this ancient, powerful, and whatever else secret society? You? But you’re just a muckraking, hack reporter for a no-account tabloid."

"My, my. You used to think my job was so impressive. I can see that our relationship has gone downhill. Yes, I am a tabloid reporter. Most of us hold jobs in the real world – it’s so much easier to network that way." A wry grin crept across his face, and he paused for a sip of brandy.

"I presume Dr. Croft gave you some hints as to what, precisely, we are?"

"Lara said the Illuminati were a Rorschach test. That people believed whatever they wanted to believe about them."

"Ah, Professor Croft. Always the skeptic. Believes it when she sees it, but not before. It’s a very admirable trait. Well, I’m quite confident her attitude about us has changed by now.

"But, I digress. Because I still harbor some affection for the woman I married, I shall tell you this much. You’ve read my profile of her, so you know that Dr. Croft has found and taken possession of certain articles of extreme historical interest. The Scion of Atlantis, the Dagger of Xian, the Spear of Destiny, etc. She should have left them for us. We are charged by the Supreme Being with bringing the planet up to the Supreme Being’s standards. The Supreme Being grants us access to certain, how shall I say this . . . certain forces at work in the universe which are beyond science, beyond reason. The objects of great power in the world are ours to use for the betterment of mankind. In short, Ms. Croft has some things which belong to us, and we want them back. She also has some knowledge of matters which should only be open to the Enlightened. It is not the place of a commoner to behold the power of the Mysteries."

Penny snapped, "Lara’s a Duchess. She’s not a commoner. You know that, you wrote the article I read it in."

"Excuse me, I did not mean to confuse. By commoner I referred not to her bloodline, but to the state of her Enlightenment. She is not Enlightened, so the Scion is not for her. We want it back.

"So, we sent you to bring her here. First, of course, we got her out of England. She’s just too ensconced there, too secure. But with some documentation which actually referred to our Pyramid here, we lured her to Africa in search of an old Moorish temple. Then, of course, the bait. It was not enough to just mail her a phony list of names of alleged Illuminati. She is very on guard against forgeries and other pranks, more so as her fame has grown. She gets a fake artifact per day at the Museum. There had to be something to make it look more real."

"That thing I’ve carried from here to hell and back was a fake?" Penny didn’t want to believe any of this, but least of all that the whole effort had been over a forgery.

"Oh, no, the document is quite real. We are not so stupid as to send a fake to Dr. Croft. She’s very good at spotting such things."

He grinned at Penny, and asked, "Are you sure you won’t have a drink? I poured it over ice, since Aaron tells me you drink it that way."

"Aaron’s dead. I pushed him out of the helicopter."

"Rather not. The fall was only twenty feet. He got a bit bruised, but he’s all right. Besides, you’ll find that we have remarkable powers of healing at our disposal.

"But I’m digressing again. The point is, if a helpless waif showed up at her door step, figuratively speaking, being pursued by unknown conspirators and bearing a deadly secret document, Croft would have to take it seriously. So what better person to play the part of helpless waif than you, Darling? You were perfect for the role."

"I don’t understand why you needed me. Why not just send some people to kidnap her?"

"Ah, but you saw what she did to our team at her dig, didn’t you. Lara Croft is not a force to be taken lightly." His eyes seemed to drift off, and he continued in a softer voice, "Pity Jacqueline couldn’t kill her, she was one of our best operatives." His gaze was wandering. He was clearly lost in a daydream.

Penny brought him back. "But why did you have to attack the expedition anyway? Why did you have to kill all those people? None of them knew anything, we never got a chance to show the document to them."

"Oh, but you miss the point, Penelope. We had to make it personal for Croft. We had to make it matter to her. Even a helpless innocent isn’t always enough. But kill a few of somebody’s friends and they’ll always come for you."

"Yeah, well, Lara killed a few of your friends at that dig, too," Penny smiled.

"Quite true. I was prepared for that. They were only novices – still in the nursery, as we say. Those were easy for her. But if Croft were here, at our pyramid, where our power is at its height . . . well, here we can do with her as we please. And it pleases us to kill her."

"But why?" Penny yelped, rising out of her chair again. Reluctantly, she lowered herself back down. "Why not just take your things back and let her live?"

"Penelope, Darling -- I’m sorry, I hear you’re using Penny these days, but I just can’t get used to it – I thought I told you, it’s not just what she has, it’s what she knows. Croft has seen the Mysteries without being initiated. She cannot live."

Penny leapt out of her chair, swung her open palm, and this time nailed him right across the cheek. "You’ll never kill her. You might have caught me, but I’m just a piker. Lara’s the best there is. She’ll chew all of you up and spit you out. Lara can do anything! You’ll never kill her!"

Tim touched his cheek, and then looked at her and shook his head. "Penelope, you really do idolize that woman. And to think, less than a week ago you hated her because you thought she was sleeping with me – oh, yes, I knew all about your suspicions. It’s a shame you like her, though, because it means this will hurt all the worse. You see, you’re wrong. We can kill her. She’s already dead."

Lara followed the slanting hallway as far as it would go. Deep inside the pyramid, it was hard to keep her sense of direction. But Lara was pretty sure she was still facing west, and probably right about at ground level. But here she had to make another choice. The path she was following was interrupted by a giant, yawning pit.

With a run up, she could probably make it across. But she’d looked down, and while it was a long ways, she could drop safely if she did it right. And, she told herself, Penny fell down. So down I go.

She slung her rifle over her shoulder, clambered over the edge until she was hanging by her fingers, and then let go. She let herself fall sideways and roll on impact. It hurt, but she was able to stand again afterwards.

The pit was too dark to see anything. The light from the hallway above was too dim to matter down here. She lit another flare. As soon as she did, Lara realized she had made a mistake by coming down here. There was no passageway out of the pit she was in, and she didn’t think she could get back up.

Knowing her flare was burning down, Lara began a quick and thorough examination of the pit. There were no doors on any of the walls. There were no handholds, to climb back up. And she didn’t have a rope.

But stepping over a rock, she saw a section of the floor that was slightly off color. Lara drew a Beretta from her hip, and aimed it at the ground. She loosed five quick rounds at the gray space on the floor, and enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing it crumble. Holstering the pistol, she looked through the hole.

The space below was much better lit than her current location, and the drop didn’t seem as far. Confidently, Lara jumped through the hole, and into a trap.

Only years of experience saved her from dying in the initial burst. As she always did, Croft rolled immediately on landing, just in case somebody might be waiting for her. Someone was. Or, more precisely, five someones. A hail of automatic weapons fire poured onto the spot where she’d hit the ground. Clambering up, Lara saw five soldiers in the room, taking cover behind rocks, crates, or other obstacles..

They didn’t waste time in adjusting their points of aim, but Lara didn’t waste time in moving. She leapt forward, drawing her pistols in mid air, and landed right on top of the crate one soldier was using for cover. She shot him in the face and vaulted to the side, dodging another rain of bullets. Rolling over when she hit the dirt, Lara came up firing, and killed another soldier.

The other three were on the other side of the room, and they did everything in their power to make it tough to get there. Ducking behind a boulder, Lara listened to the whirlwind of gunfire, ricochets, and curses filling the room. The fire was too thick; there was just no way to get across the room to where she could get a clean shot. The soldiers were all behind thick wooden crates that not only prevented her from seeing exactly where they had taken cover, but seemed to stop bullets as well.

Pretty tough wood if it’s too thick to shoot through she told herself. Maybe it’s not too thick to burn. Still hiding behind the boulder, she drew another magnesium flare – Only one left! -- and set it off. With a grunt, she heaved the white-hot projectile across the room, squarely onto the pile of crates concealing her enemies.

A satisfying crackle began quickly, and she risked a look over the boulder. One of the soldiers was fleeing from behind a burning pile of crates, and neither of the other two was shooting right now. She leapt out from behind the boulder and dashed across the room.

The soldiers started shooting immediately, but Lara darted left, right, and left again, making a very difficult target. As she drew closer to their side, she began firing away at what seemed to be the source of the gunfire. One soldier, trying to track in on her, accidentally shot the one who’d had to flee the fire, stitching him from groin to skull will 5.56 millimeter bullets.

Lara dodged to the left, rolled, and came up with the shooter right in front of her. She let him have it from both Berettas. His head exploded from the impact of two nine-millimeter slugs, splattering Lara with blood.

By Lara’s count, there was only one man left. His cover had been perfect when Lara was on the other side of the room, but from here, she could see him just fine. He was bringing his M-16 around in her direction, but Lara’s pistols were already drawn. She shot him twice.

Lara walked towards the man’s location, to check and make sure there was nothing he had that she could use. She wiped some of the blood off the front of her leotard with her hands, then reached to her back for the AK-47. Something didn’t feel right. Her bloody hand left a streak on her shoulder before she found the rifle’s grip, but it was already too late.

Over the crackle of the fire she’d started, Lara never heard the man who’d dropped through the same hole in the ceiling she’d used. Had Penny been with Lara, she would have recognized Aaron Walters, from her first helicopter ride. But Lara never even saw him. Aaron was a little miffed about having to replace his Ruger, since that blond bitch took his first one. He took it all out on Lara.

Coldly, calmly, he aimed the pistol straight between her shoulder blades, and fired.

Penny just stood there, hands limply at her sides. "What . . .what do you mean?," she stammered, in a small voice. Then, louder, "What do you mean?"

"She walked right into a trap we set for her. One of my men shot her in the back."

"How can you possibly know that? You haven’t spoken to anybody but me since I fell down here, and Lara was fine when I fell."

Timothy Black smiled wolfishly. "The Enlightened do not need to use their voice to talk, nor their ears. I know."

It was as if her skeletal structure suddenly went AWOL. Penny felt like she just couldn’t possibly stand. She sunk into the leather chair. "No." It was only one word, but it was all she could manage.

"I’m afraid so. I am sorry about that. You may not believe it, but I do have some affection for you. I thought you hated Lara Croft, which was why I felt okay about using you as a means to help us kill her. I never intended that you would come to see her as an idol."

Penny whipped her head around and screamed at the man who was supposed to be her husband. "How do you know how I feel! What makes you think you know anything about me! You never spent any time with me at all, and even when you did it wasn’t the real Tim Black. I never met the real Tim Black until today. You don’t know anything about me!"

Timothy just absorbed the outburst quietly, and sipped at his brandy. He lit another Dunhill with an onyx lighter.

Penny ran a hand over her cheek, trying to wipe away tears. "You’re a monster, Timothy. I’ve been married to a monster all along, and didn’t know it."

He looked reflective for a moment, and stoked his chin. "No, Penelope, I wouldn’t say monster. I think ‘mortal god,’ is actually more accurate. But then, that’s a good question, isn’t it? How much difference is there between a god and a monster?"

"Between my God and your ‘Supreme Being,’ there’s all the difference in the universe. My God cannot be used as a justification for what you’ve done."

"Well, I never said they were the same, did I? But that’s one of the Mysteries, and it’ll be some time before you’re ready for that one."

"I’ll burn in hell before I learn any of your Mysteries!" With a yell, Penny threw herself on Tim, and reached for his neck. She got her hands around it, and started to squeeze, but Tim worked his arms in between hers and pried her grip loose.

"Get the hell off me!" he growled, pushing against her gut.

But she wouldn’t. Blind with rage at what her husband had turned out to be, Penny grabbed again, and got hold of his tie. She held onto him by that while she pulled her right hand back and drove it forward, right into his eye.

Tim gave a cry of pain, and shoved her. From deep in his gut came a growl so resonating, so powerful, that it could not have been only him making it. He was not a strong man, and the push shouldn’t have done more than break her grip. But Penny flew across the room, landing on the edge of the pool she’d come in by.

She scrambled to her feet as Tim rubbed his eye. "Bloody bitch, I’ll have the worst black eye of my life tomorrow."

"What the hell did you do to me? You threw me halfway across the room!"

"Penelope, you just don’t listen. I told you we’re stronger here."

"What in blazes do you mean?"

"Well, again, there are Mysteries for which you are not yet prepared," Tim said. He had regained most of his earlier composure. "But suffice it to say that there are some places on the earth that are more powerful than others. You cannot know the reasons, yet. This is one, this pyramid. The Illuminated gain a special strength here. I didn’t want to use it on you, but really. What choice did I have? That punch really hurt."

"I’ll do more than hurt you, murderer!" She screamed, and ran at him again.

Lara woke up slung across somebody’s shoulder. Her eyes snapped open, and she could tell they were moving, but not much else. Memories of her last gunfight flooded back in, and she realized somebody had shot her.

Ouch! Right in the back, from the feel of it. I hurt like hell. But it was not, she noticed, the kind of hurt that went with being shot. She ached impressively, but it felt more like a blunt trauma than a penetrating trauma. She moved.

"What the hell?" Her captor practically jumped out of his skin when she wiggled, and he dropped her. Lara hit the floor on her face, and immediately rolled to the side. She saw the man with dirty blond hair drawing a gun.

"I shot you! You’re dead. I fucking shot you! You were covered with blood!" His jaw was working randomly as he pulled a pistol from his waist.

Lara gathered her legs under her body, then launched herself at the man, catching him in the gut. He doubled over, and she wrestled the gun from his grip. It was a Ruger, like the one Penny was carrying. Without wasting a second, she shot him right between the eyes.

She blew the smoke from the weapon’s fat, sound-suppressing barrel, and said, "Next time, use a bigger gun."

The silenced pistol hadn’t made enough noise to attract attention, so Lara figured she had time to check her wounds. She stripped off her backpack and tried to check out her back. There was a massive bruise, which was sore to the touch, but no entry wound. Curiously, she opened her backpack.

"Aha!" She pulled her hand out of the pack gripping the steel tube with the list of old Illuminati inside. Buried in the side of the tube was a small, .22 caliber piece of lead. It had penetrated the steel, but just barely, leaving the back half of the bullet where she could see it.

Lara retrieved her weapons from the corpse’s body, put her pack back on, and surveyed her surroundings. The man had carried her to a hangar. Three different helicopters – all UH-60 Blackhawks like the one she’d flown in on – nestled within the pyramid. Lara looked at the ceiling, but there was no opening for them to fly out of. Besides, there were doubtless many stories of pyramid above her.

Then she looked at one of the walls, and it hit her. The whole north wall of the room was a sliding door. The helicopters must fly out that way!

Lara ran to the wall, and opened one small man-sized door without opening the whole hangar. Outside of the current room, she saw the giant corridor through which she and Penny had come in. She remembered wondering why they had built the front door so big, and now it was obvious. They flew helicopters out of here.

So, that was the way out. But Lara wasn’t ready to leave yet. Not without Penny. If she’s still alive, that is.

Penny made it most of the way to Timothy before she saw him make a flicking motion with his hand, and felt an irresistible force swat her away. Again, she heard the deep, booming growl of power as he did so. She was hurled across the room again, and actually into the pool of freezing water. Scrambling back out, she tried running at him again. She saw him moving his hand, and tried jinking to the right just as he did it, but to no avail. She was slammed up against a book case as Tim’s otherworldly voice echoed off the walls. Whatever it was he was doing, you couldn’t dodge it.

She didn’t know what she could do that would work, but in the end, Penny didn’t care. Just to be fighting him, to be resisting this evil being to whom she had been married – that was what she wanted. She charged again.

This time, Penny felt herself gripped around the waist. As beastly, supernatural snarls emanated from Tim, she could almost feel the contours of giant fingers. She shrieked, and wiggled, but she was trapped. Tim laughed a deep, booming laugh, and fluttered his hand. She rose up to the ceiling, just slightly in front of him, held there by a hand she couldn’t see. Penny almost threw up, looking straight down at the ground and not seeing anything between her and it.

"You are more interesting now, Penny. This is the most fun I’ve had in years! But it’s near the end of game time. I have to go with my men to search Croft’s home, now that she’s out of the way. We’ll be recovering ancient Mysteries, after all. I can’t leave it in the hands of underlings."

Penny felt the unearthly grip around her waist slacken as Tim turned around and waved his hand at a section of bookcase. When his attention divided, the strength of his mental grip on her lessened. The books disappeared, and in their place Penny saw an ornate door. Then Tim returned his full attention to her, and any chance to escape was lost.

Lara turned the corner with both Berettas in hand. She found herself at the beginning of a corridor, right between two guards. Both cried out in surprise at her sudden appearance, and turned to fire on her. At the last moment Lara jumped up, and the guards shot each other. She walked further down the hall until she came to a door. She could hear the voices of two or three men inside.

Pistols in hand, she kicked open the door and rolled through. She came back to her feet just as two guards by the door brought rifles to bear in her direction. Lara used a pistol on each of them, then turned and used both on one man who was sitting behind a desk.

She took a second to examine the room she was in. It looked like the antechamber to any important person’s office. The man behind the desk seemed to have been a receptionist of some kind. Of course, she thought, most offices don’t have armed guards at the door. Right near the desk, opposite the one she had come in through, was an elaborately carved wooden door, with a gold handle and hinges.

She went to the desk and began to rifle it, looking for a key to the door. But there was none to be found. She was about to give up and try to kick it in, when the door opened of its own accord.

Timothy Black flicked his hand, and opened the door. "Well, Penelope, I’ll be leaving now. The question is, shall I keep you up there, or take you with me? It really hinges on whether you’re ready to be civil, doesn’t it?"

"Well, well, Timothy Black. You’re wife told me the marriage had gone sour, but I had no idea it was this bad."

Penny spoke first, yelling "Lara!" As she did, Tim whirled around in surprise.

Standing in the door he had just opened was Lara Croft, aiming two pistols right at his head.

Tim was clearly shocked. He jumped back, and gave in to his first instinct. With whatever mysterious psycho-kinetic strength he had, desperately grabbed for her pistols.

It was Lara’s turn to be surprised when her guns jumped out of her hands and flew across the room toward Tim. But he had made a mistake. His shock at seeing Lara alive, combined with the strain of dividing his concentration, left Penny free to fall while he was focusing on the guns. And when he had jumped back, Tim had placed himself directly under her.

Penny fell on him with a thud, and knocked him to the floor. They were both surprised, but Penny had had a second to think about things while she fell from the ceiling, while Tim didn’t realize what had happened until she hit him on the head. So Penny made it to her feet first.

Before he could even speak, Penny shoved the heel of her combat-boot clad foot directly into husband’s nose. Cartilage and bone were driven backwards into his brain. Timothy Black died twitching like a fish on a hook.;

After only a second to look at him, she ran across the room to Lara, who was picking her pistols up off the floor. "Oh my God, Lara! You’re okay! He told me you were dead!"

Lara laughed, stepped away from Penny, and reached into her backpack. She passed Penny the damaged metal tube. "Bloody good job of packaging Tim did on this, eh? I was shot in the back, but this stopped the bullet."

Oh, my God. Tim was the one, Lara. He told me the whole thing! He’s one of the Illuminati. Their leader, he said. This whole thing has been planned from day one."

"Yeah, well, I’ll bet their plan didn’t include us getting out of their little pyramid alive. Come on, let’s exit, stage right."

Most of the guards were already dead, and the hanger, being a facility the Illuminati used regularly, wasn’t trapped. So Penny and Lara made it to the helicopter easily. "This is great, Lara, but where do we take it from here?" Penny asked as she climbed into the chopper. "I don’t see a switch to open the roof, or anything. Besides, that eye’s up there."

"Not the roof," Lara said, "the garage door." She flipped a switch on the dash board, and the wall in front of them slid away. Penny now had a clear view straight down the original corridor they had come in through.

"No wonder they built it so wide."

Lara just smiled, and powered up the engines. To Penny, the flight out the door seemed an awful tight fit. But Lara’s piloting skills were equal to the task, and they emerged into the black Sahara night. Croft laid in a course for the airport at Tunis.

They still had the African version of international relations to worry about, so she flew the helicopter as low as she could. "I think we’ll land outside of Tunis and walk in," she told Penny. "In this country, I have no desire to bring an unidentified helicopter right up to the airport. I’ve been through too much on this trip to get shot out of the sky when I’m nearly home."

An hour later, they were walking into Tunis under the unblinking sun of dawn in the desert. "Next stop, England," Penny said cheerily. She was filled with a strange elation at having lived through it all. She should have been depressed, given what she’d learned about the life she thought she had. But somehow, Penny was happy.

Lara ruined it. "And what then? After you get back to England?"

"I just don’t know, Lara. I really don’t. I’ve never had a job in my life. I don’t know how to earn a living. But I don’t have a husband to be a housewife for anymore. Even if I did, I wouldn’t want to. I don’t have what I once had, I don’t want that anyway, but I have no idea what I do want. I just don’t know."

"Well, you’re still learning, true. But you’re pretty good in a fight, even so. You could work for me."

Penny smiled wanly. "I thought you might say that." She paused, and looked aside, running the fingers of her left hand through her hair. "I don’t know, Lara. Archeology really isn’t my cup of tea. I told you on the beach: I’ve tried living your life, and I realized I’m just not cut out for it."

She looked over at Croft, who looked surprised at the negative response. Then Lara laughed. "Penny, I don’t think, from what you just told me, that you’re in a position to turn down job offers."

Penny smiled, thought for a second, and then agreed. "It’ll do. For now, anyway."

Epilogue: One Week Later

Finished changing after a long day at the British Museum, Lara walked out to the assault course behind her house wearing baggy khaki pants and halter top, just in time to see Penny come dashing through the finish gate. While the younger woman clasped her hands behind her head and gasped for breath, Lara walked over to her butler, who was standing patiently by with a stop watch. "How’d she do this time, Jeeves?"

"One minute, thirty one seconds, Lady Croft."

Lara called to Penny, "You’ll need to do better than that, if we’re ever going to race!"

"(Gasp) I don’t want to(wheeze) race! I want (pant) to live."

"I think it’s about time we talked about those cigarettes, too!" Lara laughed, and then added, "Come on, I’m heading back to the start to run it myself."

"Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman."

Lara, Penny, and Jeeves turned in unison, to see a man in a gray pin striped suit standing in front of them. His age could have been anywhere from sixty to eighty – he had the kind of steely face that just gets more distinguished after a certain age, not older. His posture was perfect, and he stood patiently with his hands at his sides until one of them spoke.

It was Lara. "May I ask your name, sir? Not to mention how you got into my yard without tripping the alarm?

"My name is Adam Weishaupt. And, if your knowledge is as extensive as I believe it to be, that should perhaps also explain how I come to be in your yard. May I have a moment of your time?" His English was perfect, but there was just the barest hint of a German accent to it.

Lara just stared at the man for a second, before gathering her wits enough to reply, "Certainly. Please join me in the drawing room. Jeeves," she added, "some tea, please."

"Of course, Lady Croft," he wheezed, and turned for the kitchen door.

Lara and Penny went to the front door, brought the guest in through it, and went upstairs to the drawing room. Everyone took a seat, with the man perching erectly on the edge of a small sofa, and Jeeves came in with the tea. When everyone was settled and Jeeves had left the room, Lara began, "I’m sorry. Would you mind repeating your name." It was not a request.

He smiled tolerantly. "Certainly. My name is Adam Weishaupt. I come before you, Professor Croft, as a representative of the Bavarian Illuminati."

Penny tensed, as if ready to leap at the man, but with a glance Lara kept her back. "Sir, I cannot help but notice that you are alive. That’s quite an accomplishment, if you are Adam Weishaupt. Tell me how you managed to both found the Bavarian Illuminati in 1764 and still be here talking to me in 1999?"

He smiled again. "What’s the phrase they’re using in the television advertisements these days? Ah, yes. ‘Membership has its privileges.’"

Penny couldn’t hold herself back any longer. She glared at the Illuminatus and growled, "What do you want?"

"I cannot fault you, Ms. Black, for feeling a certain hostility toward members of my order. In fact, I have business to discuss with you as well. We were not aware we could find you here. Now I shall have an opportunity to, as they say, kill two birds with one stone."

Penny almost came out of her seat. "You’d best not mean that literally."

"I assure you, I don’t. Please excuse me, I do not spend much time in the day-to-day world these days, and my native language is German, not English. I don’t always follow the double meanings of words very well. Please, a little patience with a very old man, Ms. Black, and all will be explained."

Penny sat back, still looking cross, and Weishaupt turned to Lara. "Professor Croft. You have in your possession something which belongs to us."

"I believe Mr. Black once accused me of the same thing, if reports are to be believed. I did not accept his claim, and I do not accept yours." Penny had to smile. Even in khakis and a halter top, Lara was more than a match for the courtly German in the area of propriety.

"Yes, well, that’s part of what I had come to discuss with you. It has been decided that both of you can be informed that Mr. Black was . . . how shall I put this . . .overstepping his bounds. There was a small dispute between the Bavarian Illuminati and the Alumbrados. Thanks in no small part to your disposal of Mr. Black, the Alumbrados have lost." He grinned, and it was a much colder, harder grin than those he had offered before.

"Even assuming I am to believe you, that does not persuade me that I should give you any of the artifacts I have in my possession."

"We understand your reluctance. And we are quite willing to, as the Americans say, make a deal. We shall not ask for the Scion, the Ark, the Dagger, the Spear, or even the Necronomicon, although that is of particular value to us. All we ask is for the return of the document Mr. Black gave to you."

"That was, actually, a free gift of Mr. Black. He directed his wife to convey it into my possession, and she did so. You certainly have no claim to that."

"As I said, Mr. Black overstepped his authority. He was not rightfully the man who could make the decision to give it to you, and therefore his gift of it is not a valid transfer of property."

"If you intend to make a legal claim, please feel free to do so. My solicitors are Crommerford and Fletcher. They’ll be happy to deal with you."

"I’m sure you know that we would not be so foolish as to make the claim in a courtroom. Any exposure of the document is unacceptable to us. We would contest our claim . . . elsewhere."

"I’m not certain I like the tone of your voice, sir." Lara’s muscles tightened, and Penny, watching her, tensed as well. Had he come to attack them?

"I had hoped it would not come to this. It’s quite vulgar to deal in open threats. But I must warn you, we can be implacable foes."

Lara looked the man right in the eye, and said, "I shall not give it to you, and I shall not be frightened. I’ve dealt with your Society before, and I will do so again if necessary."

"Ah, but you dealt with a splinter branch. Are you prepared to feel the full weight of the Illuminati upon you?"

But Wieshaupt waved his hand, as if shooing away his own threat. "But please, this is all so very crude. Perhaps we could make an arrangement."

"Talk."

The visitor said, "Our Israeli brothers tell us you have made an arrangement with them concerning the Ark which we would like to duplicate. Keep the papers in your possession. But do not make them public. If you ever do, I assure you, Illuminati across the globe will make your death their primary purpose in life. If you do not, we can live in peace, and we shall never molest you again. And, because you possess the documents, you will have an assurance of our good faith. Were we ever to disturb your peace, you could publish the list of some of our more prominent members. To be frank, we do not relish the thought of there being genuine, documented proof that the Illuminati exist."

Penny interrupted. "Why are you so worried about that list? It was from the 1600’s. Those people are all dead."

Weishaupt’s only reply was a small, self-deprecating smile.

Lara sat, and thought for a while. Finally she spoke. "It seems like the best arrangement we can get, doesn’t it. It’s either this or total war between the two of us."

"A war which you would lose. You are only one – or two, counting Ms. Black. We are legion."

"I shan’t debate you on that, Mr. Weishaupt, but rather we’ll leave that question to be decided if we are ever put to it. For now, I will accept your arrangement." She stood, and walked over to him, sticking out her hand. "Do we have a truce?"

He rose to his feet, and this time gave a genuine smile. "We do." Weishaupt shook Lara’s hand, then turned to Penny.

"And as for you, Ms. Black, you were very sorely used by your husband, who was acting under the color of our society. True, he was a renegade, but he nonetheless abused you rather roughly in our name. For that, I am to convey the apologies of the Society. Many things are said of the Illuminati, and many of those things are true. But we do not like it said that we are without honor. We share some of the blame for what happened to you – if nothing else, for initiating Mr. Black to a power for which he was not prepared."

"Somehow," Penny said, glaring at him, "’I’m sorry’ just doesn’t make up for what Tim did to me."

"No, it most certainly does not," Weishaupt agreed, and turned on his heel for the door to the drawing room. He stepped toward it, turned back, and said to Penny, "You will find deposited to your account the sum of ten million pounds. The taxes are already paid."

With that, he walked out the door. Lara ran after him into the hallway, but Weishaupt was gone, as suddenly and mysteriously as he had come.

Author’s note:

Thanks a million for taking the time to read my story! If you’ve invested the effort in slogging through this thing, you deserve a medal, at least. Unfortunately, I don’t own any to give out. All I can offer you is the opportunity for feedback. I would welcome comments and suggestions at bhgwriter@juno.com.

Before you dash off that note, though, I should say this: Yes, I know, I took a great deal of liberty with the "facts" about the Illuminati. I am not one, nor am I involved in any other globe-spanning conspiracies that I know of, so how would I know for sure what the Illuminati really are? I don’t claim to know. The Illuminati I wrote are fictional. There is some real research that I picked up from reading some stuff from the net and R.A. Wilson’s book, but none of this is to be taken as fact, please. Remember that fictional disclaimer at the top?

Thanks again.