The Librarians and the Lost Lamp

  “I knew it!” she exclaimed. “There’s something here, but I can’t quite get hold of it.”

  “Don’t worry about that.” Ezekiel clambered onto the bed and sliced the canopy open with an icepick, so that the unseen object tumbled into his grasp. “Sorry, mate, looks like you’re not getting your damage deposit back.”

  “Is that it?” Cassandra hopped down onto the floor. “The Lamp?”

  “None other.” He handed it over to her. “Take a gander.”

  Eagerly accepting the artifact, she saw at once that the jade lamp fit the description of the Lamp that Flynn had discovered a decade ago. Standing less than foot tall, it resembled a traditional Chinese lantern, but was made of polished jade rather than paper. Stone could surely pin the lamp to a specific dynasty or era, but Cassandra didn’t care about that.

  “Oh my goodness,” she said in awe. “This is really it. Aladdin’s Lamp.”

  “And we’re the ones who found it.” Ezekiel seemed more enthused about outsmarting Dunphy than recovering a legendary relic from the pages of The Arabian Nights. “Who needs magic luck when you can make your own?”

  By contrast, Cassandra gazed at the Lamp in wonder, thunderstruck to realize that she was actually holding a genuine piece of history, or mythology, or some combination thereof. On closer inspection, however, she was alarmed to see that the Lamp had seen better days. Hairline cracks and fractures threatened the Lamp’s structural integrity, so that even one more wish might allow the Djinn to shatter his prison completely. She noted again, more anxiously than before, how warm the jade lamp felt, as though the caged Djinn was seething impatiently, ready for the day he was finally set loose upon the world.…

  “This is not good.” She cradled the Lamp against her chest, terrified of breaking it. “Not good at all.”

  “Not to worry,” Ezekiel said. “Everything’s aces now … unless you feel like treating yourself to a wish or two?”

  “Don’t tempt me!”

  Despite her apprehensions regarding the time-worn Lamp, she’d be lying if she didn’t admit that she was indeed tempted to command the Djinn to magic away her brain tumor, so that she could live a long and productive life, free of the grape-sized time bomb ticking away in her head. But, no, she had learned the hard way that being a Librarian was not about using magic for personal gain. She had no intention of ever making that mistake again, even though she suspected this was going to be an ongoing struggle for her—until her inevitable rendezvous with the Grim Reaper.

  “Sorry,” Ezekiel said. “Didn’t mean to hit a nerve.”

  “It’s fine.” She placed the Lamp carefully down on the tea table and took out her phone. “I’m going to let Baird know we’ve acquired the Lamp.”

  To her surprise, though, Baird didn’t pick up.

  “That’s funny,” Cassandra said. “Why isn’t she answering?”

  23

  2016

  “Hello again,” Krieger said. “This must be my lucky day.”

  Baird was staked out in the lobby, keeping watch over the entrance to the penthouse elevator, when Mark Krieger surprised her once more. He strolled across the lobby to greet her, his bandaged arm still in a sling. Obviously glad to see her, he grinned as he approached.

  “Hi.” She faked a smile even though his timing left something to be desired. “Fancy running into you again.”

  “I know,” he said cheerfully. “What are the odds?”

  Cassandra could probably tell you, Baird thought, if we didn’t have more important tasks requiring her talents.

  “This is Vegas,” she quipped. “Never count on the odds.”

  “Good point.” He moved in closer. “So, at the risk of pushing my luck, have you had dinner yet?”

  I wish, she thought. Ordinarily, she’d have welcomed the invitation, but she had too many other balls in the air at the moment. “Can I take a rain check? I’m afraid I have other plans.”

  Krieger’s smile froze as the warmth drained from his eyes, replaced by a cold, calculating look she recalled from his interrogations of suspected insurgents overseas.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist, Eve.”

  His gaze shifted to her chest, where an ominous red dot suddenly appeared above her heart. Baird froze, realizing that she was in the sights of a sniper. She glanced around quickly, trying to identify the location of the shooter—or a possible escape route. Her own gun was hidden beneath her jacket, tucked into the waistband of her slacks. As a Guardian, she made it a point to be armed, but the sniper already had the drop on her.

  She didn’t need to be Cassandra to calculate the sniper’s possible positions. Lifting her eyes, she spotted the casino’s costumed “camel” mascot up on the mezzanine overlooking the lobby. A ruby-red light, all but unnoticeable unless you were looking for it, came from inside the “camel’s” mouth. Unknown eyes were presumably hidden behind the mascot’s flaring nostrils. Baird suddenly had the sneaking suspicion that the performer who was usually inside the costume had been replaced by one of the Forty.

  Great, she thought, a seven-foot-tall plush camel has the drop on me.

  “Don’t even think of making a break for it,” Krieger warned, “or using the crowd for cover. I’m sure you wouldn’t want any happy-go-lucky vacationers to end up as collateral damage.”

  Oh, hell, she thought. “What’s this all about, Mark?”

  “The Lamp, course. What else?”

  * * *

  “I don’t understand.” Cassandra scanned the crowded lobby for Baird. “Where is she?”

  Ezekiel shrugged as he looked around as well. He hung onto the Lamp, which was tucked inside a large Ali Baba shopping bag they’d discovered in Dunphy’s suite. “Beats me. Maybe she just skipped out for a few minutes?”

  That’s what I might do, he thought, if I got bored enough.

  “No.” Cassandra shook her head. “That’s not like her.” She tried again to call Baird, but without success. “It’s no good. It keeps going straight to voice mail.” Her brow crinkled in concern. “Something is wrong.”

  Ezekiel was getting worried, too, although he tried to maintain a breezy attitude just to keep up appearances. “Possibly, but you know Baird. If anybody can handle herself in a tight spot, it’s her.” That sounded uncharacteristically sappy for him, so he hurried to amend it. “Well, aside from yours truly, of course.”

  This didn’t seem to reassure her. “Can you track her phone by GPS or something?”

  “Probably, in a pinch. But maybe Jenkins knows something? Or Stone?”

  “I can check,” Cassandra said, “but I can’t believe that Eve would just ditch us like that, without even alerting us first.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Neither can I.”

  The bag holding the Lamp suddenly seemed to feel a whole lot heavier. Had they obtained the Lamp, only to lose Baird in the process?

  That was not how this heist was supposed to go!

  * * *

  “Smile,” Krieger said softly to Baird, “while I ensure that everything stays friendly between us.”

  Baird clenched her fists at her side. “You know, I don’t really see that happening.”

  “Try to keep an open mind, Eve.”

  He circled around behind her, so as not to block the sight line of the disguised sniper, and discreetly relieved her of her gun and phone, depositing the pistol in the pocket of his jacket. Baird cringed at his touch. Being disarmed at gunpoint was bad enough, but by an old comrade-in-arms, no less? The betrayal stung … badly.

  “Got to say I’m disappointed in you, Mark. I always thought we were on the same side.” She spoke more in sorrow than in anger. “I would have never expected this of you.”

  “Perhaps that’s because you were too focused on the enemy you knew to keep a close enough eye on those around you,” he suggested. “Although, to be fair, I’m assuming you hadn’t been recruited as a Guardian yet, so you had no idea what the true shape of the world was, or who
the real players were.”

  “But you did?”

  “I saw enough overseas to catch on—unexplainable phenomena that convinced me power and treasures beyond imagining awaited those who had the guts to go after them.” A scary gleam came into his eyes. “But we should continue this discussion somewhere more comfortable, away from all this nonstop frivolity.” He quietly nudged her with his bandaged hand, which easily slipped free of its sling. “To the stairs, please, over there past the elevators.”

  Baird saw no choice but to comply for the present. The ominous red dot followed her across the lobby. Acting casual, Krieger guided her to a stairwell leading to the upper floors of the hotel. His good hand was tucked in his pocket, gripping the concealed handgun as he fell back behind Baird and paused at the base of the stairs.

  “You first,” he instructed. “Believe it or not, Eve, I’d just as soon not shoot you, if only for old time’s sake, so let’s just make this easy for both of us.”

  Fat chance, she thought, waiting for an opportunity to turn the tables on Krieger. So what if he had her gun? She was no slouch when it came to hand-to-hand combat. All I need is an opening.

  Too bad Krieger was no amateur, either. He took care to stay a few steps below her as they climbed the stairs, safely out of a range of any sudden strikes on her part. Baird stewed in frustration as he marched her up the stairs, where they were met by a party of giggling young women on their way down to the lobby.

  “I don’t get it,” one of them said. “Why didn’t we just wait for the elevator?”

  “For the exercise, of course. We’ve got to burn off all those drinks we still haven’t gotten to yet!”

  “Oh my god, who knew bachelorette parties were so aerobic?”

  Baird briefly considered trying to join the women, or maybe signal that she was in trouble, but then she remembered what Krieger had said earlier about “collateral damage” and decided she couldn’t risk it. Biting her tongue, she stepped aside to let the oblivious partyers pass.

  Sometimes being the good guy really gets in your way.

  “Good call,” Krieger said softly, as though reading her mind. He waited for the women to leave them and their laughter to fade away before marching her up three more floors and down a carpeted hallway to the door of an unremarkable hotel room far below the penthouse where Dunphy was staying.

  “Here we are,” he said, keeping the pocketed gun aimed at her. “Would you mind knocking? My hands are otherwise occupied.”

  She rapped on the door, wishing it was Krieger’s duplicitous face instead. She heard a chain being drawn on the opposite side of the door, which opened just a crack. A sliver of a face peered out warily.

  “It’s all right, Omar,” Krieger stated. “Let us in.”

  The sentry nodded and admitted them to the room, where Baird found four more hostiles waiting, including a striking Middle Eastern woman who had to be the same individual who was stalking Dunphy and the Lamp, and very possibly the same woman Flynn had clashed with a decade ago.

  “Marjanah, I presume?”

  The other woman smirked at Baird. “My reputation precedes me, I see. How gratifying.”

  All the pieces came together to form an ugly picture. Baird turned to face Krieger.

  “You’re with the Forty.”

  “The First of the Forty,” he clarified, “as I was when I first crossed paths with your friend Flynn Carsen many years ago. Although he knew me as Khoja Hoseyn.”

  That was a lot for Baird to process. “Major Mark Krieger of the US Army is also the First of the Forty? How does that even happen?”

  He made himself comfortable on a Moroccan-style couch, while shrugging off his sling, which appeared to serve no purpose aside from camouflage. He poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher on the coffee table in front of him.

  “It was back in Baghdad, after the shock and awe. I was investigating black-market trafficking in looted art and antiquities when I stumbled onto the existence of the Forty. They were in a sorry state, merely a shadow of their former glory and lacking proper leadership, but I saw an opportunity to build them back into something great and finally achieve their ultimate goal: obtaining the Lamp and all the riches and power that entails.” A scary gleam came into his eyes. “It was as though destiny had brought me to that dry, dusty hellhole for a reason.”

  Baird chose to stay standing. This was a side of Krieger that she had never seen before. She couldn’t say she cared for it.

  “And I came so close,” he said bitterly, “only to be tricked by that Librarian just as I was on the verge of obtaining the fabled magic lamp.” He clenched his bandaged left hand. “A shame he’s AWOL this time around. I still have a score to settle with him.”

  “As do we all,” Marjanah added.

  Baird recalled Jenkins’s concise recap of Flynn’s long-ago Arabian adventure. “Hang on,” she said. “Weren’t you lost in that cave-in way back when?”

  “Buried alive, yes, but alive nonetheless.” His expression darkened at the memory. “But I eventually managed to dig myself out of that treacherous cavern, with some assistance from my other right hand, Marjanah, who atoned somewhat for her earlier desertion by returning to look for me … eventually.”

  Marjanah scowled. “That was ten years ago. When are you going to let it go?”

  “When I have the Lamp, perhaps.” He resumed speaking to Baird. “At the risk of boring you, we eventually made our way off that accursed island, but not without a souvenir or two.”

  He slowly unwrapped his bandaged hand to reveal a palm that had been badly burned at some point.

  From when Flynn tricked him into rubbing the decoy lamp? Baird winced at the sight of the scarred flesh. But that was at least a decade ago? She kicked herself for not making the connection earlier, but, really, how could she have suspected that her friend Mark had anything to do with Flynn’s encounter with the Forty back in 2006? If only Flynn wasn’t flitting around the world and could have joined us on this case. He might have recognized Krieger even after all these years.

  Krieger displayed his seared hand. “Not very pretty, I know. Skin grafts repaired the damage years ago, but the scars returned and began throbbing again a little over a week ago.” He rescued a bottle of pain pills from his pocket and washed a couple down with a gulp of water. “That’s when I began to suspect that the Lamp had resurfaced at last and felt myself drawn to Vegas, where the throbbing only increased in intensity the nearer we drew to this fabricated desert oasis.”

  How exactly does that work? Baird wondered. No doubt Cassandra would have some theory involving mystical entanglement or some such technobabble, but Baird decided to just chalk it up to the usual magical weirdness. “And that led you to Dunphy?”

  “More or less,” Krieger said. “You can’t expect me to divulge all my tricks at this juncture. Suffice it to say that we were closing in on Dunphy when you and your Librarian friends stuck your noses into our business.” He began to rewrap his hand. “Imagine my surprise to discover that you’d enlisted with the competition.”

  “You think you’re surprised?” Baird said. “You don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”

  “Oh, I think I can hazard a guess. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We made a good team, back in the day. Why not come over to our side? Why waste your talents playing den mother to a pack of loose-cannon Librarians?”

  “Because some of us care more about duty and protecting innocents than riches and power,” she replied. “I’m a Guardian. You’re just a thief with delusions of grandeur.”

  “An exceptional thief,” he corrected her, “and we’ll see how delusional I am when the Lamp is ours.” He scrutinized her features. “Have you found it yet? Your side has always excelled at that, I’ll give you that.”

  “No idea,” she said honestly. “You kidnapped me before I could find out.”

  “Good point.” He took out her phone and inspected it. “Hmm. You have several recent voice mails.?
?? He handed the phone to her. “Access them.”

  “Or?” she asked.

  “Consider the threat implied.” He bestowed an icy smile upon her. “You’ve seen me in combat, Eve. You know what I’m capable of if necessary.”

  “Ditto,” she pointed out, but she recognized that Krieger had the upper hand at present. Reluctantly, she keyed in her password and switched the device to speakerphone. Please, she thought, let there not be any vital intel in those messages.

  Any such hopes were dashed as Cassandra’s anxious voice emerged from the phone.

  “Baird? Eve? We’ve found the Lamp, but where are you? Why aren’t you taking our calls?”

  Marjanah plucked the phone from Baird’s hand and laid it down on the coffee table so that they could all listen to Cassandra’s messages, which were basically more of the same. Krieger grinned triumphantly.

  “Congratulations, Eve,” he said mockingly. “Clearly, the moral here is to never send a thief to do a Librarian’s job.” He shot a disparaging glance at Marjanah, who bristled in response. “The trick is making sure they don’t get to keep it.”

  “That’s where we come in,” Marjanah said. “Taking what we want, when we want it, has always been the way of the Forty, whether by theft … or ransom.”

  Uh-oh, Baird thought. I don’t like where this is going.

  “So it is,” Krieger agreed. Reclaiming the phone, he called Cassandra back.

  “Hello?” she answered immediately. “Where have you been, Eve?”

  “I’m afraid Colonel Baird is presently in our custody,” Krieger said. “But you can get her back … in exchange for the Lamp.”

  A stunned silence greeted his proposal, before Cassandra finally spoke up again.

  “Who is this?”

  “An old friend of Eve’s who has a vested interest in obtaining the Lamp. I trust we can work out an equitable transaction: your Guardian for the Lamp.”

  “Let us talk to her,” Ezekiel’s voice broke into the debate. “We need proof of life.”