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"And you need the ships' logs?"
Annja looked at him. "Yes."
"Why?"
"To see if we can find a reference to Yohance. The first Yohance. The one
whose village was razed and who was taken into captivity and sold as a slave.
If we find him listed, there may be some mention of where he was from. Once we
get close enough, the map carved on the stone should be enough to get us the
rest of the way."
"You don't have to do that," McIntosh said.
Annja felt slightly irritated. "Yes, we do. That's what Professor Hallinger
and I came here to do."
"You're going to be exposed if you start traipsing around all over this city."
Her irritation grew. "Hallinger and I didn't come here to sit around as bait."
"We can't guarantee your safety unless you follow procedure."
The car stopped at a light. Shadows bumped and moved across the windows.
McIntosh reached for his pistol under his jacket.
Annja looked at the men and women, young and old, lurching at the car. Many of
them were maimed, missing fingers and hands and eyes, their faces horribly
scarred. Their skin was mottled with leprosy or ashen-gray with illness.
"Calm down," Annja said. "They're just beggars. The city is full of them."
The beggars pleaded in a number of languages, all of it sounding sad and
hopeless.
Annja reached into her pocket for some money. Quickly, she pressed money into
the hands before her.
When the light changed, the beggars backed off.
"It's not a good idea to give them money," the driver said. "Once they find
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out you'll do it, they'll stay after you."
"You've been here before?" Annja asked.
"A few times." The man looked at her in the rearview mirror as he pulled
through the intersection.
"Then you know that those people can't do anything else but beg," Annja said.
"They live outside the city in cardboard huts and sleep three and four to a
room. They have to get water from a standpipe every day and sometimes stand in
line for hours to do that. Then they have to walk or crawl or drag themselves
into this city every day in hopes of begging for just enough money to do it
all again the next day."
The driver looked away.
Annja leaned back in the seat and settled into the shadows. Neon colors
continued to slash across the windows.
"Sorry," McIntosh said. "I guess I overreacted. For a minute there I could
have sworn we'd been overrun by zombies."
"They're just poor and sick," Annja said. "They can't fix that. Someone has to
help them. That's one of the things I hate about traveling. No one seems to
care about the poor. Governments don't want to deal with the issue because
it's too expensive. And tourists feel like their vacations are getting
interrupted." She took a deep breath. "There's so much history in these
places, but all the resources have been tapped out, or they haven't been able
to compete in world markets." Annja sighed.
They rode the rest of the way to the hotel in strained silence.
Annja felt guilty about that, too. She wasn't being fair. McIntosh and the
other agents hadn't known what they were getting into.
She'd overreacted because she'd almost allowed herself to forget.
Alone at last, Annja stripped off her clothing and stepped into the deep
bathtub in her hotel room at the Novotel Dakar. The hotel was located near the
business district. Her room was at the front of the building, facing the
Atlantic Ocean and the Ile de Goree.
The scented bath smelled divine, and she could already feel the heat from the
water penetrating her muscles. Lying back, she luxuriated in the bath, letting
it soothe away the aches and abrasions from the fights she'd had. In Atlanta,
she'd only taken showers, always in a hurry.
Tonight it was comfort time.
She loved baths. She'd had a large tub installed in her loft when she'd signed
her first contract with Chasing History's Monsters. In the beginning, she'd
thought the show and she would only last a season. She wasn't an actress
and the show in her opinion wasn't very promising. So she'd splurged on
the tub and tried not to feel guilty.
Taking a deep breath, she submerged, sliding under the water and letting the
heat soak into her. She closed her eyes, feeling almost weightless in the
water.
Don't go to sleep, she warned herself. More than once she'd woken in cold
water, undoing all the good the hot bath had done.
In an effort to stay awake, she thought about McIntosh.
She was certain that he'd put her in the big suite on purpose, and she doubted
that Hallinger or any of the Homeland Security agents had matching
accommodations.
The room's a peace offering, she realized. She wondered if she needed to
apologize for the episode in the car on the way over. After that, her mind
wandered to other thoughts of McIntosh that were entirely healthy and not
exactly conducive to relaxation. She decided to push all of that out of her
mind and concentrate on the puzzle of the Spider Stone. That's what you're
here to do, she reminded herself. You're not some kind of bounty hunter for
terrorists.
Unable to hold her breath any longer, she regretfully surfaced. The knots of
tension that had tightened her back and shoulders had, for the most part,
disappeared.
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Reaching over the side of the tub, Annja dried her hands and arms on a towel
and reached into her backpack where she'd placed it on a small folding table.
Working in the tub wasn't new to her. Her mind was too busy to properly soak
if she didn't occupy it. She took the Spider Stone from one of the pockets and
held it up to the light.
Amber gleamed like cold fire along the striations.
Hallinger had enlarged photos of the stone in his room, claiming that he'd
rather work with them. Since he didn't know the language, he was working with
topographical maps of Senegal, trying to overlay the map on the stone onto the
country.
While she'd been on the plane, Annja had worked through most of the message,
but she wanted to check her findings. There was only one place to do that.
She got out of the bath, wrapped herself in a bathrobe and set up her
computer. When she was online, she logged onto the message boards.
There were several messages. Evidently the people on the board had figured out
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