Restless Soul - Alex Archer [69]
19
Annja carefully backed down the trail. The truck was too wide to fit on it for most of the way, and so she took it over bushes and ferns, scraping against trees and trying to retrace the path it had taken to limit the damage to the foliage. In places, she followed deep ruts the truck had made when it came up when the ground was muddier.
She was confident the skull bowl could be repaired. Many artifacts in museums and collections had been reconstructed from fragments. Pottery and clay figurines were often painstakingly reassembled because they were found in pieces, though sometimes just the pieces were displayed. The skull bowl had been sturdy, and so she hadn’t thought to pad it. But then she hadn’t expected to take it on a wild slipping-and-sliding ride down the side of the mountain when she was first running from the gunmen. Her fingers occasionally continued to rustle through the bag and over the skull segments, finding a bullet. Maybe the bowl had stopped a bullet that would otherwise have found her.
The bowl could be repaired, but should it be? Though she’d seen many grisly archaeological finds through the years, this one particularly disturbed her. Maybe it was better off shattered.
She punched the brake on a steep incline and felt the truck shimmy and slip and heard the cargo in the back shift. She wondered if her prisoner was being squished by crates and was mildly disappointed with herself for not stopping to check on him when the slope became gradual.
Annja did, however, stop to look at the map. It was shiny with a thick, slick lamination and rendered in a combination of pleasing pale and bright colors. It was the sort of map bookstores displayed in their travel sections, not something a driver would pick up at a gas station or in a way stop. It included the topography of Northern Thailand, listing the elevations of different sections of the mountain ranges, and the borders were dotted with pictures and interesting snippets of information about islands, beaches, temples and the larger cities. Names and numbers at the bottom on the opposite side were probably towns and cities and their populations. The print was too small to read in this light. The reverse side also showed street maps of Chiang Mai and Bangkok—the latter looking formidable because of its size. She flipped it back over to the side showing Northern Thailand and the mountains.
She’d save the map for Luartaro; he’d like it and might find something marked on it he’d like to see.
“But no more spirit caves.”
She touched her index finger to the tiny silhouette of an airplane. Mae Hong Son’s airport was the one they came in at and took the bus from, and Mae Hong Son was the closest city to her current location in the mountains. She noted all the streams and rivers in the area, many of which she suspected would have flooded their banks. To the north and south the waterfalls were marked—Pha Sua and Pha Pawng; she remembered seeing them coming in on the plane. Beautiful from the air. Plenty of roads were marked on the map, but there were no names that she could spot. One stretched up to Huay Pha, a town or large village. That road cut around a hill and to Doi Pai Kit, another village. She recalled seeing a brochure for the area at the lodge. So if she found the road and made it through those villages, she’d find the lodge and could use the phone in the office to contact the authorities. She’d also look for Luartaro.
Next would be Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai. Outside of a thread-fine line that may or may not have been a road, the map didn’t show a direct route from Mae Hong Son to the larger city. But there were several routes that twisted and turned through the mountains and would eventually get her there—taking the scenic route, so to speak. She’d heard the men mention Chiang Mai, and one of the business cards listed Chiang Mai. Annja’s desire to finish the puzzle would