Читать книгу Provenance - Alex Archer - Страница 12

The taxi rolling down the wide toll road called the Corredor Sur from Tocumen International Airport on the city’s eastern edge was white and red faded near pink by the scorching Panamanian sun. It was a Buick, about as old as Annja herself. Its air conditioner wheezed asthmatically and thumped alarmingly without appreciably thinning the humid heat. The cabbie ran it full-on anyway, despite having all the windows rolled down. Its noise and the early-afternoon traffic sounds of downtown Panama City did have the beneficial effect of mostly drowning out the cab’s CD player, which was chugging out terrible mid-nineties studio-gangsta rap at a volume that would’ve rattled the windows had they been up. Annja could feel the beats in her teeth.

They turned off the highway at a downtown exit. As with a lot of Latin American cities everything except the skyscraper-central middle of the business district interspersed shiny looming modern buildings with smaller, more inhabitable-looking older ones. In this case older meant mostly a particularly baroque variant of Spanish Colonial that Annja found especially charming.

Looking out the window at the awning-shaded shops and the crowds Annja was struck by a resemblance to New Orleans’ Latin Quarter. For all its well-publicized French heritage her hometown owed as much cultural debt to its long period of Spanish occupation as to France.

She did find herself wondering, Does archaeology ever happen anywhere it isn’t hot or humid? Although to be fair, she had to admit that she wasn’t exactly there to do archaeology. She had archaeological aims, though—to try to make sure an unknown artifact was properly conserved. So maybe that counted.

Her Romanian contact had used what Annja suspected was pirated NSA image-comparison software to sift through terabytes of raw overhead imaging. She had a feeling not all of it was supposed to be publicly available.

Her hotel, the Executive, stood in the midst of Panama City’s booming financial district. Annja had picked it because it got good reviews online, its rates were reasonable and also because, to her thoroughly irrational delight, it looked like nothing so much as a tower of giant white Lego. She tipped the driver, a dark taciturn man who had spoken English with a Punjabi accent, and wore a maroon turban.