Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Lost Cult

Chaos reigned in the converted farmhouse during the last morning of Dr. Stephen Frys's life. Dresser drawers hung open in his bedroomýdark, thanks to the still-closed curtains, except for a guttering candle. Dropped towels lay all over the bath, but no water speckled the tub; he'd washed in a basin so he could hear any suspicious sounds coming from outside the house. The bed stood as tidy as on any normal morning, but only because the professor hadn't slept in it.

Dr. Frys even skipped his beloved morning tea, taken with lemon, sugar, toast, and the incomparable view of the Scottish Highlands, a tradition that dated back to the first morning he and his late wife had spent in Whistlecrack House thirty-one years ago.

Bloodýthanks to a trembling hand during his shaveýspotted his chin and the mole on his left cheek as he lumbered down the narrow stairs. He listened to the silent, darkened house and heard only the wind outside.

He dropped his dusty suitcase to the kitchen floor with a thud, then removed his thick, black-framed eyeglasses and rubbed them clean with his handkerchief, a gesture any of his senior students knew meant a pause in the lecture while the professor turned something over in his mind. As he put the handkerchief back, he patted his pocket, reassuring himself that his cell phone was still there.

Any visitor to Whistlecrack House stopped and looked at the fireplace first when they arrived in the kitchen. Almost big enough to climb in if one crouched, it filled one wall, a great arch of brick with iron-mongered doors, a spit, hooks, and shelves for baking, roasting, or frying foods.

Last night the fireplace had been roaring. Paper after age-yellowed paper, notebook after notebook, reams of photocopied research, even old-fashioned carbon copies had flamed yellow-orange, curled, blackened, and then turned to fine gray ash almost as quickly as he could feed the fire.

Dr. Frys checked the blackened mass. A substantial part of his life lay in the still-smoldering heap. He prodded the pile with a poker, and the fire burst into new life as he exposed the last few unburned reams of typescript. He stirred the mass to make sure of the destruction.

Life does save its best jokes for last. The ashes were all that remained of research that had once made him a bit of a joke in his professioný until he gave up trying to pry open closed and comfortable minds. But now that same research had turned out to be of unexpected interest to hard-eyed, ruthless men. He'd always been half afraid of the secrets he'd discovered, but after three decades in which not even a graduate student had asked about his Mýne work, he'd half forgotten about it as well. He and Von Croy should have abandoned their research without publishing any of it, left the frightful revelations where no one would ever find them.