The Bourne Objective (15 page)

The city was precisely as he remembered it, transporting all who arrived there back in time to an age of top hats, robes, horse-drawn carriages, and communications by post. It was as if it and all its inhabitants had been preserved in amber. Everything about Oxford belonged to another, simpler age.

By the time Chrissie found a parking spot the sun had begun to peer out from behind voluminous clouds, and the day had begun to warm, as if it might really be spring. They found Professor Liam Giles ensconced in his office, a large space set up as a workroom-cum-laboratory. Shelves were filled with manuscripts and thick hand-bound books. He was bent over one of them, scrutinizing a copy of a papyrus with a magnifying glass.

According to Chrissie, Professor Giles was the Richards-Bancroft Chair of the department, but as he glanced up Bourne was surprised to see a man of barely forty. He sported a prominent nose and chin and was balding, small round glasses pushed up onto his ever-expanding forehead. He had fur on his forearms, which were also short, like a kangaroo’s.

Bourne’s one concern about returning to Oxford had been that someone would recognize him as David Webb. But even though faculty members hung on decade after decade the university was huge, encompassing many colleges, and they were far from All Souls, the college where he had made several guest lectures.

In any event, Giles accepted him as Adam Stone. He seemed genuinely happy to see Chrissie, asking after her solicitously, and after Scarlett, whom he clearly knew personally.

“Tell her to stop by sometime,” he said. “I have a little surprise for her that I think she’ll like. I know she’s eleven, but she’s got the mind of a fifteen-year-old, so this ought to tickle her pink.”

Chrissie thanked him, then introduced the enigma of the ring’s curious engraving. Bourne handed the ring over and Giles, switching on a special lamp, studied the engraving on the inside first with the naked eye, then through a jeweler’s loupe. He went to a shelf, took down textbooks, leafed through them, his forefinger moving down the large pages of dense paragraphs and small, hand-drawn illustrations. He went back and forth between the texts and the ring for some time. At last he looked up at Bourne and said, “I think it will help if I can take some pictures of the item in question. Do you mind?”

Bourne told him to go ahead.

Giles took the ring to a curious mechanism, which looked like the end of a fiber-optic cable. He carefully clamped the ring so that the filament was in its center. Then he handed them goggles with treated dark lenses, slipped on a pair himself. When he was sure they were protected, he typed two commands on a computer keyboard. A series of mini-flashes of blinding blue light ensued, and Bourne knew that he had activated a blue laser.

The silent outburst was over almost as soon as it had begun. Giles removed his goggles, and they did the same.

“Brilliant,” the professor said as his fingers flew over his keyboard. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

He turned on a plasma screen inset into the wall, and a series of high-definition photographs—close-ups of the engraving—appeared. “This is how the writing appears to the naked eye, being engraved on a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree surface. But what,” he said, “if it was meant to be read—or seen—on a flat surface, like most writing?” Here he manipulated the digital images until they merged into one long strip. “What we’re left with is what appears to be one long word, which seems improbable.” He zoomed in. “At least, that’s how it appears on the circular surface of the ring. However, now, in its flat form, we can see two breaks, so that what we’re actually looking at are three distinct groups of letters.”

“Words,” Bourne said.

“It would seem so,” Giles said with a mysterious lilt in his voice.

“But I see some cuneiforms,” Chrissie said. “I reckon they’re Sumerian.”

“Well, they certainly
look
Sumerian,” Giles said, “but in fact they’re Old Persian.” He slid one of the open texts toward her. “Here, take a look.” As she was doing that he addressed Bourne. “Old Persian is derived from Sumero-Akkadian, so our dear Christina can be forgiven her error.” The affection with which he said this punctured the pompousness of the statement. “However, there’s a crucial difference between the two without which decipherment is impossible. Akkadian cuneiforms represent entire syllables, whereas the cuneiforms of Old Persian are semi-alphabetic, which means each one represents a letter.”

“What are the Latin letters doing mixed in?” Chrissie said. “And those unknown symbols, are they a language?”

Giles smiled. “You, Mr. Stone, have presented me with a most curious—and I must say damn exciting—mystery.” He pointed to the screen. “What you see here is a composite of Old Persian, Latin, and—well, for lack of a better term, something else. I reckon I’m familiar with every ancient language mankind has discovered and cataloged, and this one is a definite outlier.” He waved a hand. “But I’ll get back to that presently.”

He moved his mouse pointer horizontally just below the engraving. “The first thing I can tell you is that there is no such thing as a composite language—cuneiform and letters just don’t mix. So if this isn’t a
language,
per se, exactly what is it?”

Bourne, who had been studying the line of the engraving, said, “It’s a cipher.”

Giles’s eyes widened behind the lenses of his glasses. “Very good, Mr. Stone. I applaud you.” He nodded. “Indeed, this seems to be a cipher, but like everything else about this engraving, it’s of a curious sort.” Here he once again manipulated the image, literally rearranging the blocks, separating the Old Persian cuneiforms and Latin letters into two distinct groups, the third group being the “letters” of the outlier language.

“Severus,”
Bourne said, reading the Latin word from the scramble.

“Which could mean any number of things,” Chrissie said, “or nothing.”

“True enough,” Giles said. “
But
now we come to the Old Persian.” He manipulated the cuneiforms. “See here, now we have a second word:
Domna.
”

“Wait a minute.” Chrissie thought for a moment. “Septimius Severus was made a Roman senator by Marcus Aurelius in about 187. Subsequently he rose to become emperor in 193, and he ruled until his death eighteen years later. His reign was a strict military dictatorship, a response to the horrific corruption of his predecessor, Commodus. On his deathbed he famously advised his sons to ‘Enrich the soldiers and scorn all other men.’ ”

“Lovely,” Giles said.

“Some interesting things about him. He was born in what is now Libya, and when he increased the size of the Roman army he added auxiliary corps, soldiers from the far eastern borders of Rome’s empire, which must have included many from North Africa and beyond.”

“How is that relevant?” Giles said.

Now it was Chrissie’s turn to have a mysterious lilt to her voice. “Septimius Severus was married to Julia Domna.”

“Severus Domna,” Bourne said. Something went off in the back of his head, deep down, beyond the veils his memory could not penetrate. Maybe it was a flash of déjà vu, or maybe a warning. Whatever it was, like all the free-floating bits of his previous life that suddenly, mysteriously surfaced, it would become an itch he couldn’t scratch. He’d have no choice but to run it to ground until he unearthed its link to him.

“Adam, are you all right?” Chrissie was looking at him with a puzzled, almost alarmed expression.

“I’m fine,” he said. He’d have to watch himself with her; she was as perceptive as her sister. “Is there more?”

She nodded. “And it gets more interesting. Julia Domna was Syrian. Her family came from the ancient city of Emesa. Her ancestors were king-priests of the powerful temple of Baal, and so very influential throughout Syria.”

“So,” Bourne said, “here we have an engraving—both a cipher and an anagram—made up of an ancient Western and Eastern language, merged.”

“Just the way Septimius Severus and Julia Domna merged West and East.”

“But what does it mean?” Bourne mused. “It seems that we’re still lacking the key.” He looked at Giles expectantly.

The professor nodded. “The third language. I reckon you’re right, Mr. Stone. The key to the meaning of Severus Domna must lie in the third word.” He handed the ring back to Bourne.

“So the language is still a mystery,” Chrissie said.

“Oh, no. I know exactly what it is. It’s Ugaritic, an extinct written proto-language that arose in a small but important section of Syria.” He looked at Chrissie. “Just like your Julia Domna.” He pointed. “You can see here—and here—and again here—that Ugaritic is an important link between the earliest proto-languages and the written word as we know it today because it’s the first known evidence of the Levantine and South Semetic alphabets. In other words the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin alphabets find their sources in Ugaritic.”

“So you know that this word is Ugaritic,” Bourne said, “but you don’t know what the word is.”

“Again, yes and no.” Giles walked up to the screen, and as he pointed to each Ugaritic character he pronounced the letter. “So I know all the letters, you see, but like the two others, this word is an anagram. Though Ugaritic appears briefly in the study of Middle Eastern languages, the study of Ugaritic on its own is quite a specialized field, and rather a small one, I’m afraid, because of the prevailing belief that it is a dead end—a
facilitation
language, rather than an
active
one. There are only two or three Ugaritic scholars in the world and I’m not one of them, so for me to decipher the anagram would take an inordinate amount of time—which, frankly, I don’t have.”

“I’m surprised there’s anyone studying it,” Chrissie said.

“Actually, there’s only one reason there are any scholars at all.” Giles walked back to his computer keyboard. “There is a small group that believes Ugaritic has, uh, shall we say magic powers.”

“What,” Bourne said, “like black magic?”

Giles laughed. “Oh my, no, Mr. Stone, nothing so fantastic. No, these people believe that Ugaritic is a key part to the workings of alchemy, that Ugaritic was created for priests, chants to make manifest the divine. They believe, further, that alchemy itself is a blending of Ugaritic—articulating the right sounds in the proper order—and the specific scientific protocols.”

“Lead into gold,” Chrissie said.

The professor nodded. “Among others things, that’s right.”

“Once again, the blending of East and West,” Bourne said, “like
Severus
and
Domna,
like Old Persian and Latin.”

“Intriguing. I hadn’t thought of it in that light, but yes. It sounds far-fetched, I know, and you have to take an enormous leap of faith, but, well, now that you’ve brought up Julia Domna and her origins, look here.” Giles worked the keyboard. The screen changed to a map of the Middle East that quickly zoomed in on modern-day Syria, and then, zooming in farther, a specific section of the country. “The epicenter of the Ugaritic language was the part of Syria that includes the Great Temple of Baal, considered by some to be the most powerful of the old pagan gods.”

“Do you know any of these Ugaritic experts, Professor?” Bourne asked.

“One,” Giles said. “He’s, how shall I say, eccentric, as they all are in this arcane and rather outré field. As it happens, he and I play chess online. Well, it’s a form of proto-chess, actually, enjoyed by the ancient Egyptians.” He chuckled. “With your permission, Mr. Stone, I’ll e-mail him the inscription right now.”

“You have my blessing,” Bourne said.

Giles composed the e-mail, attached a copy of the inscription, and sent it off. “He loves puzzles, the more obscure the better, as you can imagine. If he can’t translate it, no one can.”

S
oraya, propped up on the bed in the guest room at Delia’s apartment, was dreaming of Amun Chalthoum, the lover she had left behind in Cairo, when her cell phone began to throb on her lap. Hours ago she had switched it to vibrate mode so as not to disturb her friend, fast asleep in her bedroom.

Her eyes snapped open, the veils of her dream parted, and, putting the cell to her ear, she said, “Yes,” very softly.

“We’ve got a hit,” the voice said in her ear. It was Safa, one of the women in Typhon’s network, whose family had been killed by terrorists in Lebanon. “At least it’s a possible. I’m uploading several images to your laptop now.”

“Hold on,” she said.

Soraya had a phone company Internet card plugged into her laptop, and she switched it on. A moment later she was connected. She saw that the file was delivered and opened it. There were three photos. The first was a file shot, head and shoulders, of Arkadin, the same one Peter had showed her, so it must be the only decent shot they had of him. This version was larger and clearer, however. Marks was right, he was a handsome specimen: hooded eyes, aggressive features. And blond. Positive or negative? She wasn’t sure. The other two were obvious
CCTV
photos, the images flat, the colors poorly rendered, of a man, large and muscular, wearing one of those inexpensive sports hats with a Dallas Cowboys logo, which he probably bought at the airport. She couldn’t see enough of his face to make a positive ID. But in the second
CCTV
image, he’d tipped his hat back on his head to scratch his scalp. His hair was very black, very shiny, as if it had just been dyed. He must have thought he was out of camera range, she thought as she studied the face. She compared it with the file shot.

“I think it’s him,” she said.

“So do I. The images are from the Immigration cameras at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport eight days ago.”

Why would he fly into Texas,
Soraya wondered,
rather than New York or LA?

“He came in on a flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris under the name Stanley Kowalski.”

“You’re joking,” Soraya said.

“I kid you not.”

The man definitely had a sense of humor.

L
EONID
ARKADIN
WATCHED
with slitted eyes as the battered dirt-brown convertible came bouncing along the road that led to the wharf. The sun was a bloody flag on the horizon; it had been another scorching day.