The Oracle Code (7 page)

The
Shahidka,
the Black Widows, were the young women left behind by Islamist soldiers who died fighting for their country’s freedom from Soviet rule. According to Chechen culture, the widows were forced to become weapons to be used against Russia, waiting only to die to escape the constant rapes and narcotics that comprised their “training” for their roles.

Cherkshan did not ask how Nevsky knew that either.

“I am sorry the man is dead.” Nevsky spoke somberly. “But I am looking forward to exploring the new relationship we are about to forge.”

“As am I.” Cherkshan’s mind raced. He loved Russia, and he would fight for his country to regain its rightful place in the world.

“To remake Russia into what she once was, things must be undone.” Nevsky spoke calmly. “Men...must be undone. You understand this?”

“Yes.”

“The mission we have before us will not be an easy one, Director General. We will face many enemies. We have no choice except to overcome them.”

“Of course.”

“But there are weapons that we may yet add to our arsenal. Ones that the rest of the world has forgotten about.” Nevsky paused.

It wasn’t hesitation. Cherkshan was certain of that. In all the times he had seen Nevsky talk on television or heard him on the radio, there had never been any doubt in him.

“Have you heard of Alexander the Great?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because we will talk more of Alexander the Great in times to come. For the moment, I want you to use the resources of the FSB to find me the top five authorities on Alexander the Great and have their names on my desk at the end of the week.”

“I will.” Cherkshan was already thinking about whom he could assign the task to. Being a good leader wasn’t so much about leading as it was about knowing whom to choose as point man.

“There is one name that will turn up on that list almost immediately.” Nevsky straightened his tie. “Boris Glukov. That man is currently in Afghanistan. I thought he had some insight on Alexander the Great’s final resting place. As it turns out, he was incorrect, and I was wrong about him. I have already cut the funding on his project. He will be getting the news at the end of the week as well.”

“I see.”

“Find me these experts, General, and I will give you a Russia you can once more be proud of.”

SEVEN MONTHS LATER

10

Dean’s Office

Boylston Hall

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

United States of America

February 10, 2013

“Are you out of your mind?”

Over the years of their association, Richard Wither, dean of the Department of Linguistics, had asked Lourds that question several times. Usually it was in response to a funding request for a research project or travel money for a conference.

Lately, though, with all the notoriety afforded from publication of
The Bedroom Pursuits
as well as the Atlantis book, Lourds hadn’t asked for money. He’d asked for time off to go do the projects and conferences he’d been invited to and fully funded for. Having his name attached to various things brought a cachet these days, and he was proud of that.

“No.” Lourds kept his voice even, but inside he was a maelstrom of emotions. He didn’t think he’d ever been so scared or so excited at the same time.

Dean Wither sat across the immaculate desk that was the antithesis of Lourds’s own—any desk, no matter where he was. A gaunt, gray man in a dark suit, he looked like an undertaker.

The office reflected care and a lifetime of achievements. Books neatly lined the shelves on one wall. Certificates, awards, and photographs of Wither shaking hands with important political figures—and a few movie stars—occupied another wall. A large, saltwater aquarium filled with vibrantly beautiful fish sat against the third wall. The tank was Wither’s
pièce de résistance
and held fragments of Grecian urns and pottery carefully placed around a shipwreck.

Lourds suspected Wither dreamed about doing the things that Lourds himself did on a regular basis. The dean was almost sixty, almost old enough to be Lourds’s father. Maybe he even wanted to be treated like a father figure to a degree, but Lourds wasn’t interested in a mentor.

Before Wither could react to Lourds’s response, Lourds changed his mind. “Maybe.”

Wither’s eyebrows knitted. “Maybe?”

“Maybe I am out of my mind. I honestly don’t know. Being in love is more complicated than I’d imagined.”

“
What
?”

“Being in love.” Lourds lounged in his chair across from the dean. His hat sat on the desk between them.

Wither shook his head. “You’re not in love.”

“I’m afraid I am.”

Wither sighed. “In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never found a woman who could pull you away from your work.”

“Yes. But that’s only because I’ve never been in love before.”

“On that, we can both agree.” Dean Wither paused, then went on, “You’re asking for another leave of absence.” He checked his computer screen. “Ten days, in fact, this time.”

“Yes.”

“It’s out of the question. We’ve just gotten the semester underway. Your classes can’t afford to be without you for the next ten days.”

“I understand that, and I’ve already talked to Tina Metcalf. She’s willing to take over my classes.”

“Professor Metcalf has classes she’s teaching.”

“No, she’s teaching
a
class. Singular. One.”

“She’s currently an adjunct.”

“An adjunct who took her doctorate under me. In addition to being my graduate assistant. If anyone knows my classes, Tina does.”

“She’s already busy. We’re not going to pay her for classes we’re already paying you to teach.”

“I’m going to pay her out of my own pocket. And she’s going to be co-author on a book I’m doing on languages spoken along the Silk Road.” Lourds’s time out in Afghanistan with Boris had inspired the book, and Lourds had presented it to a publisher, promising a lot of anecdotal stories that would give the reader a flavor of what it was like on the trade caravans.

“Tina
is
impressive,” Dean Wither said grudgingly.

“Of course she is. And she’s more than qualified to work with the classes I currently have. She welcomes this opportunity. And, frankly, the money. She’s trying to make a living wage, you know. Working for me will keep her from serving at the diner where she also works. We can’t have a potential adjunct coming in smelling like burgers and French fries every day.”

Wither sighed. “Why do you need this time?”

Lourds reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box. He opened it to show the sparkling diamond ring nestled inside. “Because I’m going to ask Layla Teneen to marry me.”

For a moment, Wither was speechless. “Oh. My. God.”

***

The Dingo Diner

Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge, Massachusetts

United States of America

Lourds strode into the diner and looked for Tina Metcalf, spotting her easily in the sparse afternoon crowd. He waved, she waved, and he sat in a booth against one of the long walls.

The diner was small, with booths all down one wall and the opposing wall outfitted with booths halfway down, then stools in front of the counter and grill area.

Lourds dropped his hat on the table and slid his backpack over. He took out his Kindle and opened the e-book he was currently reading. Despite his love of thriller literature, he was having a hard time staying focused on the storyline.

“So? How’d it go? Do I get to sub for you?” Tina stood beside the table and smiled at him. In her late twenties, she was gorgeous, a petite brunette with an upturned nose and smattering of freckles. She was lean and athletic, and her jeans hugged rounded hips. The T-shirt advertised the diner. She had her hair pulled back and gazed at him through her glasses.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, you do.”

“Cool.” Tina’s grin widened. “In fact, thank god. If I had to keep schlepping burgers back and forth to tables much longer, I was gonna scream.”

“Well, we can’t have that.”

“I miss being your GA, prof.”

“I miss having you there. You were the finest GA I’ve ever had.”

“That’s what you put on all my rec letters. I thought you were just being nice.”

“No.” Lourds held up a hand. “Nothing but the truth. Otherwise, I would have never asked you to do that book with me.”

Tina’s grin grew. “Did I tell you I was totally psyched about that?”

“I believe you did mention it.” Lourds couldn’t help being happy for her. He’d spent three years with her as a doctoral student, and he’d watched her grow in so many ways. She had truly come into her own. He took pride in her. “It’s going to be a lot of work.”

“You should try schlepping burgers.” Tina sat across from Lourds. She held her forefinger and thumb a fraction of an inch apart. “I’m going to take a little break.” She sighed. “This is killing my ankles. And I will love being back in front of a class.”

“You’re a natural. You’ll do splendidly.”

“I saw you pop into my class last Tuesday.”

“Really? I thought I was being covert.”

“Kind of hard to miss the hat.” Tina picked up the hat brim and let it flop back down onto the table.

Lourds grinned ruefully. “I suppose it is.”

“Checking me out?”

“Not your ability. You’re an excellent teacher. But I didn’t want to push you under with the increased workload and cause you to sink before you’d truly gotten started.”

“Not me. I’m unsinkable.”

“That’s what I gathered.”

“So tell me...”

“What?”

“Why are you going to Afghanistan?”

Lourds hesitated. After enduring Dean Wither’s reaction, he didn’t know what to expect. “Do you remember me mentioning Professor Layla Teneen?”

“
Mentioning
? Please. You only talk about that woman all the time.”

“Well, we’ve been in contact a lot since I met her last June.”

“You’ve flown out there five times in the past eight months. House sitter when you’re gone, remember?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the deal?”

“I have never met a woman like her in my life.”

Tina blinked and looked astonished. “You’re in
love
with her?”

Lourds nodded. “Emphatically so. She’s beautiful, intelligent, giving, independent, self-aware. During these months I’ve been away from Layla, I’ve been thinking about her more and more. I can’t stop. It’s like a disease, or an aberration.”

Tina laughed. “Yeah, love can be like that. I can remember when I met Joey, couldn’t stop thinking about him.” Joey was her significant other, and they had been together since high school. Tina had told Lourds the story a number of times. “Still can’t, actually.” She focused on Lourds. “So, how in love are you? Obviously enough to go see her for Valentine’s Day. Which, may I remind you, is named after Saint Valentine, a Christian martyr, and not one presumably embraced by someone of Islamic faith.”

“I hadn’t actually thought about that. I thought all women loved Valentine’s Day.”

“It’s not genetic, though you’d think it might be. So is she excited that you’re coming?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“If it’s a surprise and Valentine’s Day is a Western holiday, she might not be expecting you.”

“She isn’t. If she was, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

“Well, it might be a really big surprise.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a surprise. This is Valentine’s Day. If she’s not expecting you, but she does know that this is Valentine’s Day, she could be expecting something else when she sees you.”

“You mean, like this?” Lourds took out the ring box and popped it open. The fluorescent lights sparkled from the diamond’s facets.

“Wow!” Tina snatched the ring and looked at it more closely. “Look at the size of that sucker!”

Lourds chuckled. “A doctorate in linguistics and that’s the best you can come up with?” But he hoped Layla was equally impressed.

11

39 Miles Southwest of Herat

Herat Province

Afghanistan

February 13, 2013

“Are you sure we should be out here this late, Professor Glukov? It’s dark, and digging around inside this cave seems dangerous.”

“Trust me, Evan. This will only be dangerous if opium traffickers show up.” Boris took his hat off and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had once again overdressed for the cave climate, but it was colder outside the cave, and it was a long way to the tent.

The Afghanistan winters could be cold and cruel, especially with the unfettered wind sweeping through the mountains, but it was not as bad as Russia, where the snow sat in piles and the river froze. Here, the snow came, and most of the time, it simply melted and ran away down the mountain.

“Opium traffickers?” Evan Foley looked at Boris curiously, then got a little paranoid and flashed his light around the passageway.

“Never mind. It is a joke.” Boris tried to brush the memory away, but he could still remember that night in the cave where he and Lourds had nearly gotten killed. It wasn’t a joke, and the memory had suddenly come back full force tonight.

Boris didn’t believe in omens. He was a man of science and of knowledge. Childish fears of the unknown were beneath him. But tonight, he’d felt a stirring in his gut that something was not right.

He wished he could have returned to his tent, opened a good book, and relaxed with some wine. Maybe vodka, if he was feeling like this. Vodka worked much more quickly than wine. In spite of the sweat trickling down his brow, he shivered.

Evan shifted beside him. The young college intern was from New York University, helping out with Boris’s dig to get a few extra credits for his course work in the Department of Anthropology. Evan was actually double majoring in anthropology and video game design, but he’d gotten behind in the anthropology classes while playing
Warcraft
,
Halo 3
, and
The Sims
.

Boris had never played any of the games, and he often tired of hearing the young man talk about them. In fact, Boris had politely suggested that Evan give up the anthropology degree and concentrate on the video games. Evan’s reply was that he needed the anthropology so he could build better games.

Tall and lanky, Evan still remained something of a couch potato. It was from all the sitting and playing games. In the camp, he charged his laptop and managed to play through the Internet with his gaming group. His fair hair and pale skin stood out in the darkness of the passageway.

They stood at an unexplored juncture of the cave. Three passageways spread out ahead of them.

Boris reached into the messenger bag he carried and took out a laminated piece of paper. It was a copy of a map he’d found in the trove he’d discovered in the original Herat dig only a few miles away. He’d found it with Lourds while cataloguing their find.

Lourds had been infatuated with Layla, and Boris hadn’t wanted to interfere with that budding relationship. That the woman would ultimately be attracted to Lourds was never an issue. In the years that he had been friends with the American, Boris had seen such things happen again and again. Lourds barely even noticed the women, really. They were just speed bumps in the path of his next discovery.

But Lourds had noticed this one.

Through the e-mails they sent back and forth, Boris had watched as the infatuation between the two lingered and finally built into something more. For the past few weeks, Lourds had talked about Layla a lot, and he’d seemed like he was dodging questions he was afraid to ask himself.

In fact, Boris had had his own troubles. Only a few days after the discovery in the original Herat dig, he had received a communiqué from Moscow letting him know his funding for the project had been rescinded. He didn’t have the money to fund his own research, and he was going to have to pay for his own way home.

That was when he’d come to love and appreciate Layla Taneen in his own way. Seeing how despondent he was, she had made a couple of phone calls, then presented him with new funding from the New York Natural History Museum to continue his work. Lourds had never known the original Russian funding had been rejected until it had already been replaced.

In Boris’s opinion, the woman was a godsend and a miracle worker. She’d even gotten a new position for herself four months ago. She was now in Kandahar, serving as a committee head for the International Monetary Fund that was dedicated to helping the people of Afghanistan find new ways to prosper at home and abroad.

Boris shined his flashlight over the map again. It had taken him months of searching geographical maps to find the mountains where he thought the site might be. The museum people had been satisfied with what he’d brought them so far, secured with Afghanistan’s blessings, but they were getting antsy.

Lourds had helped with the translation of the accompanying text, but it had been vague and uninformative to a degree. Whoever had ended up in the ossuary he and Lourds had discovered only a few miles away had also traveled here. That was what Boris believed. According to the text, the man had delivered a shipment to the caves and off-loaded it into the care of a foreigner. The writing was Old Persian, and Lourds hadn’t been able to date it with any accuracy. The papyrus it was written on was sitting in a lab, waiting to be carbon-dated.

That was the way it was in the true life of an archeologist. Things often didn’t get tested for months, and in some places, Boris had heard of year-long waiting lists. Most archeologists had to figure out timelines based on their own observations.

Boris felt certain the writing went back to first century AD. And it gave him hope that he might uncover something extraordinary. As to the identity of the foreigner, the text had said that the man was from the country of tall people.

Macedon was an abridgement of the Greek word
makednos
and the Indo-European root
mak
. Both of those, as Lourds had explained, confirming what Boris already knew, meant tall, long, slender, or highlander. Or all of those things.

And now, here he was, at a crossroads.

“Maybe we should go back. Whatever was left here might have gotten taken a long time ago. This thing the delivery guy brought here a couple thousand years ago, it could have been stolen.”

Boris looked at the young man.

Evan folded his arms and looked sullen. “I’m just saying, is all.”

“We’ll go back soon,” Boris said. “We have three passageways ahead of us. The text translation suggests that the cargo was delivered here. Pick one of those passageways, we’ll explore, then we’ll go back to camp.”

“Cool.” Evan pointed. “The one on the right.”

“Of course.” Boris promptly started down the one on the left. Boris had heard so many inaccuracies from the young intern that he’d felt more certain choosing the opposite.

***

A quarter mile farther down the tunnel, the distance measured by the Leica 764558 Laser Distance Meter that Boris had bought when he’d received his new funding and which he used religiously, the tunnel came to an end in a pile of fallen rock.

Boris sighed in frustration. The new passageway had borne tool markings, and he’d grown hopeful that there would be something to show for his time and effort.

Evan summed up their experience in one word. “Bummer.”

Boris turned to shoot the younger man a baleful glare but stopped as something in the ceiling gleamed. He lost the gleam as his flashlight swept the passageway. Slowly, he brought the flashlight back around in what he hoped was the same kind of arc.

Boris’s flashlight beam cut across the bright surface again.

Evan leaned against a wall. His backpack thumped against the stone, and it sounded hollow. He stepped away from the wall in surprise. At the same time, Boris spotted the flash again. He trained his flashlight on the shiny sliver and knelt. His fingers picked at the thin, uneven edge he found there.

Evan knelt beside him. “What is it?”

“It looks like a coin.”

“Someone dropped a penny in the wall?”

“I don’t know.” Boris pulled the messenger bag strap over his head and placed it beside him. Rummaging inside, he took out a small rock pick and banged at the wall around the coin. The stone was surprisingly soft and gave way at once.

A moment later, the silver coin tumbled to the floor.

Awed by what he saw before him, Boris put the pick aside and picked up the coin. The silver coin was about the size of a dime and bore the profile of a man wearing a tight-fitting helm. On the other side, a man seated on a chair held out his hand and clutched a spear in the other.

“What is that?” Evan peered over Boris’s shoulder.

Exasperated, Boris turned on the young man. “If you’re going to create a game that is going to hold the attention of a world of gamers and you’re going to use your knowledge of history to do it, you should know what a
drachma
is.”

“I know what a
drachma
is.”

“What?”

“A Greek coin. Percy Jackson uses them to call the Greek gods.”

“
What
?” Boris couldn’t believe his ears. Then he held up his hands. “Never mind.” He picked up his messenger bag, took out a ziplock baggie, and dropped the coin into it. “For your information, that
drachma
is a coin minted in the time of Alexander the Great. You do know who that is, don’t you?”

“Of course. King of Macedon.” Evan had slumped back into sullen.

“Stand back over there. Out of the way. And hold that flashlight on this wall.”

Evan moved back and held the flashlight steady.

Excited again, Boris attacked the wall with the pick. “You see, Evan? This isn’t real stone. Under normal circumstances, and by that, I mean torchlight or candlelight from centuries ago, the false nature of this wall would have escaped notice.” He struck the wall hard enough to make his hand ache and his arm vibrate. Stone chips flew, and a few blows later, he broke through.

Breathing hard, pulse thrumming within him, Boris switched the pick for his flashlight. He stared through the fist-sized hole he’d broken through the wall.

“My god.” His voice was a hoarse whisper.

On the other side of the wall was a tomb. And in the tomb was a stone sarcophagus that bore a sword and shield. On the floor in front of it was a chest plate. Spears stood against the wall.

With renewed vigor, Boris put down the flashlight, took a fresh grip on the pick, and attacked the wall.