The Oracle Code (9 page)

14

Kabul Serena Hotel

Kabul, Afghanistan

February 14, 2013

Lourds woke to an empty bed. Layla had left a note on the pillow next to his. She’d written in her language, knowing full well he could easily read it.

Dearest Thomas,

I thought of waking you before I left, but you looked so peaceful sleeping that I didn’t have the heart. I already miss you, and I know that you will miss me too. There is no reason to start that on your part any earlier than need be. And, truthfully, I don’t want to test my willpower by trying to walk out of this room while you are asking me to stay.

I’m afraid I wouldn’t be that strong. I find it harder to do each time we separate.

I took the time to put your things away. I will call as soon as I am able.

Love,

Layla

Groggy from jetlag and from the lack of sleep, Lourds forced himself out of bed long enough to sit on the edge and look out the window over the city. The blue towers in the distance looked like something out of a fantasy world. He thought of going to the Kharabat neighborhood, thinking that perhaps a casual stroll through the workshops where musicians made their own instruments and composed daily might be a diversion.

When the Taliban had been in power, the musicians left the historic quarter, but they’d been coming back since the terrorists had been routed. That section of the city had almost been destroyed during the Soviet occupation during the 1980s, but the musicians had returned then as well. Now, their sons and daughters worked to rebuild the area after the Taliban had been sent packing.

There was something eternal about walking through the neighborhood. Musicians occupied half-built workshops, and they sang and laughed amid the rubble, finding their muse in the darkest corners. The trips Lourds had made through the Kharabat had always been uplifting.

But he didn’t feel like going today.

Normally, he’d be excited to greet the new day while in one of the ancient cities. There was so much to study, so much to imagine. But the familiar wanderlust wasn’t in him at the moment. He felt...empty. And that wasn’t something he’d ever experienced in quite this way before.

He didn’t know what he was going to do. He didn’t want to do anything. He simply wanted Layla back with him. Reaching into his pants, which were neatly folded on the nearby chair, he took out the engagement ring and examined it again.

Sunlight filtering through the curtains covering the window splintered light from the diamond. After a while, he closed the box, put it away, and lay back down on the bed.

Mercifully, he slept.

***

The phone beside the bed rang and woke Lourds. Instinctively, he threw out a hand and managed to snare the handset. “Hello.”

“Mr. Lourds?”

Lourds almost corrected the man, ready to tell him it was
Professor
or
Doctor
, but not mister. But that was irritation at being awoken, and at being alone, not a true pride thing. Instead, he just confirmed his identity.

“This is the hotel desk, sir. I have an urgent phone call for you.”

That announcement woke Lourds more fully. His first concern was for Layla, that she might have fallen asleep while driving and had an accident.

“Of course. Put it through.” He glanced at the clock and saw that it was a few minutes before nine. The whole day still loomed before him.

The phone clicked a couple times.

“Thomas?”

It took Lourds just a second to put a name to the voice. “Boris?”

“
Da
.”

“You’re calling early.”

“It’s almost nine.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I called your office number, hoping you were working late, and talked with some young woman named Tina. I’m also told nuptials are in order. Quite surprising, actually, but not so surprising in another light.”

Lourds worked out the time differential between Kabul and Cambridge. It was almost midnight Monday in Cambridge. The only way she would have gotten Boris’s call was if she was working late at the university or had forwarded his phone calls to her phone the way she used to do. He resolved to have a talk with young Dr. Tina Metcalf when he returned to Harvard. She was far too free with his surprises.

“Well, keep the nuptials to yourself, Boris. I haven’t gotten to ask Layla yet.”

“I tender my good wishes anyway. You two will make a fine couple.”

“Thanks. I’m going to have to have a word with Tina in order to make sure the first person Layla hears this from is me.”

“Layla won’t hear it from me. And don’t punish Miss Metcalf for me calling you. I told her that it was a matter of life and death.”

That caught Lourds’s attention immediately. “Are you in trouble?”

Boris chuckled. “No. I am in euphoria. But I thought it would be better to deliver more dire tidings to that dear girl. She wasn’t going to give me your location at first.”

“Why didn’t you call my sat-phone?”

“I did. In fact, I left several messages.”

Lourds fumbled with his pants and extracted his sat-phone. He looked at the blank screen. “I forgot to turn it on when I deplaned.” He powered it up now, then saw that he had missed several phone calls from Boris and other people.

There was no phone call from Layla. He resisted the urge to call her.

“Thomas?”

“I’m here.” Some of his friend’s good-natured ebullience touched Lourds and awakened him even further. “Why are you in euphoria?”

“Because, my friend, I have made the find of a lifetime. Of course, it doesn’t rival Atlantis, but it could be quite possibly the most striking contribution I will ever make to the field of archeology.”

“You’ve got a lot of good years ahead of you, Boris. Don’t sell yourself short. What did you find?”

“A tomb. Tucked away in the mountains only a few miles from where you and I discovered the ossuary. This is a complete tomb, Thomas. The body is still in the sarcophagus, in almost pristine shape. I’ve held up any further exploration of the tomb and the remains until you arrive. How soon can you get here?”

“I’ll have to get a car, then drive to Herat. It’s four hundred miles of bad road.”

“Don’t drive. Charter a plane.”

“If I can find one.”

“There are plenty of local pilots who would be willing to make a short hop. You can be here in three hours or so. I’ll pay for it.”

“You’re awfully free with the museum’s money.”

“This is important, Thomas.” Boris sounded deadly serious. “I need you. I need your expertise to decipher some documents that were with the body. And if they’re what I think they are, this will be a nice feather in your cap as well.”

The mention of documents captured Lourds’s attention immediately. He loved doing translation work on things no one in the modern world had ever seen, the chance to try to decipher something before anyone else ever laid eyes on it.

“Who’d the body belong to?”

“I don’t know, but I suspect this corpse was once Macedonian.”

“Why?”

“Because I can pick out some things in the scroll, but not much. Enough, though, to pick out the name of Alexander the Great.”

Galvanized for the first time that morning, Lourds smiled. “I need to get off the phone so I can find a plane.”

“You’ll have to hurry. News has already leaked to the media about the discovery.”

“Really? Did you call them first thing?”

“I called you first. You didn’t answer. And I might have mentioned your name.”

“That’s going to start a circus.”

“Oh, it already has.” Boris sounded pleased with himself. “Rather nice turn out, if I must say so. Of course, the crew from
National Geographic
has been here since the beginning. And there is one young lady whose reacquaintance I’m sure you’ll look forward to.”

“Who?”

“Do you remember Anna Cherkshan?”

Lourds only had to think for a moment. “Yeah, I remember her. Young? Pretty? Reporter for
The Moscow Times
?”

“That’s the one.”

“I do like her. Every quote in her piece was exactly what we said and not taken out of context for once.” Lourds started toward the closet and quickly reached the end of the phone cord. He wasn’t used to talking on corded phones these days. He stopped. “I’ve got to get off the phone and get moving if I’m going to find a plane.”

“Hurry.”

Lourds started to get off the phone, then caught himself. “Boris?”

“Yes?”

“Congrats on the find. You deserve it.”

“Thank you. And I do deserve it. And I’ll feel better once you’re here to straighten away the documentation. I want to know what I’ve truly found as soon as possible.”

“I’m on my way.”

15

39 Miles Southwest of Herat

Herat Province

Afghanistan

February 14, 2013

Anna Cherkshan strode through the dig camp and felt the excitement in the air. The emotion was like a live thing, a tiger that thrummed through the atmosphere. That was how she would write it. That the discovering was a living thing ripped free of a dead husk. Only she would use words that would turn Boris Glukov’s find into poetry, into something solid and enduring—something like Russia could be if they could only unclasp the dead fingers of the Old Regime once and forever.

Perhaps the piece would go beyond the simple news of an archeological discovery by a Moscow professor, but she knew her editors at
The Moscow Times
would enthusiastically embrace the idea. They would understand what she was saying about the world and about her place in it. That was something her father never understood.

General Anton Cherkshan, to Anna, was the epitome of the Old Regime. Her father wanted nothing to change. He claimed that capitalist freedom was something that the Russian people would never understand. The Americans had over two hundred years to experience and master freedom and its attendant prices.

The Russian people only had a little over twenty years. And this was now the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth. Things happened more rapidly now. Situations changed more rapidly. The Russian people had only thrown off the yoke of the Tsarist government less than a hundred years ago.

Anna sighed. She could hear her father ranting and raving about the story already. Over the years, she had grown tired of his voice in her head. It wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t shut it off. Sometimes she thought that if she didn’t love her mother so much, she would never see her father again. Then, when the anger and the frustration were not so deep in her, she knew that was not true. She loved her father. He had taught her so much of what she knew.

It was just a pity that he didn’t agree with how she used that knowledge.

Adjusting her sunglasses, she stared through the bright reflection of the snowdrifts surrounding the dig site. In many places, the snow was three or four feet deep, and trails had been made by people passing. Now, much of the snow in front of the cave had been flattened. So many people had braved the cold and gathered outside the opening, beyond the sawhorse barrier the Afghanistan National Police had erected, waiting expectantly for news of Boris Glukov’s discovery.

“Excuse me. Miss Cherkshan?”

Anna turned at the voice.

A tall, dark man with short-clipped hair and a beard that was more a neatly trimmed five o’clock shadow than anything else approached her. He wore boots, khaki pants, and a
Russia Today Television
coat with the distinctive RT rendered in gold and black on green.

Petite and slender like her mother, Anna only came up to the man’s shoulder. Also like her mother, she had strawberry blond hair, but she had gray-hazel eyes like her father. Her blue parka hung to her knees.

“Yes, I am Anna Cherkshan.” Anna stood her ground. All her father’s old warnings about talking to strangers echoed in her head, too, but these days, she mostly laughed at them. A news reporter could hardly talk to only people she knew. She would never learn anything that way. Or she would learn only what people wanted her to know.

“I am Yakov Fursin. With
Russia Today
.” He smiled, and it was a nice smile, but he was too old for her. She was only twenty-six, and he had to be nearly forty.

She took his proffered hand and smiled back at him. “
Russia Today
, eh? I think I got that from the coat. What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

“I suspected as much, Comrade Fursin. I don’t run into many fans this far from Moscow.”

“Well, you have today. I read your pieces in
The Moscow Times
on a regular basis.”

“Oh really?” Anna cocked a skeptical eyebrow.

Fursin put his hand over his heart. “Truly. I do. You wound me. I especially loved the piece you did on President Nevsky’s comparisons of himself to Alexander Nevsky. The artist you had working with you on that piece has a fantastic eye.”

“Zagnetko? Yes, she is wonderful. Very witty all on her own as well.” Anna warmed slightly to the man as he mentioned other articles she had written. “What can I do for you?”

“I am told that Professor Glukov is only allowing select members of the media in to the cave.”

“That’s correct.”

“I’m also told that you are one of those members.”

“I am.”

“You also did the piece on the dig months ago not far from here where Professor Glukov first picked up the trail to this place.”

“You are very well informed.”

He smiled again and appeared even more dashing than ever. “I would like very much to get inside that cave when Professor Glukov performs his unveiling.”

Anna smiled and shook her head. “Sadly, that is beyond my power to do.”

“Please.” He placed his hand over his heart again and looked entreating. “This will mean very much to my career.”

“You can be charming all you want, Comrade Fursin. I will enjoy your efforts, but in the end it will be for naught. The passageway, I am told, is very small, and Professor Glukov is keeping a short list of attendants. I am sorry. But hopefully this story will be big enough that you will get something that helps your career.”

Fursin nodded. “I completely understand. Please do not hold my need to ask against me.”

Anna laughed. “You were very pleasant. You should see how much I push, beg, shove, and plead to get my foot in the door for a story.”

“Be well.” Fursin bowed his head and walked away.

For a moment, Anna watched the man. There was something about him that caught her subconscious attention. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she thought that beneath that charming exterior, there was a very hard man.

In that way, he reminded her of her father.

***

As he walked away from the woman, Colonel Sergay Linko gazed in frustration around the campsite and cursed his situation. During the flight to Herat, he’d learned his orders were to get close to Professor Glukov and find out what the man had discovered.

The news stations Linko had watched had revealed that Glukov had found something related to the missing tomb of Alexander the Great. Glukov had stated as much but had given nothing further.

Linko didn’t know why President Nevsky would be interested in Alexander the Great’s tomb, and Linko hadn’t even known the man’s tomb was missing. And he was only vaguely knowledgeable about who Alexander the Great had been.

To Linko’s way of thinking, Alexander the Great had been on the same par as the
bogatyr
of Slavic mythology. When he had been a child, his grandmother had read him epic poems written by the storytellers of the Kievan Rus’, the old nation of Rus. Linko had liked the stories of the wandering knights, then discovered they were much like the European knights, such as King Arthur.

But it wasn’t real. And childhood things had to be put away. Just as he had put his grandmother away when it fell to him to take care of her when she grew too frail to live without assistance.

Linko’s mother and father were gone by that time, one to cancer and the other to drink, and no one had survived to take care of the old woman. After a month of assisted care and the first bill had come due, Linko had decided he didn’t want to pay the monthly fee. So he had visited her late one night, pinched her nose shut, and held a hand over her mouth.

The next month’s bill was reduced, and that was the end of it.

Calm in his frustration, Linko went to the next group of journalists and hoped he would have better luck. He would not be deterred.

***

Lourds got out of his rented four-wheel-drive pickup and walked down to the dig site. To his relief, none of the media pointed him out or came hurrying over for a quote.

During the short flight to Herat, Lourds had looked at the photographs of the tomb that Boris had sent him through e-mail. He’d downloaded them while at Kabul International Airport, then examined them at his leisure while in flight.

He was thankful for the diversion because it had kept his mind from being preoccupied with thoughts of Layla, but she was never far from his mind.

It was confusing.

And it was daunting.

He needed to get his head back in the game.

Except that he had the ring in his backpack, and thoughts of it and Layla weren’t going away.

He walked up to one of the ANP patrolmen and showed his passport to the man.

The young man nodded gravely. “Professor Lourds. We’ve been expecting you.” He made a path through the sawhorses.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Watch your step as you go up.”

“I will.” Lourds started up the incline, and then the feeding frenzy hit.

“There’s Professor Lourds!”

Lourds didn’t know who had first vocalized his arrival, but the hue and cry rose.

“Professor Lourds. Could we get a picture?”

Lourds turned back toward the crowd and waved. Several cameras and camcorders were in evidence.

“Professor Lourds, could we get an interview?”

“In a little while, perhaps. At present, I’m afraid you people know more than I do.”

The ANP talked to a lithe young woman in a blue parka for a moment then let her through. She leaped up the incline, quick as a deer, and joined Lourds.

She threw back her parka hood and revealed strawberry blond hair and an innocent face. “Professor Lourds, you may not remember me, but I’m–”

“Anna Cherkshan. Of course I remember you. Boris is delighted that you’re involved with this.”

“And you’re not?”

“Of course I am. I was deferring to Boris. This is his circus, after all.”

“Thomas!”

Gazing uphill, Lourds saw Boris emerge from the cave and couldn’t help thinking of the groundhog that came out and checked for its shadow. It wasn’t a very flattering comparison in one respect, but Boris’s presence had certainly changed the weather.

The slight noise that had started at Lourds’s arrival became an avalanche of questions and demands for information.

Anna gazed at the crowd in wide-eyed wonder.

“Shocked to see your fellow journalists worked up into such a lather, Miss Cherkshan?”

Anna turned to him, raked hair from her face with her fingers, and shook her head. “I’ve never been on this side of it, you know. It’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

“It can be.”

“Do you ever get used to it?”

“No. Trust me, you don’t see this kind of thing every day in the field of archeology.”

“You must. You have found so many amazing things.”

“Well, I didn’t find this one. I was back in Cambridge while Boris was risking the elements and a broken neck climbing this mountain.”

“Can I quote you?”

Lourds smiled. “Of course. He’s only asked me in as a specialized consultant.”

“To translate the documents he found inside the tomb?”

“Exactly.”

Boris waved Lourds up the mountain, and Lourds went. When he reached Boris, the Russian professor scooped him up in an immense bear hug that drew laughter and catcalls from the crowd of journalists.

“It is good to see you, Thomas.” Boris placed him back on the ground.

“It’s good to see you as well.”

“I see you discovered Miss Cherkshan.”

“Actually, she found me.”

“And Layla?”

“Working, as I said.”

“Ah, that is too bad.” Boris frowned, but the expression lasted only a moment before being replaced with his broad smile again. “Does she know what has been found?”

Lourds smiled. “Boris,
I
still don’t know what you’ve found.”

“Then come. Let me show you.” Boris made his apologies to Anna, promised that she would be the next person he brought into the tomb, and led Lourds into the cave.