The Atlantis Code (9 page)

“Well, then,” Yuliya stated matter-of-factly, “as I see it, you have only two choices.”

“Two?” Natasha arched her eyebrows.

Yuliya nodded. “You can hire a maid, whom I can train to take care of you—”

“Train her?”

“Of course. It’s the only way. But to do it properly, she’ll have to spend a few years with me.”

“A few years.”

“If you want her trained to my satisfaction.”

“I see.”

Yuliya almost giggled and spoiled the moment. Natasha was always so in control of herself, always able to keep a straight face. “Or . . .”

“Good,” Natasha said. “There’s an ‘or,’ because I didn’t care for the other suggestion.”

“Or,” Yuliya went on unperturbed, “you can move in with Ivan and me.”

Natasha went quiet and still.

Yuliya knew that she’d dared too much, but she couldn’t stop herself. “The children would love it. They love you, Natasha. You’re their favorite aunt.”

“They have good taste,” Natasha said.

“You’re also their only aunt.” Yuliya couldn’t resist the dig. They were sisters and they’d never allowed each other to posture too much. Ivan had three brothers and no sisters. As yet, none of the brothers were married. She missed her little sister something fierce, and not just because of the lack of female blood relations currently in her life.

Natasha smiled. “Thank you. But I would only be intruding.” She took another roll and broke it. “Tell me what you’re doing here—Ivan said you’d found someone’s unwashed plate.”

Sadly, Yuliya dropped the subject of her sister sharing her home, knowing that Natasha would speak of it no more. Yuliya leaned back in her chair. “It’s not a dirty plate. It’s a cymbal. Several thousand years old, from the looks of it. Maybe more. I’m waiting for confirmation.”

Natasha shook her head in mock sadness. “My big sister, who went to university to learn to prowl through someone’s garbage.”

They bickered for a moment as they always did; then Yuliya told the story of the cymbal as she knew it. As always, Natasha was more interested than Yuliya had thought she’d be.

And in this case, that interest was much deserved.

ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT
AUGUST 19, 2009

“You believe there’s more than one language on the bell?” Leslie walked arm in arm with Lourds down one of the side streets not far from the hotel.

“Yes. At least two,” Lourds agreed.

“But you don’t know either one of them?”

“No, not yet.” Lourds looked at her and smiled. “Does that shake your confidence in me?”

Leslie looked into his clear gray eyes. They were beautiful eyes, warm and honest and . . . sexy. Definitely sexy. Just looking into them made her tingle.

“No,” she answered. “That doesn’t shake my confidence at all.”

“I’ll break those languages,” he told her.

“It’s what you do.”

“Yes. It is.” Lourds munched on a piece of the baklava they’d gotten from an outdoor café serving the late-night crowd. “Have you heard of the Rosetta Stone?”

“Of course.”

“What do you know about it?”

“It was . . .” Leslie thought about her answer. “Important.”

Lourds chuckled. “Yes, it was.”

“And it’s kept in the British Museum in London.”

“That’s true as well.” Lourds took another bite of baklava. “The important thing about the Rosetta Stone was it was written in two languages, Egyptian and Greek.”

“I thought it was three.”

“Two languages, but there were three scripts used. Hieroglyphic, demotic Egyptian, and Greek. When Napoléon’s army found that stone, the artifact gave us, eventually, a path to understanding the ancient Egyptian language. We knew what the Greek inscription said. By assuming all the passages said the same thing, scholars eventually cracked the meaning of the hieroglyphs. All they had to do to crack the hieroglyphic code was to match the hieroglyphics to the meanings we had from the other two sections. Finding that stone allowed the decryption and translation of all the writings from ancient Egypt that we’d stared at, for millennia, on tomb and temple walls, without having a clue what they said. Of course, it took over twenty years, and a number of brilliant minds to get there, even with the existence of the Stone.”

“Do you think the bell is like the Rosetta Stone?” The ramifications of that cascaded through Leslie. “A missive from antiquity in two languages waiting to be translated?”

“I don’t know,” Lourds replied. “I don’t know, for example, if the two languages say the same thing. That was one of the reasons the Rosetta Stone was so important. It repeated. And I can’t read either language—another reason the Rosetta Stone was such a breakthrough. We could translate the Greek. But I’ve got no frame of reference. All I know is that two languages are written on it that I can’t understand. And I don’t like it. I’m not accustomed to drawing a blank with ancient languages.”

“It would be so brill if the bell were some kind of Rosetta Stone.”

“The Rosetta Stone had only
one
language on it that we didn’t understand. And it was a single message that repeated three times. I don’t believe that’s the case here.”

“You believe there are two different messages?”

“I don’t know yet. But the length of the passages and the structure differences in the text indicate to me that might be the case. All of which means that it’s going to take longer to work out than I like. I’ll apologize in advance for my distraction. This is a puzzle that calls to me.”

“Not a problem. I totally understand.” Leslie finished the baklava. “You aren’t alone, you know. When I put pictures of the bell on the Internet on some appropriate academic boards and sent it to all the scholars I knew, no one could tell me what language was on it. Or languages, I suppose.”

Lourds stopped walking and looked at her. “You put pictures of the bell on the Internet?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone respond to your Internet postings?” Lourds asked.

“A few people did.”

Excited, Lourds gripped Leslie’s elbow and turned her. He glanced around, got his bearings—only then did Leslie realize he’d been following C. S. Forester’s advice of wandering aimlessly through the city—and headed back to the hotel.

“Where are we going?” Leslie asked.

“Back to the hotel,” Lourds answered. “I think we may have just discovered how the thieves targeted us.”

RYAZAN CITY, RYAZAN’
RUSSIA
AUGUST 19, 2009

Gallardo waited in the Russian-made GAZ-2705 cargo van outside Ryazan State Medical University, where Professor Yuliya Hapaev was working. Magnetic signs on the van’s sides advertised a local cleaning company that had contracts with the university.

Shifting in the seat, Gallardo forced himself to remain detached and not take the long wait personally. He’d expected the woman to step out of the building before now and return to the dorm where she was staying.

So where was she? Even a workaholic wouldn’t work this late.

“Someone’s coming out,” Farok called over the radio.

Gallardo picked up the night-vision binoculars from the glove compartment.

“It’s her,” Farok said.

Training the binoculars on the lone figure that walked out of the building, Gallardo studied her. The night-vision capability washed out the woman’s color, turning everything into soft greens. He couldn’t tell if she was a brunette or not, but the size and shape looked right.

Gallardo knew that Farok and DiBenedetto’s team would close in and prepare to take the woman. “Is she carrying anything?”

“No,” Farok answered.

Gallardo thought about that. “The object must still be inside the building.”

“Yes.”

Gallardo opened the van door and got out. The light didn’t come on, because he’d removed the dome light as a precaution. He caught a brief glimpse of the woman, striding purposefully back to the parking lot; then she was gone.

“Take the woman,” Gallardo instructed. “I’ll get the prize.”

After Farok responded that they would take the woman alive if possible, Gallardo transferred his pistol from its shoulder holder to the right pocket of his coat. Then he trotted toward the building, staying in the shadows as much as he could.

Natasha Safarov knew the men were following her. She’d been followed before, so she knew what to look for and what to listen for. Her heart rate increased slightly as her body readied itself for fight or flight. She kept her breathing slow and even. In the cold, anyone watching her could tell if that changed, because the gray puffs of her breath would give her away.

Her mind flew, taking in her options and laying out her odds. Everywhere she went was a potential battlefield. She’d been trained to take advantage of whatever was there. She always saw terrain, not scenery. It might not help her here, though. On the university grounds this time of night, there wasn’t much in the way of useful cover.

She wondered who the men might be, wondered if they were part of that bad business that had taken place in Beslan. A faction of militant Ossetians, rioting again for the return of their ancestral lands, had taken hostages. Natasha had gone in and retrieved them. There had been considerable bloodshed. She didn’t doubt that some of their number would want revenge. Nor that she would be a likely target.

And if it isn’t the Ossetians
, Natasha reflected,
it could be many others.
She’d left a long line of enemies behind her. The job demanded it. Anger seeped into her because these men had brought violence so close to her family.

She focused, listening to the rhythm of her pursuers, picking out the sound of their feet from all the other noises that trickled through the quiet night. She had them now, all tracking on her personal defense systems, each one indelibly marked.

Sliding her hands into the pockets of her coat, she fisted the two Yarygin PYa/MP-443 Grach pistols she carried there. Both pistols held seventeen-round magazines. She had extra magazines tucked into an inside pocket. She hoped she wouldn’t need them.

The men were patient, though, closing gradually from three sides.

Without warning, Natasha turned and sprinted up the steps of a nearby building. Shadows filled the breezeway, and she felt fairly confident she would become invisible to her pursuers almost at once.

They were determined not to lose her, though. The sound of their footsteps, hesitating for just a moment, came hard after her.

Natasha ran, light on her feet and silent in her crepe-soled shoes. At the end of the breezeway, she leaped from the steps to her left and took cover against the building’s side behind a line of bushes. Taking out both pistols, flipping off the safeties with her thumbs, she waited.

Two men ran through, stopped, and peered out at the open expanse before them. It was too bad there wasn’t another nearby building. Natasha thought they would have been confused longer.

Both men drew weapons, obviously sensing that they were in danger. The presence of the weapons decided Natasha’s course of action. There were more of them. That number gave them the advantage. But she could make the odds stack more in her favor, right here, right now.

She leveled her pistols.

One of the men turned toward her. His pistol was raised, his arms bent to keep it close to his body as he held it in a shooter’s triangle before him. He looked at her just over the open sights.

Natasha squeezed the trigger of the pistol in her right hand just as he saw her. The 9 mm round blasted through the space between the man’s widening eyes. She fired again, shifting to the other pistol, and put two rounds through the second man’s neck. From the way he tumbled, she suspected one of the rounds had severed the man’s spinal cord.

Moving quickly, Natasha walked over to the two dead men. The flat, harsh cracks of her pistol shots echoed in the breezeway behind her.

Kneeling, replacing her left-hand pistol in her duster pocket just for the moment, Natasha frisked the men. They had no ID. That wasn’t unusual. On an assassination assignment, the handler usually took all of a hitter’s identification so he—or she—couldn’t be traced back to the people who’d initiated the hit.

The band on one of the dead men’s wrists caught Natasha’s attention as she heard voices over the radio headsets. They’d been alerted now. Whoever her attackers were, they knew she was armed.

Natasha studied the wristband, recognizing it as a tactic used by special forces around the world. She flipped open the protective cover, expecting to see her own face.

But the face in the picture wasn’t hers. It was Yuliya’s.

Rising, Natasha plucked her other pistol from her duster, turned, and ran back toward the building where she’d left her sister.