The Atlantis Code

CHAPTER 2

Hi. This is James Kale. If you’ve reached this message, I’m obviously not answering the phone. Either I’m busy or I’ve dropped signal. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m able. And, Mum, if this is you, I love you.”

Listening to the familiar message, Leslie Crane frowned. James was reliable. He prided himself on staying available to the people he worked with. He should be answering his phone. Unless he’d let the darned thing run out of juice — again. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done that. Leslie was going to tie the man to his recharger one of these days.

“Is something wrong?” Lourds asked. He sat across from her at the small table in the outdoor café where she’d taken him for breakfast.

Traffic passed by slowly, and it was accompanied by men on camels and horses. Donkeys pulled carts with rubber bicycle tires, headed for the souks. The open-air markets drew many of the locals as well as the tourists. The locals bought fresh vegetables while the tourists bought keepsakes and gifts for relatives. Even though she’d been in Alexandria for a few days, Leslie still marveled at the way the modern city seemed somehow jammed into a way of life that had existed for thousands of years.

The server had cleared away their plates after an array of dishes that included molokhiyya soup with rabbit, torly casserole made with lamb, grilled pigeon breasts stuffed with seasoned rice, melon slices and grapes, followed by raisin cake soaked in milk and served hot, and cups of chocolate-flavored Turkish coffee.

“I was trying to call my producer,” Leslie explained.

“Is he staying nearby?” Lourds asked. “We could wander over that way and check on him.”

“There’s no need. I’m sure he’s fine. James is a big boy, and I’m certainly not his mother. He should be at the set. I’ll check in with him when we get there.”

“So what got you into show business?” he asked.

“Do I detect disapproval?”

He grinned. “Perhaps wariness is a better word choice.”

“You don’t like television?”

“I do. But I often find it self-serving.”

Challenged a little, Leslie said, “I love being on camera. I love seeing myself on television. More than that, my dad and mum like seeing me there, too. So I try to do as much of it as I can.” She grinned. “Is that self-serving enough for you?”

“Yes. And more honest than I’d expected.”

“What about you?” she asked. “Why are you willing to be part of this series? Does it play to some dark part of your vanity?”

“Not at all,” Lourds assured her. “If it hadn’t been for the dean and the board of directors prodding me to go, I would have graciously declined. I’m here at the university’s insistence. And because it offered me a chance to once more return to Alexandria. I love this place.”

Intrigued, Leslie set her chin on her crossed hands, elbows resting on the table. She stared into those warm gray eyes. “But if you hadn’t agreed, you wouldn’t have been able to enjoy this lovely place.”

“And the lovely woman who brought me here.” Lourds’s eyes met hers evenly, holding them for a moment.

Warmth spread through Leslie that had nothing to do with the afternoon sun. Oh, you are good, Professor Lourds. I’m going to have to be careful around you.

DiBenedetto pulled the truck into an alley only a few blocks from the open-air café where Lourds now dined with Leslie Crane. Before they’d come to a full stop, a five-year-old German Mercedes drove into the alley after them. Gallardo caught sight of the car in the side mirror.

He reached under the lightweight jacket he wore and gripped the 9 mm pistol in the shoulder holster. “Pietro,” he called over the headset.

“Yes,” Pietro’s gravelly voice responded. “It’s me. Don’t shoot.”

Relaxing a little, Gallardo kept his hand on the pistol as the Mercedes slid to a stop behind the truck. He peered through the smoky glass and saw Pietro’s impressive bulk seated behind the wheel of the luxury car.

Gallardo got out of the vehicle. DiBenedetto fell into step with him. They swung open doors on the sedan and dropped into seats.

Farok climbed out of the truck in a clean burnoose. He’d left the bloody one inside the rear compartment. For a moment, he occupied himself with carefully closing the door behind himself. Even after the back of the truck was sealed, the smell of petrol whipped through the alley. Satisfied with his handiwork, Farok sped up to his usual pace and joined them in the car. He stank of petrol as well.

“Everything set?” Gallardo asked.

Farok nodded and passed James Kale’s identification, passport, and personal effects to him. The corpse had been left stripped clean.

“Yes. Everything is set,” Farok said. “I doused the interior with the petrol and detergent, and I rigged a road flare to the door. When anyone opens the cargo area, the interior of the truck will become an inferno.”

Gallardo nodded. The petrol-and-detergent mixture was a poor man’s substitute for napalm. It would burn hot and concentrated, making immediate identification of the body very difficult — even more difficult than the loss of all his identifying papers now in their possession. The truck had been stolen last night in preparation for its use this morning. There was nothing in it that would tie back to them.

Pietro drove through the other end of the alley and pulled out onto the street, drawing angry honks from the other drivers and startling a camel.

“Cimino,” Gallardo called over the radio.

“I’m here,” Cimino said. “They’re moving again.”

“Are they still on foot?”

“Yes.”

“Drop out of the loop. Get someone else in there.”

“All right.”

Gallardo’s stomach tightened. For eight months, they’d followed the trail of the artifact that Stefano Murani had charged them with finding. The trail had finally led them from Cairo, where the artifact had only been a whisper, to Alexandria, where Gallardo should have known it probably was anyway.

The problem with illegal artifacts was that they left no trail, or a spotty trail at best. And if some of them hadn’t moved much, as this one had not — the shopkeeper who sold it reported that it had languished on a shelf in a back room for seventeen years — then the trail was masked by the passage of time as well.

Even before they’d killed the producer, three dead men lay along the bloody trail they’d followed from Cairo. All of them had been dealers in rare — and stolen — antiquities.

“They’re headed back to the studio,” Cimino said.

A hollow boom! sounded from the left, in the direction of the place they’d abandoned the truck. Turning, Gallardo saw a cloud of smoke mushroom into the air above the buildings. Sirens sounded soon after.

“Well, now,” DiBenedetto mused from the backseat, “that didn’t take long, did it? This city is filled with thieving bastards.”

“A few less of them at the moment, perhaps,” Farok chimed in.

They exchanged a high five.

Gallardo ignored the bloodthirstiness of his hirelings. It was normal for them, and it was why he employed them. He turned his thoughts to the studio room. He and his men had already been there once in preparation. They knew the layout. Going inside today would be easy.

“Put them there,” Leslie directed. “While we’re setting up, has anybody heard from James?”

“No, but he approved the set and the camera layout last night,” one of the young men said. “He was going to check out some new locations today.”

“Good,” Leslie said. “Tell me if he checks in.” She turned her attention to the arrangement of the objects she wanted Lourds to look at.

Seated at a small desk at the back of the large room, Lourds watched the young woman’s preparations with mounting interest. She’d obviously gone to the effort of making the presentation of the promised artifacts elaborate. They were even recording the event.

A slim man of Egyptian ancestry crossed the room with the wheeled aluminum pilot case he pulled behind him.

With an air for the theatrical that would have fitted him perfectly for life on the stage at Kom Al-Dikka, the man produced a key and slid it into the locks holding the case shut. He snapped open the locks and put the key away.

Lourds was only partially distracted by the sound of the emergency vehicles attending to a nearby problem. One of Leslie’s crew had reported that there was a vehicle fire of some kind only a few streets over. Official vehicles were, according to the kid, swarming like flies.

Moving slowly, the man reached into the case and removed six objects, placing them reverently on the desk in front of Lourds. When the man was finished, he bowed to Leslie, who thanked him; then he went to stand nearby.

Lourds looked around the room, unable to keep from smiling. Six young men and women stood with Leslie, waiting to see what he would do. He felt like a kid playing his favorite game.

“What do you find so humorous?” Leslie asked.

“This.” Lourds waved his hand at the six objects. “Every year at the university, students bring me things to read. Usually replicas, though. Not the real thing.”

“My resources run somewhat deeper than the average university student’s.” Leslie’s voice held a note of determination. She was evidently not prepared to have her investment of time and research casually tossed off.

“That they do.” And Lourds meant that as a compliment. “Still, this is rather like a stage magician at a dinner party. He hasn’t gone there to entertain, yet once other people find out what he does, they want him to do magic tricks so they can ooh and ahh over them.”

“Or maybe they want to catch him in a pratfall, landing him flat on his arse,” one of the young men volunteered. His head was shaved and he sported tattoos all over his arms.

“Is that what Ms. Crane is hoping for?” Lourds asked him. “A pratfall?”

The young man shrugged. “Dunno. I bet her a few pounds you couldn’t read ’em all. But I think she hopes you get ’em all right.”

“I don’t mind having a few extra pounds, Neil,” Leslie responded. “I’m confident Professor Lourds is exactly what Harvard claims him to be. Proficient in all known ancient languages.”

“Proficient,” Lourds corrected, “in several.” Though I can find my way through all, he amended to himself. It wasn’t bragging. He could.

“Sounds like he’s laying out his excuses, he does,” Neil said, grinning.

The building was one of the older ones in the city. Air-conditioning here was an afterthought. As a result, the room was comfortable, but not hermetically sealed like the hotel environment Lourds had left. They were in a corner office. One set of windows overlooked the gray-green Mediterranean, and the other had a fine view of downtown Alexandria. Lourds was willing to bet he could probably see Kom Al-Dikka from the window.

Leslie had told him the office had been stripped and set up to handle the television show’s production needs. A small set, lit and ready to go, occupied one side of the room, which was blocked off from the windows so they could control the light. It was decorated to look like someone’s study, with bookcases full of fake books behind the desk where Lourds had been told he’d sit. The desk was larger and better than the one he had in his office at Harvard. Covered with computer equipment that looked capable of launching spacecraft, it looked like it fit the rock star status the program aspired to lend him.

The other side of the room, and the majority of the space, was filled with cameras, boom microphones, and sound and audio equipment that lined shelves. Bundled wires snaked in all directions and looked like they were barely being kept under control. The whole room was, Lourds found, somewhat intimidating.

Lourds picked up the first item, a wooden box about six inches long by four inches wide by two inches deep. Colorful hieroglyphics tracked the top and sides. Lifting the lid, he found a small figurine of a mummy.

“Do you know what this is?” Lourds turned the small box around to display to the group of television personnel.

“A shabti,” Leslie said.

“Very good. Do you know what a shabti is?”

“A good-luck piece that was left in an Egyptian tomb.”

“Not exactly.” Lourds tapped the figure. “A shabti figurine was supposed to represent the deceased’s majordomo, someone who would work in the afterlife for him.”

“It’s one thing to know what it is,” Neil suggested, “but it’s another to read the writing.”

“It’s from chapter six of the Book of the Dead.” Lourds studied the inscription, not wanting to assume in case someone had altered the writing that should have been there. But everything was as it was supposed to be. He read the hieroglyphics easily. “ ‘If N is called up to do any work that is done there in the underworld, then the checkmarks (on the work list) are struck for him there as for a man for his (work service) duty be counted yourself at any time that might be done to cultivate the marsh, to irrigate the riverbank fields, to ferry sand west or east. “I am doing it — see, I am here,” you are to say.’ ”

Leslie glanced down at her notebook, then handed it over to Neil.

“So he got one right,” Neil said, handing the notebook back. “For all you know, he memorized that passage.”

Lourds moved on to the next item: a replicated papyrus written in Coptic, which looked entirely too familiar. He glanced up at Leslie. “This is from the coded document I translated.”

“It is,” she agreed. “Since they didn’t have a Books on Tape version, I thought I’d like to hear an audio presentation.”

Neil looked at her. “Is this the kinky thing you told me about?”

“Yes.” Her brilliant green eyes never left Lourds’s.

A challenge, then? Lourds was amused and interested to see how far she’d let him go. After all, he’d had to present the piece a fair number of times at different committees, including the dean’s house for a celebration on the translation’s acceptance. The reading, rendered with an orator’s skill that had developed naturally from Lourds’s years as a teacher, had been a major hit and had set academic tongues to wagging scandalously. She didn’t know his world at all if she thought mere words could embarrass or frighten him here.

He read the first section of the document aloud, then translated it. Leslie stopped Lourds before the first session of foreplay got serious. “All right,” she said, blushing. “You know the text. Move on to the next one.”

“Are you sure?” Lourds said. “I’m quite familiar with this.” He purposefully didn’t clarify whether he was familiar with the text… or the technique presented. His words were every bit as much a challenge as hers were.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I don’t want the network bigwigs twitching.”

“Wow, man,” Neil said, grinning from ear to ear. “That’s brill. Didn’t know porn could sound so… so… bitching.”

Lourds didn’t bother to correct the misrepresentation of the piece. It wasn’t intended to be porn — not exactly. It was more a diary of the writer’s experiences — a reminder of his past. But read aloud now, its use had changed. Once a listener heard words, the words as well as the meaning became subjective, and it became applied to that individual’s views on life and the moment. For Neil, it probably was porn.

The third piece was Ethiopian, written in Ge’ez, which was abugida. As a grapheme form, transcribed in signs, it denoted consonants with inherent trailing vowels. Besides Ethiopia, the form was also used by certain Canadian Native American tribes — the Algonquian, Athabascan, and Inuit — as well as the Brahmic family of languages — South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia. It had penetrated the East as far as Korea. The piece was a length of elephant tusk used by a trader to record his journey into what was then called the Horn of Africa. From what Lourds gathered from the record, it had been intended as a gift to the man’s eldest son, a marker and a challenge to go farther and dare more than his father did.

Evidently Lourds’s translation matched what Leslie had in her notes, because she kept nodding as he read.

The fourth piece seized Lourds’s attention completely. It was a ceramic bell, probably once used by a priest or shaman to call a community to prayer or announcement. It was divided into two sections: there was a clapper at the top and a reservoir for holding herbs at the bottom. A faint ginger smell clung to the piece, indicating that it had been recently used. A ring at the top invited speculation that it had hung from a shepherd’s crook or a similarly shaped staff. The piece had the burnished look of an object that had been handled and cared for continuously over many centuries, perhaps even over millennia. The reservoir might even have held oil at one time to provide an ancient lantern for the bearer.

The inscription on the bell truly set it apart from the other pieces Lourds had sitting before him. In fact, the most fascinating aspect about the bell was the writing that went around it.

He couldn’t read it. Not only that, but he’d never seen anything like it in his life.

In the alley behind the building where the television people had their rented rooms, Gallardo got out of the car. He stepped quickly to the back of the vehicle, followed by Farok and DiBenedetto.

Pietro released the trunk latch from inside. The lid rose slowly, revealing the duffels stashed within. Unzipping the top duffel, Gallardo took out a Heckler & Koch MP5. He added a specially modified silencer to the weapon as Cimino joined them.

Cimino was a thick, squat man who spent all his time in gyms. His drug of choice was steroids, and he kept himself painfully close to overuse, staying just this side of healthy and sane. His head was shaved. Aviator sunglasses bisected his face.

“They’re inside?” Gallardo asked.

“Yes.” Cimino picked up a machine pistol as well.

“Security?”

“Building only. Not much of that.” Cimino threaded a silencer into place on his weapon with practiced ease.

“Sounds good to me.” Farok armed one of the machine pistols, then dropped it into a canvas bag he slung over his shoulder.

“All right,” Gallardo said, feeling a thrill sizzle through his stomach in anticipation of the action and the success he knew was soon going to be his. He tapped the bag, then entered the building’s side entrance.

Feeling as though someone was pulling a fast one on him, Lourds examined the writing more closely, thinking perhaps it had been inscribed recently upon an ancient bell — which would have been foolish under the circumstances because such an act would have destroyed the bell’s huge intrinsic value — to fool him. If it was a forgery, it was a masterpiece. The inscription felt smooth to the touch. In places it was even worn to the point that it was almost faded.

Yep. If it was a fake, it was a damned good one.

Operating by instinct, Lourds reached into his backpack, which was beside his chair, and took out a soft graphite pencil and a tablet containing sheets of onionskin tracing paper. Placing a sheet of paper on the bell, he rubbed the pencil against the surface, creating a negative image of the inscription.

“What are you doing?” Neil asked.

Lourds ignored the question, consumed by the puzzle that was before him. He took a small digital camera from his backpack and took pictures of the bell from all sides. The camera’s flash, especially when used on smooth ceramic, didn’t always allow the image to pick up shallow markings. That’s why he’d done the rubbings.

He was engrossed. He didn’t even notice when Leslie approached and stood on the other side of the desk.

“What’s going on?” Leslie asked.

“Where did you get this?” Lourds asked, turning the bell in his hands. The clapper pinged softly against the side.

“From a shop.”

“What shop?”

“An antiquities shop. His father’s shop.” Leslie nodded toward the tall, sallow man in his forties standing against the wall. The man looked a little worried.

Lourds pinned the man with his gaze, not wishing to be trifled with. If that’s what this was, of course. He was halfway convinced this wasn’t a joke. It felt far too elaborate. The bell felt real.

“Where did this come from?” Lourds asked in Arabic.

“From my father, sir,” the man said politely. “The young lady requested that we put something old in with the other items. To better test you, she said. My father and I told her we could not read what was written on the bell either, so we didn’t know what it said.” He hesitated. “The young woman said this was all right.”

“Where did your father get this bell?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s been in his shop for years. He tells me that no one seems to be able to tell him what it is.”

Lourds switched back to English and looked at Leslie. “I want to talk to his father. See the shop where this bell came from.”

Leslie looked surprised. “All right. I’m sure we can arrange that. What’s wrong?”

“I can’t read this.” Lourds looked at the bell again, still not believing what he knew to be true.

“It’s okay,” Leslie told him. “I don’t think anyone’s really going to believe that you can read all those languages. You knew a lot of others. The people who watch our show will still be impressed. I’m impressed.”

Lourds told himself to be patient. Leslie truly didn’t understand the problem.

“I’m an authority in the languages spoken here,” he told her. “Civilization as we know it began not far from here. The languages used here, living and dead, are as familiar to me as my own hand. Given that, this writing should be in one of the Altaic languages. Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s a family of languages,” Lourds explained, “that encompassed this area. It’s where all language here sprang from. Although the subject is hotly contested by linguists. Some linguists believe the Altaic language resulted from a genetically inherited language, words and ideas — and perhaps even symbols — that are written somewhere in our genetic code.”

“Genetics predisposes language?” Leslie arched a narrow eyebrow in surprise. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Nor should you. I don’t believe it’s true. There’s another, more simplistic reason why so many languages at the time shared common traits.” Lourds calmed himself. “All those people, with all their different languages, lived in close proximity. They traded with one another, all of them in pursuit of the same things. They had to have common words in order to do that.”

“Sort of like the computer explosion and the Internet,” Leslie said. “Most of the computer terms are in English since the United States developed much of the technology, and other countries simply used the English words because they had no words in their own language to describe the computer parts and terminology.”

Lourds smiled. “Exactly. A very good analogy, by the way.”

“Thank you.”

“That theory is called the Sprachbund.”

“What is the Sprachbund?”

“It’s the convergence area for a group of people who ultimately end up partially sharing a language. When the Crusades took place, during the battles between the Christians and the Muslims, language and ideas were traded back and forth as much as arrows and sword blows. Those wars were as much about expanding trade as they were about securing the Holy Land.”

“You’re telling me that they ended up speaking each others’ language.”

“The people that fought or traded, yes. Bits of it. We still carry the history of that conflict in words of modern English. Words like assassin, azimuth, cotton, even the words cipher and decipher. They come from the Arabic word sifi, which is the number zero. The symbol for zero was central to many codes. But this artifact shares nothing with the native languages of this area — or with any language I’ve ever heard or seen.” Lourds held up the bell. “In those early years, craftsmen — especially craftsmen who wrote and kept records — would be part of that Sprachbund. That’s a logical assumption. But this bell—?” He shook his head. “It’s an anomaly. I don’t know where it came from. If it’s not a forgery, and it doesn’t feel like one, what we’re looking at is an artifact from some other place than the Middle East.”

“What other place?”

Lourds sighed. “That’s the problem. I don’t know. And I should know that as well.”

“You think we have a real find here, don’t you?” Excitement gleamed in Leslie’s eyes.

“A find,” Lourds agreed tentatively, “or an aberration.”

“What do you mean?”

“The inscription on that bell could be… humbug, for lack of a better term. Simply nonsense made up to decorate the bell.”

“Wouldn’t you know, if that were the case? Wouldn’t it be easy to spot?”

Lourds frowned. She had him there. Even an artificial language would require a basis in logic. As such, he should be able to spot that.

“Well?” she pressed.

“I should be able to tell. This looks authentic to me.”

Leslie smiled again and leaned toward the bell, regarding it with intensity. “If that’s truly written in a heretofore undiscovered language, then we’ve made an astonishing find.”

Before Lourds could respond, the door suddenly ripped from its hinges. Armed men burst into the room, aiming their weapons at the people inside.

“Everybody freeze!” a man yelled in accented English.

Everybody froze.

Lourds thought he recognized an Italian accent in the man’s words.

The four armed men pressed into the room. They used their fists and their weapons to drive the whole television crew to the floor. All of Leslie’s people cowered there and remained still.

One of the men, the one who had spoken, crossed the room in long strides and grabbed Leslie by the arm.

Lourds stood instinctively, not able to calmly sit by and watch the young woman get hurt. But he wasn’t trained for this kind of thing. Sure, he’d spent time in rough parts of the world. But he’d been lucky. The worst violence he’d ever experienced personally was a dustup in soccer.

The man put the machine pistol’s barrel to Leslie’s head. “Sit back down, Professor Lourds, or this pretty young woman dies.”

Lourds sat, but the fact that the man knew his name unnerved him.

“Very good,” the man said. “Put your hands on your head.”

Lourds complied. His stomach turned sour. Even as wild as it had sometimes gotten while he’d been in unsettled lands studying languages, he’d never had a gun pointed at him.

“Down,” the man ordered, dragging Leslie to the ground. When she was down, the man looked at the items on the desk. Without hesitation, he took the bell.

And that’s when the man made his first mistake. He and his men took their eyes off Leslie.

Before Lourds fully realized what was happening, she pushed herself to her feet and flung herself at one of the men. She knocked him over and took his gun, then dived beneath the heavy desk at the back of the set in a single fluid motion.

Her move took the thieves by surprise. Clearly they weren’t expecting a mere woman to put up much of a fight.

They had underestimated her, but they were clearly professional because it didn’t take long for them to catch up.

The sounds of gunfire filled the room as that desk took punishment it was never intended for. Bullets filled the air with wooden splinters.

Leslie fired back. Her shots were much louder than their attackers’, and she clearly knew what she was doing. Bullet holes tracked the walls behind their attackers, coughing out puffs of plaster dust that looked surreal to Lourds.

Meanwhile, the crew scrambled for cover.

So did the thieves.

No! Lourds thought. No artifact is worth the deaths of all these people.

Then he heard the familiar ping of Leslie’s sat-phone.

He could call for help.

In the middle of the chaos, Lourds rolled across the floor and ducked behind the desk with Leslie.

“I’ll talk. You shoot. Or we’ll both die.”

“Good point,” she said.

She handed over the phone, already keyed to an emergency number. More gunfire. And then a scream. Lourds hoped it was one of the robbers who had been hit, not one of the crew.

When a burst of startled Arabic came across the line of the phone in his hand, Lourds started talking.

Before he’d finished his second sentence, the sound of sirens outside intensified.

Help was on the way.

And the robbers could hear it, too.

They took off, one of them leaving a blood trail.

Leslie took off after them, holding her fire until she could get a clear shot.

Lourds followed, just in time to pull her out of the way as a final volley from the thieves splintered the office door.

On the floor, terrified but still whole, Lourds wrapped his arms around Leslie. He felt the sweet press of female flesh against his body and decided if he had to die in that instant, there were worse ways to go.

He held on to the woman, trapping her body under his.

“What do you think you were doing?” Lourds demanded of the woman. “Do you want to get killed?”

“They’re getting away!” Leslie tried to pull free from his grasp.

“Yes, and they should. They should get far away. They have automatic weapons, they outnumber us, and the police are coming — most of the force, if the sound is any indication. You’ve already saved our necks. It’s enough. Put that gun down and let the professionals take over.”

Leslie relaxed in his arms. For a moment he thought this was the point she was going to remonstrate with him and call him a coward. He’d discovered in the heat of the moment that good sense was often confused with cowardice by those watching from the sidelines.

Two of the young men from the production crew poked their heads up from where they were hiding. When they weren’t shot on the spot, Lourds deemed it safe enough to stand. He did so, helping Leslie to her feet.

Walking out to the hall, Lourds stared at the bullet holes that marred the hallway’s end as well as the walls, ceiling, and floor. The bad guys hadn’t been sharpshooters, but they’d certainly sprayed enough bullets into the general vicinity to make a statement.

“Call the police,” Lourds told one of the young Arabic men. “Tell them that the thieves have gone, and the only ones left here are us. We want them aware of that when they get here, or things could get exciting again.”

One of the crew, already pale, turned white and reached for the phone.

Leslie pulled away from Lourds and ran to a window. She looked out over the city.

Lourds joined her, but he saw nothing.

“We lost the bell,” she said, “before we even knew what it was.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Lourds told her. “I took copies of the inscription on the rubbing as well as taking a full set of photos of the bell with the digital camera. We may have lost the bell itself, but not the secrets it contains. Whatever they are, they aren’t totally beyond our grasp.”

But he had to wonder if pursuing the puzzle wasn’t going to put them back in front of someone’s guns. Somebody had wanted that bell enough to kill him and the entire crew for it. Would they kill to squash research about it as well? That wasn’t what being a professor of linguistics was about.

Nor was talking to a hundred revved-up Egyptian cops.

But judging from the sounds of the footsteps in the hall, it looked like he was about to learn all sorts of new things today.