The Atlantis Code

CHAPTER 5

Leaning closer to the computer screen, Lourds studied the pictures of the mysterious bell. The images Leslie Crane had posted to various archeological and history sites had been professionally done. But the images didn’t show the entire surface area of the bell. They’d been taken from either side, leaving out a lot of the inscription. Thankfully, he had the rest.

Leslie stood beside him, and Lourds was more conscious of the heat of her body than he wanted to be. He didn’t like distractions while he was working.

The text that accompanied the images of the bell was simple and direct, merely asking if anyone had any knowledge of the history of the thing. A few responses had accumulated over the two weeks the images had been on the Internet sites, but nothing of them seemed out of the ordinary.

“Did you ever receive any e-mail regarding the bell?” Lourds inquired.

“Nothing that revealed the bell’s history,” Leslie answered. “There were a few questions about it.”

“What kind of questions?” Lourds leaned back.

“Where did we get it? What we were going to do with it? That kind of thing.”

“Did you reply?”

“No. I was looking for information, not wishing to give it away.” Leslie was silent for a moment. “Do you truly think the men who burst in on us came because of these postings?”

“I think that had to be the case. How else would they have known where the bell would be?”

“I used a blind drop. It was supposed to be secure.”

Lourds nodded. “According to my assistant, the problem with Internet security is that as soon as someone writes a supposedly ‘secure’ program to protect traffic, someone else is busy finding ways around it.”

“I know. I did a piece on encryption before I was hired by the present program.” Her voice broke a little. “I just can’t believe this has happened. I e-mailed scholars. I posted on university sites. Why would an obscure artifact like the bell draw the attention of killers?”

Noting the young woman’s troubled expression in the depths of the computer screen, Lourds turned to her. “What happened that day wasn’t your fault, Leslie.”

She crossed her arms over her stomach. “If I hadn’t posted the images of the bell on the Internet, none of this would have happened. James wouldn’t have—” She took a ragged breath. “No one would have gotten hurt.”

“What you did,” Lourds insisted, “was to unwittingly step into a particularly nasty situation.” He took one of her hands in his for a brief squeeze. “What you’ve managed to uncover—”

“Inadvertently,” Leslie put in.

Nodding, Lourds said, “Inadvertently though it may be, you’ve still managed to find an incredible thing.”

“The trouble is we’ve lost it.”

Lourds returned his attention to the bell images. “Sometimes you don’t have to actually have possession of a thing to learn from it. Sometimes it’s enough simply to know that it exists.” He nodded at the screen. “That’s what put whoever stole the bell from us onto our tracks. They knew it existed. All we have to do is figure out how they knew that.”

“I thought they were just thieves hired by someone who wanted the bell.”

“Exactly. That is just what they were. But judging from the violent way the men acted, and by the look of them, I would say they were skilled mercenaries. Perhaps even hired thieves. After all, they hardly looked like collectors to me. They looked more like some kind of rent-a-thug convention product — although one of the more expensive options on that menu.”

“But if someone knew about the bell, wouldn’t that person have gotten it from the shop years ago?”

“Knowing about an object and knowing where that object is are two very different things.” Lourds brought up his e-mail client.

“You’re saying that like that’s a good thing?”

“Because it means that there’s a trail out there. One that led those men to the bell, to us, and one that we can hope to find ourselves. A trail goes in two directions. We might be able to find whoever was searching for that bell. And we might be able to find what they know about it.” Lourds waited as the mail server clicked through the mail. He hadn’t checked it in days.

Many familiar names popped up onto the screen.

“What are you doing?” Leslie asked.

“I’m going to contact a few people I know. Generate a few inquiries of my own. Perhaps we’ll get as fortunate as the men who came looking for that bell.”

The mail continued to cycle.

“Wow,” Leslie said. “Don’t you ever answer your e-mail?”

“Occasionally. People who know me know it’s often best to call me. You can lose entirely too much time responding to every piece of e-mail that comes your way.” A name caught Lourds’s attention.

Yuliya Hapaev. It had popped up more than once.

Lourds knew Yuliya personally. Whenever he traveled to Russia, he tried to make sure he visited her. He clicked on the mail sorter, bringing up all the e-mail from Yuliya.

There were a half dozen messages. Three of them had attachments.

“Ardent fan?” Leslie asked.

“An archeologist I know.”

“The name looks Russian.”

“It is.” Lourds clicked on the earliest e-mail. It was dated eleven days ago.

“Do you know her well?”

On the surface, the question sounded innocuous. But Lourds knew what Leslie implied. “I know Yuliya, her husband, and her children quite well.”

“Oh.”

Lourds read the first message.

Three other messages contained similar inquiries, offered more as a backup in case his e-mail client had dropped mail. The university’s server had been known to do that.

The fourth message contained the first of the attached images. Lourds clicked to open it, then waited for a moment for it to download.

The image instantly seized his attention. He tapped the keys, enlarging the image so he could see the writing on the surface.

“It looks like some kind of ancient Frisbee,” Leslie said. “Or a plate.”

“It’s neither,” Lourds said. “It’s a cymbal.”

“A symbol? Of what?”

“A musical instrument.” Excited, Lourds used the mouse and keyboard to bring up one of the digital images he’d shot of the bell.

“What are you doing?” Leslie leaned closer, peering over his shoulder. Her hair lightly brushed his cheek.

“Did you notice the writing on the cymbal?” Lourds knew his voice was tight with excitement. He could feel it and hear it.

Leslie hesitated. “You think it looks like that on the bell?”

“It does resemble that on the bell.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it. You’re the expert.”

“I am,” Lourds agreed. He stared at the inscription on the cymbal. Like the writings on the bell, he couldn’t decipher it.

He got up from the desk and retreated to his backpack sitting on a chair by the bed. Rummaging through the backpack, he took out his cell phone and a small address book. He looked up Yuliya Hapaev’s number. He had two for her. One for home and one — a satellite phone — for work.

Lourds guessed that with the recent find Yuliya would be at work even though it was late. He called that number.

Looking back at the computer screen, Lourds studied the two images. There was no doubt about the similarity of the two inscriptions. Whatever language they were written in, they shared a history.

The phone rang again and again.

Yuliya stretched, listening to her vertebrae snap and crack. Many people thought the hardest part of an archeologist’s job was the actual dig. But unearthing artifacts from a site was pleasant compared with staying seated at a desk poring over those things for hours at a time.

You need a break so you can look at this with fresh eyes. Yuliya knew it was true. She’d stayed with the research as long as she could, but she was well and truly stuck. She couldn’t remember ever being this stymied.

She decided to make a call home, then retire for the night. Lifting the cymbal from the lab table, she started back across the room to lock it away in the vault.

That was when she saw the man standing at the doorway.

Yuliya stopped and stared at him, frightened immediately because of his size and the roughness in his face.

“Do you speak English?” the man asked in Russian.

“Who are you?” Yuliya demanded. “How did you get down here?”

The man smiled, but the expression didn’t look disarming. Instead, he had the cold smile of a predatory shark. “I speak a little Russian, but not enough to talk about what we need to discuss.” The man came closer.

Yuliya took a step back.

“You are Professor Hapaev, right?” the man asked. “You were making Internet inquiries about that?” He nodded at the cymbal in her hands.

“Get out before I call for security.” Yuliya tried to make her voice firm.

The man ignored her. He reached for the cymbal.

Yuliya stepped back, remaining out of reach. She didn’t have much room to maneuver.

As if by magic, a pistol appeared in the man’s hand.

Gunshots, muffled by the walls, sounded outside. Yuliya knew what the flat cracks were. She’d been around weapons before. Natasha had tried to teach her to shoot, but Yuliya had proved miserable at the skill. She’d finally protested that even if she learned how, she didn’t intend to have a pistol in the household with her children.

More gunshots sounded.

The man spoke in Italian, but the pistol in his hand never wavered.

Yuliya knew enough to identify the language, but not enough to understand it. At first she thought the man was talking to her; then she saw that he was speaking into a pencil-thin microphone along his cheek.

“Who is the woman that left this building?” the man demanded.

Natasha! Cold fear ran through Yuliya’s veins, and her heartbeat sped up.

“Who is she?” The man stepped forward and grabbed Yuliya by the arm.

The cymbal almost slipped from her hands. She caught it at the last minute.

Gunshots cracked again.

“Who is she?” The man pointed his weapon at Yuliya’s left eye.

“My sister,” Yuliya croaked. She felt horrible revealing that, but she desperately wanted to see her children again. She didn’t want them to grow up without her. “Natasha Hapaev. She’s a police inspector.” She pulled her courage together. “Doubtless she has already notified the police.”

The man cursed, then snatched the cymbal from Yuliya’s grasp.

Yuliya thought she might live, that her words and Natasha’s gun might have scared him off. Even when the bright light from the muzzle flash blinded her and her head rocketed back against the wall behind her, she thought she was going to get through the encounter alive.

Then emptiness sucked her away as blackness clouded her vision.

Heart thudding like a sledgehammer in her chest, Natasha Safarov ran through the darkness. The men were after Yuliya. That thought crescendoed inside her head.

Bullets chased through the night, striking the ground and trees around her as she sped back toward the building where she’d left Yuliya. She recharged her weapons on the run, then tucked her left pistol back in the duster so she could reach her sat-phone.

She punched up the emergency police number.

“Ryazan’ Police Department,” a laconic male voice announced.

“This is Inspector Safarov of the Moscow Department,” Natasha said quickly. The flat cracks of gunshots punctuated her words. She added her identification number. “I’m under attack at Ryazan’ University.”

“By whom, Inspector?”

“I don’t know.” A bullet tore bark from a tree only inches from her head. “Get someone here. Now!”

“Yes, Inspector.”

Natasha folded the phone. She felt heartened that the dispatch officer hadn’t tried to verify her identity. Of course, Moscow was only three hours away by rail and there weren’t many female inspectors even in the Moscow division.

Shadows danced out across the space between the buildings behind her. Natasha lifted her pistols and fired at them.

A man cried out in pain as one of the shadows stumbled and fell. The other stepped back into hiding.

Abandoning her position, Natasha ran, looping back behind the building next to the one where she’d left Yuliya.

Inside the lab, Gallardo peered down at the dead woman. The bullet had ruined her face. He compared what was left of her face to the image inside the plastic pocket on his sleeve. He had no doubt the woman was the professor he’d been sent to terminate if necessary.

Kneeling down, Gallardo called out to one of the men who’d followed him inside the room. He held the cymbal out. The man gingerly took the cymbal and packed it into the protective case they’d brought to transport the artifact.

Gallardo quickly went through the dead woman’s pockets. He took everything out and dropped it into a large plastic bag. When he had everything, he sealed the bag. He doubted there would be anything worthwhile in the clutter, but there was a Zip drive that looked promising.

Standing, Gallardo waved to the room. “Burn it,” he ordered.

Two of the men ran through the lab and knocked flammable liquids onto the floor. The burning stink of alcohol filled the still air.

A third man stood near the door with an assault rifle.

Gallardo walked back to the small office in the back, drawn by the blue glare of the computer monitor. Inside the office, he looked at the screen.

The e-mail client showed a list of messages. Some were in Cyrillic, but others were in English.

A name caught Gallardo’s eye.

Gallardo cursed, remembering the uncanny luck the professor had back in Alexandria. Now the man’s name had turned up here.

Gallardo didn’t believe in luck, good or bad, but he hated the insistence of fate. Lourds’s constant turning up in the chase for artifacts for the Society of Quirinus wasn’t something he was prepared to tolerate.

He listened to the gunshots, then spoke into the microphone. “What the hell is going on out there, Farok?”

“It’s the woman,” Farok replied. “The archeologist.”

“The archeologist is down here,” Gallardo corrected him. “She’s not going anywhere.”

“Then who is this one?”

“Her sister. She’s a police inspector.”

“She’s deadly as anything with her pistols,” Farok said. “She’s killed two of our men and injured three others.”

Gallardo couldn’t believe it. The mercenaries he’d hired for the assault on the college were good. “Is she dead?”

“No. In fact, she’s headed back toward your position.”

Cursing again, Gallardo said, “Get the bodies and the wounded loaded up. I’ve got what we’ve come for. We need to get out of here.”

Farok hesitated.

Gallardo knew that Farok hated to walk away from a fight. “If she’s a police inspector, then there’s every chance she’s called in reinforcements. It’s time to clean house and get out of here.”

“All right,” Farok said, his reluctance clear in each word.

At the doorway, Gallardo took an emergency flare from his combat harness, armed it, then tossed it onto the floor. The flare sparked only a moment later, then caught the spilled alcohol and chemicals on fire. The wavering blue haze quickly spread across the liquid pooled across the floor.

Natasha saw that the men were pulling back as she reached the back of the medical building. She was torn for just a moment over the thought of pursuing them. But there was no choice. Even if it meant they escaped, she had to find Yuliya.

The back door was locked.

Stepping back from the door, Natasha took deliberate aim at the lock and fired three times. The bullets ripped through the metal in a flash of sparks. She was aware that the muzzle flashes clearly marked her position, so she kept low to the ground.

A warning Klaxon roared to life.

She tried the door again, and this time it opened. Yanking the door wide, she dashed inside just as a brief flurry of bullets struck the door and the alcove.

Staying low, Natasha sprinted down the hallway, looking for a stairwell that led to the basement level. She told herself to slow down, that the men might still be inside the building. But all she could think of was Yuliya.

When she found the stairwell, she hurled herself down it, crashing against the back wall of the landing. The impact hurt her shoulder, but she forced herself to keep moving.

At the bottom of the stairwell, she stepped through a door with her pistols crossed over her wrists. Her breathing rasped in the emptiness of the hallway.

No one moved.

For a moment Natasha stood frozen, not certain which way to go. Then she spotted the gray pallor of smoke pouring from a room to her left.

Yuliya!

Natasha ran, unable to control the fear that thrummed through her. Shoving her left pistol into her duster pocket, she grabbed the knob and pulled the door open.

Smoke roiled from the room, pressing toward Natasha and clinging to her. The acrid smell of burning chemicals pinched her nose. Holding her duster sleeve over her mouth, she breathed through the fabric and ran into the room, desperately searching for her sister.

Flames danced across the floor, licking at the alcohol spilled across the tiles. Fire covered the back wall. Several glass containers along the shelves to the left exploded.

A quick inspection of the office revealed that Yuliya wasn’t there. Looking at the blazing inferno continuing to gain strength, Natasha thought that it was possible the men had taken Yuliya prisoner. She hoped so.

Then that hope died as she moved around the room and spotted Yuliya lying on the floor. The blood that had seeped from Yuliya’s head held back a line of flames.

No!

Natasha ran to her sister. One look at the grievous injury done to Yuliya’s head told Natasha that there was no hope for her sister.

Tears, from the burning chemicals as well as from the emotional pain, blurred Natasha’s vision as she dropped beside her sister’s body. Firelight danced across the smooth pool of blood. The heat blackened the blood at the edges.

Natasha put her pistol down on the floor and cradled Yuliya’s head. Crying, Natasha thought of all those mornings when there had only been her sister and her after their father had gone to work. If not for Yuliya—

The door rasped open behind her.

Whirling, Natasha plucked her pistol from the floor and pointed it at the dark figures that entered the room. The men were dressed in uniforms that identified them as campus security.

“I’m Inspector Safarov of the Moscow Police,” Natasha said loudly.

“Inspector,” one of the men said, “I’m Pytor Patrushev. I work security here at the college.”

“Keep your hands up.”

The man complied. “You need to get out of here. I’ve called the fire department, but these chemicals—”

“Come closer. Let me see your identification. Use only one hand.” A coughing fit tore at Natasha’s words.

Patrushev approached her and proffered the clip-on ID attached to his coat lapel.

Blinded by tears from the chemicals, denying the pain, physical as well as emotional, that raked at her, Natasha could barely see the rectangle. She felt that the man offered no threat and trusted her instincts.

“We’ve got to get her out of here,” Natasha said.

Together, Natasha and the man carried Yuliya’s body from the room before the fire or the smoke could take them.

Firemen carried Yuliya’s body to a waiting ambulance. Natasha steeled herself, pulling herself from the abyss of despair. The scene was like too many she’d gone through in Moscow. Shoot-outs with Mafiya members, confrontations with drug dealers, and hunts for murderers all spun into a surreal confection that bloated her skull.

The Ryazan’ police arrived with the fire department. The police, however, stayed back from the area the firemen had roped off. But a few of them were starting to ask questions of the spectators.

Natasha sat with Yuliya. She felt certain the men who had killed her sister were gone.

The fire lit up the first floor, but the powerful streams of water gradually beat it back.

A cell phone rang.

Automatically, Natasha reached for hers, but when she brought it from her hip holster, she saw that it wasn’t her phone ringing. She turned to Yuliya and tracked the shrill tone to the pocket of her sister’s lab coat.

She pulled the sat-phone to her face and shielded the mouthpiece with her body. She spoke in Russian. “Hello?”

“Yuliya?” The voice was distinguished, speaking Russian with a slight American accent.

“Who is this?” Natasha continued in Russian.

“Thomas Lourds,” the man replied. “Look, I’m sorry to call at such a late hour, but it’s important. I just saw the cymbal you’ve been working on. It ties in with an artifact I recently came into contact with.” The man hesitated.

Natasha forced herself to be calm. The man didn’t sound like he would be one of the men who had killed Yuliya and hunted her. There was something familiar about the man’s name. She felt certain Yuliya had mentioned him to her.

“What I wanted to tell you,” Lourds went on, “is that there could be some danger attached to your artifact.”

“Excuse me,” Natasha said. “What did you say your name is?”

Lourds didn’t answer immediately. “You’re not Yuliya,” he accused.

“My name is Natasha Safarov. I’m—”

“Yuliya’s sister,” Lourds replied. “She’s often talks of you.”

For a moment the pang of hurt that lanced through Natasha’s heart stilled her tongue. She struggled to speak.

“I’m a colleague of Yuliya’s,” Lourds said. “May I speak to her?”

“She can’t come to the phone.”

“It’s important that I speak to her.”

“I will give her a message.”

Lourds didn’t speak for a moment. “Tell her that I think her life may be in danger. I’m in Alexandria, Egypt. I was — briefly — in possession of an artifact that might tie in with the cymbal that she’s contacted me about. A few days ago, men attacked us and took it. They killed two people during the theft. These are dangerous men.”

“I’ll let her know.” Natasha forced herself not to look at Yuliya’s body. “Do you have a number where she can call you back?” She pocketed her pistol and took out a pen, quickly jotting the number down on her notepad while she balanced the sat-phone on her shoulder.

“Ask her to call me at her earliest convenience. And let her know that I apologize about being remiss in not responding to her e-mails.”

Natasha made a note to check Yuliya’s e-mail as well. She promised that she would, then hung up.

Looking through the crowd, Natasha spotted a young police officer in uniform. She called him over and showed him her identification, asked the name of the inspector in charge and where she could find him, then ordered the officer to watch over Yuliya’s body.

“You’re sure you wounded some of the men, Inspector?” Captain Yuri Golev asked politely. He was a blunt, squared-off man in his late fifties. His hair was silver, but his mustache and eyebrows remained black. He put a cigarette to his lips and took a deep pull. The flashing lights of the fire trucks and police cars carved deep hollows under his sad eyes.

“I killed at least two of those men,” Natasha said.

Golev gestured with his cigarette, waving at the college grounds where uniformed policemen searched the dark landscape with flashlights. “Then where are their bodies?”

“Obviously they took them with them,” Natasha replied.

“Obviously,” Golev echoed, but he didn’t sound sincere. “Why did those men come here looking for your sister?”

“I don’t know.”

Golev looked at her. “Or perhaps they were looking for you.”

“No one knew I was going to be here. Yuliya had been here for days.”

“Did anyone wish your sister ill will?” Golev asked.

“Not that I’m aware of.”

Golev smoked in silence for a moment while staring at the medical building. The fire department had gotten the chemical fires out. “Your sister was an archeologist?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes those people find interesting things.”

The statement was deliberately leading. Natasha knew what Golev was thinking, and she knew he was aware that she did.

“She was working on a state assignment,” Natasha said. “She wasn’t working with anything valuable.”

“Something this highly organized, especially if they took their dead with them — an unusual occurrence in the sort of bottom-feeding criminal I generally come in contact with — wouldn’t be initiated on a whim.”

Natasha agreed but didn’t say anything.

“She gave no indication that she feared for her life?” Golev asked.

“If she had,” Natasha said as evenly as she could, “I would never have left her.”

“Of course.” Golev sighed and his breath plumed gray in the night. “This is a very bad business, Inspector.”

Natasha didn’t reply.

Golev looked at her then, and his gaze was softer. “Are you sure you want to be the one who tells her family?”

“Yes.”

“If there’s anything you find you need, Inspector, please let me know.”

“I will.” Natasha said good-bye and trudged back to the parking lot where she’d left her car. Thomas Lourds was uppermost in her mind. Even if the man wasn’t involved in Yuliya’s murder, he might know something that would lead to those who were. Natasha intended to find out everything he knew.