The Oracle Code

11

“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.