The Oracle Code

29

After the bath, Layla had excused herself and left the room. Lourds knew she didn’t want to step too far outside the boundaries of her culture while they were in her country. He respected that, but he resented it at the same time.

She had told him that she knew he wanted to work anyway, which was true, but he still felt that separation.

He sat at the desk with the scrolls spread out before him, next to the notes in his journal that he’d made while reading them in Herat. While going through the scrolls again, he referred to his notes and paid attention to repetitive narrative and how the scribe, Callisthenes, had put his writing together. Even though the coded section was different, some of the narrative architecture would be the same. Finding the thread to pull the translation together was going to be difficult.

Someone knocked on the door.

Lourds swung around in the chair, instantly wary. There was still no word on the men who had attacked them. “Yes.”

“Dinner is ready.” Layla spoke through the door.

“I’m on my way.” Lourds hadn’t realized until that moment that he was starving. He reached for his hat out of habit, then left it sitting on the desk. He let himself out and smiled at Layla.

“How is the work going?”

“Slowly. I’m breaking some of the code down, then I’m finding other sections of it to be impossible again.” He walked downstairs beside her.

“Another code?”

“I believe so. Callisthenes was apparently a careful man.”

“Perhaps he had a big secret to hide.”

“He thought so. In the other scrolls, he mentions that Alexander the Great’s final resting place has ‘the power to change the course of nations.’”

“How?”

Lourds grinned. “That’s one of the things that he’s most secretive about. He claims that Alexander was somehow blessed by the gods, that he had been given a great gift, and that the only way people would be safe was if Alexander took that blessing down into the underworld with him.”

“You mean, like Hades?”

Lourds shrugged. “That would be the literal translation.”

“Perhaps Callisthenes hated Alexander.”

“No.” Lourds ran a hand through his hair and felt the ache between his shoulder blades that told him he’d been working on the translation for far too long. “You’d have to read the scrolls, Layla. Callisthenes thought the sun rose and set on Alexander the Great.”

“Wasn’t he a slave?”

“Not a slave, exactly. More like an indentured servant. He was one of the historians Alexander had chosen to document his life.”

“There were others?”

“Yes. But we don’t know how many there were or who they happened to be.”

“Aristotle was Alexander’s mentor, and I know Aristotle wrote about nearly everything. Maybe there is some overlap with his writings and the scrolls you are translating.”

“So many things were lost when the Library of Alexandria burned, I can’t even tell you. Many of the treatises and books that Aristotle wrote were lost.” Lourds thought about that for a moment. “But Aristotle was Alexander’s mentor, and Callisthenes was convinced that Alexander’s relationship with Aristotle was part of the Great Blessing. Callisthenes stresses that Alexander would never have become as cunning and as good a tactician as he was without Aristotle’s help.”

“As I recall, Alexander’s father, Philip II, chose Aristotle as his son’s teacher.”

“You’ve got a good memory.”

Layla made a face. “Many of the artifacts we tried to preserve in my previous job had histories that tie back to Alexander. I can’t help but know some things about this time period.”

“You’re right about Philip II choosing Aristotle as Alexander’s teacher, but Aristotle was Greek, remember? And at that time, there was a heavy anti-Macedonian reaction going on in the Greek city-states. If events had not happened as they did in Aristotle’s life, he wouldn’t have been available for the job of teaching Alexander.”

“What do you mean?”

Lourds reached the first floor and smelled the dinner coming from the kitchen/dining room. “Oh my god, that is wonderful.”

Smiling, Layla nodded. “As it turns out, Captain Fitrat is also an excellent chef.”

“A chef?”

“He says he just cooks. A very modest man, our Captain Fitrat.” Layla took him by the arm. “Let’s get a plate and sit down. The captain has worked very hard, and I don’t want to disappoint him.” She pulled him into the dining room. “Then I want to hear the rest of this miracle with Aristotle.”

The image that Anna had sent hadn’t been of good quality, but it had been good enough to get an answer when Cherkshan sent it through the system. He didn’t send it through normal FSB channels, though, forwarding it instead to a young lieutenant whom he knew could keep his mouth shut.

Emil Basayev was a friend of the family and one of Cherkshan’s most promising officers. When Emil had been younger, he had gone to school with Anna. He was a year older than her but had not exhibited the same proclivities toward the new Russian independence that his daughter did. For a time, Emil and Anna had been…close. And during that time, Cherkshan had been more satisfied with her. Katrina had hoped for a marriage and children for their daughter.

But that had not happened. When Anna had gotten old enough for university, she had gone.

Cherkshan had Emil on the speakerphone in his office. Emil had remained in Moscow to oversee some of the intelligence-gathering operations and to help hack into the Ukraine’s computer networks the next day.

“His name is Sergay Linko, General. He is a colonel in the FSB.”

That surprised Cherkshan. He knew the man by reputation but had never met him. Cherkshan’s stomach turned cold, and he became even more worried about Anna. Linko was a known killer, a hardcore executioner who enjoyed wetwork, which was what undercover operatives called their murders.

Cherkshan was of the opinion that murders were murders. It was better to meet a man on the battlefield. He took in a breath and let it out, staring at the picture on his computer monitor. “Can there be some mistake? This is a bad picture.”

“This is a very bad picture. That’s why I searched through the video footage that came out of Herat. I found this.”

A small box opened up on the monitor and showed a video of a man carrying an assault rifle and running across snow-covered ground. Almost in mid-stride, he shot a Taliban warrior in the face while his opponent lay in wait on the ground. Bright crimson blood sprayed out over the snow, and the camcorder operator turned away from the sight with a choked curse.

The video footage stopped then backed up slowly and froze. In the new image, Linko was more recognizable. He was wearing a Russia Today coat, which was ludicrous. Nothing the man did would ever end up on television. At least, not with his name or features attached to it.

Yet…here he was.

“General?”

“I am here.”

“I have confirmed Linko’s identity through our facial recognition database.”

“His face is in our database?”

“Our database, sir. Not everyone’s. No one else will be able to run this image of Linko and get a confirmation of his identity. He has been very circumspect in his work.”

“The man has left a trail of bodies after him.”

“According to his file, yes.”

“He’s a killer, not a soldier.”

Emil said nothing.

Cherkshan stared hard at the man. And now he is after my daughter.

“Send the colonel’s file to me. My eyes only. Lock it tightly. I do not want prying eyes looking at this.”

“Yes, sir.” A moment later, Emil told him that the file had been sent. A few moments after that, it showed up in Cherkshan’s e-mail.

The general stared at the hard planes of his daughter’s pursuer and tried to make himself believe that everything would be all right. Dreading what he would find, Cherkshan clicked on the file in his mail, saving it off to another folder on his hard drive. He buried it among plans for the Ukraine invasion, but he would know where it was. Then he opened it and watched the file spread across his monitor.

One of the files showed the bodies of Colonel Linko’s confirmed kills. Linko obviously most enjoyed those assignments where discretion was not enforced. Several of the kills had been of Islamic terrorists, CIA agents, and black marketers. Those had been done in public, and they had been very messy.

The man was a psychopath on a very loose leash. It was no surprise that he had been hidden away in the FSB.

Farther back in the files, Cherkshan found more pictures, these of Chechen women who had been tortured. According to the accompanying information, Linko had demanded information from them, but they had died and taken it to the grave with them.

Cherkshan felt certain that the women had had no information worth knowing. No one could have been that dedicated to keeping a secret. Linko was a sadist who enjoyed hurting and killing people, that was all.

He closed the images and read through Linko’s service record. Much of it had been redacted, but enough of it remained to fill in the blanks. People summoned Linko like a rusalka, a succubus that came out to mesmerize victims then deliver them into death’s embrace. The gender was wrong, but the end result was the same.

Now this thing was after Anna, and Cherkshan felt certain he knew who had put Linko on Lourds’s trail. After his audience with President Nevsky and the man’s mention of Alexander the Great, Cherkshan had read up on the Macedonian king. Nevsky hadn’t said what had interested him so much about Alexander, and Cherkshan couldn’t fathom the reason.

During the past few months, the general had read dozens of books and grown more frustrated with his independent research. He had a small library of the books at home but had found nothing that would warrant the Russian president’s focus.

Growling a curse, Cherkshan closed down the file, took a final look at the image of Colonel Sergay Linko, and hoped that the men protecting Anna and Lourds would kill the FSB agent, or that he could at least tell Anna about the danger she was in, but that would circumvent Nevsky’s actions to apprehend or kill the American linguist and take whatever he was truly after.

That, too, was another mystery.

Cherkshan drank the dregs of his tea, now tepid, then grabbed his greatcoat and put it on. He wanted to walk among the tanks. That was when he felt most in control of a coming battle.

Turning out the lights behind him, he departed the room.