by Lee Burvine
Come on in, lady. The water's fine.
* * *
Morgan knew they weren't alone in the house. She held her breath and waited...
Another crunching sound.
"That came from the kitchen," Danni whispered.
Morgan drew her weapon and spoke softly. "Get down on the floor. Both of you."
Rees was off the couch and on the rug about as fast as he could fall.
"What's happening?" Danni was still sitting on the couch, eyes locked on Morgan's gun.
Rees reached up and pulled her down.
Danni fell on top of him on the floor. "What the hell?"
As she moved toward the kitchen, Morgan could hear Rees telling Danni to stay put.
Please, for Christ's sake listen to him, Danni.
Closer to the kitchen now, she could see the entrance.
Classic keyhole set up here. Without something like a flash-bang grenade, she might as well walk in with a bull's-eye painted on her forehead.
If she stayed put, she could hold the living room against entry from the kitchen. And whoever was in the kitchen could hold any entrance into there from the living room.
Stalemate.
The one advantage Morgan might gain would be situational intelligence. Right now she knew that other person's precise location and they probably knew hers. She had to tip that balance.
A voice rang out from the kitchen.
"Put the gun down and slide it away. Where I can see it."
What the hell?
"You even turn, you're dead."
After a moment's confusion, Morgan realized she recognized the voice.
A heavy thunk. A scraping noise. Then the voice came again. "Kerry. I got a bead on him. Get in the kitchen before he does something stupid and I have to actually shoot the bastard."
Danni. That's Danni.
Morgan stepped close beside the kitchen door, prepared herself, then jumped into the door frame, weapon at the ready.
The blond man from the Mark Hopkins was crouched down there on the kitchen floor.
About five feet in front of him lay a SIG Sauer 9mm.
Behind him, Danni stood in the open garage door. She held the .22 target pistol Morgan had bought for her, pointed at the man's head.
Rees ran up behind Danni holding a golf club. "I couldn't stop her."
"Yeah, I know," Morgan said. "I never could either."
CHAPTER 14
REES STEPPED INTO Danni's kitchen and shut the garage door behind him. He walked over to stand beside Morgan, giving the blond man on his knees down there wide berth.
He'd seen that man in action before. The guy could move. Fast.
Danni stayed back by the door and kept her gun pointed at the man's head. Morgan had him covered from another angle. And yet somehow with two guns aimed right at this guy ... Rees still felt like they were at some kind of disadvantage.
"Okay," Morgan said to the man, "let's try this again. Get on your knees. Hands behind your head."
No repeat of the performance back at the Mark Hopkins this time. The blond man did exactly as instructed. He kneeled and placed both hands behind his head.
Morgan didn't take her eyes off him. "Rees, pick up his gun."
Rees dropped the golf club he'd grabbed in the garage and retrieved the man's gun from the floor. He marveled once again at the weighty compactness of a handgun. It was only the second time in his life he'd ever held one. A marvelous piece of mechanical engineering, really.
"Who the hell is this guy?" Danni asked Morgan. "And what do you mean, 'Let's try this again?'"
"Later, Danni." Morgan glanced at Rees. "Take a good look at him. Is this the shooter from the pier today? Take your time."
Rees studied the blond man's face. Then shifted over a step to see his profile. "It's definitely the guy from the Mark Hopkins. And it could be the man from the pier."
He couldn't be sure, though. This man still had on the gray suit he'd worn at the hotel. The shooter at the pier had been dressed differently. He wore some kind of billed hat, and a pair of sunglasses. And he'd been a good hundred feet or so away.
"That was me," the blond man said, in a relaxed voice. "I had a Jimmy Buffett T-shirt on."
"Yes, that's right," Rees said. "He did."
The blond man gave a nod. "Sorry I didn't finish this back there. Coulda saved you all a lot of trouble." He looked up at Rees. "You in particular. It's most likely gonna go a lot worse for you now."
Rees felt strangely disoriented. The man's tone was so wildly at odds with the situation. That wasn't even a threat just then. No bravado or bluff. It sounded like someone apologizing for missing a lunch date.
"Look at me," Morgan ordered the blond man. "Who are you working for, and why are you trying to kill this man?" She indicated Rees with a nod.
The blond man looked calmly at Morgan. "Hey, I'll cooperate. Just don't shoot me, all right? I can't tell you who I'm working for, 'cause I honestly don't know. As far as the mission, it was to eliminate Dr. Rees here and two other of Edward Fischer's associates. When it turned out Fischer was still alive, well, he went on the list too."
"Keep talking," Morgan said.
"Okay. So I was also supposed to recover some things." He turned to Rees again. "But it looks like you and the other two caught a little break. The guys you call Herodotus and Anaximander."
Rees watched the man who seemed to be watching him right back. Watching him intensely, with some kind of purpose.
The blond man continued. "I guess you don't know who they are. But you know how to get in touch, right? You might want to give them a little heads up now."
He hasn't told us anything we didn't already know, Rees thought. He's just interviewing us.
Rees turned to Morgan. "He just confessed to killing Fischer and the others. We have three witnesses. We call the police, right? They're sure as hell going to believe me now."
Danni turned to Morgan then. "He killed Edward Fischer? This guy killed Edward Fischer?" Her breath compressed into shallow gasps and her hands began to shake. She took a step toward the blond man.
"Danni, no," Morgan said. "Stay away from him."
Danni took another step then stopped. She lowered her gun, and leaned forward. Then she spit in the man's face. "You piece of shit. Do you have any idea what you did? You took the life of a great man."
The blond man didn't react. Not at first. Then Rees saw his eyes drift. They seemed to lose focus. His jaw muscles twitched strangely.
Something drew Rees's attention lower. A dark stain had appeared on the man's suit pants, at the crotch. It spread out as Rees watched.
He was pissing himself.
Danni didn't appear to have seen it. Too close to have a good angle maybe.
Rees glanced at Morgan. The look on her face-she'd definitely caught it.
"Danni, get back." Morgan said. "Get back, now."
The blond man's eyes rolled up into his head, leaving nothing visible but the whites. He made a choking sound, then coughed. A wet spray erupted. Red droplets appeared on the white floor tiles.
Blood. And now blood began to run from the man's mouth.
He toppled onto his side and started to convulse violently.
Danni stepped back. "Oh my God. What's happening to him?"
"He's having some kind of seizure," Rees said.
The man curled up into a fetal position. The convulsions abruptly ceased. He didn't appear to be breathing.
Rees leaned in to see if the man's shirt was moving, looking for any sign of respiration.
The blond man exploded in a blur of motion.
Rees gasped and fell backwards into Morgan. As they both tumbled, he caught a glimpse of the blond man all over Danni.
Rees and Morgan hit the floor with an incredibly loud bang. Then Rees realized ... that wasn't them.
That was a gunshot.
He saw Danni on the floor now too. Be
hind her, the door to the garage was open again.
The blond man was gone. But there was more blood on the floor.
A lot more blood.
CHAPTER 15
Six months earlier-Busra
ADNAN TOTAH CHECKED his watch, then stubbed out his cigarette. Just past two a.m. That meant his current boss, Joshua Amsel, had been up in his room for almost three hours.
Time to get on with it.
Totah rose from his chair outside the closed café and started walking back to the hotel. The warm night air offered scant relief from the day's withering heat. Not a problem for Amsel, of course. A block away, he and his men relaxed in the air-conditioned comfort of Cham Palace, Busra's only first class hotel. Money equaled privilege, as it always had.
Totah had money on his mind tonight, more so even than usual.
He had spent half the evening sitting in a dark corner of the hotel's bar, keeping watch on the old archaeologist until he finally staggered out. After the day's whisky-fueled celebrations, Amsel would be deeply asleep by now.
The whole operation pulled up stakes tomorrow. Amsel and his men would soon be gone. And with them would go the mystery of this whole strange affair. The impossibly charmed dig. The weird, high-tech surveying tools.
And the codex.
Which was apparently the target of the entire effort. All that work, all those resources for one ancient document. How could it possibly be worth it?
One of Totah's men had proffered an explanation at dinner earlier that night. "Magik is at the heart of this thing," he said in a low voice. "We know he uses a jinni, maybe many. What if this is an ancient book of spells and incantations? Dark knowledge lost to the ages. Such a thing could bring power and fortune to one who knows how to wield it!"
Nods and agreeing grunts greeted the sensational conjecture.
Totah had a slightly more prosaic explanation, which he did not share with the table.
The Romans, Byzantines, and Ottomans-who had all been here at various times-used writing mainly for the purpose of record keeping. What kind of records would be worth the expense and risk of coming into the middle of a civil war to retrieve?
Records of hoarded gold. Of secret vaults, of taxes collected and diverted, perhaps by a dishonest Roman governor or Ottoman Bey.
What if the codex was a kind of treasure map?
That would explain much. Yes, it would.
Totah slipped into the hotel through a side door. He'd duct-taped the door's latch open before he left earlier in the evening. If Amsel had security people posted back in the lobby, Totah was already past them now.
He made his way up to Amsel's floor via the fire exit stairs, and stood outside the archaeologist's door listening. He smiled at what he heard. The old man had some extra kilos on him. Like many heavy men, he snored.
The room key duplicate had cost Totah two month's wages. It would be well worth it. If it worked.
He carefully slid the plastic rectangle in and out of the lock slot. The light on the mechanism flashed red. The door remained firmly locked.
No, no, no.
He tried the key again. Again the red light.
His heart, which had already been beating quickly, thumped against his ribs now.
He tried again, a bit faster.
A green light and a soft click. He was in.
Totah closed the door quietly behind him. The room had a stale cigarette smell. And it was wonderfully cool. The snoring continued from what appeared to be the separate bedroom of a small suite.
Totah stood still, breathing quietly through opened mouth, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the near darkness.
When he could see well enough, he crept over to the bedroom door and carefully closed it. It made a tight fit, and the door was heavy and felt quite solid. He could barely detect Amsel's snoring now, which meant that Amsel surely could not hear Totah's quiet movements in the next room.
When he turned around, the codex was sitting directly in his line of sight. It lay there on the dining table, resting on a folded piece of clean linen.
It had been opened.
A pair of cotton gloves lay beside it, along with several textbooks bearing German titles. Also a leather-bound notebook, which he had seen Amsel carrying many times.
Totah took out his smartphone. He'd made sure it was fully charged and that the camera's simulated shutter noise was disabled. The closed bedroom door behind him already eliminated what had been one of his bigger worries. The flash. That would not matter now.
He approached the table, thinking whatever page of the codex Amsel had been examining was already likely to be important. A piece of luck there.
As he stood over the ancient book, Totah couldn't quite make out the writing in the darkened room. Then he remembered the phone's flashlight function. With the bedroom door closed, it had become a viable option.
More good luck. Fate was smiling on him.
He shone his light down on the page, and soon thrilled to realize he could read the words there. Some of them at least. There were no lines or dots above or below the words-marks that indicated vowels and helped distinguish certain letters from each other. Early Arabic lacked them. That meant this writing was surely very old.
And then, as he continued to decipher the text, a familiar pattern began to emerge. A kind of rhythm.
Totah's heart sank. Yes, he could read quite a few of these words. And he already had. Many, many times. Not a treasure map here.
This was the holy Qur'an.
It seemed that Amsel had found an ancient copy. While surely valuable, there were other ancient Qur'an manuscripts. Hundreds. Maybe thousands of them.
Still, there had to be something quite special about this one. Perhaps it was one of the five Uthman Qur'ans. One manuscript only suspected of being an Uthman Qur'an was held in a museum in Tashkent. It was considered priceless.
Totah carefully turned one of the stiff, brown pages of this Qur'an ... and found himself surprised, and a bit perplexed. Slowly he turned back again. Then forward. This simply could not be right.
In the name of Allah, what is this strange book?
Amsel's notebook on the table caught Totah's eye. Perhaps he would find an explanation there.
Totah possessed enough English to follow Amsel's general thoughts. As he flipped the pages of the old man's journal, his mind began to race along with his pulse. Soon came a low roaring in his ears. Then the bile began to rise, hot and bitter, in his throat.
Jinn? Amsel was playing with something much worse than jinn here. Satan himself had set his hand to this disgusting plot.
"Dogs," he muttered. "And you will die like dogs."
He turned off the flashlight function on his phone and put it away. Totah carried only a pocket knife, but it would do to cut the throat of the old man. Then he would take this abomination and commit it to the same flames into which its author had been cast.
He pulled out his pocket knife and opened it, then grabbed the codex roughly off the table.
"Put that down, Adnan."
Totah turned to see Amsel standing in his robe in the opened bedroom doorway. Something dark there in his hand.
"I didn't pay you well enough?" Amsel asked. "You have to steal from me too? I'm deeply disappointed."
Totah shook the codex at him. "This is a lie," he growled.
Amsel's eyebrows shot up. "Oh. So, you've read my notes. Well, this is very interesting. Very interesting, indeed." He paused a moment. "Tell me, then-what were your first thoughts?"
Totah spit on the rusted copper cover of the evil thing. "It is a fraud."
"Hmm. And yet you saw it come out of the earth with your own eyes. Your hand-picked men excavated the site." Amsel took a step closer.
"You knew where it was because you planted it there. That is why this dig was so productive. You always knew exactly where everything was to be found."
"Yes, I knew it was there. Bu
t not for the reason you think." Amsel held a hand out, palm up. "Give that to me. Despite what you might wish to believe, it's quite real. That's precisely why it is exceedingly valuable."
A glint of light from the barrel confirmed the gun in Amsel's other hand. The old man took another step. He stumbled in the darkness.