The Atlantis Code

by Charles Brokaw

  “More than that,” Lourds said. “Language is ingrained in people. I believe it gives them a sense of who they are and where they’re headed in their lives. It . . . shapes them.”

  “By that definition, even rap singers create a language.”

  “No. They don’t exactly create it. They’re lifting it from their people, then turning it into a unique art form. Much as Shakespeare did the English language.”

  “Comparing rap singers to Shakespeare? That would be considered scandalous in some academic circles. Even dangerous.”

  Lourds sighed. “Maybe. Probably more a flagrant violation of scholarship than a killing matter. But it’s true. If a section of people divide from the larger majority, they tend to develop their own language. Just as university professors and reporters—each with a defined field—develop specialized words that provide a shorthand method of commentary within that group. Or a culture may develop an entirely new language to avoid being understood by a larger population they exist within. A major case in point is the Gypsies.”

  “I knew they had their own language.”

  “Do you know how Gypsies came about?”

  “Mother and Father Gypsy?” she guessed.

  Lourds laughed. “At some point, yes. But in the beginning, they were probably low-caste Hindus recruited into a mercenary army to fight against the Islamic conquerors. Or they may have been slaves taken by the Muslim conquerors. Either way, or another if neither of those two answers is right, the Gypsies became their own people and created their own language.”

  “Subjugation leads to the creation of a language?”

  “It can. Or the destruction of one. Language is one of the most highly evolved tools and skill sets humanity has fashioned. Language can unite or divide people as quickly and easily as skin color, politics, religious beliefs, or wealth.” Lourds peered at her, surprised at himself for talking so much. And at the fact that the young woman’s eyes hadn’t glazed over as yet. “Sorry. Caught me in a lecturing moment. Am I boring you yet?”

  “On the contrary. I find myself more fascinated than ever. And I can’t wait to show you our mysterious challenge. Have you had breakfast?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Then I’m inviting you to breakfast.”

  “I’m honored,” he said. “And hungry.” And hopeful of getting an interesting meal here, though he didn’t say that to his hostess.

  Lourds lifted the backpack he carried and heaved it over his shoulder. It contained his notebook computer and several texts he felt he couldn’t travel without. Much of the information in them was duplicated in his computer hard drive space, but he loved the feel and smell of books when he had his choice between virtual and actual text. Some of the texts had traveled with him for twenty years and more.

  He walked beside Leslie as they made their way through the foot traffic and vendors, listening to the singsong voices of hawkers calling out their wares. Alexandria was in full swing, hustling for a living one more day between tourists and thieves.

  An uncomfortable sensation of being watched grew in the middle of Lourds’s back. Over the years of traveling in foreign countries, including many troubled nations in the far parts of the globe, he’d learned to heed such warnings. A time or two, those feelings had saved his life.

  He paused a moment, looking back, trying to see if anyone in the crowd was showing any undue interest in him. But all he saw was a sea of faces, all of them moving and jostling as they skirted the traffic.

  “What is it?” Leslie asked.

  Lourds shook his head. He was imagining things. Serves me right for reading that spy novel on the plane, he chided himself.

  “Nothing,” he said. He fell into step beside Leslie once more as they crossed Hurriya Street. No one seemed to be following them. But the feeling didn’t go away.

  “Did he see you?”

  Standing across the busy expanse of Hurriya Street, Patrizio Gallardo watched the tall university professor striding away. Gallardo let out a tense breath. He still didn’t know everything that was going on. His contact, Stefano Murani—Cardinal Murani, these days—was closemouthed with his secrets. That was how their employers had taught them to be.

  Both of them had been recruited by the Society of Quirinus for their respective strengths. Murani had come from an aristocratic family that lived on old money. With that as his stepping-stone, he’d gone into the Catholic Church, quickly rising through the ranks to become a cardinal. In his position at Vatican City, Murani had access to secret documents and papers that had never been in the public eye.

  Gallardo came to the Society’s attention another way. His father, Saverio Gallardo, was part of an organized crime family in Italy that harvested money from the unwary. Patrizio Gallardo tried the organized crime route, but hadn’t been very happy with working under his father’s thumb, despite his talent for the trade.

  He liked the work, and—working for the right person—it paid really well. Anybody could shove a gun in someone’s face and demand their money. But not everybody had the stones to pull the trigger and wipe the blood from their face afterwards. Patrizio Gallardo did. And that was what he did for the Society. It was what he was prepared to do today. All the Society had to do was point.

  Today they had pointed at university professor Thomas Lourds.

  “Did he see you?” Cimino asked again.

  Gallardo glanced at their quarry. This time he didn’t stare at the man, just took in the whole street scene. Lourds continued on his way, chatting amiably with the woman.

  “No,” Gallardo replied. He wore a small headset mostly hidden by his shirt collar. He was almost six feet tall, a blunt fireplug of a man in his early forties. Browned by the desert sun, scarred from battles against people who had tried to take from him and from people he’d taken from, he was a round-faced man with thick black hair, unshaven jaws, and a heavy mono-brow arranged in a scowl over close-set eyes. Anyone who met his direct gaze usually crossed the street to avoid his path.

  “We could ambush this man,” Cimino said. “Killing him would be easy. Then we could take what we came for.”

  “If we kill Lourds now,” Gallardo pointed out, “there’s a chance that we won’t find the artifact we’re looking for. He doesn’t have the artifact. We have to wait until the woman leads us to it.”

  Stepping out to the curb, Gallardo waved a hand.

  Three blocks down the busy thoroughfare, a ten-year-old cargo truck surged away from a side street and motored along Hurriya Street. It pulled in at the curb, and Gallardo climbed into the passenger seat. The dirty windshield blunted some of the sun’s stare. The air-conditioning wheezed asthmatically and brought only slight relief against the unrelenting heat.

  Gallardo mopped his face with a handkerchief and cursed. He looked at the driver. “How’s our guest?”

  DiBenedetto shook his head and took a hit off his Turkish cigarette. He was young and hard-edged, maintaining a steady morphine addiction that would one day be the end of him. He was a ruthless killer by choice, even worse than Cimino because the drug robbed him of most of his feelings. He stayed loyal to Gallardo only because Gallardo provided enough of the drug to keep the addict happy.

  “He still hasn’t talked?” Gallardo asked.

  DiBenedetto turned and smiled at Gallardo. His face was young despite the drug. He was twenty-two. But his ice-blue eyes were ancient and alien. If humanity and compassion had ever dwelt there, they were long gone.

  “He screams,” the young killer said. “He cries. He pleads. Sometimes he even tries to guess at what we want to know. But he doesn’t know.” He shrugged. “It’s pathetic. Still, Farok has enjoyed the struggle to get him to talk.”

  Gallardo opened the panel that connected the truck’s cab to the cargo area.

  Their guest lay in the back. His name was James Kale. He was a television producer on the show Ancient Worlds, Ancient People. In his late thirties, he’d been a handsome man before Gallardo’s butchers had gotten
to him. Now his ginger-colored hair was matted with his blood, his face torn by brass knuckles, and one eye gouged out. They’d also amputated the fingers of his right hand and castrated him.

  The last had been Farok’s touch. The Arab was cruel, taking pleasure in the torture he inflicted.

  Kale lay curled in a fetal ball, his maimed hand held tightly against his chest. His pants were dark with blood. More blood covered the interior of the cargo space, streaking the floor and the walls, even sprayed onto the ceiling. The producer was balanced precipitously on the ragged edge of living, about to take a last plunge into the abyss.

  Farok sat with his back to the side of the space and smoked a cigarette. He was in his fifties, a dark, hard man dressed now in a bloodstained burnoose. Gray flecked his beard, but there was blood mixed in there, too. He looked up at Gallardo and smiled.

  “He still insists,” the Arab said in his guttural accent, “that he knows nothing of the artifacts the woman is going to show to the professor.” He dropped a hand to Kale’s thigh.

  Kale yelped and drew his trembling leg away.

  Farok moved, caressed the producer’s leg. “I have to admit, after I claimed his eggs, I began to believe him.”

  The bloody sight disgusted Gallardo. He’d seen such things before. In fact, he’d even done them, and would again if he had no one to do them for him. But he didn’t care for it. He looked at Farok. Then drew a line under his chin with his forefinger.

  Smiling, the Arab pulled a straight razor from inside his burnoose. Dropping ash from his cigarette, he leaned forward, smoothed Kale’s hair, causing the man to flinch and cry out in fear. Gripping a fistful of hair, Farok yanked his victim’s head back and slashed his exposed throat with the knife.

  Gallardo turned away and closed the panel. He concentrated on watching the professor and the television woman.

  CHAPTER

  2

  H

  i. 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 lef
t 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.