With an air for the theatrical that would have fitted him perfectly for life on the stage at Kom Al-Dikka, the man produced a key and slid it into the locks holding the case shut. He snapped open the locks and put the key away.
Lourds was only partially distracted by the sound of the emergency vehicles attending to a nearby problem. One of Leslie’s crew had reported that there was a vehicle fire of some kind only a few streets over. Official vehicles were, according to the kid, swarming like flies.
Moving slowly, the man reached into the case and removed six objects, placing them reverently on the desk in front of Lourds. When the man was finished, he bowed to Leslie, who thanked him; then he went to stand nearby.
Lourds looked around the room, unable to keep from smiling. Six young men and women stood with Leslie, waiting to see what he would do. He felt like a kid playing his favorite game.
“What do you find so humorous?” Leslie asked.
“This.” Lourds waved his hand at the six objects. “Every year at the university, students bring me things to read. Usually replicas, though. Not the real thing.”
“My resources run somewhat deeper than the average university student’s.” Leslie’s voice held a note of determination. She was evidently not prepared to have her investment of time and research casually tossed off.
“That they do.” And Lourds meant that as a compliment. “Still, this is rather like a stage magician at a dinner party. He hasn’t gone there to entertain, yet once other people find out what he does, they want him to do magic tricks so they can ooh and ahh over them.”
“Or maybe they want to catch him in a pratfall, landing him flat on his arse,” one of the young men volunteered. His head was shaved and he sported tattoos all over his arms.
“Is that what Ms. Crane is hoping for?” Lourds asked him. “A pratfall?”
The young man shrugged. “Dunno. I bet her a few pounds you couldn’t read ’em all. But I think she hopes you get ’em all right.”
“I don’t mind having a few extra pounds, Neil,” Leslie responded. “I’m confident Professor Lourds is exactly what Harvard claims him to be. Proficient in all known ancient languages.”
“Proficient,” Lourds corrected, “in several.” Though I can find my way through all, he amended to himself. It wasn’t bragging. He could.
“Sounds like he’s laying out his excuses, he does,” Neil said, grinning.
The building was one of the older ones in the city. Air-conditioning here was an afterthought. As a result, the room was comfortable, but not hermetically sealed like the hotel environment Lourds had left. They were in a corner office. One set of windows overlooked the gray-green Mediterranean, and the other had a fine view of downtown Alexandria. Lourds was willing to bet he could probably see Kom Al-Dikka from the window.
Leslie had told him the office had been stripped and set up to handle the television show’s production needs. A small set, lit and ready to go, occupied one side of the room, which was blocked off from the windows so they could control the light. It was decorated to look like someone’s study, with bookcases full of fake books behind the desk where Lourds had been told he’d sit. The desk was larger and better than the one he had in his office at Harvard. Covered with computer equipment that looked capable of launching spacecraft, it looked like it fit the rock star status the program aspired to lend him.
The other side of the room, and the majority of the space, was filled with cameras, boom microphones, and sound and audio equipment that lined shelves. Bundled wires snaked in all directions and looked like they were barely being kept under control. The whole room was, Lourds found, somewhat intimidating.
Lourds picked up the first item, a wooden box about six inches long by four inches wide by two inches deep. Colorful hieroglyphics tracked the top and sides. Lifting the lid, he found a small figurine of a mummy.
“Do you know what this is?” Lourds turned the small box around to display to the group of television personnel.
“A shabti,” Leslie said.
“Very good. Do you know what a shabti is?”
“A good-luck piece that was left in an Egyptian tomb.”
“Not exactly.” Lourds tapped the figure. “A shabti figurine was supposed to represent the deceased’s majordomo, someone who would work in the afterlife for him.”
“It’s one thing to know what it is,” Neil suggested, “but it’s another to read the writing.”
“It’s from chapter six of the Book of the Dead.” Lourds studied the inscription, not wanting to assume in case someone had altered the writing that should have been there. But everything was as it was supposed to be. He read the hieroglyphics easily. “ ‘If N is called up to do any work that is done there in the underworld, then the checkmarks (on the work list) are struck for him there as for a man for his (work service) duty be counted yourself at any time that might be done to cultivate the marsh, to irrigate the riverbank fields, to ferry sand west or east. “I am doing it—see, I am here,” you are to say.’ ”
Leslie glanced down at her notebook, then handed it over to Neil.
“So he got one right,” Neil said, handing the notebook back. “For all you know, he memorized that passage.”
Lourds moved on to the next item: a replicated papyrus written in Coptic, which looked entirely too familiar. He glanced up at Leslie. “This is from the coded document I translated.”
“It is,” she agreed. “Since they didn’t have a Books on Tape version, I thought I’d like to hear an audio presentation.”
Neil looked at her. “Is this the kinky thing you told me about?”
“Yes.” Her brilliant green eyes never left Lourds’s.
A challenge, then? Lourds was amused and interested to see how far she’d let him go. After all, he’d had to present the piece a fair number of times at different committees, including the dean’s house for a celebration on the translation’s acceptance. The reading, rendered with an orator’s skill that had developed naturally from Lourds’s years as a teacher, had been a major hit and had set academic tongues to wagging scandalously. She didn’t know his world at all if she thought mere words could embarrass or frighten him here.
He read the first section of the document aloud, then translated it. Leslie stopped Lourds before the first session of foreplay got serious. “All right,” she said, blushing. “You know the text. Move on to the next one.”
“Are you sure?” Lourds said. “I’m quite familiar with this.” He purposefully didn’t clarify whether he was familiar with the text . . . or the technique presented. His words were every bit as much a challenge as hers were.
“I’m sure,” she said. “I don’t want the network bigwigs twitching.”
“Wow, man,” Neil said, grinning from ear to ear. “That’s brill. Didn’t know porn could sound so . . . so . . . bitching.”
Lourds didn’t bother to correct the misrepresentation of the piece. It wasn’t intended to be porn—not exactly. It was more a diary of the writer’s experiences—a reminder of his past. But read aloud now, its use had changed. Once a listener heard words, the words as well as the meaning became subjective, and it became applied to that individual’s views on life and the moment. For Neil, it probably was porn.
The third piece was Ethiopian, written in Ge’ez, which was abugida. As a grapheme form, transcribed in signs, it denoted consonants with inherent trailing vowels. Besides Ethiopia, the form was also used by certain Canadian Native American tribes—the Algonquian, Athabascan, and Inuit—as well as the Brahmic family of languages—South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia. It had penetrated the East as far as Korea. The piece was a length of elephant tusk used by a trader to record his journey into what was then called the Horn of Africa. From what Lourds gathered from the record, it had been intended as a gift to the man’s eldest son, a marker and a challenge to go farther and dare more than his father did.
Evidently Lourds’s translation matched what Leslie had in her notes, because
she kept nodding as he read.
The fourth piece seized Lourds’s attention completely. It was a ceramic bell, probably once used by a priest or shaman to call a community to prayer or announcement. It was divided into two sections: there was a clapper at the top and a reservoir for holding herbs at the bottom. A faint ginger smell clung to the piece, indicating that it had been recently used. A ring at the top invited speculation that it had hung from a shepherd’s crook or a similarly shaped staff. The piece had the burnished look of an object that had been handled and cared for continuously over many centuries, perhaps even over millennia. The reservoir might even have held oil at one time to provide an ancient lantern for the bearer.
The inscription on the bell truly set it apart from the other pieces Lourds had sitting before him. In fact, the most fascinating aspect about the bell was the writing that went around it.
He couldn’t read it. Not only that, but he’d never seen anything like it in his life.
In the alley behind the building where the television people had their rented rooms, Gallardo got out of the car. He stepped quickly to the back of the vehicle, followed by Farok and DiBenedetto.
Pietro released the trunk latch from inside. The lid rose slowly, revealing the duffels stashed within. Unzipping the top duffel, Gallardo took out a Heckler & Koch MP5. He added a specially modified silencer to the weapon as Cimino joined them.
Cimino was a thick, squat man who spent all his time in gyms. His drug of choice was steroids, and he kept himself painfully close to overuse, staying just this side of healthy and sane. His head was shaved. Aviator sunglasses bisected his face.
“They’re inside?” Gallardo asked.
“Yes.” Cimino picked up a machine pistol as well.
“Security?”
“Building only. Not much of that.” Cimino threaded a silencer into place on his weapon with practiced ease.
“Sounds good to me.” Farok armed one of the machine pistols, then dropped it into a canvas bag he slung over his shoulder.
“All right,” Gallardo said, feeling a thrill sizzle through his stomach in anticipation of the action and the success he knew was soon going to be his. He tapped the bag, then entered the building’s side entrance.
______
Feeling as though someone was pulling a fast one on him, Lourds examined the writing more closely, thinking perhaps it had been inscribed recently upon an ancient bell—which would have been foolish under the circumstances because such an act would have destroyed the bell’s huge intrinsic value—to fool him. If it was a forgery, it was a masterpiece. The inscription felt smooth to the touch. In places it was even worn to the point that it was almost faded.
Yep. If it was a fake, it was a damned good one.
Operating by instinct, Lourds reached into his backpack, which was beside his chair, and took out a soft graphite pencil and a tablet containing sheets of onionskin tracing paper. Placing a sheet of paper on the bell, he rubbed the pencil against the surface, creating a negative image of the inscription.
“What are you doing?” Neil asked.
Lourds ignored the question, consumed by the puzzle that was before him. He took a small digital camera from his backpack and took pictures of the bell from all sides. The camera’s flash, especially when used on smooth ceramic, didn’t always allow the image to pick up shallow markings. That’s why he’d done the rubbings.
He was engrossed. He didn’t even notice when Leslie approached and stood on the other side of the desk.
“What’s going on?” Leslie asked.
“Where did you get this?” Lourds asked, turning the bell in his hands. The clapper pinged softly against the side.
“From a shop.”
“What shop?”
“An antiquities shop. His father’s shop.” Leslie nodded toward the tall, sallow man in his forties standing against the wall. The man looked a little worried.
Lourds pinned the man with his gaze, not wishing to be trifled with. If that’s what this was, of course. He was halfway convinced this wasn’t a joke. It felt far too elaborate. The bell felt real.
“Where did this come from?” Lourds asked in Arabic.
“From my father, sir,” the man said politely. “The young lady requested that we put something old in with the other items. To better test you, she said. My father and I told her we could not read what was written on the bell either, so we didn’t know what it said.” He hesitated. “The young woman said this was all right.”
“Where did your father get this bell?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s been in his shop for years. He tells me that no one seems to be able to tell him what it is.”
Lourds switched back to English and looked at Leslie. “I want to talk to his father. See the shop where this bell came from.”
Leslie looked surprised. “All right. I’m sure we can arrange that. What’s wrong?”
“I can’t read this.” Lourds looked at the bell again, still not believing what he knew to be true.
“It’s okay,” Leslie told him. “I don’t think anyone’s really going to believe that you can read all those languages. You knew a lot of others. The people who watch our show will still be impressed. I’m impressed.”
Lourds told himself to be patient. Leslie truly didn’t understand the problem.
“I’m an authority in the languages spoken here,” he told her. “Civilization as we know it began not far from here. The languages used here, living and dead, are as familiar to me as my own hand. Given that, this writing should be in one of the Altaic languages. Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s a family of languages,” Lourds explained, “that encompassed this area. It’s where all language here sprang from. Although the subject is hotly contested by linguists. Some linguists believe the Altaic language resulted from a genetically inherited language, words and ideas—and perhaps even symbols—that are written somewhere in our genetic code.”
“Genetics predisposes language?” Leslie arched a narrow eyebrow in surprise. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“Nor should you. I don’t believe it’s true. There’s another, more simplistic reason why so many languages at the time shared common traits.” Lourds calmed himself. “All those people, with all their different languages, lived in close proximity. They traded with one another, all of them in pursuit of the same things. They had to have common words in order to do that.”
“Sort of like the computer explosion and the Internet,” Leslie said. “Most of the computer terms are in English since the United States developed much of the technology, and other countries simply used the English words because they had no words in their own language to describe the computer parts and terminology.”
Lourds smiled. “Exactly. A very good analogy, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
“That theory is called the Sprachbund.”
“What is the Sprachbund?”
“It’s the convergence area for a group of people who ultimately end up partially sharing a language. When the Crusades took place, during the battles between the Christians and the Muslims, language and ideas were traded back and forth as much as arrows and sword blows. Those wars were as much about expanding trade as they were about securing the Holy Land.”
“You’re telling me that they ended up speaking each others’ language.”
“The people that fought or traded, yes. Bits of it. We still carry the history of that conflict in words of modern English. Words like assassin, azimuth, cotton, even the words cipher and decipher. They come from the Arabic word sifi, which is the number zero. The symbol for zero was central to many codes. But this artifact shares nothing with the native languages of this area—or with any language I’ve ever heard or seen.” Lourds held up the bell. “In those early years, craftsmen—especially craftsmen who wrote and kept records—would be part of that S
prachbund. That’s a logical assumption. But this bell—?” He shook his head. “It’s an anomaly. I don’t know where it came from. If it’s not a forgery, and it doesn’t feel like one, what we’re looking at is an artifact from some other place than the Middle East.”
“What other place?”
Lourds sighed. “That’s the problem. I don’t know. And I should know that as well.”
“You think we have a real find here, don’t you?” Excitement gleamed in Leslie’s eyes.
“A find,” Lourds agreed tentatively, “or an aberration.”
“What do you mean?”
“The inscription on that bell could be . . . humbug, for lack of a better term. Simply nonsense made up to decorate the bell.”
“Wouldn’t you know, if that were the case? Wouldn’t it be easy to spot?”
Lourds frowned. She had him there. Even an artificial language would require a basis in logic. As such, he should be able to spot that.
“Well?” she pressed.
“I should be able to tell. This looks authentic to me.”
Leslie smiled again and leaned toward the bell, regarding it with intensity. “If that’s truly written in a heretofore undiscovered language, then we’ve made an astonishing find.”
Before Lourds could respond, the door suddenly ripped from its hinges. Armed men burst into the room, aiming their weapons at the people inside.
“Everybody freeze!” a man yelled in accented English.
Everybody froze.
Lourds thought he recognized an Italian accent in the man’s words.
The four armed men pressed into the room. They used their fists and their weapons to drive the whole television crew to the floor. All of Leslie’s people cowered there and remained still.
One of the men, the one who had spoken, crossed the room in long strides and grabbed Leslie by the arm.
Lourds stood instinctively, not able to calmly sit by and watch the young woman get hurt. But he wasn’t trained for this kind of thing. Sure, he’d spent time in rough parts of the world. But he’d been lucky. The worst violence he’d ever experienced personally was a dustup in soccer.
The Atlantis Code Page 3