Natasha Safarov knew the men were following her. She’d been followed before, so she knew what to look for and what to listen for. Her heart rate increased slightly as her body readied itself for fight or flight. She kept her breathing slow and even. In the cold, anyone watching her could tell if that changed, because the gray puffs of her breath would give her away.
Her mind flew, taking in her options and laying out her odds. Everywhere she went was a potential battlefield. She’d been trained to take advantage of whatever was there. She always saw terrain, not scenery. It might not help her here, though. On the university grounds this time of night, there wasn’t much in the way of useful cover.
She wondered who the men might be, wondered if they were part of that bad business that had taken place in Beslan. A faction of militant Ossetians, rioting again for the return of their ancestral lands, had taken hostages. Natasha had gone in and retrieved them. There had been considerable bloodshed. She didn’t doubt that some of their number would want revenge. Nor that she would be a likely target.
And if it isn’t the Ossetians, Natasha reflected, it could be many others. She’d left a long line of enemies behind her. The job demanded it. Anger seeped into her because these men had brought violence so close to her family.
She focused, listening to the rhythm of her pursuers, picking out the sound of their feet from all the other noises that trickled through the quiet night. She had them now, all tracking on her personal defense systems, each one indelibly marked.
Sliding her hands into the pockets of her coat, she fisted the two Yarygin PYa/MP-443 Grach pistols she carried there. Both pistols held seventeen-round magazines. She had extra magazines tucked into an inside pocket. She hoped she wouldn’t need them.
The men were patient, though, closing gradually from three sides.
Without warning, Natasha turned and sprinted up the steps of a nearby building. Shadows filled the breezeway, and she felt fairly confident she would become invisible to her pursuers almost at once.
They were determined not to lose her, though. The sound of their footsteps, hesitating for just a moment, came hard after her.
Natasha ran, light on her feet and silent in her crepe-soled shoes. At the end of the breezeway, she leaped from the steps to her left and took cover against the building’s side behind a line of bushes. Taking out both pistols, flipping off the safeties with her thumbs, she waited.
Two men ran through, stopped, and peered out at the open expanse before them. It was too bad there wasn’t another nearby building. Natasha thought they would have been confused longer.
Both men drew weapons, obviously sensing that they were in danger. The presence of the weapons decided Natasha’s course of action. There were more of them. That number gave them the advantage. But she could make the odds stack more in her favor, right here, right now.
She leveled her pistols.
One of the men turned toward her. His pistol was raised, his arms bent to keep it close to his body as he held it in a shooter’s triangle before him. He looked at her just over the open sights.
Natasha squeezed the trigger of the pistol in her right hand just as he saw her. The 9 mm round blasted through the space between the man’s widening eyes. She fired again, shifting to the other pistol, and put two rounds through the second man’s neck. From the way he tumbled, she suspected one of the rounds had severed the man’s spinal cord.
Moving quickly, Natasha walked over to the two dead men. The flat, harsh cracks of her pistol shots echoed in the breezeway behind her.
Kneeling, replacing her left-hand pistol in her duster pocket just for the moment, Natasha frisked the men. They had no ID. That wasn’t unusual. On an assassination assignment, the handler usually took all of a hitter’s identification so he—or she—couldn’t be traced back to the people who’d initiated the hit.
The band on one of the dead men’s wrists caught Natasha’s attention as she heard voices over the radio headsets. They’d been alerted now. Whoever her attackers were, they knew she was armed.
Natasha studied the wristband, recognizing it as a tactic used by special forces around the world. She flipped open the protective cover, expecting to see her own face.
But the face in the picture wasn’t hers. It was Yuliya’s.
Rising, Natasha plucked her other pistol from her duster, turned, and ran back toward the building where she’d left her sister.
CHAPTER
5
ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT
AUGUST 19, 2009
L
eaning closer to the computer screen, Lourds studied the pictures of the mysterious bell. The images Leslie Crane had posted to various archeological and history sites had been professionally done. But the images didn’t show the entire surface area of the bell. They’d been taken from either side, leaving out a lot of the inscription. Thankfully, he had the rest.
Leslie stood beside him, and Lourds was more conscious of the heat of her body than he wanted to be. He didn’t like distractions while he was working.
The text that accompanied the images of the bell was simple and direct, merely asking if anyone had any knowledge of the history of the thing. A few responses had accumulated over the two weeks the images had been on the Internet sites, but nothing of them seemed out of the ordinary.
“Did you ever receive any e-mail regarding the bell?” Lourds inquired.
“Nothing that revealed the bell’s history,” Leslie answered. “There were a few questions about it.”
“What kind of questions?” Lourds leaned back.
“Where did we get it? What we were going to do with it? That kind of thing.”
“Did you reply?”
“No. I was looking for information, not wishing to give it away.” Leslie was silent for a moment. “Do you truly think the men who burst in on us came because of these postings?”
“I think that had to be the case. How else would they have known where the bell would be?”
“I used a blind drop. It was supposed to be secure.”
Lourds nodded. “According to my assistant, the problem with Internet security is that as soon as someone writes a supposedly ‘secure’ program to protect traffic, someone else is busy finding ways around it.”
“I know. I did a piece on encryption before I was hired by the present program.” Her voice broke a little. “I just can’t believe this has happened. I e-mailed scholars. I posted on university sites. Why would an obscure artifact like the bell draw the attention of killers?”
Noting the young woman’s troubled expression in the depths of the computer screen, Lourds turned to her. “What happened that day wasn’t your fault, Leslie.”
She crossed her arms over her stomach. “If I hadn’t posted the images of the bell on the Internet, none of this would have happened. James wouldn’t have—” She took a ragged breath. “No one would have gotten hurt.”
“What you did,” Lourds insisted, “was to unwittingly step into a particularly nasty situation.” He took one of her hands in his for a brief squeeze. “What you’ve managed to uncover—”
“Inadvertently,” Leslie put in.
Nodding, Lourds said, “Inadvertently though it may be, you’ve still managed to find an incredible thing.”
“The trouble is we’ve lost it.”
Lourds returned his attention to the bell images. “Sometimes you don’t have to actually have possession of a thing to learn from it. Sometimes it’s enough simply to know that it exists.” He nodded at the screen. “That’s what put whoever stole the bell from us onto our tracks. They knew it existed. All we have to do is figure out how they knew that.”
“I thought they were just thieves hired by someone who wanted the bell.”
“Exactly. That is just what they were. But judging from the violent way the men acted, and by the look of them, I would say they were skilled mercenaries. Perhaps even hired thieves. After all, they hardly looked like collectors to me. They looked more like some k
ind of rent-a-thug convention product—although one of the more expensive options on that menu.”
“But if someone knew about the bell, wouldn’t that person have gotten it from the shop years ago?”
“Knowing about an object and knowing where that object is are two very different things.” Lourds brought up his e-mail client.
“You’re saying that like that’s a good thing?”
“Because it means that there’s a trail out there. One that led those men to the bell, to us, and one that we can hope to find ourselves. A trail goes in two directions. We might be able to find whoever was searching for that bell. And we might be able to find what they know about it.” Lourds waited as the mail server clicked through the mail. He hadn’t checked it in days.
Many familiar names popped up onto the screen.
“What are you doing?” Leslie asked.
“I’m going to contact a few people I know. Generate a few inquiries of my own. Perhaps we’ll get as fortunate as the men who came looking for that bell.”
The mail continued to cycle.
“Wow,” Leslie said. “Don’t you ever answer your e-mail?”
“Occasionally. People who know me know it’s often best to call me. You can lose entirely too much time responding to every piece of e-mail that comes your way.” A name caught Lourds’s attention.
Yuliya Hapaev. It had popped up more than once.
Lourds knew Yuliya personally. Whenever he traveled to Russia, he tried to make sure he visited her. He clicked on the mail sorter, bringing up all the e-mail from Yuliya.
There were a half dozen messages. Three of them had attachments.
“Ardent fan?” Leslie asked.
“An archeologist I know.”
“The name looks Russian.”
“It is.” Lourds clicked on the earliest e-mail. It was dated eleven days ago.
“Do you know her well?”
On the surface, the question sounded innocuous. But Lourds knew what Leslie implied. “I know Yuliya, her husband, and her children quite well.”
“Oh.”
Lourds read the first message.
Dear Thomas,
I hope this message finds you doing well and on the brink of
an exciting discovery. I’ve found something interesting
myself. Should you get time, I’d appreciate a consultation. I
would have called, but I just don’t know if it’s worth the
bother yet.
Sincerely,
Yuliya
Three other messages contained similar inquiries, offered more as a backup in case his e-mail client had dropped mail. The university’s server had been known to do that.
The fourth message contained the first of the attached images. Lourds clicked to open it, then waited for a moment for it to download.
The image instantly seized his attention. He tapped the keys, enlarging the image so he could see the writing on the surface.
“It looks like some kind of ancient Frisbee,” Leslie said. “Or a plate.”
“It’s neither,” Lourds said. “It’s a cymbal.”
“A symbol? Of what?”
“A musical instrument.” Excited, Lourds used the mouse and keyboard to bring up one of the digital images he’d shot of the bell.
“What are you doing?” Leslie leaned closer, peering over his shoulder. Her hair lightly brushed his cheek.
“Did you notice the writing on the cymbal?” Lourds knew his voice was tight with excitement. He could feel it and hear it.
Leslie hesitated. “You think it looks like that on the bell?”
“It does resemble that on the bell.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it. You’re the expert.”
“I am,” Lourds agreed. He stared at the inscription on the cymbal. Like the writings on the bell, he couldn’t decipher it.
He got up from the desk and retreated to his backpack sitting on a chair by the bed. Rummaging through the backpack, he took out his cell phone and a small address book. He looked up Yuliya Hapaev’s number. He had two for her. One for home and one—a satellite phone—for work.
Lourds guessed that with the recent find Yuliya would be at work even though it was late. He called that number.
Looking back at the computer screen, Lourds studied the two images. There was no doubt about the similarity of the two inscriptions. Whatever language they were written in, they shared a history.
The phone rang again and again.
RYAZAN CITY, RYAZAN’
RUSSIA
AUGUST 19, 2009
Yuliya stretched, listening to her vertebrae snap and crack. Many people thought the hardest part of an archeologist’s job was the actual dig. But unearthing artifacts from a site was pleasant compared with staying seated at a desk poring over those things for hours at a time.
You need a break so you can look at this with fresh eyes. Yuliya knew it was true. She’d stayed with the research as long as she could, but she was well and truly stuck. She couldn’t remember ever being this stymied.
She decided to make a call home, then retire for the night. Lifting the cymbal from the lab table, she started back across the room to lock it away in the vault.
That was when she saw the man standing at the doorway.
Yuliya stopped and stared at him, frightened immediately because of his size and the roughness in his face.
“Do you speak English?” the man asked in Russian.
“Who are you?” Yuliya demanded. “How did you get down here?”
The man smiled, but the expression didn’t look disarming. Instead, he had the cold smile of a predatory shark. “I speak a little Russian, but not enough to talk about what we need to discuss.” The man came closer.
Yuliya took a step back.
“You are Professor Hapaev, right?” the man asked. “You were making Internet inquiries about that?” He nodded at the cymbal in her hands.
“Get out before I call for security.” Yuliya tried to make her voice firm.
The man ignored her. He reached for the cymbal.
Yuliya stepped back, remaining out of reach. She didn’t have much room to maneuver.
As if by magic, a pistol appeared in the man’s hand.
Gunshots, muffled by the walls, sounded outside. Yuliya knew what the flat cracks were. She’d been around weapons before. Natasha had tried to teach her to shoot, but Yuliya had proved miserable at the skill. She’d finally protested that even if she learned how, she didn’t intend to have a pistol in the household with her children.
More gunshots sounded.
The man spoke in Italian, but the pistol in his hand never wavered.
Yuliya knew enough to identify the language, but not enough to understand it. At first she thought the man was talking to her; then she saw that he was speaking into a pencil-thin microphone along his cheek.
“Who is the woman that left this building?” the man demanded.
Natasha! Cold fear ran through Yuliya’s veins, and her heartbeat sped up.
“Who is she?” The man stepped forward and grabbed Yuliya by the arm.
The cymbal almost slipped from her hands. She caught it at the last minute.
Gunshots cracked again.
“Who is she?” The man pointed his weapon at Yuliya’s left eye.
“My sister,” Yuliya croaked. She felt horrible revealing that, but she desperately wanted to see her children again. She didn’t want them to grow up without her. “Natasha Hapaev. She’s a police inspector.” She pulled her courage together. “Doubtless she has already notified the police.”
The man cursed, then snatched the cymbal from Yuliya’s grasp.
Yuliya thought she might live, that her words and Natasha’s gun might have scared him off. Even when the bright light from the muzzle flash blinded her and her head rocketed back against the wall behind her, she thought she was going to get through the encounter alive.
Then emptiness sucked her away as blackn
ess clouded her vision.
Heart thudding like a sledgehammer in her chest, Natasha Safarov ran through the darkness. The men were after Yuliya. That thought crescendoed inside her head.
Bullets chased through the night, striking the ground and trees around her as she sped back toward the building where she’d left Yuliya. She recharged her weapons on the run, then tucked her left pistol back in the duster so she could reach her sat-phone.
She punched up the emergency police number.
“Ryazan’ Police Department,” a laconic male voice announced.
“This is Inspector Safarov of the Moscow Department,” Natasha said quickly. The flat cracks of gunshots punctuated her words. She added her identification number. “I’m under attack at Ryazan’ University.”
“By whom, Inspector?”
“I don’t know.” A bullet tore bark from a tree only inches from her head. “Get someone here. Now!”
“Yes, Inspector.”
Natasha folded the phone. She felt heartened that the dispatch officer hadn’t tried to verify her identity. Of course, Moscow was only three hours away by rail and there weren’t many female inspectors even in the Moscow division.
Shadows danced out across the space between the buildings behind her. Natasha lifted her pistols and fired at them.
A man cried out in pain as one of the shadows stumbled and fell. The other stepped back into hiding.
Abandoning her position, Natasha ran, looping back behind the building next to the one where she’d left Yuliya.
______
Inside the lab, Gallardo peered down at the dead woman. The bullet had ruined her face. He compared what was left of her face to the image inside the plastic pocket on his sleeve. He had no doubt the woman was the professor he’d been sent to terminate if necessary.
Kneeling down, Gallardo called out to one of the men who’d followed him inside the room. He held the cymbal out. The man gingerly took the cymbal and packed it into the protective case they’d brought to transport the artifact.
The Atlantis Code Page 7