The Atlantis Code

by Charles Brokaw

  While sorting out languages on various illuminated manuscripts coming out of Russia, Lourds had come upon several volumes that were of questionable authenticity. None of them were radically outside canon as linguists recognized it, but knowing what was real and what was artifice was often helpful.

  Lourds had chanced upon Danilovic while researching some of the illuminated manuscripts in Odessa, where some of them had been acquired. As it turned out, Danilovic had actually sold three of the manuscripts Lourds was researching to American and British universities.

  Over long dinners filled with much storytelling and a few lies thrown in for good measure, Danilovic and Lourds had become friends. Danilovic had also owned up to brokering the forged manuscripts. After all, he explained, an antiquity dealer’s main task in life was to make sure a buyer felt happy about his or her acquisition. Those acquisitions didn’t necessarily have to be authentic.

  Danilovic was a genteel rogue. He never robbed anyone at gunpoint, though he dealt with several unsavory types who did. Only out of necessity, he was careful to point out, but Lourds also knew the man never failed to make a profit.

  “I’m doing well,” Lourds said. He watched through the window as Natasha continued her phone conversation. He and Danilovic exchanged pleasantries and a few stories, then Lourds got down to business. “I’m in a bit of a situation, Josef.”

  “Oh?” Danilovic was immediately attentive. “I’ve never known you to be in trouble, Thomas.”

  “It’s not trouble of my own making, I assure you. But it’s trouble nonetheless.”

  “If there is anything I can do to help, you have but to ask.”

  “I’m presently in Moscow,” Lourds said. “And I need to get out of the country without being found out.”

  There was the briefest pause. “The police are looking for you?”

  “Yes. But it’s the other people looking for me that I’m more concerned about. I don’t know if they’ve given up trying to find us.”

  “Give me an hour or so. Will you be all right till then? Is there anything you need?”

  Lourds was touched by the little man’s concern. Over the years, they had been in and out of each others’ lives, and the friendship had been sporadic. Still, they shared a love and knowledge of history that few could equal.

  “No. We’re fine,” Lourds said.

  “Good. Let me have your number and I will call you when everything is ready.”

  Lourds gave his number, then added, “I’m also going to e-mail you some images.”

  “Of what?”

  “Some things I’d like you to quietly ask around about.” After everything Danilovic was doing for them, Lourds knew he had to include his friend in the information. He was suddenly aware of how much he was being forced to trust the man, but he was also surprised by how much he was willing to do so.

  “What things?”

  Lourds watched as Natasha hung up the phone and left the drugstore. She checked the street and crossed back toward the apartment building. “I’ll explain when I see you. Until then, if you can find out any information about these things, I’d be grateful.”

  “Take care, my friend. I look forward to seeing you.”

  Lourds said good-bye and hung up the phone.

  “You can just call someone up and get us out of Moscow, mate?” Gary asked incredulously.

  Lourds looked at the younger man. Gary looked stunned. Leslie’s eyebrows were arched in surprise.

  “I hope so,” Lourds replied. “But it remains to be seen.”

  ______

  A knock sounded on the apartment door.

  Lourds glanced up from the notebook computer. It was 10:23 P.M. He’d all but given up on Danilovic’s escort service.

  Gary dozed in a chair with a graphic novel spread across his chest. Leslie sat beside Lourds, where she’d been nearly the whole time. She’d worked on her own notebook computer while Lourds surfed the Internet looking for the links Yuliya had mentioned in her notes.

  Natasha came from the covered window that looked out over the street. Her hand slid beneath her jacket and emerged with her pistol.

  Lourds’s mouth went dry as he closed down the computer.

  Natasha stood with her back to the wall beside the door. She held the pistol in both hands.

  “Who is it?” she asked in Russian.

  “I am Plehve. Josef Danilovic sent me.”

  The tension wound up inside Lourds. He felt his heart hammering. Leslie laid a hand on his arm as he got to his feet.

  “Are you alone?” Natasha asked.

  “I am alone,” Plehve replied.

  “If you are not,” Natasha told him, “I will shoot you dead and hope to get anyone behind you.” She opened the door in one move as she leveled the pistol before her.

  An old, bent man stood in the doorway. He was dressed in a weathered knee-length coat and held his battered hat in his hands.

  “I would really prefer not to be shot,” Plehve said in Russian.

  With one hand, Natasha pulled the man into the room. He stumbled and almost fell. Natasha maneuvered him easily. She kept her pistol close in to her body so it couldn’t be easily snatched away.

  “Stand,” Natasha ordered. She had switched to English. Lourds assumed that was to keep things orderly among the non-Russian-speaking Britishers.

  “Of course.” The old man stood easily and almost carelessly. He gave the appearance that being hauled into rooms in the middle of the night at gunpoint was normal.

  Natasha waited on the other side of Plehve. She kept his body between her pistol and the door. After a moment, when no one broke the door down, she lowered her weapon. But she didn’t put it away. She nodded.

  “May I smoke?” Plehve asked.

  “Of course,” Natasha said.

  The old man took a pack of cigarettes from beneath his jacket and lit one. He inhaled then released the smoke and waved it away with one hand.

  “You’re late,” Natasha said.

  Plehve grinned. “Your people are very good at catching individuals who try to bend the law these days. The prison systems can be awfully demanding. And perhaps Josef overestimated my abilities.”

  “Not about getting us out of Russia, I hope?” Natasha asked.

  “I can do that,” Plehve answered.

  Minutes later, Lourds trailed after the old man. Leslie followed in Lourds’s wake with Gary walking silently behind her. Natasha brought up the rear.

  After arriving back on the street, they crossed to an alley. Plehve had a ten-year-old Russian-made Zil waiting in the shadows. With a flourish, he opened the door for Leslie and Lourds.

  Natasha rejected the offer of sitting in the back. She rounded the Zil and got in on the passenger side. Only then did Lourds realize the interior light hadn’t come on. Plehve was obviously a careful man.

  After everyone was safely inside, Plehve slid behind the wheel and they got under way. Only when they were moving did Lourds release the tense breath he’d been holding.

  No one spoke until Plehve drove them from the Moscow city limits. The old man kept his one hand on the wheel the whole time, but the other was kept busy chain-smoking. Evidently Plehve wasn’t so confident that he could accomplish the transfer as he tried to act.

  He also told them the drive would take almost twenty hours if they drove straight through and didn’t stop for anything but fuel and bathroom breaks. Lourds was surprised to discover how tired he was. But part of it was in reaction to having nothing to do.

  For a while, he slept.

  “Why do you think my sister contacted the Planck Institute?” Natasha asked. Her eyes burned. She hadn’t rested well since Yuliya’s murder. She watched Lourds closely. Only a few minutes earlier, the man had roused from sleep.

  “Yuliya believed the cymbal was probably carried up into Russia, then called Rus, by the Khazars.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Historians disagree on the actual beginnings of the Khazar people,
” Lourds said. “Some experts link them with the lost tribes of Israel who scattered after the destruction of Israel. The general thinking that’s readily accepted today is that the Khazars were Turks. I know a bit about them because I’ve written a few monographs on the Oghuric tongue.”

  Natasha didn’t say anything. She knew Yuliya had highly regarded Lourds. But Natasha also knew that she wasn’t educated enough about such matters to know if Lourds was telling the truth or fabricating the story on the spot. So she watched him for signs that he was lying. That was a skill she was quite good at.

  “They were part of the Hun culture,” Lourds went on. “They formed clans and traveled the world in search of trade. Even the name has roots in that endeavor. The term Khazar is linked to the Turkish verb gezer, which translates almost literally for ‘wandering.’ They were simply wanderers.”

  “My sister was an archeologist.” Natasha heard the hesitation in her voice when she spoke of Yuliya in the past tense. “She knew about history. How can you know so much?”

  Lourds sipped from his water bottle. “Linguistics and archeology overlap to a degree. How much they overlap depends on how deeply the linguist or the archeologist pursues their knowledge. Yuliya and I pursued it doggedly. We learned constantly. Every day was school.”

  Natasha silently agreed with that. There was never a time that she could remember her sister not having a thick book on some dusty subject near to hand.

  “You’re certain the Khazars didn’t make the bell?” Natasha asked.

  “Fairly certain. Yuliya felt the same way. She believed the Khazars got it from the Yoruba people.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “West Africa.”

  “West Africa is a big place.”

  “I know. That’s why we’re going to the Max Planck Institute. She had asked to see several of their papers.”

  That surprised Natasha. “Yuliya was planning to go to Leipzig?”

  “That’s what she said in her notes. If possible, she wanted me to accompany her to translate.”

  “Why Leipzig? Wouldn’t it be simpler to go to West Africa?”

  “The documents Yuliya wanted to see are no longer in West Africa. They’re being kept in Leipzig. The Max Planck Institute continues to do a lot of research and study into the history of slavery and lost African cultures.”

  “Don’t they have museums in West Africa? Other places to keep dry, dusty documents?”

  Lourds smiled. “Of course they do.” He took another sip of his drink. “But they don’t have the option of storing all of their history there. Many of the physical artifacts that tell such history are gone.”

  From the way his eyes narrowed and he took time to scratch his beard, Natasha knew the professor was taking a moment to assemble his thoughts. Reflecting on him now, she realized that he truly was a striking-looking man. She doubted that her sister cared for Lourds only because of his mind, however fascinating that might be. Of course, Yuliya’s faithfulness to her husband was beyond doubt.

  “When cultures get destroyed and subjugated the way the West African peoples’ were,” Lourds said, “their history becomes scattered, lost, and sometimes rewritten. The museums in West Africa—in Benin, Nigeria, Senegal, and the other twelve countries recognized in that region—hold only a small fraction of the material that once existed.”

  “The rest was destroyed?”

  “Destroyed and lost. Sold and stolen. But mostly lost. The knowledge isn’t all gone. A lot of the peoples in the region keep their culture alive orally. Tales they tell that have been handed down through generations of people. Many of those, sad to say, are gone forever. But bits and pieces of the cultural tradition of the region were bought by collectors. Much is in the hands of private collectors and museums all over the world. You never know where a piece of it might turn up. Like that cymbal.”

  “You haven’t said why Yuliya believed the Khazars brought the cymbal north into Russia,” Natasha pointed out.

  Lourds took out his computer and opened it. He tapped the keys in quick syncopation. Immediately afterwards, a picture of old-looking coins opened up on the screen.

  “What are those?” Natasha found herself growing more interested.

  “Those,” Lourds said, “were found at the same time the cymbal was. They were taken from the same site excavation. Stratigraphical comparisons indicated that they were left there at the same time.”

  “ ‘Left’?”

  “That was Yuliya’s guess. According to the site notes left by the archeological team that uncovered the artifacts, the cymbal and coins were found together.”

  “Why would they be left behind?”

  “I can only hazard a guess, but I agree with what Yuliya surmised. Whoever left the cymbal and the yarmaqs was attempting to cache them so they wouldn’t be taken.”

  Natasha turned that over in her mind. The possibility that the cymbal had been sought hundreds of years ago intrigued her. Just as it was being sought now. Who would know about something that had been lost for so long? Who would remember it over the vast amounts of time since it had been cached, and would chase it now?

  “These coins are what convinced Yuliya that the Khazars carried the cymbal north into Rus,” Lourds went on. “The coins are called yarmaqs. The Khazars minted them. They were so uniform and pure that they were used in trade throughout Rus, Europe, and China.”

  Natasha peered at the coins in the digital image. A man lying on a litter showed on one side of the coin. Yuliya had also captured images of the obverse. That showed a structure that looked like a temple or perhaps a meeting hall.

  “So we’re going to Leipzig to find out why the Khazars were carrying the cymbal into Rus?” Leslie asked. She’d evidently awakened some time during the discussion.

  “Not exactly,” Lourds answered. “We’re going to Leipzig to search for documentation about the cymbal. Since the language on the cymbal, part of it at least, contains Yoruban writing, I hope that we can find some clue of where the cymbal came from. Discovering how and why the Khazars came by it would be a bonus.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  POPE INNOCENT XIV’S STUDY

  STATUS CIVITATIS VATICANAE

  AUGUST 22, 2009

  T

  ension gnawed at Cardinal Murani’s stomach and flayed his nerves as he sat outside the pope’s study. The chair was comfortable despite the ornamentation. He occasionally flipped pages in a book on Eastern European history, but he didn’t read. His mind was too jumbled for that.

  He glanced at his watch and found it was 8:13 A.M. The time was only three minutes after he’d looked at it previously. He reached to turn a page and found that his hand trembled slightly. The tremor seized his attention. He studied it with bright interest.

  Fear? he wondered. Or anticipation? He didn’t know why the pope had called this meeting.

  He flexed his fist and willed it to be still. It became so. He smiled at his control over himself. In the end, that was all that really mattered.

  The door to the pope’s study opened. A young priest stepped from within and looked at Murani.

  “Cardinal Murani?” the young priest asked.

  At first Murani thought the priest was being impudent by having to ask his name. After all, he was known throughout the Vatican.

  Then Murani realized he didn’t know the man. Of course, that was acceptable. Murani didn’t trouble himself to learn the names of priests unless they aided him or offended him.

  “Yes,” Murani answered.

  The young priest nodded and waved toward the study. “His Holiness will see you now.”

  Murani placed the book back into the leather bag he carried. Then he stood. “Of course he will,” he said. But he wished he felt more confident.

  “Good morning, Cardinal Murani.” Pope Innocent XIV waved a hand at one of the plush chairs before his huge desk. The polished surface reflected the opulence of the room. “I trust I didn’t keep you waiting overly long.
”

  “Of course not, Your Holiness.” Murani knew no other answer was permitted. He approached the pope.

  Pope Innocent XIV looked good for a man in his early seventies. His spare frame held no extra flesh, and his blue eyes gazed clearly. He had a hawk’s beak for a face, pulled out behind his large, long nose. Years of poring over arcane texts had left his head slightly sunken between his shoulder blades. The overall effect was that of a predatory bird. His white robes resembled a dove’s plumage, but Murani knew that image was misleading. There wasn’t anything gentle about the pope.

  Before he had been elected to the papacy by the Sacred College of Cardinals, Wilhelm Weierstrass had been a librarian within that body. Prior to that he had been a bishop with an undistinguished career.

  And, Murani felt certain, his years as pope were going to be equally undistinguished. He would change nothing, lead nothing, and—in the end—accomplish nothing toward reaffirming the Church’s place in the world. Murani hadn’t voted for the man.

  “I’ve been told you’re feeling better,” the pope said.

  “I am, Your Holiness.” Murani briefly knelt and kissed the Fisherman’s Ring on the pope’s finger before sitting. Gazing around the room, Murani took note of the two Pontifical Swiss Guardsmen inside the room. They stood at attention on either side of the pope.

  The Pontifical Swiss Guard had been created in 1506 by Pope Julius II, but Pope Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII had provided the groundwork for recruiting the mercenaries for protection. To date, the Pontifical Swiss Guard was the only such unit still in existence. They’d begun as an offshoot of the regular Swiss mercenary army that had placed soldiers throughout Europe.

  Although the Swiss Guard still wore their traditional red, blue, yellow, and orange uniforms during special occasions, most often they were dressed as they were now in solid blue uniforms, a white collar, brown belt, and black beret. The ones in the pope’s chambers also carried SIG P75 semiautomatic pistols. The sergeant carried a Heckler & Koch submachine pistol. The weapons had been integrated into the bodyguards’ armament after Pope John Paul II had nearly been assassinated.