by Steve Berry
“Stopping you.” Viktor motioned with his head. “Free her, Malone.”
“Tell you what,” Malone said. “You free Cassiopeia and I’ll keep an eye on the minister.”
“Still don’t trust me?”
“Let’s just say I prefer to do this my way.” He raised his gun. “Like he said, drop the knife.”
“Or what?” Zovastina said. “You’ll shoot me?”
He fired into the ground, between her legs, and she recoiled. “The next one’s in your head.”
She released the knife.
“Kick it this way.”
She did.
“What are you doing here?” Cassiopeia asked him.
“I owed you. Goats?” he said to Viktor, as the other man untied Cassiopeia.
“You use what you have. Seemed like a good diversion.”
He couldn’t argue.
“You work for the Americans?” Zovastina asked Viktor.
“That’s right.”
Fire boiled in her eyes.
Cassiopeia shook the ropes free and lunged toward Zovastina, swinging her fist and catching the other woman square in the face. A kick to the knees and Zovastina stumbled back. Cassiopeia continued her attack, planting her foot into Zovastina’s stomach and slamming the woman’s head into the trunk of one of the trees.
Zovastina shrunk to the ground and lay still.
Malone had calmly watched the assault. “You get all that out of your system?”
Cassiopeia breathed hard. “I could have given her more.” She paused, rubbing her wrists from the ropes. “Ely’s alive. I talked to him on the phone. Stephanie and Henrik are with him. We need to go.”
Malone faced Viktor. “I thought Washington wanted your cover protected?”
“I had no choice.”
“You sent me into this trap.”
“Did I tell you to confront her? You didn’t give me a chance to do anything. When I saw your problem, I did what I had to.”
He didn’t agree, but there was no time to argue. “What do we do now?”
“We’re going to leave. We’ll have a little time. No one will disturb her back here.”
“What about the gunfire?” Malone asked.
“It won’t be noticed.” Viktor motioned around him. “This is her killing field. Many enemies have been eliminated back here.”
Cassiopeia was lifting Zovastina’s limp body from the ground.
“What are you doing?” Malone asked.
“Tying this bitch to those ropes, so she can see what it feels like.”
Stephanie drove with Henrik in the front seat and Ely in the rear. They’d had no choice but to commandeer the guard’s car since theirs had four flat tires. They quickly left the cabin, found the highway, and began the trek south, paralleling the Pamir foothills, heading toward what over two thousand years ago had been known as Mt. Klimax.
“This is amazing,” Ely said.
She saw in the rearview mirror that he was admiring the scytale.
“When I read Ptolemy’s riddle, I wondered how he would convey any message. It’s really clever.” Ely held up the scytale. “How did you figure it out?”
“A friend of ours did. Cotton Malone. He’s the one with Cassiopeia.”
“Shouldn’t we go see about her?”
She heard the anticipation in his question. “We have to trust that Malone will handle his end. Our problem’s here.” She was talking again like the dispassionate head of an intelligence agency, cool and indifferent, but she was still rattled from what happened at the cabin. “Cotton’s good. He’ll deal with it.”
Thorvaldsen seemed to sense Ely’s quandary. “And Cassiopeia is not helpless. She can take care of herself. Why don’t you tell us what we need to know to understand all this? We read in the manuscript about the draught, from the Scythians. What do you know about them?”
She watched as Ely carefully laid the scytale aside.
“A nomadic people who migrated from central Asia to southern Russia in the eighth and seventh centuries before Christ. Herodotus wrote about them. They were bloody and tribal. Feared. They’d cut off the heads of their enemies and make leather-bound drinking cups from the skulls.”
“I’d say that would build you a reputation,” Thorvaldsen said.
“What’s their connection to Alexander?” she asked.
“In the fourth and third centuries BCE, they settled in what became Kazakhstan. They successfully resisted Alexander, blocking his way east across the Syr Darya river. He fought them fiercely, was wounded several times, but eventually made a truce. I wouldn’t say Alexander feared the Scythians, but he respected them.”
“And the draught?” Thorvaldsen said. “It was theirs?”
Ely nodded. “They showed it to Alexander. Part of their peace with him. And he apparently used it to cure himself. From what I read, it appeared as some kind of natural potion. Alexander, Hephaestion, and that physician’s assistant mentioned in one of the manuscripts were all cured by it. Assuming the accounts are accurate.
“The Scythians were a strange people,” Ely said. “For example, in the midst of one fight with the Persians, they all abandoned the battlefield to chase a rabbit. Nobody knows why, but it’s noted in an official account.
“They were gold connoisseurs, using and wearing enormous amounts. Ornaments, belts, plates, even their weapons were gold adorned. Scythian burial mounds are full of gold artifacts. But their main problem was language. They were illiterate. No written record of them survives. Just pictures, fables, and accounts from others. Only a few of their words are even known, and that’s thanks to Herodotus.”
She could see his face in the rearview mirror and realized there was more. “What is it?”
“Like I said, only a few of their words survived. Pata meant kill. Spou, eye. Oior, man. Then there’s arima.” He shuffled through some of the papers he’d brought. “It didn’t mean much, until now. Remember the riddle. When you reach the attic. Ptolemy fought the Scythians with Alexander. He knew them. Arima means, roughly, place at the top.”
“Like an attic,” she said.
“Even more important. The place the Greeks once called Klimax, where we’re headed, the locals have always called Arima. I remember that from the last time I was there.”
“Too many coincidences?” Thorvaldsen asked.
“It seems all roads point here.”
“And what do we hope to find?” Stephanie asked.
“The Scythians used mounds to cover their kings’ tombs, but I’ve read that mountain locations were chosen for some of their most important leaders. This was the farthest reach of Alexander’s empire. Its eastern border. A long way from home. He would not have been disturbed here.”
“Maybe that’s why he chose it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. The whole thing seems odd.”
And she agreed.
Zovastina opened her eyes. She was lying on the ground and immediately recalled Cassiopeia Vitt’s attack. She shook confusion from her brain and realized something was tightly gripping both wrists.
Then she realized. She was tied to the trees, just as Vitt had been. She shook her head. Humiliating.
She stood and stared out into the clearing.
The goats, Malone, Vitt, and Viktor were gone. One of the guardsmen lay dead. But the other was still alive, propped against a tree, bleeding from a shoulder wound.
“Can you move?” she asked.
The man nodded, but was clearly in pain. All of her Sacred Band were tough, disciplined souls. She’d made sure of that. Her modern incarnation was every bit as fearless as the original from Alexander’s time.
The guard struggled to his feet, his right hand clamped onto his left arm.
“The knife,” she said. “There, on the ground.”
Not a hint of pain seeped from the man’s mouth. She tried to remember his name, but could not. Viktor had hired each one of the Sacred Band, and she’d made a point not to become attached to an
y of them. They were objects. Tools to be used. That’s all.
The man staggered to the knife and managed to lift it from the ground.
He came close to the ropes, lost his balance, and fell to his knees.
“You can do it,” she said. “Fight the agony. Focus on your duty.”
The guard seemed to steel himself. Sweat poured down his brow and she noticed fresh blood oozing from the wound. Amazing he wasn’t in shock. But this burly soul seemed in superb physical shape.
He raised the knife, sucked a few breaths, then cut the bindings that held her right wrist. She steadied his shaking arm as he passed her the knife, and she freed herself from the other rope.
“You did well,” she said.
He smiled at her compliment, his breath labored, still on his knees.
“Lie down. Rest,” she said.
She heard him settle on the ground as she searched the forest floor. Near the other body she found a gun.
She returned to the injured guardsman.
He’d seen her vulnerable and, for the first time in a long while, she’d felt vulnerable.
The man lay on his back, still gripping his shoulder.
She stood over him. His dark eyes focused on her and, in them, she saw that he knew.
She smiled at his courage.
Then aimed the gun at his head and fired.
SEVENTY-SIX
Malone glanced down at the rough terrain, a mixture of parched earth, greenlands, rolling hills, and trees. Viktor piloted the chopper, a Hind, which had been parked on a concrete pad a few miles from the palace. He knew the craft. Russian made, twin top-mounted turboshaft engines driving a main and tail rotors. The Soviets called it a flying tank. NATO dubbed the mean-looking thing the Crocodile, due to its camouflage color and distinct fuselage. All in all a formidable gunship, this one modified with a large rear compartment for low-capacity troop transport. Thankfully, they’d managed to leave both the palace and Samarkand with no problems.
“Where’d you learn to fly?” he asked Viktor.
“Bosnia. Croatia. That’s what I did in the military. Search and destroy.”
“Good place to build your nerves.”
“And get killed.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
“How far?” Cassiopeia asked through the headset.
They were flying east, at nearly three hundred kilometers an hour, toward Ely’s cabin in the Pamirs. Zovastina would soon be free, if not already, so he asked, “What about anyone coming after us?”
Viktor motioned ahead. “Those mountains will give us cover. Tough to track anything in there. We’ll be into them shortly, and we’re only minutes from the Chinese border. We can always escape there.”
“Don’t act like you didn’t hear me,” Cassiopeia said. “How far?”
Malone had intentionally avoided answering. She was anxious. He wanted to tell her he knew she was sick. Let her know somebody cared. That he understood her frustration. But he knew better. Instead, he said, “We’re moving as fast as we can.” He paused. “But this is probably better than being tied to trees.”
“I assume I’ll never live that one down.”
“Something like that.”
“Okay, Cotton, I’m a little upset. But you have to understand, I thought Ely was dead. I wanted him to be alive, but I knew—I thought—” She caught herself. “And now—”
He turned and saw excitement in her eyes, which both energized and saddened him. Then he caught himself and finished her thought, “And now he’s with Stephanie and Henrik. So calm down.”
She was seated alone in the rear compartment. He saw her tap Viktor on the shoulder. “Did you know about Ely being alive?”
Viktor shook his head. “I was taunting you on the boat in Venice when I told you he was dead. I had to say something. Truth is, I’m the one who saved Ely. Zovastina thought someone might move on him. He was her adviser and political murder is commonplace in the Federation. She wanted Ely protected. After that attempt on his life, she hid him. I haven’t had anything to do with him since. Though I was head of the guard, she was in charge. So I really don’t know what happened to him. I learned not to ask questions, just do what she said.”
Malone caught the past tense observation concerning Viktor’s job status. “She’ll kill you if she finds you.”
“I knew the rules before all this started.”
They continued flying smooth and straight. He’d never flown in a Hind. Its instrumentation was impressive, as was its firepower. Guided missiles. Multibarrel machine guns. Twin cannon pods.
“Cotton,” Cassiopeia said, “do you have a way of communicating with Stephanie?”
Not a question he wanted to answer at the moment, but he had no choice. “I do.”
“Give it to me.”
He found the world phone—Magellan Billet–issue, provided by Stephanie in Venice—and dialed the number, slipping off his headset. A few seconds were needed before a pulsating buzz confirmed a connection and Stephanie’s voice greeted him.
“We’re headed your way,” he said.
“We left the cabin,” she said. “We’re driving south on a highway marked M45 to what was once Mt. Klimax. Ely knows where it is. He says the locals call the place Arima.”
“Tell me more.”
He listened, then repeated the information to Viktor, who nodded. “I know where that is.”
Viktor banked the copter southeast and increased speed.
“We’re on our way,” he told Stephanie. “Everyone here is fine.”
He saw that Cassiopeia wanted the phone, but that wasn’t going to happen. He motioned no with his head, hoping she’d understand that now was not the time. But to comfort her, he asked Stephanie, “Ely okay?”
“Yeah, but anxious.”
“I know what you mean. We’ll be there before you. I’ll call. We can do some aerial recon until you get there.”
“Viktor any help?”
“Wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for him.”
He clicked off the phone and told Cassiopeia where Ely was headed.
An alarm sounded in the cabin.
His gaze found the radar display that indicated two targets approaching from the west.
“Black Sharks,” Viktor said, “coming straight for us.”
Malone knew those choppers, too. NATO called them Hokums. KA-50s. Fast, efficient, loaded with guided missiles and 30mm cannons. He saw that Viktor also realized the threat.
“They found us quick,” Malone said.
“There’s a base near here.”
“What do you plan to do?”
They started to climb, gaining altitude, changing course. Six thousand feet. Seven. Nine. Leveling at ten.
“You know how to use the guns?” Viktor asked.
He was sitting in the weapons officer’s seat, so he scanned the instrument panel. Luckily, he could read Russian. “I can manage.”
“Then get ready for a fight.”
SEVENTY-SEVEN
SAMARKAND
Zovastina watched as her generals considered the war plan. The men sitting around the conference table were her most trusted subordinates, though she tempered that trust with a realization that one or more of them could be a traitor. After the past twenty-four hours she could not be sure of anything. These men had all been with her from the beginning, rising as she rose, steadily building the Federation’s offensive strength, readying themselves for what was about to come.
“We’ll take Iran first,” she declared.
She knew the calculations. The current population of Pakistan was a hundred and seventy million. Afghanistan, thirty-two million. Iran, sixty-eight million. All three were targets. Originally, she’d planned a simultaneous assault, now she believed a strategic strike better. If infection points were chosen with care, places of maximum density, and the viruses planted with skill, the computer models predicted a population reduction of seventy percent or more would occur within fourteen days.
She told the men what they already knew, then added, “We need a total panic. A crisis. The Iranians have to want our assistance. What do you have planned?”
“We’ll start with their military forces and government,” one of the generals said. “Most of the viral agents work in less than forty-eight hours. But we’ll vary which ones we use. They’ll identify a virus fairly quickly, but then they’ll have another to deal with. That should keep them off guard and prevent any productive medical response.”
She’d been concerned on that point, but not anymore. “The scientists tell me the viruses have all been modified, making their detection and prevention even more difficult.”
Eight men surrounded the table, all from her army and air force. Central Asia had long languished between China, the USSR, India, and the Middle East, not part of any of them, but desired by all. The Great Game had played itself out here two centuries ago when Russia and Britain battled each other for dominance, neither caring what the native populations wanted.
Not anymore.
Central Asia now spoke with unity through a democratically elected parliament, ministers, elections, courts, and a rule of law.
One voice.
Hers.
“What of the Europeans and the Americans?” a general asked. “How will they react to our aggression?”
“That’s what it cannot be,” she made clear. “No aggression. We’ll simply occupy and extend aid and relief to the embattled populations. They’ll be far too busy burying the dead to worry about us.”
She’d learned from history. The world’s most successful conquerors—the Greeks, Mongols, Huns, Romans, and Ottomans—all practiced tolerance over the lands they claimed. Hitler could have changed the course of World War II if he’d simply enlisted the aid of millions of Ukrainians, who hated the Soviets, instead of annihilating them. Her forces would enter Iran as savior, not oppressor, knowing that by the time her viruses finished there’d be no opposition left to challenge her. Then she’d annex the land. Repopulate. Move people from the Soviet-ruined regions of her nation into new locales. Blend the races. Do precisely what Alexander the Great had done with his Hellenistic revolution, only in reverse, migrating east to west.