I told her how, at the camel crossing, they had come very close to finding me.
“I don’t remember the car ever stopping,” she said. She had been unconscious, apparently, for most of the ride, and had lost a lot of blood. Even now she verged on delirium.
“I’m afraid of infection,” the archaeologist said, gently cleaning her puncture wound with an antiseptic solution. His name was Vladimir Karakov. “I don’t want to close it. We must get you to a hospital.”
“And you as well,” Faraj said, nodding toward the burly Russian’s bloody pant leg, where he’d hastily wrapped a strip of cloth around his wounded thigh.
“We leave when the storm pass,” Karakov said, gazing up at the ceiling. The wind, thrashing the canvas, had reached a fevered pitch. Darkness had fallen, and the lantern’s flickering light revealed a thick swirl of dust. Squatting on the stool beside Oriana’s cot, Karakov pawed through his medical kit. Given his boldness in battle, I’d expected a much younger man; Karakov looked to be in his fifties. He pulled out several bandages and a fat roll of gauze, and threw a quick glance up at me. “You are Duran’s brother, yes? The one they were looking for?”
“I’m sorry to have caused you so much trouble,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “You save my life. This woman’s, too, I’m sure.” Pinching closed her puncture wound, he applied the first of the butterfly bandages.
Far from believing I had saved their lives, I knew it was I who had endangered them. If I’d followed the advice of Dr. Fiore back in Rome, I’d have been home safe in the States by now and none of these killings would have happened.
The road to hell, as they say. It had led me to nothing but guilt.
“Outside, the man they killed, was he with the police?”
Karakov nodded. “The authorities sent him out to guard this site, after the seeds were stolen.”
“You mean…they thought you might find more?”
“I told them it is unlikely. I am more than thirty years digging in the Karakum. This is the only oasis site we find the lotus seeds. But many believe—or want to believe—more seeds might be found. And not just the Iranians. The last thugs to visit us were Taliban.”
“Afghans? Here?”
“We are not far from the border. They control the poppy trade and the smuggling routes up into Russia. It didn’t take long before they hear the rumors.”
“What rumors?” I asked.
“Please, we must lift her,” Karakov said. Faraj and I assisted him in sitting Oriana up on the cot. I held her shoulders as the Russian wrapped the gauze around her abdomen, covering the bandaged wound. Oriana seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness. Still she managed to mumble “Spasiba,” the Russian word for thanks.
“Eyn davar,” Karakov replied.
“You speak Hebrew,” she said.
“I attended your field school at Hazor,” he said, then glanced up at me. “And for six years I teach American students—at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA.”
He finished the wrapping, and we laid her back down on the cot. “Allow her to rest,” he said. Handing me the lantern, he carried the stool across the floor and set it down near the table. Faraj brought him the medical kit, and the Russian went to work on his leg. With a scissors he cut the pant leg off just above the knife wound. Then he unwrapped the cloth around it, and for the first time I saw his cut.
It sent a cold shiver through me. The top layer of his thigh muscle had been neatly severed.
Karakov gestured to a nearby crate. “There, please, the Imperia.” Faraj peered inside the crate and pulled out a crystalline bottle, its label in Cyrillic script. “I apologize,” Karakov said. “But I have only two glasses.” From the crate, Faraj retrieved a plastic drinking cup and a shot glass with the image of a monkey in a fez. He poured a jigger of vodka into each, then handed the shot to Karakov and the plastic cup to me.
“Za Vas!” the Russian growled, and tossed the contents down his throat.
I took a searing sip from mine and offered the cup to Faraj. He waved it aside. Karakov thrust out his empty glass and Faraj carefully refilled it. Again the Russian slammed down the jigger. I took another sip.
“My razor,” Karakov said. “Over there, by the basin.”
I retrieved it, along with a can of Gillette shaving cream. “You mentioned rumors,” I said.
Karakov set about shaving off the leg hair around his wound. “On the Asian plains, rumors spread like the wind. It has always been so. Men crave what they do not have, and everything on the known earth has passed along this way. That craving built the Silk Road.”
I glanced over the table. “Is that what you’ve uncovered here? Relics of the Silk Road?”
“I’ve been digging at oasis sites for decades in this desert. But the fire temple we uncovered here came long before the silk routes. It was built by the Indo-Iranian people, better known as the Aryans.”
Faraj said, “These are the people gave my country its name!”
“Yes,” Karkakov said. “‘Iran’ comes from Aryana: ‘Land of the Aryans—the Noble Ones.’”
I asked if they were the people who made the sacred drink from the lotus.
Karakov dragged the razor along the tender edge of his wound. “The Aryans were horse-herding nomads and warriors, the inventors of the chariot, who poured down out of the Eurasian steppe in the second millennium B.C. One wave swept over the Hindu Kush into the Indus Valley of India. They brought with them the beginnings of Vedic religion and the ritual drink called soma. Another wave descended on the Iranian plateau, bringing with them a similar polytheistic religion that included a drink called haoma. It’s believed that both soma and haoma were derived from the same source, a plant whose identity has been lost to the mists of time.”
“Until now,” I said.
“We found the seeds buried in a sealed pot, underneath remnants of the fire altar.”
“What made you think they were from the soma plant?” I asked.
“The things buried with them. A ritual pestle and mortar. Straining bowls and ceramic stands for processing a liquid. And cult vessels and bone tubes for drinking the libation.”
Karakov doused his now shaven wound with the antiseptic solution. Faraj poured him another vodka, and the Russian continued his story. He said a lab at the University of Zurich determined the seeds were from an extinct species of lotus, and carbon-dated them to around 1500 B.C. Inquiries immediately poured into Karakov’s office at the History Museum in Mari, and scientists from around the world came to visit the dig site and examine the seeds for themselves.
One was the noted paleoethnobotanist Daniel J. Duran.
“I felt honored to meet him,” Karakov said. “He was the American professor who had discovered kykeon, the legendary elixir of ancient Greece, the secret of the Eleusinian Mysteries. He was coming, I assumed, to honor another legend, one that stretched back even deeper into the past.”
But what Dan brought with him shocked the Russian to his core: identical lotus seeds of his own.
“I was astonished,” Karakov said. “And highly skeptical. Unlike the ancient seeds found buried here, your brother’s were fresh and viable—recently plucked from a living plant.”
Dan was intent on confirming that his seeds were the same species as Karakov’s. But before sending them off to the laboratory in Zurich, he insisted the seeds be sterilized. “He wanted to make certain they couldn’t be used for propagation.”
Ten days later, they received the results. The laboratory tests proved a positive match.
“It left no doubt,” Karakov said. “The ancient soma lotus, lost for several thousand years, had not only been identified, it was alive and propagating somewhere on the planet. The question, of course, was where.”
Dan refused to say; he feared the precious lotus plant would fall into the wrong hands. And sure enough, the following night, two Iranians showed up at Karakov’s apartment, asking where Dan was, where he kept the pl
ants, and threatening the Russian’s life. But before the men could reach him, Dan managed to slip away, taking with him every last seed.
Though relieved that his American guest had escaped, Karakov clearly resented the fact that Dan had made off with his find. “I can understand why he took his own seeds,” he said, “but he had no reason to take mine. I felt betrayed.”
“Do you have any idea where he went?” I asked.
Karakov unfolded a packet from his medical kit. I noticed what looked like threads of dental floss. Then I saw they were attached to curved needles and realized they were stitches.
He downed another shot of vodka. “Did your brother ever mention a professor named Borzoo Baghestani?”
It wasn’t the sort of name one would easily forget. I shook my head, no.
“He teaches archaeology at the University of Bukhara. Your brother told us that on his way here he paid the professor a visit. I have met Baghestani on several occasions. Interesting man, but I don’t know him well. He has always seemed…a little reticent with me. He’s Iranian, and in the past he has worked for the government in Tehran. I suspect that may be how they found out about your brother.”
“Have you tried to contact him?”
“We leave many phone messages, but have not heard back. For now, he is our only link to finding your brother—and where he has taken our seeds. My colleague left here yesterday to look for him.
“How far is Bukhara?” I asked.
“Couple hundred miles to the northeast,” Faraj said. “Across the border, in Uzbekistan.”
“Have you heard back from your colleague?” I asked.
Karakov was carefully unpacking the kit: needles, sutures, scissors, clamps. The vodka seemed to be slowing him down. “She was supposed to call me last night. I tried to reach her this morning, before I left Mari. No answer. The guard tried her on his satellite phone. He couldn’t get through.” The Russian picked up a curved suture needle and contemplated the pointy crescent. I noticed both fear and a kind of wistfulness in his eyes, and realized it had been there all along. “I am worried,” he said, a bit groggily. “This woman…I have grown quite fond of her, you see. She has worked at my side now for…over a year. It was she who convinced me to pursue this excavation.”
I stared dumbstruck at Karakov as a realization came over me. “Is she the one who contacted my brother?”
He nodded despondently. “She told me they used to be friends.”
Faraj noticed the look on my face. “What is wrong?”
“I know this woman,” I said. “I used to be friends with her, too.”
49.
Cipher
IN THE DREAM, as always, Phoebe sits on the grass under the giant oak at Dodona, looking exactly the same as she did that very last time I saw her. Her porcelain skin seems to glow in the shade. Her blonde bob ruffles in the breeze. Try as I might to read her thoughts, her face remains inscrutable, her cool eyes fixed on nothing. Gone is the ice-blue sapphire sparkle, the curl of a grin at the corner of her mouth, the peals of easy laughter and the quick-minded chatter, the teasing and flirtation that had captured me. She’s been spirited away by the light-fingered wind, and all that remains before me is this stony-eyed veneer, this cold marble statue Aphrodite.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Phoebe had already decided to leave me, well before that hour beneath the tree. At some point she had glimpsed, through my cavalier façade, the emptiness I’d hidden away, even from myself. She had seen the void of doubt, the lack of aspiration, the dilettante’s desultory interest in art, the pathetic uselessness of my very minor talents. What, after all, did I really have to offer? A room in a broken down apartment house in Rome? A rich man’s taste and a poor loser’s pocketbook? The peripatetic life of a vagabond? A man needs something more than a cynic’s sense of humor. I had found no real meaning, no purpose to pursue, no great passion or loyalty to sustain me. And indeed, I could barely make a living on my own. My very occupation was illegal. There was little I believed in, less that I could love, and nothing I could bring myself to fight for. Not even this comely Dutch girl who had made off with my heart. I had turned my sprightly Phoebe into stone.
JUST AS IN DODONA, the wind woke me up. The tent canvas rippled like a battered battle flag, and the kerosene lamp threw wobbling shadows. I had fallen asleep on the floor beside the cot. Oriana was still out of it, and Faraj was snoozing soundly beside the drunken, snoring Russian, who had promptly keeled over after stitching up his leg.
I got up and searched for the gallon water jug, stepping over Karakov’s upturned belly. The omnipresent dust had left my mouth and throat encrusted. I poured a half cup of water and drank.
It occurred to me the dryness may have triggered my stony dream, conjuring up Phoebe like a sphinx out of the sand. The riddle she posited troubled me. How had she managed to contact Dan? And how did she know the lotus seeds were likely to be found here?
The answer to both seemed suddenly obvious: It must have been Dan who had contacted her.
I took another sip of the lukewarm water. A story began to fall into place. My paleoethnobotanist brother had somehow figured that soma seeds were likely buried here. He got word to Phoebe, who would have been intrigued. As would any archaeologist—including the Russian expert she recruited to unearth them. Once the ancient seeds were found, Dan showed up to see if they matched the fresh seeds he’d discovered.
They did. He had proved his living lotus plant was the same as the ancient soma.
And now Phoebe had gone after him.
Gazing down at Karakov snoring on the floor, I realized the old Russian bear had fallen in love with her, too. Hell, it probably happened to every man she ever met. Even that old crackpot on Ogygia had been smitten.
I felt again that awful pang I hadn’t felt since Athens. “Jealousy is a form of fear,” Professor Auerbach would have told me. Fear of not having the thing you desire. While I had been pining away in Rome, Dan had been busy luring her back. How many times, I wondered, had the two of them gotten together? He’d just now spent nearly two weeks with her—long days and nights in the desert. Undoubtedly, she still had feelings for him. And Dan surely never stopped wanting her. I wondered if he’d renewed his marriage proposal. And if Phoebe had finally broken down and slept with him.
For a moment I just stood there, trying to summon the will to scrape my heart up off the floor. As I gazed unthinking over the pottery shards on the table, my eyes came to rest on a single artifact, an object both odd and familiar. It appeared to be made of bronze, like the shapely axe head beside it, but looked neither functional enough for a tool nor deadly enough for a weapon. On each end of its cylindrical handle, four pointed prongs sprang outward. They might have been eagle talons, or pointed, leaping flames.
I gauged its weight in my hand. Though it was larger and more crudely made, the basic design looked strikingly similar to the object I’d discovered in Maya’s suitcase. I felt certain the two items were related.
Excited, I woke up Karkakov. Snorting and grunting, he came back to life, in the process waking Faraj. The two of them sat up, saucer-eyed.
I held out the artifact to Karakov. “Tell me what this is.”
50.
Vajra
“A VAJRA,” HE SAID. “That’s the second recovered at this site. The first was what brought me here and got this whole thing started.” He straightened his sutured leg and winced. “Could somebody please make some coffee?” He gestured toward a tin on the table, and Faraj set to work.
I helped the archaeologist up onto the stool. “I thought you said it was Phoebe convinced you to excavate this site.”
“Phoebe had heard about the Vajra that was found here, uncovered after a flooding of the Murgab. I was digging in the foothills of the Kopet Dag at the time. She persuaded me that excavating here might be better rewarded.”
“Why? What’s a Vajra?”
“‘Vajra’ is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘diamond thunderbolt.’ The th
underbolt was the weapon of Indra, the great lord of heaven and the god of storms and war. For the ancient Aryans, the Vajra symbolized his power and strength—like the lightning hammer of the Norse god, Thor, or the thunderbolt of Zeus.”
Faraj struck a match. We watched him light the canned fuel cooker under the coffee pot.
I picked up the decayed, verdigris thunderbolt. “What’s it have to do with the soma lotus seeds?”
“It was the clue to finding them,” he said. “The Vajra belongs to Indra, and Indra is described in the Rig Veda hymns as the foremost imbiber of soma. The divine drink invigorates and strengthens him. It allows him to rise above his fear and perform heroic action.”
I thought back to something he’d said earlier. “That’s what you meant, isn’t it—about rumors and the Taliban? They think this legend is true—that soma will instill them with courage.”
“The Taliban control the drug trade. They’ll capitalize on whatever they can sell to fund their war, and kill whoever gets in their way. It’s the Iranian obsession that I don’t understand.”
“But you said yourself: a tribe of the Aryans split off into Iran. It’s a part of their Persian heritage.”
“Believe me, the Ayatollahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran do not care a fig about their heretic ancestors.”
“It’s true,” Faraj said. “The clerics discourage it. The Aryans have nothing to do with Islam. The religion of Mohammed comes out of Arabia—more than two thousand years later.”
I looked to Karakov. “But didn’t you say that archaeology professor worked for the Iranians?”
The Assassin Lotus Page 20
