“Fitting epitaph for a terrorist tyrant,” I said. “Still issuing threats from the grave.”
The caretaker eyed the slab somberly. “It was said that for a year after Timur’s internment, people heard him howling from the earth.”
“My goodness,” Phoebe said. We gazed around the chamber. The darkness felt palpable, the air cold and still. “It’s awfully quiet down here now,” she said.
The silence was unnerving. I stared at the broken graveslab, trying again to imagine the corpse crumbling to dust beneath it. What secrets had the tyrant taken with him to the grave? I asked the caretaker if—despite Timur’s warning not to “violate his stillness”—the tomb had ever been opened.
“Yes,” he answered. “In 1941. Russian anthropologists opened the coffin. They found the skeleton of a big man, lame on his right side—just as the stories told.” The caretaker’s eyes crinkled knowingly. “A few hours later, the news arrive that Hitler is invading Mother Russia.”
I squinted skeptically.
“It’s true,” Phoebe said. “And when the body was re-interred in 1942, the battle of Stalingrad began—the turning point of the war.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
The remark drew a glare from the caretaker. “Fear the fire,” he admonished, “and fear Allah wherever you may be.”
“Of course,” I said. “And fear Tamerlane’s ghost, too, apparently.”
“When they opened the grave,” Phoebe asked, “do you know if they found anything else buried with him?”
“What else, Miss?”
“Like flowers, maybe, or perhaps flower seeds?”
He looked at her curiously. “I have not heard of this. Why do you ask such a question?”
Phoebe and I exchanged a glance. So much had been revealed, why hold back now? I turned to face the caretaker. “Did you ever hear of a professor from Bukhara named Borzoo Baghestani?”
His hand flew over his heart. “May peace be upon him. I hear of his terrible murder. A very kind and learned man. He visit the tomb here many times.”
Again I glanced at Phoebe, then pulled out the camel chess piece. “Another man was killed last night—a friend of the professor. He thought this would help us find something, some secret in this tomb. Do you have any idea what he meant?”
The man took the piece from me. He seemed intensely curious about it, and held it up under the light. The dark camel gleamed with its sinister allure. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes.” He turned to us, beaming. “The secret is right before your eyes!”
He reached under his jacket.
BLAM! BLAM! White-hot gunshots pierced the dark.
The earsplitting blasts stunned me. I turned in fright to Phoebe to see if she’d been hit. A startled look had frozen on her face.
She was gaping at the caretaker. He stared back vaguely into the empty space between them. Then he staggered forward and crumpled to his knees. He opened up his right hand and gazed down at the camel, then he looked back up at us and tumbled over, dead.
Two bullet holes bled out his back, just behind his heart.
We peered into the darkness beyond him. Out from the shadows stepped the stout figure of Anand. His eyes were on the caretaker, his hands clamping the revolver he had seized on the train.
Phoebe gawked in horror. “Anand—what have you done!” She rolled the caretaker onto his back and checked his throat for a pulse. Grimacing in bewilderment, she glared up at Anand. “He’s dead.”
“Save your pity,” he said. He reached down and pulled aside the caretaker’s jacket, revealing a Damascene dagger in a sheath.
“An Assassin?” I said.
“Yes, though not the one who killed Professor Woolsey, I suspect.” He nodded toward the darkness behind him. “The real janitor lies back there.”
I ventured in that direction with Phoebe. A man’s body appeared like a shadow on the floor. Stripped of his jacket, he lay beside a puddle of blood from a slit across his throat.
The Assassin had apparently murdered the janitor, then donned the dead man’s jacket and cap when he heard our knock at the door.
Anand walked up to the body, wiping the revolver with his handkerchief. He placed the gun in the caretaker’s hand and pointed it toward the Assassin. “Perhaps the poor fellow was not quite dead when the Iranian walked away from him.”
Phoebe and I stood gaping at Anand in amazement. I realized that once again he wasn’t wearing shoes. No wonder we hadn’t heard him. He bent down to pick up the Assassin’s own suit jacket, neatly folded on the floor nearby—alongside an iron crowbar. Pulling a passport out of the jacket, he read the owner’s name: “Mowwafak Mousavian.” Anand placed the passport back in the suit pocket, then fished out the Iranian’s car keys—“Don’t think he’ll be needing these—” and slipped them into his pocket.
His nonchalance irritated Phoebe. “This is crazy,” she said. “We have to inform the police.”
Anand addressed her calmly in his lilting intonation. “I told you how I feel about the Uzbek police. But of course I will leave that to you. I’d appreciate it, however, if you delayed a few minutes”—he picked up the crowbar, appraising it—“long enough to find out what he was looking for in that grave.”
70.
Grave Robbers
THE NIGHT BEFORE, Anand had come straight from the train station to Tamerlane’s mausoleum. Finding the building securely locked and no one answering the door, he decided to set up a stakeout and await the Iranian’s arrival. It wouldn’t be long, he thought. An Assassin had murdered Woolsey for Baghestani’s research, and according to Woolsey that research would direct him to the tomb.
The answer to Tamerlane’s soma secret lay in the mausoleum. With nothing more than a chess piece to go on, Anand felt he had little choice but to wait.
What he didn’t know was that another Assassin was already inside.
“How did he get here so quick?” I asked.
“The call outside the travel agent’s office,” Phoebe said. “They must have sent him here immediately when they found out where you were going.”
“He forced his way in with the janitor,” Anand said, “then killed him here in the crypt.”
“So he was in here all night by himself?” Phoebe asked.
“It wasn’t until you two showed up that he finally came to the door.”
“He must have been waiting for us,” I said. “To find out what we knew.”
“And to kill us,” Phoebe said.
I bent down to retrieve the jade camel from the corpse. Though rigor mortis had not yet set in, the cold, curled fingers seemed to cling to it. I bolted upright. “You sure that guy is dead?”
“He doesn’t have a pulse,” Phoebe said, then glanced around the dark. “But down here, who knows?”
I raised the chess piece up into the light, just as the Assassin had. “Right before your eyes,” I quoted, wondering what he had meant. The black jade seemed to devour the light and exude a kind of darker luminescence of its own—vividly present, yet negative and cold, like some sinister inversion of “suchness.”
Anand lowered my hand. “Right before your eyes,” he said.
I looked down. We were standing before Tamerlane’s graveslab.
“Whatever it is that’s in that grave,” he said, “it mustn’t be left for the Hashishin.”
I stared at the ominous Arabic inscription. “I’m not sure I can take any more punishment and misery.”
“Let’s just hope we don’t start another war,” Phoebe said.
Two cracks split the 600-year-old slab into three separate segments. Anand began tapping each one with the crowbar, gauging their relative size and weight. “We haven’t much time,” he said. “The tail segment seems the smallest and lightest. I would suggest—”
A thumping sound interrupted him.
The three of us fell silent, listening.
The sound came again—a muffled double thud. We stared down at the grave.
“
Oh my God,” I said.
Again, another thump, with a barely-audible shout, as if Tamerlane were howling to be let out of his tomb.
“Quickly!” Anand said. He stepped between us and slipped the tip of the crowbar under the stone. Applying the full force of his weight against the bar, he levered the tail segment, shifting it over half a foot, opening up the crack.
Phoebe and I peered inside and detected a shadowy movement. “He’s alive!” I shouted.
“Pull the stone!” Anand commanded. We slipped our fingers into the crack and hauled the block as he levered. One final strenuous tug slid it completely off.
The air thickened with a ghastly odor. Our heads came together as we gaped into the grave. Two pairs of feet lay side-by-side, one completely wrapped in linen, the other clad in hiking boots, ankles lashed with rope.
“Get him out!” Phoebe cried. Anand and I grabbed the bound ankles and hauled them out the gap. Blood stained the trouser legs. An open shirt revealed the man’s bare chest, streaked with bleeding wounds. His wrists were tied behind his back. Phoebe grabbed his shoulders as at last his head appeared: long, scraggly blondish hair, dark with blood and sweat; a gag stretched across his mouth, a cut across his throat.
The whiskered face looked so battered I failed to recognize it. Not until we set him down and Phoebe fell upon him.
“Daniel, my God! What have they done to you?”
I dropped down beside him, so shocked I couldn’t speak. Like Oriana’s Jewish star, a bloody Christian cross had been carved into his chest.
Anand took up the Assassin’s blade and reached to cut loose the gag. Dan jerked back, terrified.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Anand is a friend.”
The agent handed the blade to me. I gently sliced the gag.
“Water,” Dan whispered.
I grabbed a bottle from my pack. Lifting his head, we let him drink. It brought him slowly back to life. “I must have passed out,” he said.
“Not much air through those cracks,” Anand said. “The gunshot and my tapping probably roused you.”
“You’re okay now, brother.” I rolled him onto his side and cut his hands free. Phoebe took the blade from me and sawed the rope from his feet. “Can you stand?” she asked. We helped him up.
Anand wiped our prints from the dagger’s handle, then carefully reinserted the knife back into the Assassin’s sheath.
Standing unsteadily between Phoebe and me, Dan stared down at the killer’s corpse, unable to look away. The blood on my brother’s face, I noticed, was streaked with tracks from tears.
“He can’t hurt you anymore,” Phoebe said.
Dan looked more depleted than resentful. “He thought I was holding out.”
“You did hold out,” Phoebe assured him.
“I don’t have that much courage,” he said. “I told him everything I knew.”
“He’s dead,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Dan remained disconsolate. “It matters,” he said, “to me.”
“You live to be brave another day,” Anand said. He was busy prying open the head end of the grave. “Lend me a hand here, Jack. We’re running out of time.”
I helped him slide the stone aside.
“There’s nothing there,” Dan said. “Only Timur’s bones.”
“Afraid you’re right,” Anand said, withdrawing his head from the hollow. He tore open the top of the burial sheet. A puff of dust settled as we peered into the slit. I glimpsed a patch of sallow skull, scraps of skin still clinging to it, and clumps of russet beard.
“Conqueror of the World,” I said.
Anand turned to Dan. “It was you then, I take it, opened the grave?”
“I came in with the tourists,” he said. “Concealed that crowbar in my pants leg, and hid down here when the building closed.” He nodded toward the sarcophagus. “I was struggling with that gravestone when he struck me from behind.”
Anand eyed the Assassin’s corpse. “He must have got in when the janitor arrived.”
“He never made a sound,” Dan said.
Anand said, “The dagger is silent.”
By the time Dan regained consciousness, the Assassin had bound him hand and foot. “That’s when he started with the knife. And his fists. I finally passed out…and woke up in the grave. He threatened to leave me there to die.”
“What did he want?” Phoebe asked.
“The same thing they all want.” Dan cast a wary glance at Anand. “The source of the soma lotus.”
“No cell phone reception down here,” Anand said. “He probably didn’t receive word from Bukhara until later.”
Phoebe turned to Dan. “But certainly you told him. Didn’t you?”
“The source? No. I don’t know where it is.”
“You don’t know?” I said. “You mean you didn’t tell Baghestani?”
“No.”
“Dan, please,” Phoebe said. “There’s no sense keeping it secret any longer.”
He turned his weary gaze to her. “Why do you think I’m here?” he said. “Believe me, if I knew the place where the seeds came from, I would have told him long before he stuffed me in that grave.”
We stared at him, dumbfounded. “But you’re the one who found the fresh seeds,” I said. “That’s why all these people have been after you.”
“I didn’t find the seeds,” he said. “I stole them.”
Phoebe riled up. “So that’s why you didn’t tell me.”
“Who did you steal them from?” I asked.
“A Swiss mountaineer named Felix Fiore.”
“I met him!” I said. “In Rome. He’s the retired CEO of a pharmaceutical company. He’s been trying to track you down.”
Phoebe stared at Dan as if she didn’t recognize him. “You really have turned into a thief,” she said.
“I told him I’d return the seeds if he told me where he got them.”
“I was wrong then,” Phoebe said. “You’re an extortionist and a thief.”
“I’m a scientist, Phoebe, despite what you think. I’m looking for answers—”
“You’ve put yourself and all of us in danger. I don’t see how—”
“Please, not now,” I said, amazed at how quickly they’d fallen back into bickering. “We’re wasting time. What about Baghesta—”
“Afraid you’re right,” Anand said, vigorously wiping the pry bar to remove his fingerprints. “The doors will open any moment now. If we don’t clear out of here, we risk arrest for murder.” He placed the bar in the grip of the dead Assassin, then rose and turned to me. “Please. Show your brother.”
I’d almost forgotten. Pulling the camel out of my pocket, I told Dan, “This is from a Tamerlane chess set that belonged to Professor Baghestani. It looks to be made from the same jade as the cenotaph upstairs. Does it mean anything to you?”
Dan turned it in his hand, mystified.
“Two spaces diagonal, two straight,” Phoebe said.
He pondered, still puzzled.
“It’s Bactrian,” I said. “Camel caravans? The Silk Road? Anything?”
Finally he shook his head, looked at us, and shrugged.
“Well then,” Anand said. “It would appear we’ve arrived at a dead end indeed.”
71.
The Scientist
A BLOCK AWAY FROM THE MAUSOLEUM we spotted the Iranian’s car: no surprise, a black Mercedes, tinted windows and all. A click of the key fob confirmed it. Within seconds Anand was chauffeuring us down another broad, tree-lined boulevard, heading toward Samarkand’s tourist mecca, the central square known as the Registan bazaar. With only the caravan camel as a clue, Anand had decided he wanted a map of the ancient Silk Road route.
No one had any better ideas.
In the back seat, behind the tinted windows, Phoebe quickly set to work patching up my brother. I turned around and watched, trying to comprehend the fact that we’d actually managed to find him. Alive. It was a great relief and, despite his a
bysmal condition, a joy to finally see him again.
Phoebe soaked his shirt with bottled water and used it to wipe the dried blood from his chest. After swabbing the cuts with disinfectant, she plastered them with the last remaining bandages in my kit. The wounds, though painful, were not too dangerously deep, and despite the beating he’d taken, no bones appeared to be broken. It was clear the Assassin had wanted to keep Dan alive—at least until he got some answers.
I needed a few myself—starting with Tamerlane. “Why the tomb?” I asked.
Dan winced as Phoebe dabbed a contusion at his temple. “Sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I much prefer being tortured by you.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she said. “I’m just getting started.”
“Promises, promises.”
Their bantering bothered me. “Dan—why the tomb?”
“Baghestani believed Tamerlane must have known a good deal about soma. The Sufis—”
“Ahmed Yasawi—the bronze cauldron?” Phoebe wanted her theory confirmed.
“Yeah,” Dan said. “He looked into that. The connection very likely came through Tamerlane’s Sufi imam. But it might have been even simpler than that. For centuries rumors of a sacred soma plant had passed with the caravans along the Silk Road. Tamerlane was bound to have heard—”
“Hold still,” Phoebe said. She spread a butterfly bandage over an inch-long split on his cheek. “There. Just try not to smile.”
“Impossible when I’m looking at y—” He winced as she wiped dried blood from his chin.
“That help?” she said.
“You’re a sadist.”
“I thought that’s what you liked about me. Answer your brother’s question.”
“What question?”
“Tamerlane,” I said. “The Silk Road. You were saying there would have been rumors.”
“Yes. Many believed the soma plant still grew somewhere in Asia. Baghestani said Tamerlane searched for it during his ransacking invasion of India, and was looking for it again, toward the end of his life, when he turned his sights on China.”
The Assassin Lotus Page 30
