The Lost Tomb

by N. J. Croft

  “Why are you asking?”

  Peter was Noah’s father’s younger brother, and Noah had known him all his life. There were only ten years between them, and they’d always been close. Peter had made the effort to spend time with him whenever he was in the country, and after Ben had died and everything turned to crap, he’d been the one person Noah had felt he could rely on. It was because of Peter that he’d asked his father if he could go to military school—the same one Peter had attended—and because of Peter that he’d joined the army. It was all he’d ever wanted.

  Father figure, role model, and later his mentor—Peter was the one person he trusted implicitly.

  “I received an anonymous email saying that Eve was murdered.”

  “Jesus, Noah.” There was a minute’s silence, no doubt while Peter processed the information. “There was nothing in the reports to suggest foul play.”

  “Who carried out the investigation?”

  “Exactly who you’d expect. The local police in conjunction with the Russian civil aviation authority. The plane was still over Russia when it went down.”

  Yeah, Noah figured as much. “Can I see whatever files you have?”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  He pressed a finger to his forehead. “I don’t think I have a choice. I can’t ignore this.”

  “No, you’re right. I’ll send them through. But my immediate thought is that you’re being manipulated. I just can’t see how. Or why. You’re out of Arachnid. Why would anyone come after you? Maybe revenge? But it seems a very odd way to go about it.”

  “I know. I’ve been sitting here trying to work out the possible motives and coming up with…nothing.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then I’d keep it to yourself. In the meantime, forward me the email. I’ll get one of our people to look into it, though I doubt we’ll find anything. Maybe it’s just someone trying to mess with your head.”

  “I’ve considered that.” He sent the email to Peter’s secure account. “Could it be something to do with my new job?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “The email came through on my new work account. Could be significant.”

  “Or not. You’re reaching. How are the children?”

  Noah blew out a breath and ran his hand over his short hair. “Harper is channeling her inner bitch. Luce thinks I’m going to die if I leave her sight. Daniel has decided screaming is the best way to get what he wants. Oh, and I fired the nanny this morning.” That reminded him—he needed to find someone to watch the children. And fast. He didn’t think any of them would survive too long if he was their sole carer.

  “That good, huh?” The amusement in Peter’s voice came through loud and clear.

  “Yeah, that good. The Brothers were a breeze compared to this. Anyway, let me know if you find anything. And send those reports.”

  “Will do.”

  After the call ended, he pressed 100 and asked Tom to come in.

  “Tom, I need a nanny. Urgently.”

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you a little old? Or is this some sort of fetish?”

  “I’m serious. Find me the perfect nanny who can start today by four o’clock or you’re fired.”

  Tom grinned. “I do like a challenge.”

  Chapter Five

  As Noah hesitated outside the door of Cranfields, a private club in the city, a black SUV drove past. He tracked its movements, taking a mental note of the license plate. The vehicle didn’t slow, just kept on moving, disappearing around the corner. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen it before, though.

  Best case scenario, he was being paranoid. After all, black SUVs were hardly uncommon on the streets of London. Maybe he wanted there to be something suspicious about Eve’s death. Maybe he was incapable of living an ordinary life and was hunting for anything to drag him out of the quagmire of boring domesticity. Maybe the part of him that still loved Eve was still struggling to let her go.

  But the email had been real.

  It was eight in the evening, and he should be at home, spending time with his children. He was all they had now—or so Harper had informed him that morning as he’d hurried out the door.

  Poor fucking kids.

  With a last glance down the road, he pushed open the door to the club.

  Stepping inside was like traveling back in time. The place reeked of cigar smoke and old leather. The walls were dark oak paneling, the curtains crimson velvet—a cross between an old-fashioned library and a bordello, or so Noah imagined. He knew nothing about either such places. The few occupants looked about as old as the furniture. He hadn’t even known gentlemen’s clubs still existed, yet here he was.

  Professor Donald Ramsey had been Eve’s tutor at Oxford where she’d gotten her undergraduate degree and started her post-grad research. He’d been at their wedding. He was also Harper’s godfather. Noah liked the man, though they’d never been close.

  He found Don sitting in an armchair in the bar, drinking whiskey. He must have been in his sixties, but he looked fit and too young to be in this place, his face brown from the sun. He’d been on a dig in Africa and hadn’t been able to come to Eve’s funeral service, but he had called, and Noah knew he felt genuine sadness over Eve’s passing. As Noah approached, he stood up and then waved him to the chair opposite.

  “I’m so sorry about Eve,” he said. “She was a wonderful woman and a great archaeologist. We’ll all miss her.”

  “Thank you.” He sat down, and Don held up two fingers at the barman. The man immediately came over with the drinks then left with a smile and no words.

  “Good service,” Noah said, picking up his whiskey.

  Don gave a wry smile. “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing in a place like this.”

  “It did occur to me.”

  “My father got me a membership when I was twenty-one. I’ve been coming here ever since. It’s somewhere to stay when I’m in town. You said you needed to talk. How can I help you?”

  Noah took a sip of whiskey. Single malt and smoky in his mouth. Appreciation of good scotch was something Peter had taught him at an early age when he’d given a twelve-year-old Noah his first shot of single malt. “I just wanted to understand Eve’s work better. We never spoke of it much.”

  “A little late now, isn’t it?”

  Was there censure in the words? Probably.

  “Maybe. But she was on a…job when she was killed. She hadn’t been out in the field since the kidnapping. I guess I just want to make sense of it, understand the whys and maybe a little of what motivated her.”

  Don studied him for a moment, his head cocked to one side, and Noah resisted the urge to squirm. “Are you passionate about anything, Noah?”

  The question wasn’t what he’d been expecting. “Terrorism,” he said. “I’m passionate about stopping it.”

  “Interesting. Well, then maybe you can understand a little of how Eve felt about her work. She was passionate about archaeology. Perhaps the most passionate woman I’ve ever met. She loved the hunt and the chase, searching out the secrets of the past.”

  A part of him wished he had gotten to know that side of her while she was still alive. He’d always been so wrapped up in his own work, believed it to be more important, more relevant.

  “What was she passionate about in the last few years?” he asked. Since the divorce, they’d stopped talking about anything personal and stuck to conversations about the children. “What was she working on when she died?”

  “She was searching for the lost tomb of Genghis Khan. She’d been involved all her academic life. She wrote her thesis on it.” Don gave him a look that clearly said Noah should’ve already known this. He wasn’t wrong.

  A pang of guilt hit h
im low in the stomach. “In Mongolia?”

  “Eve worked from the university. She never got over what happened in Iraq and couldn’t face fieldwork. But the advances in archaeological techniques over the last few years have made it easier to carry out research from the comfort of your own office. Also, it’s not easy to get permission to visit Mongolian sites, especially anything related to Khan.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I suspect they don’t want the tomb found and desecrated. Mongolians don’t treat death in the same way as most westerners. Anyway, shortly after she came back to the U.K., Eve got funding from an organization that I gather has a lot of influence.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “The Mongolian Historical Society. I have to admit I’d never heard of them, but the techniques Eve uses—used—do not come cheap. So presumably they had money.”

  “But why would anyone really care?”

  Don sipped the last of his drink then set the empty glass down. “What do you know about Genghis Khan?”

  They’d studied him in the military academy, but some guy on a pony eight hundred years ago hadn’t seemed particularly relevant to Noah at the time. This was in the aftermath of 9/11. He’d believed they’d had bigger things to think about. “Not a lot.”

  “I’m surprised, considering your interest in terrorism. Some people say Genghis Khan was the most successful terrorist who ever lived, so he should be right up your alley. He was also a brutal and successful warrior who came from humble beginnings to conquer a vast area across the Middle East and Europe.”

  “If I remember correctly, he killed a lot of people. Raped a lot of women.” The killing Noah could get over. The rape not so much.

  “Many think he was a tyrant, but if you measure him by the rules of his day, then he was no worse than most leaders and better than many. He was a liberal in a time of intolerance—he allowed all religions to flourish. And he was an egalitarian in an age when bloodlines meant everything. All you needed to progress in Khan’s army was to be brave and be loyal.”

  “So why is his tomb so hard to find? I would have thought a big guy like that would have had a great fancy burial plot.”

  “You would think so.” Don smiled. “All this talking is making me thirsty.” He raised his hand to the barman again, and they were quiet while he brought over the bottle. “You can leave it,” Don told the man, who nodded and left while Don filled their glasses. “There are lots of stories about how Genghis Khan died. One is that he was assassinated by an Indian princess who he had taken as plunder from a defeated city. That’s my favorite. But the most likely is that he died as a result of an arrow in his knee while on his last campaign against the Tangut nation, along the Yellow River. His body was brought back to Mongolia for burial, most believe somewhere on the sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun. But Genghis Khan did not want his burial site to be known.”

  “Why?”

  “No one really knows, though there are other rumors which we’ll get to later. Anyway, legend has it that his body was taken back to Mongolia by an escort of soldiers who killed any onlookers they met on the way. Then once the burial was completed, all the slaves, laborers, and mourners were murdered. And after that, the soldiers of the escort were also killed. Some say they drove a herd of a thousand horses over the site to hide the location of the grave, others that they diverted the course of a river. Whatever they did, it was effective—the burial site has never been located, though others have been. Many of his descendants were also buried in the area. In secret. It’s believed that his grandson Kublai Khan had twenty thousand men killed following his burial.”

  “That’s a little paranoid.”

  “Perhaps. And then there are the Darkhats.”

  “The Darkhats?”

  “On Genghis Khan’s death, fifty loyal families were appointed guardians of the area to keep the secret of the tomb. It’s believed their descendants live there even now and will kill anyone who gets close. The area is known as the Great Taboo.”

  Was that the answer? Had these Darkhats killed Eve because she was about to find out the location of the tomb? It seemed a little unbelievable.

  “But that’s just a legend,” Don said.

  There was something else he didn’t understand. “She was in Russia when she died. Why? When the tomb is supposed to be in Mongolia.”

  “Archeology has changed a lot over recent years. It used to be a lot of digging and finding nothing, so you’d move on and dig somewhere else, until eventually you struck lucky and actually found something.”

  “The good old days,” Noah said. Actually, it sounded pretty boring to him.

  Don grinned. “Yes. The good old days. But things have changed. Today, archaeology is more like being a private investigator. You may get to do a little digging at the end, but first you have a lot of information to sift through. And, most recently, satellite images to study. Thousands of them, looking for some minute thing out of place that might indicate there is something interesting underground.”

  “So that’s what Eve was looking for in Russia? Seems a long way to go. Why not just get them sent or shared?”

  “I don’t know for sure what she was doing there—we hadn’t spoken for a while—but I doubt she was looking at satellite images. Maybe at military records, not related directly to the tomb but to another artifact: The Spirit Banner of Genghis Khan.”

  He sighed. “Okay, so what’s a Spirit Banner?”

  “The Mongolian warriors created them by tying horsehair around the shaft of their spears just below the blade. Genghis Khan had two, a white one for times of peace and a black one he carried into battle. The Mongolians believe that the warrior and the spirit banner become so entwined that on his death his spirit passes into the spear and it becomes the embodiment of the warrior on Earth.”

  “So Eve was looking for these spirit banners?”

  “The white one disappeared after Khan’s death, maybe buried with him. But for centuries, the black spear was kept in a monastery in central Mongolia, guarded by the monks. Then in the 1930s, Mongolia was overrun by the henchmen of Stalin. Over thirty thousand people were killed in a series of campaigns to stamp out the Mongolian religion. Stalin was a real tyrant.”

  “And they took this banner?”

  “No. It was apparently whisked away to safety but never seen again. I suspect Eve was following the trail of the Spirit Banner. She spoke about it briefly the last time we met. Here, actually. A couple of months before she died.”

  “Wouldn’t she have told someone if she’d found it? If it was such a big deal.”

  “Maybe. Maybe she didn’t get the chance. Or it was found but they haven’t made the announcement yet. Not everyone does this for the fame and fortune.” He emptied his glass and looked across the table, eyes narrowed as if he could see into Noah’s head. “Now are you going to tell me what this sudden interest in your ex-wife’s work is really all about?”

  Noah made a snap decision. “I received an anonymous email claiming Eve was murdered.”

  Don was silent for a minute, staring into his glass. “And what do you believe?”

  “I have no clue. But she tried to get ahold of me the night before she died. She left a message but didn’t say what was bothering her. And the next day, she was dead.” He put down his glass and pressed the spot between his eyes, trying to make sense of everything, to see a pattern in the pieces. “I just don’t get it. Why would anyone kill over a grave of some guy who’s been dead for nearly a thousand fucking years? Treasure?”

  Don shrugged. “Genghis Khan looted his way across the world, amassing great wealth. So I suppose it could be treasure. But I suspect something else, and you’re not going to like it.”

  Noah snorted. He didn’t like any of this. “You’d better tell me then, so I can get used to the idea.”

  “There’s another legend, no
t so widely known or believed, that Khan’s success was not just down to his prowess as a warrior and leader but that he had some sort of secret weapon, a magical talisman that he took into battle, carried between two black stallions, so powerful and dangerous that, when he died, he wanted it hidden forever. Or maybe not forever but until a worthy successor came along. Only someone destined to become the ruler of the world would be able to find the Talisman and use it.”

  Noah blinked. “Shit. Magic? Really?”

  Don chuckled. “Your expression says it all. I take it you don’t believe in magic?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “I don’t believe in magic, either, but there are those who do. And perhaps something doesn’t have to be real for people to believe. Look at religion.”

  He was right, of course. Most of the terrorist attacks that took place had some tie to religion. There were plenty of people willing to die for beliefs Noah found totally incomprehensible. Though in his experience, many times religion was just a cover for a political or power-based agenda.

  Still, he couldn’t believe that Eve had been killed because of some magic talisman buried eight hundred years ago.

  He’d told himself to keep an open mind. But open to magic?

  Never going to happen.

  He’d follow through on all the leads—he had no alternative—until he uncovered the truth, be it magic or revenge. But now it was time to change the subject, finish his drink, and go home to his children.

  As he left the building fifteen minutes later, his gaze automatically searched the roads.

  There was no black SUV.

  …

  Sara stood in the cover of a deep doorway across the street and watched Noah Blakeley leave the club. The daylight was fading, and the streetlights were coming on. In the dim light, he appeared pre-occupied.

  From her research, she was beginning to believe that Noah actually was that rare specimen—a genuinely good man. Maybe he could help her or they could help each other. She just had to work out the best way to approach him.