by Alex Archer
With the two men watching, Annja placed her backpack on the table next to the case and unzipped it. Inside were a digital SLR camera and a laptop computer. Both pieces of equipment had seen their fair share of adventures at her side and she'd come to rely on them in more ways than one.
She took out the laptop and started it up, then connected the camera to it. She fired off a few shots of the lab around her, just to test the connection. Satisfied that all was working the way it should, she put the camera down and turned back to her pack.
Annja fished out a pair of white cotton gloves from a side pocket of the bag and pulled them on. The soft material would protect the brittleness of the pages, as well as provide a barrier between them and her skin, keeping the damaging oil from her fingertips from doing the journal any harm. She might think it was a fake, but she'd treat it as authentic until she could prove otherwise. For the same reason, she laid out a wide piece of silk on the tabletop in front of her.
"May I?" she asked Davenport.
"Be my guest."
She opened the small brass clasp holding the case closed and lifted the lid. Reaching inside, she drew out the slim volume and set it down in the area she had prepared.
Just like that, she was lost in the work. She might be a minor television celebrity—and a fierce adventurer, thanks to Joan's sword—but that didn't mean she'd lost her love of archaeology and the mystery and suspense that came with it. Discovering a new artifact, tracing its lineage, verifying its authenticity—it still moved and inspired her in ways that few other things could. Her awareness of the other people in the room faded as she gave herself completely to the task in front of her.
Annja picked up the camera and used it to take a full-size color photo of every single page in the book. She did the same with the inside and outside cover pages, both front and back. The pictures were immediately downloaded on to the laptop and organized sequentially. This would allow her to view the entire work without the need to handle the book itself, eliminating the possibility, no matter how slim, of it being damaged in the process. It would also let her magnify various sections, something she couldn't do if she were working solely from the original.
Once she was finished, she put the camera away and replaced the journal in its protective case. Pulling up a chair, she settled in front of the laptop and began reading.
8
Annja was quickly engrossed in her work, so much so that she never even noticed when Davenport gestured to Mason and the two of them slipped out of the room behind her back.
The book had been handwritten in Latin in a thin, spidery script. The pages were faded and, in some cases, heavily stained, making it difficult to understand certain passages, but for a seven-hundred-year-old book it was remarkably well preserved.
She began to read.
The book was exactly what Davenport had claimed—the personal journal of a man who'd endured a long and arduous journey deep onto the Mongolian steppes on behalf of the church. Curran was an excellent writer and she soon found herself drawn into the story itself. She could sense the man's loneliness, could feel his determination to do the job right and return home. She even ached along with him when his only companion succumbed to his wounds and died in the middle of the night. Curran's death must have been sudden, for he hadn't made any reference to the coming end in his journal. One day he was writing about trying to dig himself out and then the next, nothing.
She read through the entire work once, start to finish, looking for glaring problems that would instantly tell her the document was a fake. When she didn't find any, she settled in for a more intricate examination.
The first thing she did was look for historical inaccuracies. She'd once examined a manuscript supposedly written by a Catholic priest who'd accompanied Vasco da Gama on his famous journey around the Cape of Good Hope. It had been an excellent forgery; the paper had passed the radiocarbon test, the text had been written in the dialect spoken in the area where the priest had supposedly lived at the time, even the ink had been correctly aged. The whole charade had only fallen apart when Annja reached the last page of the manuscript. The forger had added the words Societus Iesu, Latin for Society of Jesus, after the writer's signature. Apparently he hadn't done his homework on that little addition, for the Jesuits, a Catholic order founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola, wouldn't come into being until fifty years after the events portrayed in the manuscript.
The trouble was that not only were Curran's observations historically correct, as nearly as she could tell, such as the location of Guyuk's summer encampment and the establishment of trade with parts of China, but they contained many small details that the average forger more than likely wouldn't be aware of at all. Things like the stench that hung over the Mongol army at all times in the field due to their reluctance to bathe in rivers and streams, or the way Mongol horsemen would smear their exposed skin with yak grease to take the bite out of the winter wind on the high plains.
She stopped looking for historical errors after a few hours and turned instead to linguistic ones. Language grows and changes, just like any other organic element, and a good historian can also spot a forgery by the way certain words or phrases are used within a text.
Annja struck out there, too.
Her doubts about the authenticity of the manuscript were starting to take a beating in the face of what she was reading. So far, the manuscript had passed every test.
Knowing she'd been at it for hours, she got up and stretched a bit. She noticed a small serving tray had been left by the door at some point, and lifting the lid she discovered a plate of turkey sandwiches, complete with cranberry sauce and a bed of lettuce, along with a soft drink that was still icy cold. She gratefully dug in.
When she finished eating, she decided to give the text a rest and turn her attention to the map that had been hand drawn in the back of the journal.
She was in the midst of rereading the document for the sixth or seventh time when she saw a key piece of the puzzle. Several words on the page started with a funny little curlicue, as if the writer had left the pen on the page for a few seconds too long. At first, she thought it was just an artifact of the particular pen the author had used. Perhaps its point hadn't been cut properly and the ink had pooled where it shouldn't have. But then she began to notice that there wasn't a consistency to its appearance. On one page a word starting with the letter T would have the little curlicue, but two pages later the same word would not.
Curious, she went back to the beginning and began to flip through the images of each page, looking for the strange little mark. Her trained eye began to pick out a pattern to its occurrences, something a little less than random.
"That's interesting," she told the empty room around her.
Grabbing a piece of paper, she went back to the beginning of the text again, but this time she wrote down every word where the strange mark appeared. She listed them in a vertical column, one after another, until she had reached the end. Scanning down the list, she quickly noted that the words seemed to form sentences and so she rewrote them in horizontal lines instead, guessing where one sentence left off and another one began. When she was finished, she was left with several paragraphs of text.
Her eyes widened as she realized what they were.
9
They came over the wall like ghosts.
Unheard.
Unseen.
They didn't hesitate once they were on the ground on the other side but rather set off immediately for their objective, unconcerned with any of the defensive measures that had been put into place to prevent just the kind of thing they were attempting.
The mastiffs caught their scent within seconds of their appearance on this side of the wall. Trained to silently advance and render intruders immobile, the massive dogs moved through the darkness, intent on teaching their prey a lesson about trespassing where they were not wanted.
The lead man caught sight of the dogs as they came around the corner of the house. They were
large, a good hundred and eighty pounds if an ounce, and they were coming on fast, but he kept his concentration on his objective, the south wing of the main house, and trusted his companions to handle their part of the job.
The dogs were quick, but the two men stationed in the trees outside the estate were quicker. Seconds after the dogs came into view, the sniper team went into operation, adjusting for distance, windage and the animals' oncoming speed, and then firing.
Two shots.
Two hits.
The tranquilizer darts took another few seconds to work, so the dogs had closed to within fifteen feet of the lead man before they faltered and then crashed to the ground, unconscious.
Ignoring them, the team raced on.
The intruders made it halfway across the lawn before the dogs' handlers came around the side of the house on their usual patrol route. The handlers had only just begun to process the fact that their charges were nowhere to be seen when the team in the trees fired again.
Unconscious, the handlers dropped into the grass before they even knew what hit them.
The motion sensors and floodlights came next. A swath of earth twenty feet in width had been seeded with pressure plates attached to a series of high-intensity lights that were intended to blind and disorient intruders who made it past the dogs. The specific section of the lawn containing the sensors looked no different than any other and an ordinary intruder would have been hard-pressed to get beyond it.
But as they had already demonstrated, this was no ordinary group of intruders.
The lead man never slowed. He charged into the designated area, his eyes on the wall that was getting closer with every step, confident that the sensors had been disarmed.
No sirens split the night.
No lights forced back the darkness.
The lead man reached the outside wall of the manor house. Unslinging the grapple gun from where he carried it across his back, he took aim and fired. The small steel hook shot upward, arced over the edge of the roof and embedded itself in the tiles high above. A sharp tug on the climbing rope attached to the hook confirmed its placement.
Hand over hand, the lead man and two others climbed to the roof, while the final two men in the team took up positions at the bottom of the rope, guarding the escape route for the others.
Once on the rooftop they followed the route that they had all committed to memory, moving from their initial entry point at the end of the south wing to a section of the roof above the main manor house. Their leader used the four chimneys to orient the team and then advanced to a spot midway along the roof's western edge.
At his signal, his two companions began pulling up the roofing tiles and stacking them to one side. When they had created a space large enough for a man to fit through, one of them stepped to the side. The lead man, who by now had assembled a portable cutting rig from parts removed from his pack, passed the rig to his waiting companion.
The item they had come for was less than fifteen feet away, separated from them by just a thin section of plaster and wood.
The leader glanced at his watch.
They were right on time.
He gave the signal for his teammate to start cutting.
* * *
A NNJA FOUND M ASON and his employer in Davenport's study on the first floor. She wasted no time in getting to the point.
"Something about the journal has been bothering me since this morning and I've only just now figured out what it is. If Curran died in that cave, who found the journal and how did you come to be in possession of it?" she asked.
Mason glanced at Davenport and the other man nodded, giving permission for him to answer the question.
"I handle a variety of jobs for Mr. Davenport. One of those happens to be scouting out new business opportunities. I was in Mongolia recently with a geological team, looking for mineral deposits. While investigating a series of caves a few days outside of Karakorum, we stumbled upon the mummified remains of two men. The journal was on a shelf near one of the bodies."
"And so you took it?"
Mason shrugged. "I thought it might be important and taking it with me seemed the best way of preserving it."
Annja frowned. "But now that you've had time to examine its contents, surely you understand that the site, and anything it contains, could be of historic importance to the Mongolian people?"
Davenport stepped in. "Of course we do, Annja. But we also want credit for finding the site and permission to excavate it. That is why we intend to apply for the proper paperwork to sponsor an expedition to do just that in the spring." He spread his hands, as if to say, Can't you see we're doing the right thing here? "Determining the authenticity of the journal seemed an important step in that process."
Annja wasn't sure if that was the whole story or not, but she recognized that it was all she was going to get at the moment.
"Good enough," she said, with a shrug of her own that clearly said she wasn't going to make an issue of it. "Then I guess it's okay to tell you…I think it's real." Annja couldn't keep the smile from spreading across her face as she admitted it.
Davenport let out a whoop of joy. "I knew it!" he shouted. "I just knew it."
Mason was up, shaking his employer's hand, congratulating him, the two of them laughing and talking, when Annja broke in again.
"I said I think the journal is real. Unfortunately, the map is not."
That brought both of them up short. Davenport's voice held a trace of steel as he asked, "What do you mean the map is not?"
Annja brought her laptop over to the table in front of the chairs where they'd been seated and turned it around to face them.
"Look," she said. "This is a full-scale image of the map from the back of the journal." The map appeared on the screen before them. "I cleaned it up some, but otherwise it is exactly the same. No image enhancements or anything like that."
The two men nodded to show they were following her.
"Now this," she said, calling up another image, "is a modern-day map of the same area. I've reduced it to scale to match the other one." The two maps appeared side by side.
Davenport glanced between them. "I don't see…Oh."
Annja grinned. "Yeah. Oh." She tapped the keyboard and they all watched as the two images slid over each other. Doing so allowed them to see that Curran, or whoever had drawn the map, had deliberately introduced errors into the positioning of many of the major landmarks. For instance, the Onon River had been moved slightly to the east while the Hentiyn Nuruu mountain range had been relocated a good distance to the south. The other errors were similar in nature; Annja had counted eleven in all.
Davenport stared at the map in confusion. "Why would he do that?"
Annja opened her mouth to reply but Mason beat her to the answer.
"He wanted to pass on the information but didn't want to make it easy in case it fell into the wrong hands. Remember, there's no way for anyone at that time to verify the map short of going there themselves. So a few subtle alterations and, voilà—the secret is safe."
Davenport frowned. "So the map's a fake? It won't lead us to the tomb?"
Annja smiled. "The map's authentic all right, in the sense that it is as old as we expected it to be, and more than likely penned by the individual we think penned it. The thing is, it just doesn't give accurate directions to the tomb. At least, not directly. The location of the tomb is in there, we just have to break the code to get it."
Davenport's eyes shone with curiosity. "Code?" he asked.
* * *
T HE CUTTER SHUT OFF the torch and set it aside. He drew out a long-bladed combat knife. He used it to wedge up one side of the rectangle he'd cut in the roof, and then slid a gloved hand beneath it. A sharp tug broke the last remaining edge and the piece came free in his hand. He passed it to the others and then cautiously stuck his head down through the opening he'd created.
The work area was immediately below them, just as they'd been told it would be.
There was no need for instructions. The entry team had been briefed thoroughly before their departure and they all knew their own individual assignments. One man stayed behind to cover the roof while the leader and the last remaining team member lowered themselves through the hole they'd cut and dropped lightly to the floor below.
They were in!
* * *
"L ET ME SHOW YOU ." Annja closed out the maps and brought up several pages from the journal itself. She pointed out the strange addition to each letter that had caught her eye in the first place, then showed them how selecting only those words brought up another message hidden inside the text of the first.
Beneath the watchful gaze of the eternal blue heaven
The spirit of the warrior points the way
To where the blood of the world intertwines
And the voice in the earth has its say
The sixty brides rode sixty steeds
