The Lost Throne

by Chris Kuzneski

  “No,” Payne joked, “but I beat them up when they wouldn’t do my homework.”

  “I should’ve known. I’m going to make note of that in your personnel file.”

  “If you must. But before you do, I was wondering—”

  Raskin interrupted him. “If I could do you a favor.”

  “Crap! Am I that predictable?”

  “Both of you are. Let me guess, D.J. is there, too.”

  “You know it.”

  “And you’re calling from . . . Florida. Am I right?”

  Payne nodded. “How’d you know that?”

  The ever-present clicking of Raskin’s keyboard could be heard in the background. “Because I’m tracking your call with Blackbird, our latest GPS satellite. Give me ten more seconds and I can shoot a missile up your ass. Seriously. Right up your ass.”

  “Ouch! You’re one scary geek.”

  Raskin smiled. “Don’t you forget it.”

  “Okay,” Jones said from across the hotel room. He sat in front of his laptop, which was logged on to an encrypted system at his office in Pittsburgh. “I’m ready.”

  Payne turned on his speakerphone. “Randy, you’re on with D.J.”

  “So,” Raskin asked, “what kind of trouble are you in this time?”

  “It’s not us,” Jones explained. “It’s a colleague of ours. And the clock is ticking.”

  Raskin nodded in understanding. The joking stopped at once. “What do you need?”

  “We need access to restricted phone numbers. Seventeen calls in the last twelve hours. All of them placed to Jon’s cell.”

  “The line we’re on now?”

  “Affirmative,” Jones answered.

  “No sweat. I started tracking it the moment he called. Give me a few seconds to get through his network’s firewall, and I can retrieve everything you need.”

  “Can you send it to my laptop?”

  “If you’d like. Or I can just read it to you.”

  Jones shook his head. “No thanks. I want a hard copy.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll send it right now.” Raskin hit Enter, sending the file. “It might take a few minutes to arrive. My system is running slow today. I’m crunching some serious data.”

  “In that case,” Payne said, “would you mind answering one question about the calls?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  Raskin glanced at his middle screen. It was flanked by several others, all of them filled with data for other projects. “As far as I can tell, the calls came from three different sources. But the majority of them were placed in one city: Saint Petersburg.”

  “Saint Petersburg? We’re in Saint Petersburg.”

  Raskin shook his head. “Sorry, dude. Wrong Saint Petersburg. I’m talking about Russia.”

  Payne hung up, more confused than before. “Someone’s calling me from Russia? That makes no sense. I haven’t been there in years.”

  Jones said nothing as he waited for the file to appear on his screen. When it did, he hit a few keys and the document started to print on his portable printer, which weighed less than three pounds and fit inside his laptop bag.

  “Here you go,” he said to Payne as he handed him a copy of the phone logs. Then he printed a second copy for himself, so he could take notes in the margin.

  According to the list, fifteen calls had been made to Payne’s phone from one number in Saint Petersburg, Russia. They had started at 3:59 A.M. and had ended at 11:01 A.M. That pattern changed at 11:28 A.M. when the caller switched to a pay phone—a fact confirmed by his final message.

  “Any thoughts?” Payne asked.

  “A few. Take a look at the last column.”

  The phone logs were divided into six columns, five of which were pretty straightforward. The first showed the date of the call. The second showed the time it was placed. The third showed the duration. The fourth showed the caller’s number. And the fifth showed the location.

  No problems reading any of those.

  But the sixth was a different story. It was more complicated.

  At the top of the column, there was a single word: TOW.

  No description. No explanation. No help of any kind.

  Payne and Jones tried to figure out what it meant by analyzing the column itself, but the data was an enigmatic mix of numbers and letters, separated by a dash. 18-A. 22-F. 4-C. And so on. A few of the combinations appeared more than once, always on successive calls, yet there didn’t seem to be a discernible pattern. At least not at first glance. And for all they knew, the letters might have been translated from the Cyrillic alphabet.

  Payne asked, “Is TOW an acronym?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe time of something. Something that starts with a W.”

  “Time of waking my ass up.”

  “Somehow I doubt it. In fact, now that I think about it, time won’t work at all. It doesn’t correspond with the alphanumeric codes in the last column.”

  “The what?”

  “The things with the dashes.”

  Payne smiled. “Any thoughts on what could?”

  Jones shrugged. “It might be some kind of machine code—a basic set of instructions for the phone company’s central processing unit. I’m not sure why it would be listed, though.”

  “It wouldn’t be. But I think you’re on the right track. We’re definitely dealing with a code. The only question is what kind. Why don’t you fire up your CPU and run a search? Who knows? Maybe Google can help us out.”

  Normally, Jones would have told Payne to wait, insisting that he could figure it out on his own. After all, solving mysteries was a passion of his, which was one of the main reasons that he had opened a private investigations firm in Pittsburgh when he left the MANIACs. But in this case, time was crucial, so he sat in front of his laptop and ran an Internet search for TOW.

  Hundreds of possibilities popped up on his screen, none of which seemed likely.

  But Jones kept trying, searching page after page, until something clicked. And when it did, he shook his head in frustration, pissed off that he hadn’t thought of it sooner.

  It was a look that Payne had seen many times. “Got something?”

  Jones nodded. “It’s not an acronym. It’s an abbreviation. It stands for tower.”

  “Tower?”

  “As in cell phone tower. Each letter and number combo refers to a specific area in the city. If we get a tower map, we can figure out where our mystery caller was each time he called.”

  “And how will that help?”

  “If necessary,” Jones said, “I can access traffic cameras in each of those grids and look for familiar faces. Who knows? We might get lucky and get a picture of this guy.”

  Payne frowned. It sounded like a lot of unnecessary work. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we just call the number and talk to him?”

  8

  Dial crept anonymously around the monastery—never mak ing eye contact, always blending in, never staying in one room for too long. He knew the moment he stopped was the moment someone would approach. And he wanted to avoid that at all costs.

  In his mind, there was an appropriate time to discuss a case.

  And that time was much later.

  Built in 1475, Agia Triada had been remodeled on several occasions but remained true to its post-Byzantine roots. The interior of its church was architecturally ornate, both in design and material, while the artwork was colorful and vibrant. Dial did his best to ignore the religious frescoes that surrounded him, focusing instead on the crimson puddle on the main altar.

  This was where the killings had occurred.

  More than one person had died here—that much was certain. But he wouldn’t know an actual number until he was briefed on the blood work. From the looks of things, he guessed somewhere between five and ten. They had been killed on the stone slab, then immediately dragged toward the side door. He could tell that from the thickness of the blood trail. These v
ictims, fresh from the slaughter, had continued to bleed as they were moved.

  Following the path, he left the chapel and walked toward a four-foot restraining wall. It was made of stone and designed to keep people from falling over the edge. Only in this case it hadn’t done its job. Dial noticed a large patch of dried blood near its base. The red stain streaked up the side and continued to the top, as if the bodies had been picked up and dumped over the side.

  Dial turned on his flashlight and leaned over the wall, careful not to touch anything. In the past few minutes a light fog had settled in the valley, obscuring the crime scene below. From this height all he could see were the surrounding peaks that rose above the mist like a lost city in the clouds. Yet somehow that seemed appropriate. The monks had chosen this place for its isolation, a way to avoid the dangers and distractions of the outside world. But in the end, they had neglected to consider a basic tenet of life:

  Just because you ignore the world doesn’t mean the world will ignore you.

  Since half the police force was in the church looking for evidence, Dial decided to roam the outer parts of the monastery, hoping to answer the one issue that plagued him the most.

  Why were the monks killed?

  Was this a hate crime against the Orthodox faith? A robbery gone bad? Or something more psychotic—perhaps an ex-monk getting revenge against his former brethren?

  The truth was he didn’t know and probably wouldn’t until he had a better grasp of the monastic way of life. In his mind, one of the biggest drawbacks of working for a worldwide organization like Interpol was how difficult it was to understand all the ideologies he encountered while traveling the globe. And since Dial had never visited this part of Greece, he knew he had a lot to learn about the local people and their customs.

  For him, the quickest way to shed some light on Metéora was to find somebody to talk to. Not another cop, who would be inclined to discuss the case, but someone who could help him understand the culture of the local monasteries. Preferably someone who still lived in one.

  With that in mind, Dial stopped looking for clues and started searching for a monk.

  Halfway across the complex, he saw a bright light shining under an ancient door. It was made of the same wood as the front gate but was not nearly as tall. Dial knocked on it gently and waited for a response. A few seconds passed before an old man opened it. He had a long gray beard and piercing eyes that sat deep in their sockets. A coarse robe hung off his frail frame like loose skin, as if it were a part of him. It was tied at the waist by a white cord that dangled to his knees.

  He stood there, silent, quietly studying Dial while Dial returned the favor.

  Two men sizing each other up.

  Finally, the old man spoke. His name was Nicolas. “On most days you would be asked to leave.” He reached his pale hand forward and tugged on the cuff of Dial’s short-sleeved shirt. “This is not appropriate for a house of God.”

  Dial lowered his eyes in shame. He had read the warning sign in the valley but had ignored it—mostly because he didn’t think anyone was alive to enforce the rules. Now he felt like a total ass. He hadn’t said a word, yet he had already offended the monk. “I can leave if you’d like.”

  “That won’t be necessary. There are more important things to worry about.”

  Dial introduced himself, then said, “Actually, I was kind of hoping that you could assist me with some of those things. As a foreigner, I don’t know much about Greek monasteries—as you can tell from my clothes.”

  Nicolas considered Dial’s request for several seconds before he stepped outside and closed the door behind him. “Let us walk. I’d like to show you something.”

  Without saying another word, he started the long journey across the complex. His gait was hobbled, a combination of his advanced age and the uneven surface of the stone courtyard, but he was determined to reach his destination without any help. This was most apparent when they reached the spiral staircase to the bell tower. It stood three stories high and was covered with a tiled roof. The monk grasped the handrail with one hand while lifting his robe with the other. Then he pulled himself to the top, one painful step at a time.

  “Do you know the story of Agia Triada?” asked the monk as he struggled with the stairs. “The hermits who built this place climbed to the top of the rock with their bare hands but weren’t strong enough to carry supplies. So one might wonder how they accomplished their goal.”

  Dial recalled what Andropoulos had said. “Didn’t they lift their equipment with ropes?”

  “They did, but how did they get the ropes to the top?”

  “On their backs?”

  Nicolas stopped walking. “Have you ever lifted two thousand feet of rope? Of course not. It would be far too heavy and cumbersome.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “So what did they do? How did they get the rope to the top?”

  Dial was adept at solving mysteries, but even he was stumped by this one. “I have no idea.”

  “Not even a guess?”

  “Nope. Not even a guess.”

  Nicolas reveled in victory. “My brethren used kites.”

  “Kites? How did that work?”

  “One monk stood at the bottom of the cliff and flew a kite high into the air. When the wind was right, he let it drift toward the top of the rock where another monk grabbed its tail. The long kite string was then tied to the end of a rope, allowing the monks to pull it up the cliff.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Dial admitted. “How did they come up with that?”

  Nicolas shrugged. “Give a man enough time to think and he can accomplish anything.”

  Dial smiled. He liked this guy. He had several more questions that he wanted to ask the monk, but he could see Nicolas was having trouble with the stairs. Out of respect, Dial stopped talking until they reached the top of the bell tower.

  “I’ve spent many days up here,” said the monk as he fought to catch his breath. He stared at one of the nearby peaks, ignoring the darkness and the fog that surrounded them. “This tower has the best view of the valley. And I should know. I’ve seen them all.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  Nicolas shook his head. “I haven’t lived here for many years. Not since the decision.”

  “The decision?”

  “Holy Trinity was a working monastery for several centuries. Now it is a haven for tourists, and we are nothing but tour guides. Do you know how many monks live here?”

  Dial guessed. “Twenty.”

  “One,” said the monk. “And he is now dead.”

  “Only one? What about the other victims?”

  “What about them?”

  “If they weren’t residents, why were they here in the middle of the night?”

  Nicolas shrugged. “I have not been told.”

  Dial paused for a moment, trying to think things through. He had been under the impression that the killers had broken into the monastery and slaughtered all the monks who lived here. Now he knew that wasn’t the case. With the exception of one monk, all the other monks were late-night visitors. And the reason for their visit had been kept a secret. Suddenly, Dial realized that if he could figure out that reason, then he would be a whole lot closer to catching the killers.

  “So,” Dial asked, “who’s in charge of all the monasteries at Metéora?”

  “That would be the hegumen, the abbot.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “Unfortunately, that is not possible.”

  “Why? Is it against the rules?”

  Nicolas shook his head.

  “In that case, where can I find him?”

  “That depends. Where do you take the dead?”

  Dial groaned, completely mortified. “I am sorry. I didn’t know.”

  The monk remained silent as he stared into the distance.

  “When will a replacement be named?”

  “Once we have all the answers. There are still m
any questions that need to be asked.”

  Dial knew the feeling. “In the meantime, who’s in charge of Holy Trinity?”

  Nicolas turned toward Dial and pointed to himself. “I am here, so I am in charge. I will tend to this place until a successor is named.”

  “As luck should have it, I’m in charge, too.” Dial paused for a moment, thinking. “If you’re interested, maybe we can help each other out. I can answer some of your questions if you can answer some of mine.”

  The monk smiled for the first time that night. “Yes. I would like that very much.”

  9

  Jones had spent several minutes analyzing the phone logs, focusing his attention on the coded sixth column while overlooking the simplest approach of all: dialing the number.

  “You know,” Payne joked. “For the smartest guy I know, you’re pretty stupid.”

  “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  “I did! I’ve been calling you stupid for years.”

  Jones sneered. “I meant about the phone.”

  “Honestly? I got caught up in all your excitement.”

  “In other words, you just thought of it yourself.”

  Payne shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “When you call,” Jones said, trying to shift the focus from himself, “remember to use the international code for Russia. It’s zero, one, one, seven.”

  Payne turned on the speakerphone and dialed the number that had placed fifteen of the seventeen calls. There was a slight delay before his call went through, followed by the unfamiliar sound of a foreign ring. Much different from the sound in America. More like a windup phone from yesteryear. It rang once. Then again. Then a third time. Yet no one picked up.

  A fourth ring. Then a fifth. Then a sixth.

  Finally, after the seventh ring, the ringing stopped and someone answered.

  “Da?” said the voice in Russian.

  Payne and Jones looked at each other, confused. Not only didn’t they speak much Russian—although they knew that da meant “yes”—they realized this wasn’t the same man who had left three messages for Payne. This voice was younger. More tentative.