Sanskrit Cipher: A Marina Alexander Adventure

by C. M. Gleason

  Gabe was staring at her, and she saw the spike of anxiety in his eyes. “A metal-eating bacteria that works that quickly?”

  “It appears to be. We’ve got microbiologists working on the analysis, of course, but at first blush, it seems that the bacteria is inert until it’s exposed to its, uh”—she glanced at her notes to find the term—“necessary resources. No, actually, it’s inert until it’s exposed to oxygen, so if it’s kept in, say, water, it would be harmless until exposed to the air.”

  “There’s oxygen in water,” Gabe pointed out.

  Helen shrugged, scanning her notes again. “I’m not a chemist or a microbiologist. I’m delivering the facts as they’re presented to me, and based on what they took out of the canister, that’s their postulation. So the form of oxygen is apparently relevant—liquid versus gaseous.”

  “Right, of course. Just thinking out loud,” he said.

  She nodded. “What I’m getting from the report is that manganese or some sort of metal is the resource that activates the bacteria—that makes it grow or spread or multiply. The microbes might just exist in a sort of limbo in water or wherever, but once they get the right conditions—uh, resources—meaning their food, the right atmosphere, and so on, that’s when they explode and take over.”

  “How do we know the Skalas are involved—I’m guessing they left some sort of message, as they usually do?” Gabe asked.

  “Their mark was on the bottom of the canister, which Mr. Strung had thrown away. That’s how we got looped in. It’s also important to note that the canister, and all parts of it, are made from plastic, which apparently is not a resource for this bacteria.”

  Bergstrom had finished his first small Styrofoam cup of coffee, and now he lifted the second one. “And so the Skaladeskas have a fast-working bacteria that eats—or destroys—manganese. Metal. All sorts of metal. Steel. Iron. Everything. And you’re saying that over the course of several hours, this bacteria ate through enough of the bottom of a semitruck that the whole thing collapsed?”

  Helen nodded. She already knew what horrors were going through the minds of the men across from her.

  Trains. Planes. Ships. Bridges. Buildings.

  All were made from metal.

  Thirty-One

  While they waited for the pizza to be delivered, Marina listened intently—and with growing concern—while Eli filled her in on what had happened since his graduate student Patty died.

  “So three people are dead—and you aren’t, but you nearly were, twice—because of this bee?” she said when he finished.

  Eli nodded, his expression sober. “Possibly even four. I’m pretty sure Patty was the first victim, and that her death in Ladakh wasn’t just a random accident.”

  “So what about this bee could be cause for such violence? Do you have any ideas? It must be some sort of rare specimen…but what would make it so important?”

  He nodded, still holding his glass of water. “Not only rare. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like her. She’s an unusual color, and fairly small as far as Apis bees go. I haven’t seen any pictures from Patty’s notes—I haven’t taken the time to log in and look because I haven’t been on a secure network—but it has to be the same bee that came in the package from Paris over a hundred years ago.”

  “That’s pretty random,” Marina said with a frown. “Your grad student comes across a unique and rare bee, and at the same time, someone discovers it packed away in an attic from a hundred years ago.”

  He nodded. “Like you said earlier—it’s synchronicity. And you just had a dream about the same kind of bee. Not a coincidence. Something’s going on…something that has the whole universe involved.”

  Or Gaia. She exhaled, nodding. She couldn’t argue with that, considering her recent dream—or journey—with Lev. “I’ll tell you about my dream—and I want you to show me this bee—but let me take out the dogs and feed them. The pizza should be here any minute now.”

  “Mind if I freshen up a little? I’ve sort of been on the run for the last two days.” He grimaced. “I feel like Jack Ryan.”

  “Of course. You know where everything is,” she said. “Use the upstairs bathroom.”

  Boris and Adele did their business in the side yard, then, just as Marina was taking them back in, a car with a Cottage Inn sign on it appeared up the street.

  She went to grab her wallet, and when she came back out to greet the pizza delivery person, she found him talking to a man in the driveway behind Eli’s Jeep.

  “That’s for me, I think,” she said to the delivery man with a smile.

  The other man turned to her, and she saw that he was a priest. “Oh, hello,” he said. “I was just telling this man here that I was considering how to convince him to let me take that off his hands.” He gestured to the pizza with an engaging smile. “We don’t have deliveries like that where I come from.”

  Marina smiled in return and guessed from his accent, blue-black hair, and olive skin that he might be from Italy or somewhere in the Mediterranean. “Cottage Inn is an Ann Arbor staple,” she said, paying the driver and taking the pizza. Since she didn’t see a car on the street and didn’t recognize the priest as a neighbor, she said, “Are you visiting for long?”

  The delivery man was already in his car pulling out of the driveway when the priest replied. “For a short while. Are those your dogs?” He looked toward the house where Adele and Boris were barking, noses pressed to the glass sidelight on one side of the door. They did not like it when their mistress was with strange people and they weren’t there to protect her.

  “Yes,” she said, and decided it was time to end the conversation—after all, she had a hot pizza in her possession, and she was getting a too-interested, nosy vibe from the priest. “Enjoy your walk,” she added as she turned to go up the sidewalk.

  “It’s a beautiful neighborhood,” he replied, gesturing with his hand. “Birds singing everywhere, flowers in bloom, bees buzzing around.”

  Marina didn’t stop, but something about his words stuck with her as she let herself into the house, maneuvering around the dogs—who’d lost interest in the visitor outside in favor of investigating the smells coming from the flat box she carried.

  Eli bounded down from upstairs just then. His chin-length hair was damp from a shower, hanging loose and dripping on his SEX, BUGS, AND ROCK & ROLL shirt. “The pizza delivery guy was a priest?”

  Marina chuckled. “No, just someone taking a walk at the same time.”

  “That smells really good, so I’m going to eat while you tell me about your bee dream.” He grinned.

  “I’m not sure it was actually a dream,” she said once they settled back on the sofa with their plates of pizza. “I think it might have been a—a journey. Lev said I was in the Lower World.”

  “Lower World…are you talking about a shamanic-type of journey?” he asked, then started on his pizza.

  Marina was relieved that Eli seemed to have at least a basic understanding of shamanic traditions. And that he wasn’t looking at her as if she were losing her mind. “It’s never happened before, but I don’t have any other explanation. I wasn’t sleeping. I was just sitting in my chair and thinking about things, and then…well, I was gone. Somewhere. Lev was there, and there was a bee. I assumed it was that unusual pinkish color because it was in the Lower World—in the journey—but it seems as if a bee like that really exists.”

  “Did Lev speak to you in the—during the journey?”

  She nodded. “We spoke. He made his case again for why the Skalas do what they do.” She couldn’t tell Eli that every time she spoke to her grandfather, heard his arguments and listened to his emotional pleas, her determination to stay away—to reject the Skaladeskas—wavered a little more. Lev’s words were compelling, and now, after directly experiencing her connection to Gaia while in the Turncoat Don cave, she felt the personal connection even more deeply.

  “What is it, Marina?” Eli watched her intently. He even put down the pizza
he was holding.

  She couldn’t tell even Eli about what happened when Gaia released Bruce’s foot. Could she?

  “The bee was the last thing I saw in the journey—even after Lev was gone. And I heard the word ‘sacred’ in my head. I think…I think that bee is—is sacred or holy or something special.”

  He nodded, frowning as if in deep thought. “I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but the specimen came from the man who wrote a book called The Secret Life of Jesus Christ. We’ve got a holy—so to speak—connection there, nebulous as it seems.”

  She was enjoying her pizza, but not enough to keep from asking, “The Secret Life of Jesus Christ? What’s that all about?”

  Eli shrugged. “Don’t know. I haven’t really delved into that part of the mystery. Admittedly, I’ve been more focused on the Apis. But there was a letter in the same box, and Helen Darrow was able to translate a little bit of it. Something about proof—it seems that the box contained Nicolas Notovitch’s ‘proof’—presumably related to the book and whatever Jesus’s secret life was. Or is alleged to be. I haven’t gotten around to Googling it because—”

  “Because you’ve been distracted by your bee. Of course.” She smiled. “So a letter and a bee were mailed from Paris? Anything else?”

  “Other documents were in there as well—in French and Russian and, I think, Sanskrit.” Reaching for the gym bag on the floor next to the couch, he withdrew a sheaf of old, yellowed papers and plopped them onto the table with a little less care than Marina would have liked. They were, after all, at least a hundred years old.

  Many were handwritten in ink, and there were the splotches and blots that came from dipped-fountain-pen writing. Marina wiped off her hands well and looked through them briefly. She saw diagrams, sketches, photos—and yes, some Sanskrit as well as Russian and French. She paused at a grainy black-and-white photo of two Buddhist monks that had obviously been taken more than a century ago. They appeared to be standing in front of a rocky aperture.

  Eli fished out a glass jar from the bag. It was filled with wadded-up cotton bandaging. “And here she is. The star of our show.”

  He removed the jar’s lid, then carefully unrolled the delicate cotton weave to reveal the bee.

  The hair all over Marina’s body prickled when she saw it. “It looks like the one from my journey,” she said, aware that her physical response to this little being was surprisingly intense. “I’ve never seen any insect with that sort of coloring—and definitely not a bee.”

  Eli was gazing upon her—the bee, not Marina—with adoring eyes, and it took a moment before he seemed to hear her. Despite the gravity of the situation, Marina couldn’t control an affectionate smile. The man and his insects.

  When he finally looked up, he saw her smirk and grinned back. “It’s not often that a guy gets to discover a new species—although I’m not the one discovering it,” he added quickly. “Neither did Patty. Someone—maybe even a group of people—has known about and have maybe even protected these Apis for who knows how long. So it’s not a matter of discovery. But I certainly hope to study her.”

  “Protected.” Marina nodded thoughtfully. “This bee’s been protected. Yes, that’s the right word, isn’t it, considering that at least one entity—probably two—are trying to destroy the information you have so that…what? No one knows about the bee? Or are they trying to destroy the bee itself?”

  He was nodding. “Exactly. Are they trying to keep her—the bee—a secret, and thus protected and unnoticed, or are they simply trying to destroy her so no one has her? The answer is: I don’t know. We don’t know.”

  “Did you look at Patty’s notes that the tech person transferred to your account? Nice going on that, by the way. No one here at Michigan would have agreed to do that without written authorization.” She gave him a wry smile as she slid another piece of pizza onto her plate.

  “I haven’t looked yet. I want to be on a secure network before I access my files—including the ones from Patty,” he told her. “And the only reason Rindy—that was her name, the person in IT—gave me access is because apparently she saw me on NatGeo.” He gave a bashful smile and began to devour another piece of pizza. “Celebrity does have its perks, I guess.”

  “I bet it helps with grants,” she said with a knowing smile. Adele came over and gave her a nudge with her cool, damp nose. I need to go out, said the nudge.

  “Doesn’t hurt, that’s for sure. And Patty—she was a real asset to the department. She was very articulate and interesting—not to mention smart as a whip—and funny in a self-deprecating way. It didn’t hurt that she was tall, blond, and not too hard on the eyes.” He shrugged. “It sounds mercenary—yeah, totally sexist—but Patty often said the same thing herself. You know how it works. Unfortunately.”

  “I certainly do,” she replied. She knew how much funding she could get if even one of the documents in Tsar Ivan’s library came into her possession.

  But that wasn’t an option.

  “But there’s still no obvious reason why this little bee is important enough to kill,” she said, looking at the delicate, fuzzy thing while she absently scratched the patient Adele between the ears. The specimen was surprisingly intact for being an unprotected century-old. “But it’s got to have something to do with the book written by Nicolas Notovitch, don’t you think?”

  He nodded. “There was something else in the box, too, that I wanted you, in particular, to see.”

  “All right—I’ll let these two out in the back so they can chase squirrels and leaves, and then you can show me.” As soon as she stood, Adele and Boris crowded her, looking up with anticipatory eyes, shifting and dancing with excitement. Then Adele perked up and ran to the back door, barking. Boris clattered after her, barking just as loudly. “Must be a squirrel out there,” she told Eli with an apologetic grin.

  She released the still-barking dogs out the back door into the fenced-in yard. It was just turning to twilight and shadows were growing long, but that didn’t matter, because the two shepherds could see a leaf blowing across the yard at midnight.

  Just as Marina stepped back through the entrance, someone knocked at the front door. She caught sight of the figure in the sidelight as she walked toward it and recognized the priest she’d spoken to earlier.

  Maybe he was lost.

  Nonetheless, Marina opened the door cautiously. “Hi.”

  “Pardon me, ma’am…so sorry to bother you,” he said. “But I dropped my phone and now it’s not working—I need to call for my friend to pick me up.” He showed her the very damaged mobile phone. “Perhaps I could use yours? Or you could call for me? I think I know the number. It was a very nice walk, but I’m ready to leave now and I don’t have a car here, you see.” He smiled, and his brown eyes glinted with humor.

  “Yes, of course,” Marina said. “Let me just get my phone.”

  She stepped back from the door just as Eli called, “Who’s here? Everything all right?”

  “Yes, I’m just—” She stopped, the words dying in her throat when she saw that the man had pushed through the front door and was now standing in the foyer.

  The priest had a gun pointed at her.

  Thirty-Two

  “It’s good your dogs are safely outside,” said the man with the gun. He was dressed in black with a distinctive white-tab collar, but Marina strongly doubted he was actually a priest. “I wouldn’t want them to get hurt. Now let’s just move easily to join your friend, yes? Into the other room.”

  Eli had risen, obviously hearing Marina’s stifled cry of alarm. He was standing, frozen, as they came into the living room, with Marina moving slowly, since the gun was trained on her.

  “Sit here, if you please,” the man said, using the gun to point to the place she’d recently vacated on the sofa. “Dr. Sanchez, you will move to that chair, slowly and carefully, and keep your hands where I can see them.” Eli, after a brief exchange of glances with Marina, complied. The priest stood above and
behind the sofa close enough to Marina to hold the gun on her.

  “How did you find me here?” Eli demanded as soon as he was seated. “It was you, wasn’t it? You knocked me out and stole my bag, back in Champaign. How did you get here?”

  The man shrugged. “It’s of no concern now, is it? I’m already here. And I don’t anticipate this taking very long. Where is the bee?”

  But before either Marina or Eli could speak, the man’s attention fell on the specimen, which sat precisely where they’d left it. He nodded.

  “Ah, good, there it is. Now, if you could wrap it back up— I see you have a container for it, Dr. Sanchez, excellent. Just put it back in the jar and set it right on the table here for me.” He didn’t need to warn Eli not to make any sudden moves; the unwavering barrel of the firearm was far too close to Marina for anyone to take any chances.

  “What’s so important about the bee?” Marina asked as Eli complied with their captor’s demands. “Why are so many people after it?”

  The priest’s mouth tightened, turning white at the corners. “Indeed, it’s true—I’m not the only one you’ve encountered in this competition of sorts, am I, Dr. Sanchez? Unfortunately, I arrived at your meeting place with the Fetzer woman too late.”

  “She was murdered over this bee,” Eli said, his mouth so tight the words sounded chopped off. “She and Tina Janeski and Patricia Denke. And I nearly was as well. I deserve to know why.” He slammed down the jar with its burden, making a hard thunk on the edge of the table. Marina was relieved he hadn’t broken the display glass.

  Still keeping the gun directed at her, the intruder reached for the jar with his free hand and slipped it into his pocket. The barrel of the weapon didn’t so much as jiggle as he did so. “What do you think it’s all about, Dr. Sanchez? Surely you have some idea. Dr.—Aleksandrov, is it? Your theory?”

  “Are you really a priest?” she countered. He inclined his head, and she scoffed. “A priest who brandishes a gun and uses it to steal what he wants?”