Charles Brokaw - The Lucifer Code

The office was clean and tidy, the books neatly organized on the shelves, and the desk immaculate. Artefacts from the Roman and Ottoman empires that had helped build Constantinople were artfully arranged in shadow boxes. Lourds had been through Olympia’s collection before and found nothing unique. She had gathered most of the items during her grad-school years when she occasionally went out into the field on digs with archaeologists. She had proudly shown Lourds photographs of those days, but she had never pined to return to them. One of her favourite artefacts was a vase depicting an image of a young woman kneeling before a young man. Carbon dating had verified that it had come from the Mycenean period, probably around 1600 BC. It had belonged to a believer in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which had been based on the mythology of Demeter and Persephone.

Persephone was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, brother and sister gods, and she’d been seized by Hades, her uncle. Hades had taken her to the underworld to live after he’d fallen in love with her. Zeus had given his permission for the kidnapping, but Demeter had brought eternal winter to the world of mortals in her grief. At length, Demeter had freed her daughter from the underworld for nine months of the year, providing an explanation for the winter months to those people who wondered about such things. The Eleusinian Mysteries, one of the so-called Mysteries practised in the Graeco-Roman period because they continued without benefit of doctrine or written support, had been instituted to define some men and women as more godlike than others. Which, Lourds reflected wryly, was often the case with religion.

The other piece on her desk was from the Ottoman Empire at the time the Roman empire entered its decline. Olympia had found a sizeable trove of artefacts on a local dig and had received a plate depicting Osman’s Dream.

Osman I had been the nickname of the charismatic and idealistic king of the empire during its glory days. Although even during the days of its telling, the idea of Osman’s Dream was never accepted as a real event, it was nonetheless attributed to him. In his ‘dream’, Osman was driven to conquer the lands round the borders of his empire by a vision of a big tree with roots spreading through three continents. The branches had woven throughout the sky. As a result, he’d formed the Ottoman government that changed the lives of everyone living within the empire, and those who became subjects of it.

‘Sit down.’ Olympia waved him to a chair while she knelt in front of her bookshelf. ‘If you’re going to keep anything secret in your office, where should you keep it?’

‘On the lowest shelf,’ Lourds replied immediately. ‘All the other professors will probably be too old and fat to get at it. And the young ones will be too proud to search.’

Despite her tense mood, Olympia laughed. ‘And if that isn’t the case, most of them aren’t athletically inclined enough to get up quickly. So if they’re snooping, you’ll catch them.’

Lourds placed his backpack between the chair and the wall out of the way, then sat.

‘Do you have the book with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you haven’t written down the translation?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t write down any translation. I don’t want it to fall in the wrong hands.’

‘And whose hands would be wrong?’

‘For starters, the men you ran into down in the catacombs.’

‘They know about the Joy Scroll?’ Lourds asked.

‘Of course they know about the Joy Scroll. Why do you think they tried to kidnap you?’

‘Actually, they did kidnap me.’

Olympia found what she was looking for, then stood and returned to her desk.

‘That’s not a book,’ Lourds observed.

‘It’s a thumb drive. It’s better than a book.’

Lourds groaned in disgust.

That earned him a sharp look of reproach. She wagged the thumb drive under his nose. ‘I can carry more books on this one device than you can pack into this room.’

Lourds held his hand up in mock surrender. He preferred books, enjoying the smell and the heft of them, as well as the solid link to the past they represented. A book was more informal than an electronic document. A book was a personal experience for the reader.

Olympia plugged the thumb drive into the USB port on her computer and booted it up. She turned the wide-screen monitor so Lourds could easily see. Then she looked at him.

‘You’re familiar with John of Patmos?’ she asked.

That sharpened Lourds’ attention immediately. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but that name was certainly not one of them.

‘John the Divine?’ he asked.

‘Exactly.’ Olympia gazed at him. ‘As I said, Thomas, this is huge and it’s important.’

‘Tell me we didn’t lose our subject,’ Colonel Anthony Eckart snarled as he walked through the college hallways. Students quickly got out of his way. He was used to that kind of reaction. Head on, he looked like trouble.

In his early forties, he kept himself in shape with a strict diet and physical regimen. Whenever he could, even in the field, he ran ten miles daily and did solid PT. Off-duty, he hit the gym and dojo wherever he lived in whatever country he happened to stay. He stood six feet three inches tall in his stocking feet and wore a size 48 jacket. These days he kept his head shaved skin smooth. Scars showed there and on his face, giving him a hard look that frightened people away. To blend in with the college crowd, he wore black Dockers, a black turtleneck and a sports coat cut to hide the longslide Colt.45 semi-automatic pistol holstered under his arm. In a pinch, he didn’t need a weapon. He knew over a hundred ways to kill a man with his bare hands.

‘We didn’t lose him,’ Jude Mayfield replied over the earwig Eckhart wore. ‘Guy went into the building there. We’ve got all the entrances covered. He hasn’t come back out.’

Eckart walked as quickly as he could without missing an opportunity to peer into the various rooms along the hall. Occasionally a student or member of faculty would meet his gaze, but they quickly looked away.

‘Are we connected with the college security net yet?’ Eckart asked.

‘That’s affirmative,’ Beale replied. He was running com for the team. ‘If they get a squeal, we’ll know about it.’

The next door was closed. Eckart approached it and turned the knob, but found it locked. Cursing beneath his breath, he reached into his jacket pocket for a pneumatic driver. No longer than a screwdriver, the device held pneumatic charges that drove a bolt through the end.

Eckart pressed the driver’s barrel against the lock and pressed the button. He muffled the solid ca-chunk of the device operating with his body and felt his hand jump. But the expended force blew the locking mechanism into the room. He opened the door and peered inside in case Lourds was hiding there.

The room was empty.

Cursing again, Eckart once more took up the hunt.

‘Has anyone figured out why the subject rabbited from the tower?’ Eckart demanded.

No one answered for a moment.

‘Whatever it was,’ Mayfield said, ‘it wasn’t us. We had him under surveillance, but he didn’t know we were there.’

‘Maybe we aren’t as alone here as we think we are.’ Eckart hated the way they had veered from their game plan. Trying to find someone on the move through unknown territory wasn’t easy. They didn’t have the home-court advantage, and they couldn’t operate with impunity.

He wished he could’ve stayed in Saudi Arabia and seen the fallout from the assassinations he and his team had put together. That had to have spooked Prince Khalid. Judging from the television footage coming out of King Abdullah Economic City, Khalid was gearing up and preparing for war. Or, better yet, retribution. That was what Webster had wanted. As a result, other Middle Eastern states as well as India, Pakistan and China were all on high alert. The moment someone made a wrong move there, those nations would be at each other’s throats.