Steve Berry: The Balkan Escape (Short Story): A Cassiopeia Vitt Adventure

The Balkan Escape is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Ballantine Books E-book Original

Copyright © 2010 by Steve Berry

Excerpt from The Emperor’s Tomb copyright © 2010 by Steve Berry

All Rights Reserved.

5 YEARS AGO

Cassiopeia Vitt wasn’t sure if they would kill her now or later. But they would kill her, that much was certain.

Or at least they’d try.

Which meant she needed to do something, but her options were limited. Her hands were bound behind her back with nylon twine, her feet chained to the rock wall that encased her like a dark cocoon. She was deep in the Rila mountains, more than two hundred kilometers south of Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, alone. Worse, no one knew her location, and the deep cirques, sharp peaks, and glacial moraines surrounding her were among the remotest in the Balkans.

She’d arrived yesterday, finding the camp at the base of a forested slope.

A low methodic hum rising from one of the tents, and two black cables snaking a path into the mountain, signaled a generator. She was just about to follow their trail and enter the cave when a man appeared in the entrance. He was short, thick through the shoulders, with tanned features and a thin mustache. He wore sooty blue coveralls with butterfly stains in both armpits. Surprise flooded his face when he spotted his visitor, but it quickly vanished .

He said something to her in Bulgarian. Slavic languages were not her strong point, so she tried English. “I was in the village and learned of your camp. I thought I would have a look.”

He carried a pick and shovel, which he set aside. “Afraid there is not much but archaeologists digging for bones.”

The English was clean and crisp, only a hint of a Russian accent .

“That’s fascinating,” she said, but she thought about how the person in town, who’d pointed her this way, had said the men identified themselves as rock hounds .

“It is cold and dirty in there, and not many bones.” He squatted down and rested his legs. “Feels better out here in fresh air.”

He slipped a pack of cigarettes from a pocket and offered her a smoke. She declined, and he lit one for himself with a disposable lighter. The man said his name was Petar Varga .

“How long have you been here?” she asked .

“Too long. I think this is bad idea. Dry cave, yes?” He enjoyed his cigarette .

“A university sponsoring the dig?”

He stood. “More than one. But this is small project. Exploratory. Just seeing what earth will yield.”

“I have always been fascinated by archaeology,” she said. “Think I could see the dig site?”

He cocked his head and frowned. “Pretty tight space in there.”

She flashed a smile. “I’m not afraid.”

He flicked his cigarette to the ground. “Why not? Come, I show you around.”

“Get up,” she was told.

They’d come for her.

Two men with guns.

She was unchained and led back into the same tunnel that Varga had shown her yesterday. Narrow at first, but fifteen meters into the mountain it opened to nearly two meters wide. Weak bulbs periodically dissolved the darkness, revealing sharp walls, the floor a mixture of sand and gravel. Offshoot tunnels opened into more black chasms. Their level changed twice and rose steadily. The air hung thick and fetid, like a basement flooded after a storm.

Ahead, the passage ended in the same rectangular chamber she’d seen yesterday, about twenty meters long with a low ceiling of jagged rock cast in a bluish tint by steaming halogens. At the far end was what appeared to be an altar—a rectangular slab of blackened stone supported by round pillars, the structure elevated by a platform hewn from the floor’s rock.

Behind the altar were faint wall frescoes.

A hunting scene in which a boar was attacked by a horse-mounted hunter and a naked man wielding a double ax. She knew the double ax represented royal power, while the naked man signified Zalmoxix, the Thracian solar god. The artwork had triggered Varga’s mistake yesterday when he incorrectly identified them as Roman. Her mistake had come when she hadn’t made a speedy retreat.

A new man waited for her near the altar.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a narrow waist and matching hips. A tiny nose with a slight bump protruded from his round face, and strands of black hair brushed the tips of his ears. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt.

“I am Lev Sokolov,” he said to her, his English infused with an even thicker Russian flavor. “I have been told to question you.”

“By who?”

“Russians. They control here.”

“The last time I looked, Bulgaria was an independent nation.”

He shrugged. “Maybe so. But the Russians control here.”

“What’s so special about this place?”

“Why are you here?”

She couldn’t say that Henrik Thorvaldsen had asked her to check out the locale. Her Danish friend, fascinated by anything lost and twenty times wealthier than she could ever hope to be, had stumbled onto the possible location of an undiscovered Thracian tomb.

Which was rare.

The Thracians were a warlike, nomadic people who’d settled the central Balkans nearly 5000 years ago. They were first mentioned in the Iliad as allies of the Trojans against the Greeks, and Herodotus cynically noted that they sell their children and let their wives commerce with whatever men they please . Two and half millennia ago they dominated the mountains of northern Greece and what would later become southern Bulgaria. Eventually conquered by Alexander the Great, then reconquered by the Romans, they were finally assimilated by Slavs in the 6th century. They developed no written language and left no trace of their existence, save for tombs littered with fabulous gold and silver treasures. Most had been found farther north, in central Bulgaria, in what had been dubbed the Valley of the Thracian Kings. But Thorvaldsen had happened on to the location of a more obscure site, to the south. A place that had once been a vital part of ancient Thrace, whose residents had named the mountains Rila—meaning “well watered.” He’d hoped that the site might prove virgin. Unfortunately, others had found it first.

And they weren’t after treasure.

“I’m on holiday and have never seen this part of Bulgaria,” she said to Sokolov.

“Ms. Vitt, you are important. You own multibillion-dollar corporation, inherited from your father. You own grand estate in southern France. Woman like yourself, a person of great means, does not take holiday in these mountains.”

They’d confiscated her passport yesterday after taking her captive, and clearly somebody had been busy.

“What do you plan to do?” she asked. “Hold me for ransom?”

“I simply ask, why are you here?”

She caught something in Sokolov’s eyes, a gentle request that she answer honestly. She wondered if the two other men, who stood on the far side of the chamber, understood the conversation. Their actions did not indicate that they were even listening.

“This is a Thracian tomb,” she said, opting for the truth.

“I wondered who built it,” Sokolov said. “How old is it?”

“Probably third to fifth century BCE.”