The Iranian’s eyes grew wide, and he threw his hands up in a supplicating gesture. “No. Please. I did what you asked.”
The Chinese man glanced at Sasha again. “You need him for anything else?”
Sasha blinked, not fully comprehending the question. The man might be able to help her translate the document, but there were other ways to accomplish that. What she really needed was a computer; her computer. “I don’t think so.”
That was answer enough for the Chinese man. He adjusted the barrel of the pistol so it was trained between the captive’s eyes…
And then he abruptly pitched backward onto the ground. Before any of his cohorts could react, they too went down, pistols and flashlights clattering to the floor, the latter describing wild and random arcs of illumination before coming to rest.
Sasha stood motionless, unable to fathom what had just happened. She picked up the flashlight she had been using to inspect the document and swept it around the library. Her beam found a large figure, dressed in desert camouflage and heavily laden with military gear, emerging from behind one of the shelves. His face was partially obscured by a night vision device, and at the touch of her flashlight beam, he raised a hand to shade his eyes. Sasha saw that he held a gun in the other hand; wisps of smoke were issuing from its long barrel.
“Miss Therion!” The voice, a man’s voice, came from another direction, and she turned to see two more similarly dressed figures moving toward her from a different part of the room. “It’s Jack Sigler. Are you all right?”
Sigler?
She remembered him. One of the Delta commandos who had accompanied her in Iraq, and had tried to rescue her in Myanmar.
Her head started to pound with the effort of processing what had just happened. More variables. More chaos.
But this time, she was able to resist the pull of the vortex. She now had the key to unlocking the manuscript, and with it, the secret of the Elixir.
The solution was within her grasp. Soon, she would have the means to balance the equation, and at last, wipe away all the uncertainty.
THIRTY-NINE
King heard a voice, a low whisper. It was the Iranian man, the hostage they had saved from a triad bullet, cowering on the floor, mumbling incoherently… No, not mumbling…talking into a cellular phone.
“Bishop!”
Bishop darted forward and smacked the phone from the man’s hand, sending it flying across the room to shatter against a wall. He brandished the barrel of his carbine, thrusting it toward the man’s face. “Who did you call?” he barked, and then he repeated the question in Farsi.
The fearful hostage muttered something in the same tongue and then continued pleading.
“What did he say, Bish?” asked Queen.
“He called the police. They’re probably on their way.”
“Damn.” King continued forward until he was standing in front of Sasha. His gaze fell on the unrolled parchment. “It that it? Is that what you were looking for?”
She nodded.
King let his carbine hang from its sling and took out his digital camera. He snapped several photographs of the document before rolling it up and stuffing it into a pocket. “We need to get out of here, now.” He keyed his mic. “Rook, Knight, sitrep.”
Both men succinctly reported that everything was clear outside the dome.
“Deep Blue, this is King. It looks like we’re going to be needing that extraction soon.”
The electronic voice responded immediately as if anticipating the request. “Understood. The bird left the ground five minutes ago. ETA to the rendezvous point is twenty mikes.”
“Roger, out.” He turned to the Sasha again. “Where’s Rainer?”
She gave him a blank stare, as if unaware that he was addressing her, but then she snapped out of it. “He didn’t come. He thought the Iranians would be suspicious of a Westerner.”
King felt only a flicker of disappointment. Taking down Rainer would have been the icing on the cake, but rescuing Sasha and recovering the information to decode the Voynich manuscript was nothing to sneeze at. He gestured to the bodies on the floor. “Who are they?”
“Triad foot soldiers,” muttered Queen.
Sasha nodded. “Posing as a Chinese cultural delegation.”
That made sense. Iran and China had a cozy relationship, with the latter buying most of the former’s oil exports, keeping the regime flush with cash in spite of the sanctions imposed by Western nations. King hoped Queen’s assessment was correct and that they hadn’t just killed actual Chinese diplomats; one international incident was more than enough.
“Queen, stay with her. Bishop, check these guys for a set of keys. We’re gonna borrow their ride.”
Bishop jerked a thumb at the Iranian hostage. “What about him?”
King regarded the frightened man. “Let’s hope that when the police get here, he remembers to tell them that we’re the good guys.”
They hastened out of the library chamber and back to the dome’s entrance. Knight and Rook were waiting for them at the SUV — a Toyota Hilux Surf — and without any discussion, they piled inside. Bishop settled into the driver’s seat and started the engine, while King, in the front passenger seat, busied himself with establishing a satellite data-link. The others crowded into the rear, with Knight and Rook taking the door seats.
By the time they reached the edge of the open area surrounding the ruins, King had started uploading of the images of the al-Tusi document to Parker. Now, if they didn’t make it out, the secret to decoding the Voynich manuscript would survive. Nevertheless, he was cautiously optimistic about their prospects. It would take a while for the police to arrive, and hopefully by then, they’d be long gone, en route to the remote pick-up location several miles west of Maragheh.
His good feeling lasted about a minute, the length of time it took for Bishop to navigate through the maze of exterior ruins and around old foundations to the paved road south of the dome. There, in the small parking lot, waited another vehicle identical to their own. Several men with Asian features stood vigilantly around its exterior, and as Bishop drove past them without slowing, they all began moving, shouting and gesturing animatedly at the departing SUV.
King felt a knot of dread in his stomach. “Miss Therion, how many men were in that cultural delegation?”
Sasha seemed blissfully unaware. “About a dozen. Why?”
King sighed and shook his head. “One of these days, everything is actually going to go according to plan; I truly believe that. Bishop…drive like hell.”
FORTY
Parker felt a wave of relief at the news of Sasha’s rescue, but that did little to dull the sting of having been cut out of the operation. He couldn’t begin to imagine the hell she’d gone through, and the fact that he wasn’t there to comfort her only compounded his bitterness.
The computer chirped an alert, signaling that a download was in progress. He waited until the transfer was complete and then opened the file. There it was; Nasir al-Tusi’s instructions on how to build the device that would decode the Voynich manuscript.
He scrolled over the text, cutting and pasting it into a translation matrix, and in a matter of only a few seconds, he was able to read the Persian scholar’s words in English. He skimmed the introductory paragraphs and focused on the specifications for the urghan. Sasha had already constructed a virtual replica of the exterior body — the wooden sounding chamber that would amplify the musical tones — and the bellows system that supplied air to the pipes. All that was missing was the pipes themselves. Al-Tusi had fashioned them out of wood, and provided extensive information about the size, thickness, and shape of the pipes. The units of measurement were unfamiliar to Parker, but as he read on, he saw that even that detail was unimportant. The last section of the roll contained information on how to verify that the urghan was tuned correctly; each character of Voynich script corresponded to a specific note on the Persian harmonic scale.