“And he’s not anywhere in Europe, Russia, or Ukraine, I’ve already made certain of that,” Soraya said. “Do you know why he’s gone to ground?”
“Dimitri Maslov, his old mentor, has taken out a fatwa, or whatever the Russians call it, on him.”
“I can understand why,” Soraya said. “Maslov hired him to get the arms business from Nikolai Yevsen, which is what he was doing in Khartoum several weeks ago. Instead he made off with Yevsen’s entire client list, which was stored on a computer server.”
“Well, the word is that Maslov caught up with Arkadin in Bangalore, but was unable to either kill or capture him, so now he’s vanished.”
“In this day and age,” Soraya said, “no one can vanish, at least for long.”
“Well, at least now you know where he isn’t.”
“True enough.” Soraya thought a moment. “I’ll get someone to run through immigration security tapes in the Americas, maybe Australia, too, and see what they come up with.”
David Webb had been to Oxford University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the English-speaking world, twice that Bourne could recall, though, of course, there could have been more visits. In those days the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents had been located in the university’s Classics Centre at the Old Boys’ School in George Street. Now it was housed in a new home, the ultramodern Stelios Ioannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies at 66 St Giles’, as incongruous to the study of ancient languages as it was to Oxford’s stately eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings. This part of St Giles’ was in the center of Oxford, an ancient city whose charter had been enacted in 1191. The center was known as Carfax, a word derived from the French carrefour, meaning “crossroads.” And indeed, the four great thoroughfares of Oxford, including High Street, met at this juncture, as famous in its own way as Hollywood and Vine, and with a whole lot more history.
Chrissie had phoned her friend, a professor by the name of Liam Giles, before they started out from London. Oxford was only fifty-five miles away, and it took them just over an hour to get there using her old Range Rover. Tracy had given it to her when she started traveling so much.
The city was precisely as he remembered it, transporting all who arrived there back in time to an age of top hats, robes, horse-drawn carriages, and communications by post. It was as if it and all its inhabitants had been preserved in amber. Everything about Oxford belonged to another, simpler age.
By the time Chrissie found a parking spot the sun had begun to peer out from behind voluminous clouds, and the day had begun to warm, as if it might really be spring. They found Professor Liam Giles ensconced in his office, a large space set up as a workroom-cum-laboratory. Shelves were filled with manuscripts and thick hand-bound books. He was bent over one of them, scrutinizing a copy of a papyrus with a magnifying glass.
According to Chrissie, Professor Giles was the Richards-Bancroft Chair of the department, but as he glanced up Bourne was surprised to see a man of barely forty. He sported a prominent nose and chin and was balding, small round glasses pushed up onto his ever-expanding forehead. He had fur on his forearms, which were also short, like a kangaroo’s.
Bourne’s one concern about returning to Oxford had been that someone would recognize him as David Webb. But even though faculty members hung on decade after decade the university was huge, encompassing many colleges, and they were far from All Souls, the college where he had made several guest lectures.
In any event, Giles accepted him as Adam Stone. He seemed genuinely happy to see Chrissie, asking after her solicitously, and after Scarlett, whom he clearly knew personally.
“Tell her to stop by sometime,” he said. “I have a little surprise for her that I think she’ll like. I know she’s eleven, but she’s got the mind of a fifteen-year-old, so this ought to tickle her pink.”
Chrissie thanked him, then introduced the enigma of the ring’s curious engraving. Bourne handed the ring over and Giles, switching on a special lamp, studied the engraving on the inside first with the naked eye, then through a jeweler’s loupe. He went to a shelf, took down textbooks, leafed through them, his forefinger moving down the large pages of dense paragraphs and small, hand-drawn illustrations. He went back and forth between the texts and the ring for some time. At last he looked up at Bourne and said, “I think it will help if I can take some pictures of the item in question. Do you mind?”
Bourne told him to go ahead.
Giles took the ring to a curious mechanism, which looked like the end of a fiber-optic cable. He carefully clamped the ring so that the filament was in its center. Then he handed them goggles with treated dark lenses, slipped on a pair himself. When he was sure they were protected, he typed two commands on a computer keyboard. A series of mini-flashes of blinding blue light ensued, and Bourne knew that he had activated a blue laser.
The silent outburst was over almost as soon as it had begun. Giles removed his goggles, and they did the same.
“Brilliant,” the professor said as his fingers flew over his keyboard. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”
He turned on a plasma screen inset into the wall, and a series of high-definition photographs-close-ups of the engraving-appeared. “This is how the writing appears to the naked eye, being engraved on a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree surface. But what,” he said, “if it was meant to be read-or seen-on a flat surface, like most writing?” Here he manipulated the digital images until they merged into one long strip. “What we’re left with is what appears to be one long word, which seems improbable.” He zoomed in. “At least, that’s how it appears on the circular surface of the ring. However, now, in its flat form, we can see two breaks, so that what we’re actually looking at are three distinct groups of letters.”
“Words,” Bourne said.
“It would seem so,” Giles said with a mysterious lilt in his voice.
“But I see some cuneiforms,” Chrissie said. “I reckon they’re Sumerian.”
“Well, they certainly look Sumerian,” Giles said, “but in fact they’re Old Persian.” He slid one of the open texts toward her. “Here, take a look.” As she was doing that he addressed Bourne. “Old Persian is derived from Sumero-Akkadian, so our dear Christina can be forgiven her error.” The affection with which he said this punctured the pompousness of the statement. “However, there’s a crucial difference between the two without which decipherment is impossible. Akkadian cuneiforms represent entire syllables, whereas the cuneiforms of Old Persian are semi-alphabetic, which means each one represents a letter.”
“What are the Latin letters doing mixed in?” Chrissie said. “And those unknown symbols, are they a language?”
Giles smiled. “You, Mr. Stone, have presented me with a most curious-and I must say damn exciting-mystery.” He pointed to the screen. “What you see here is a composite of Old Persian, Latin, and-well, for lack of a better term, something else. I reckon I’m familiar with every ancient language mankind has discovered and cataloged, and this one is a definite outlier.” He waved a hand. “But I’ll get back to that presently.”
He moved his mouse pointer horizontally just below the engraving. “The first thing I can tell you is that there is no such thing as a composite language-cuneiform and letters just don’t mix. So if this isn’t a language, per se, exactly what is it?”
Bourne, who had been studying the line of the engraving, said, “It’s a cipher.”
Giles’s eyes widened behind the lenses of his glasses. “Very good, Mr. Stone. I applaud you.” He nodded. “Indeed, this seems to be a cipher, but like everything else about this engraving, it’s of a curious sort.” Here he once again manipulated the image, literally rearranging the blocks, separating the Old Persian cuneiforms and Latin letters into two distinct groups, the third group being the “letters” of the outlier language.