Actually, Dmitry wasn’t sure why they’d been sent to follow Boris Glukov. The man was an academic who had embraced the new capitalism and turned his back on Mother Russia. Other than that, he was just an overly educated man who had an unhealthy interest in the past.
“The American left the Frenchwoman in his tent.”
“Dominique is in his tent?”
“Yes.”
That interested Dmitry only slightly. The Frenchwoman was easily ten years younger than Lourds. He hadn’t made a play for her at the communal dinner they’d joined in with the Germans, but Dmitry had known she was interested in the American professor. Mostly because of that book Lourds had written. The bedroom one, not the Atlantis one.
“And he left her to go see Boris Glukov?”
“Yes.”
Dmitry sat up and reached for his pants, pistol already in hand. “Then we should go investigate what is going on.”
Even though this was a terrible assignment, Dmitry was not going to let a chance to get back in the good graces of Moscow pass. He pulled his pants on, tucked the pistol into the back of his waistband, and reached for his shirt.
Lourds walked up to Boris’s tent as quietly as possible. He played his flashlight beam over the front of the tent and leaned down. “Boris.” He had to repeat himself three times before his friend responded.
“My God, Thomas, is that you?”
“Yes.”
Boris groaned. “What do you want?”
“I figured it out.”
“You should be with Dominique. She’s young. She doesn’t need her sleep. I do.”
“I figured out the riddle.”
Inside the tent, everything was quiet for a moment, then Boris thrashed around. He shoved his head through the ten flaps. It was a massive head. Bushy and kind and large and gentle-featured, Boris was a man who was equal parts intimidation and kindness. Men often feared him when he scowled at them, but children always seemed to know his heart and that he would never harm them.
“You solved the riddle!” Boris sounded incredulous.
“Yeah.”
Boris let go the tent flaps, grabbed Lourds’s head between his hands, and kissed him between the eyes. “You solved the riddle.”
“I did.” Lourds staggered back.
“You’re drunk.”
“Not nearly so much as I was earlier. Come, my friend. Let’s take a walk.”
2
Lourds trudged along beside Boris as they climbed the incline up the mountain. He wore one of his friend’s coats, which was too big and caught the wind more than deflected it. He carried the tools they would need in a bag in his right hand.
Boris was a fireplug of a man, a couple inches under six feet tall and at least fifty pounds overweight. Years of walking from one dig site to another had kept him fit, though, and he easily matched Lourds’s longer stride. His bushy, black hair was going gray at the temples, giving him a sophisticated look that didn’t go with the wrinkled khaki shirt and pants. He looked like a classic, Russian hard-line politician, but he dressed like a bum. He added his flashlight beam to Lourds’s, forming a big pool of yellow that lit up the craggy ground festooned with rocks.
“How did you figure it out?”
Lourds smiled. “I’d rather show you first.”
Boris Glukov was one of the foremost authorities on Hellenistic Greece. The timeframe began with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, and ended in 146 BCE, when Rome annexed the Greek peninsula and outlying islands.
Several times over the past few years, and over Finlandia Vodka, Lourds had heard Boris wax eloquent over some aspect of Alexander’s empire getting broken up and the resulting wars as the world seemed to turn against Macedon.
The period was rife with colorful characters as well. Ptolemy was left in Egypt to carve out an empire for himself, more or less. He had even arranged for the body of his friend and compatriot, Alexander the Great, to be brought to Memphis, Egypt, to consolidate his power. Those efforts were renewed when Ptolemy’s son, Ptolemy II, succeeded his father.
Philip V of Macedon had fought to keep the country free of Rome and had even brought peace to his people and the Greeks, temporarily holding the Empire at bay. His fatal mistake had been in forging an alliance with Carthage, Rome’s bitterest enemy.
Glukov loved the history that followed Alexander the Great, and in that, he had a bond with Lourds, who loved the Ancient Library of Alexandria. The Ptolemys had been the stewards of that great repository of knowledge.
The library had burned in 48 BCE, when Julius Caesar set fire to his ships in the harbor to thwart Achillas’s blockade. Lourds could only imagine how surprised the Egyptian general had been when he saw the Roman ships burning to the waterline, set ablaze by the same man that commanded them.
Lourds loved the idea of the library. Legend had it that the great library housed most of the knowledge of the known world at the time. There were still rumors and myths that not all of the library had burned that day. There were some who insisted parts of it had been carted off and hidden away.
Although none of the rumors had yet turned out to be true, Lourds believed that some of it must have survived. He’d spent a considerable portion of his life trying to find those caches.
“I was very fortunate when I found that scroll.” Boris referred to the scroll that had brought Lourds to the dig. Finding the scroll had been, as many archeological finds had begun, a fluke. Of course, archeologists and historians — and linguists, truth be told — hunted such flukes. He walked at Lourds’s side, and his face looked pale in the moonlight. “There are so many things that have been lost throughout history.”
“It’s good for us that many of them insist on being found.”
“That’s because some things are never meant to be hidden from the sight of man forever.”
Lourds didn’t think about disagreeing, but he knew that wasn’t true. The Vatican had some of the Atlantean scrolls, one of them in particular that would change the way people looked at the story of the Flood. There was another scroll that had lifted a Great Evil from the world, and that scroll would never be seen again. And more recently, there was another scroll, now in the hands of the Israelis, that would have ignited a religious war that might have consumed the world.
There were some things that were meant to be hidden away forever.
Boris continued. “I tell you, I was flummoxed. There I was, standing in a marketplace in Herat, looking at a document that was easily two thousand years old, and the man I bought it from had no idea what he had. But he saw my interest, and he gouged me with bloodthirsty enthusiasm.”
That was how things were in the Middle East. There was so much history in that area that a trained scholar couldn’t go anywhere without tripping over some forgotten historic record or ages-old document. The worst part about it was that so many of the people in possession of those things didn’t know what they had.
Of course, that could be said about the United States as well. In a country not quite two hundred and fifty years old, there were still many things that had been lost and subsequently found. The extra copy of The Declaration of Independence that had been found behind a painting only a few years ago was a good case in point. The possible number of things that had been lost in countries thousands of years old was staggering. And so many of those lost items were documents of one type or another. Some of them were on clay tablets, papyrus, even on turtle shells.