Читать книгу Library Of Gold - Alex Archer - Страница 11

Chapter 4

Sir Charles Davies had a house outside the city in Greenwich, just across the Connecticut state line, and it was there Annja found herself early the next morning. She’d wanted to see the journal for herself before listening to the rest of Charles’s proposal and he’d readily agreed. Doug hadn’t been so thrilled when she’d called to let him know she wasn’t going to make the day’s voice-over session.

“We’ve still got a ton of work ahead of us, Annja. We can’t afford to take a day off.”

“And yet that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” she said with a mischievous grin. “Unless, of course, you want me to tell Sir Charles I couldn’t possibly continue the discussion we started last night about his funding an expedition to find the lost library of Ivan the Great.”

“We can’t afford to waste any more…wait. Did you say Ivan the Great?”

“I did, but you’re right. We couldn’t possibly take a day off. I’ll tell Sir Charles I can’t make it and…”

“Wait!” Doug cried, a hint of panic in his voice. “You can’t tell him that.”

“But I thought you wanted—”

“Never mind what you thought. I’m telling you I want you to spend whatever time you need with Sir Charles. Make that expedition a reality and make sure you get broadcast rights for Chasing History’s Monsters.”

Annja had barely been able to keep herself from laughing as she’d solemnly agreed to follow Doug’s instructions to the letter before she hung up the phone.

She’d taken a taxi from the Greenwich train station and now stood outside the property’s gates, staring at the mansion just beyond. The place was enormous; at least as expansive as Roux’s place outside Paris.

Well, you knew Charles had money, right? Just what did you expect?

Definitely not this.

She was reaching for the intercom when the gates swung silently open. Clearly, someone had been watching the closed-circuit security cameras for her arrival. She glanced up at the black eye of the camera pointed at her from on top of the nearby gatepost, gave it a little wave and headed up the drive toward the front door.

Charles was waiting there in his wheelchair, a smile on his face. Next to him stood a good-looking man in his late twenties, with a mop of curly brown hair and big brown eyes. He was dressed in jeans and a button-down Oxford, Italian loafers on his feet.

This must be Gianni.

“Annja, so glad you could make it,” Sir Charles said, reaching out and shaking her hand. “And this man, my dear, is the reason I dragged you all the way out here this morning. Annja Creed, Gianni Travino.”

Bingo.

They shook hands.

“Good to meet you, Gianni.”

Annja didn’t miss the fact that he seemed to hold her hand a fraction of a moment longer than necessary.

They followed Charles inside.

“I suspect you’re eager to get started so we’ll save the tour for later and I’ll take you to the room we’ve set up, if that’s all right with you…?”

They made small talk as he led them through the house. She could feel Gianni’s gaze on her as they walked, and she assumed he was sizing her up. Her long auburn hair, athletic form and decidedly feminine curves were likely a far cry from the stuffy museum heads he’d been dealing with about the library.

Then again, he might just be admiring her for totally different reasons. And wouldn’t that be nice?

Yes, it would. She hadn’t had a date in what felt like forever; she been too busy dashing here and there around the globe on behalf of Chasing History’s Monsters, never mind her unofficial role as champion of the innocent.

Charles took them to a small room off the second floor. The diary was waiting for her in the center of the table like a long-lost friend and she went to it eagerly, pulling on the pair of white cotton gloves Charles gave her. Then he and Gianni excused themselves to go back to the meal they’d been sharing. Annja didn’t want a thing. She was too excited.

The journal was thin, bound in dark leather and tied together with a red ribbon that had seen better days. Maybe that’s why Charles Davies had tied his invitation with a ribbon. Cute. It rested on a glass platform designed so she could observe the specimen from all sides. It came equipped with two lamps, one shining down on the book from above and the other shining up on it from below. A legal pad and pencil lay on the table, in case she wanted to take notes.

Annja unzipped her knapsack, removing both her laptop and her digital camera. Booting the laptop, she connected it with a thin white cable to the camera and, after verifying the link between the two devices was working properly, began taking photos. This was so much a part of her standard procedure that it had become second nature to her. She always made a visual record of the artifact first, before beginning a more hands-on examination, and she had no intention of taking shortcuts now just because she wasn’t in the field. What she was doing was simply good science, and if there was anything she prided herself on, it was being thorough. That way, the client couldn’t ever accuse her of being sloppy or, worse yet, unprofessional. Her reputation was all she had in this line of work.

Finished with the camera, she turned her attention to the journal itself. She untied the ribbon and set it gently aside. With anticipation thrumming through her veins, she opened the book and stared at the crisp, clean handwriting on the first page. The Italian unfurled smoothly in her mind.

The morning began with a personal summons from the czar.

Three uninterrupted hours later she closed the journal and sat back. Charles and Gianni must have looked in on her, but she hadn’t noticed them and fortunately they’d let her be. The legal pad beside her was covered with notes, and a fresh set of pictures, this time of some of the journal’s pages, were displayed on the laptop. The journal was just what Gianni and, by extension, Charles had claimed it to be—a firsthand account of the design and construction of the vault commissioned by Ivan the Terrible to house the Library of Gold.

At first Fioravanti’s excitement at being chosen for such an important project had practically leaped off the page and he’d been clear and direct in his language. This changed once he began to suspect that he might never live to see the finished result. By the last several pages he’d become downright evasive in his wording.

But what had interested Annja the most was the final page of the journal. Unlike all of the others, this one was clearly in code, with a series of letters laid out in a rectangular arrangement with eleven rows of eighteen letters.

CAECPARTIZSNAIIYOI

AETPCIOUIRCIEIEUTC

WRRWODTOAAEEINMOFN

NTWTBAURYTIOHUPSUO

SNROTWESUVTKUAIASR

AECTMTSIBUNRASHYAR

LDEREGOWOTSWONIUHT

TTCUDUSIHOOASISELE

RMNINEEEREUNNGPFYD

MNOGAPIOOADTSDETUL

IEEUEFGSENRSSTOETO

It was a form of substitution code and, luckily, one she was familiar with. The trick was to lay out the message with the proper number of rows, each with the right number of letters, until something made sense when you read down the vertical rows.

After a little bit of trial and error, Annja settled on twenty-two rows, each with nine letters.

CAECPARTI

ZSNAIIYOL

AETPCLOUL

RCIEIEUTC

WRRWODTOA

AEEINMOFN

NTWTBAURY

TIOHUPSUO

SNROTWESU

VTKUAIASR

AECTMTSIB

UNRASHYAR

LDEREGOWO

TSWONUUHT

TTCUDISIH

OOASISELE

RMNINEEER

EUNNGPFYD

MROGAPIOO

ADTSDETUL

IEEUEFGSF

NRSSTOETO

Then, reading down the rows moving from left to right, Annja spelled out the entire message, inserting breaks between words where they seemed most appropriate. To her surprise, it had been coded into English.

CZAR WANTS VAULT TO REMAIN A SECRET. INTENDS TO MURDER ENTIRE WORK CREW. CANNOT ESCAPE WITHOUT AROUSING SUSPICION BUT AM SENDING A DETAILED MAP WITH GIUSEPPE FOR YOU TO USE AS YOU SEE FIT. GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN. YOUR BROTHER DOLFO.

If we could only get our hands on that map…

Charles’s confident smile. Did he already have it? Is that why he’s so convinced the journal will lead him to the library?

There was only one way to find out.

Annja took a photograph of the page containing the unbroken code and then one of the decoded message she’d worked out on her scratch pad. Afterward she packed everything up and emerged from the examination room to find Charles’s butler, a tall, thin balding man with tufts of gray hair sprouting out of his ears and dressed in a sharply pressed black suit, waiting for her.

“Sir Charles and his guest have retired to the study. Sir Charles left instructions for me to guide you there, if that would be all right with you?”

Annja indicated the hallway before them with a sweep of her arm. “Lead on.”

He took her down a few of the hallways she’d passed through earlier on her way to the examination room and then up a set of stairs to a room on the third floor. Gianni and Charles were deep in discussion over what looked to be a map—presumably of Moscow—but broke off when Annja arrived. The butler served them all drinks—Scotch for their host, espresso for Gianni and a mug of hot cocoa for Annja—and then they settled down to discuss their next steps. Annja and Gianni sat in leather armchairs in front of the desk with Charles in his wheelchair between them.

Annja didn’t waste any time asking the question that was burning her up inside.

“Do you have it?”

Charles looked at her with a cautious expression. “Have what?”

“The map, of course. Or did you think a simple substitution code was going to trip me up?”

He laughed aloud, delighted, it seemed, with both her ability to figure out the code and her attitude. He turned to Gianni and said, “Decoding that message took us, what? Seventy-two hours?”

“Seventy-four and a half,” the younger man replied, his gaze intent on her.

Annja pretended not to notice. “Since I obviously passed your test with flying colors, let’s get down to brass tacks. What exactly am I here for?”

“I should think that would be obvious by now,” Charles replied. “I want you to lead an expedition to find the lost library.”

Annja wasn’t surprised. From the moment he’d mentioned the ancient library she knew that was where he was headed. But she also knew there was much more to an expedition than just deciding to conduct one.

“While I certainly appreciate the confidence you’ve shown in me…” she began, but got no further.

Davies held his hand up. “Now just hang on a minute,” he told her. “Hear me out before you go telling me how crazy this is.”

She hadn’t been thinking quite that negatively, but waved to him to continue nonetheless.

“There have been more than eighteen well-funded attempts to find the library in the past fifty years, including two by Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. All of them have ultimately failed,” Charles said. “I have no intention of having my expedition join that long and illustrious list.

“That’s why I want to hire you, Annja. You have far more experience than any of the other expedition leaders I would be forced to consider if you turn me down. Though I’m confident you won’t,” he hastened to add.

Don’t be so sure of that.

“Money is no object, so you will have the best gear and whatever equipment you need to retrieve the library once you have confirmed its location. I will also call on my contacts in Russia to provide you whatever access and assistance you need to be successful.”

She had no doubt that his connections would be invaluable, as half the trouble on expeditions like this was securing the right to go where they wanted to go and search where they wanted to search. But she still wasn’t confident about his motives.

“What is it you expect to do with the library once we find it?” she asked.

For just a moment Charles appeared startled, as if the thought had never occurred to him.

“Is that what you’re concerned about? Rest easy, Miss Creed. If you locate—” he shook his head “—excuse me, when you locate it, the library will be turned over intact to the proper authorities inside the Russian government.”

It was a reasonable response, but Annja found herself pushing him just a bit further. “Right after you pocket a hefty finder’s fee, right?”

Charles laughed outright. “Look around you, Annja,” he said, indicating with a sweep of his hands the house, the grounds, his entire business empire by extension, she supposed. “The media claims I have more money than God and you know what? That’s probably the only time I’ve ever agreed with them. I set a record last year for the most consecutive appearances on Forbes magazine’s Top Ten Wealthiest People list. What on earth would I do with more money?”

It was the response she was looking for. The library was part of the world’s cultural heritage, a glimpse into the beliefs and practices of the past. It belonged to the Russian people and shouldn’t be locked away in some private collector’s vault.

“Good,” she said, “at least that’s settled. But we’re still faced with the issue of finding the map Fioravanti was talking about in his journal. You said you think you know where it is?”

Charles looked over at Gianni, who had been sitting patiently listening to their exchange. “Tell her,” he said to the younger man.

Annja saw the flash of excitement in Gianni’s eyes as he turned to face her. “According to what I’ve been able to discover, Ridolfo’s brother gave the map to Kasmir Nabutov, their cousin by marriage and an Orthodox priest assigned to the Cathedral of the Annunciation. Everything I’ve found on the topic suggests that Nabutov secreted the map inside the Gospel of Gold, though how or exactly where I don’t know.”

She knew that Ivan the Terrible had gifted the Gospel to the cathedral in 1571, right about the same time the library had gone missing. Legend claimed the Gospel had once been a part of the library and that it contained a clue to the library’s whereabouts, but it had been stored in the cathedral for hundreds of years with restricted access. Nobody had verified if the legend was true.

Given that they weren’t getting in to see the Gospel, Annja didn’t see how this was going to help them and said as much to the other two.

“As it turns out,” Charles replied, “I have a colleague on the staff of the cathedral. I’ve made arrangements for the two of you to privately examine the Gospel the day after tomorrow.”

The chance to see and touch the Gospel of Gold would have been enough to get her to agree to the trip. That she would be doing so as part of an expedition to find the lost library of Ivan the Terrible was icing on the cake.

Really good icing.

Now it was her turn to smile.

“So when do we get started?” she asked.