Ancient Echoes (6 page)

Batbaatar ran to the ladder and began to climb up. “We've
got to get out! We'll be buried alive!”

Michael stared at the woman. He knew better, but couldn't help
himself, and reached out to brush back the lock of hair, his fingers delicately
traveling along her face.

Where he touched, the skin felt soft. Warm. His breathing
quickened. He lightly pressed down, and when he lifted his fingertips, her skin
reformed with the elasticity of living flesh.

Jianjun
saw,
and Michael heard his
sharp intake of breath.

How could she have been preserved this way?

And what...

He bent low and studied the strange red stone over her lips.
He had never seen or heard of a stone that particular color in nature, and
wondered if it wasn't an alloy of some sort.

More sand fell. The storm had arrived in full, violent fury.

“We can wait no longer,” Acemgul cried. He began to follow
Batbaatar out of the pit. “This will be your own tomb if you don't hurry!”

Ignoring the sand and chaos behind him, Michael glanced at
Jianjun. Jianjun understood; his shoulders slumped, everything about this felt
wrong to him, yet he nodded. “Yes. Yes, of course. You must.”

As the air of the chamber grew thick with sand and dust,
Michael kept his hand steady and used only his forefinger and thumb to grip the
red stone. He slowly lifted it from the body's mouth.

Then, unable to believe what he saw, he stood mute and
frozen in place.

The woman's eyes opened and she looked straight at him.

Jerusalem

AT THE SOUND OF footsteps running
toward her, Charlotte’s uneasiness from earlier in the day combined with her
ICE and terrorism training kicked in. She lunged inside Al-Dajani’s building to
seek a secure position.

Behind her, the guard shouted.
Then, a
sickening pop, the sound of a silencer on an automatic handgun.

Down the hall she found a narrow side corridor and spun into
it. Heart pounding, she slid her hand into her shoulder bag and gripped her
Glock.

“What's going on?” Al-Dajani flung open the door of his
office at the end of the main hall.

A stranger with frizzy, close cut black hair, an olive
complexion, and wearing tan slacks and a black sweater stepped into view. The
.357 magnum in his hand looked like a cannon.

With no word, no hint of danger, no warning, he lifted it
and fired.

“No!” Charlotte shouted. She pulled the trigger three times
in rapid succession, her unsilenced handgun loud and reverberating in the
hallway. The stranger fell.

She ran to Al-Dajani. He lay on the floor, the top of his
head a gaping black hole of hair, blood, and white matter.

Bile rose in her throat. Unbelieving, her gaze darted over
the office where she'd sat with both joy and curiosity that very morning. Blood
had splattered over the walls, furniture and floor. Then she turned to the
gunman. She'd never shot a man before.
Had never killed.
Her head swam. Something about him...had she seen him earlier?
Near the Wailing Wall?
She wasn't sure. But what if she had
been followed that day? There was no “if,” she realized. How else could the
gunman have been so close behind her when the guard unlocked the door?

If she had acted faster, shot to kill sooner, would her
friend still be alive? Had she hesitated? The thought crushed her.
If she could have saved Al-Dajani...

A police siren sounded in the distance.

With sudden clarity, she realized she had to get away. To
become involved with the Israeli police investigating a triple homicide verged
on madness.

The siren grew louder, closer.

On top of Al-Dajani's desk she saw a stack of papers about
alchemy.

His words flooded her…alchemy, the American professor,
Dennis…and she found herself snatching up the papers, clutching them tight
against her chest as if they might contain some answers. As she turned to run
from the office, she remembered hearing a slight jingle of keys as Al-Dajani
walked. His jacket lay draped over the back of the desk chair, a surprisingly
normal and homey touch considering all that had just happened. He had always
parked his car in a small lot in the back—a perk for those with offices in this
building. She reached in one pocket then the other before she found his keys.

At the door to the office, she checked to be sure there
wasn't a second gunman in the hall.

She ran to a stairway then paused, clutching the cold steel
of the railing, and listened for footsteps on the staircase. All remained
silent. She plunged down.

“What I've found is incredible,” Al-Dajani had said.

He complained about his office being broken into, and
feeling he'd been followed. Foolish paranoia, he'd called it. But it wasn't
paranoia.

The only thing that connected her and Al-Dajani was the
reason he had called her—the subject Dennis investigated before his death. Did that
cause Al-Dajani to die?

A thought, unbidden and terrifying, hit her. If someone
killed Al-Dajani now because of Dennis’ investigations thirteen years earlier,
could Dennis’ death have been—

No! She couldn’t think that. His death was because he’d been
in the wrong place…because of bad luck.

Or was it?

Al-Dajani had said she might want to know the truth.

He was right. She did.

As she exited to the street, she pushed the remote, and saw
the welcoming flash of the headlights on an older Mercedes.

She got in, and as she started the car, a tall, muscular
man, with short blond hair, a thick jaw, ran towards her from the back of a
neighboring building. He aimed his gun directly at her.

Mongolia

THE
KARABURAN
OR “black
hurricane” swept over the desert at one-hundred-twenty miles per hour, burying
everything in its path with layers of sand. This one was larger than most, a
true Sahara-like sand storm caused when individual particles of sand vibrated
and flew upward, and then slammed back to earth. As they repeatedly struck the
ground they loosened other particles that did the same thing, causing the storm
to grow and revolve, much as an ocean wave churned and swelled as it raced over
the water.

Jianjun pulled Michael out of the tomb and forced him to
hurry. Above them, the sky had turned a sickly brown. In the distance a wall of
dust, sand, and dirt rolled toward the site. It looked as if the entire desert
had been lifted up and formed a thick ochre cloud that would smother everything
in its wake.

“There's no more you can do now.” Jianjun shouted as the
wind grew louder. “You covered the coffin. It survived two thousand years; it
can survive a few more days. We'll dig it up again when the storm passes.” He
hooked one arm with Michael's, and with the other grabbed Batbaatar's shirt as
the Mongolian led them to the jeep, with Acemgul pushing from behind.

 “Get in quickly,” Batbaatar begged. He'd seen sand hit
so hard it tore the skin off a man, and he wasn't about to get stuck in it, or
to let that happen to his boss. Despite himself, he liked the difficult,
solitary American, but the man had a death wish.

They jumped onto the jeep. Michael pulled his jacket off and
covered his head and face with it. The winds advanced, swirling as if in some
wild, syncopated rhythm. Depending on how the sands hit, the entire excavation
could be wiped out in an instant, burying Lady Hsieh deep underground once
more.

Batbaatar drove as fast as he dared across the desert. The first
waves of sand punished the jeep, tossing it about as it struggled forward.
Batbaatar used every ounce of strength to control the wheel. Yet, Michael's
thoughts remained at the tomb.

Once inside the
ger
, although the storm shook its
ribbed walls, its round construction helped withstand the area’s brutal winds
.
Two sturdy wooden vertical posts supported the entire structure, while wooden
latticework framed the circular walls. Slim poles slanted upward from the walls
to form a circle at the center of the roof providing a means to vent the stove.
The walls were swathed in layers of thick, natural-colored wool with a top
layer of off-white canvas. Overlapping rugs of hides from yak and horses along
with richly patterned wool carpets covered the floor and portions of the walls.

Acemgul handed Michael a glass of
airag,
a sour brew
of fermented mare’s milk, and made him drink it straight down. Batbaatar gave
each man a bowl of hot tea laced with salt and yak milk in the Mongolian style.
Michael didn’t realize his fingertips were nearly frozen from the temperature
drop in the sunless sky until he touched the hot bowl.

 
To forget the sound of the storm, Batbaatar
took out his stringed
huqin
and began to sing traditional melancholy
songs of brave deeds of warriors past. Soon, the wind’s howls grew too loud for
even that simple pleasure. The temperature plummeted further, and they all
burrowed beneath rugs and quilts to stop shivering.

Michael leaned back against a pile of pillows, holding
another glass of
airag
. Candles cast shifting patterns on the
ger's
walls, suffusing it with a subdued and gentle mood within the raging storm.
Michael looked over at Batbaatar and Acemgul, and even Jianjun, all now
convivially joking and drinking in this land of no power lines, no fences, not
even a road sign.

He felt alone.
Again.
He shut his
eyes, hoping for the relief of sleep.

The winds grew louder, thundering around him.

She opened her eyes and looked straight at me.

Gently, Jianjun lowered the lids, and they had stayed
shut.

Her skin had been warm and soft. Jianjun saw that, too.
Or had he?

He repeated to himself she was dead, she had to be, and yet…

He tried to convince himself he only wanted to find out how
Lady Hsieh’s body could have remained without putrefaction or decomposition for
over two thousand years. He knew of a few instances of that happening, but none
for that length of time. In the west, Catholics believed the body of Saint
Bernadette of Lourdes remained preserved after death as in life. In Japan, the
tooth of the Buddhist monk, Nichiren Daishonen, honored by the Soka Gakkai
cult, was said to have a piece of the monk’s gum on it, and that the gum was
living flesh.

At the other extreme, the Soviets had tried to preserve
Lenin’s body in a glass enclosure, but it rotted away and they had to rebuild
him in wax—a sort of Communist homage to Madame Tussaud’s famous museum.

Michael had never heard of an instance of a body of someone
who wasn’t a saint or a holy man surviving unblemished. But he had no interest
in saints or sinners, no interest in the spiritual or ethereal. Cold, rational
science interested him. Or so he tried to persuade himself.

Somehow, he would find a way to sneak Lady Hsieh out of
Mongolia. Bribes might help, but somehow, he would succeed. He must.

She wasn’t just a mummified corpse to him, but much more.

He had to find out why.

The winds grew louder, thundering around him.

o0o

Michael left the
ger
hours later, drunk and
miserable, while the others slept. The brunt of the storm had passed, but the
night was cold and dark. He wanted the solitude of his own
ger
.

He paused, needing to think, but the world swayed under his
feet and he stumbled forward.

He angled toward his
ger.

It was gone.
Smashed by sand.
Blown away.

His mind couldn’t function. What had he been thinking? He
should go back inside. Back to sleep.
But not to dream.
He hated his dreams.

It must have been the rush of air entering her mouth when
I removed the red stone that caused her eyes to open that way. No other
rational explanation existed. No rational...

He raked his hands through his hair. Only here, in this
quiet loneliness, could he admit what he saw, what had both frightened yet
electrified him. When her eyes were open, they were alive. Not the flat,
unseeing eyes of the dead, but focused. Warm. They saw him, and somehow formed
an unbidden, unimagined connection. They seemed to understand his innermost,
darkest, most frightening thoughts.

The connection felt deeper, stronger, than anything he had
known before; perhaps because it had been so startlingly unexpected.
And real.
He would swear that to his dying day.

Why was he out here? Suddenly, he didn't know if he was
awake or asleep, or if this was one of those dreams so vibrant that when you
woke, you could scarcely believe it wasn’t real.

He sensed her again. Lady Hsieh. She called to him. Even as
he argued with himself about the impossibility of what he heard, something drew
him toward the
kurgans,
away from the camp, out into the open. He
couldn't fight it. He turned toward the dig.
To Lady Hsieh.
He needed to see her again, to answer her call.

He rose as straight as he could, shoulders broad and
squared, and forced his steps toward the dig.

The air remained thick and murky, the stars and moonlight dim.
All road marks had been covered by a heavy layer of sand and dust that sucked
and grabbed his boots.

Yet, he knew he headed in the right direction. She drew him
to her, led him there.
A dream, but not a dream.
He
pressed forward.

Another burst of wind and sand hit, and he pulled his scarf
low to cover his face. Head bowed, he stumbled, blinded, and then slid down a
steep embankment into nothingness.