43
In his apartment in New York City, a man called Nick Masters sat upright and looked at the illuminated display of his bedside alarm clock: 3.17. He’d been in bed for less than two hours. ‘Have you any idea what time it is?’ he said.
‘How long have we known each other?’ JJ Donovan asked.
‘What? You call me up in the middle of the night to ask me that?’
‘This is important. How long?’
‘Ten years, maybe twelve, I guess. Why?’
‘And do you trust me?’
‘As much as I trust anyone else in this goddamn country, yes.’
‘And I trust you, Nick, which is why I’m calling. We go back a long way. We know each other, and we’ve worked together before. I need some help. I need somebody who can handle whatever’s about to kick off out here.’
‘Where are you?’ Masters asked.
‘India. I need you and I need some of your men as well. Men who know what they’re doing. Guys with combat experience.’
‘All my people know what they’re doing. That’s why I recruit them. So what do you want from me?’
In his small hotel room in Mumbai, Donovan looked at the list he’d prepared, wondering if there was another way to achieve his aims. Then he shrugged. He had to prepare for all eventualities, and that meant assuming they might have to fight when they got to the search area. He figured that the more firepower his team could muster, the better.
‘I need at least half a dozen men on the ground, plus personal weapons and two or three four-by-four jeeps or trucks.’
Masters was scribbling notes as he listened.
‘What’s the target?’
‘I’ll get to that in a moment. I’m following two people, and they’re getting real close to something that I’ve been looking for.’
Donovan quickly explained about Bronson and Angela Lewis, and the trail he’d been following.
‘Whereabouts in India are they heading?’
‘They’ll have to fly to either Mumbai or Delhi, but they’ll be making for Kashmir, right up in the north, heading for a place called “the valley of flowers”. What I don’t know is exactly where in that valley we should be looking. That’s why you have to locate them as soon as possible. I’ll send you an email with all the data I’ve got. There’s even a photograph of Bronson. Check your inbox in five minutes.’
‘OK,’ Masters said, thinking fast. ‘The quickest way to get to Kashmir is to fly to Islamabad or Lahore, and then cross the border. I’ve got a couple of friends in the Pakistan military machine, which should solve the problem of getting weapons and vehicles into India. I’ll borrow everything I need from them, and then find a nice quiet place to slip over the border. And I’ll try to get a couple of my guys to Mumbai or Delhi right now, see if they can pick up Bronson’s trail. Whatever happens, I’ll have some of my people out there within twenty-four hours.’
‘Good. And just tread softly, will you? That part of India’s a sensitive area – I don’t want any official entanglements.’
‘I always tread softly,’ Masters replied. ‘Like the saying goes, I walk softly and carry a big stick – except that these days that normally means an assault rifle or a Browning fifty cal.’
He looked over the notes he’d scribbled down on the pad beside his bed. ‘You still haven’t told me what the target is,’ he pointed out.
Even over the satellite telephone link, there was no mistaking the suppressed excitement in Donovan’s voice.
‘You remember that tiny piece of papyrus I bought at auction ages ago? The one I named the Hyrcania Codex?’
‘Yeah,’ Masters replied, smothering a yawn. ‘You thought it might be a clue to …’ His voice died away as he recalled what Donovan had told him a couple of years earlier. For a few moments he sat there in silence. Suddenly he knew exactly what his old friend was talking about and, despite himself, he felt a sudden chill as he realized the implications.
‘You mean you’ve found something that might lead you to it?’
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ Donovan said. ‘You know that I’ve been looking for it ever since I read the translation of the papyrus text, how I’ve had my people scouring the web, checking museum databases, doing everything I could to track it down. Now I’m real close to finding it – or rather Bronson and Lewis are, because they’ve got more information than I have. And when they do find it, I’m going to take it from them.’
‘But surely it would have turned to dust after all this time?’
‘For a while, I thought so too. But now I reckon that it could still be viable, just because of where it’s hidden. If I’m right, this would be the greatest archaeological discovery in the history of the world, more important than anything that’s ever been found before. And the implications for science are just mind-blowing.’
‘You’re serious about this, JJ, aren’t you?’ Masters said slowly.
‘You’re damn right I’m serious. To recover this object, I’ll risk everything. It’s been a long search but now – right now – the end-game has just begun.’
44
In his hotel in downtown Mumbai, Bronson had just woken up. After he’d had a shower and a shave, he announced that he felt a bit better but Angela didn’t think there was much visible improvement, and told him so.
‘You still look like a jet-lagged zombie,’ she said, putting her arms round him. ‘Just a clean-shaven zombie, which is only marginally better. Come on. Let’s go and find the business centre.’
Downstairs, the receptionist directed them to a small room off to one side of the lobby. Inside were two desktop computers, a fax machine and a laser printer. Angela sat down in front of one of the desktop machines, and plugged a memory stick into one of the USB ports. A few moments later, the printer hummed and began feeding pages into the output tray.
Angela and Bronson knew they had to act as tourists and join the increasing numbers of Westerners drawn to the Leh region of India by its stark and untamed beauty. But they realized that two Westerners wandering about unescorted in some parts of that area, which had a massive military presence because of the sensitivity of the nearby borders with China and Pakistan, might well attract attention – official and otherwise. They also knew they would have to leave the tourist routes to find what they were looking for, so Angela had come up with a cover story that might help.
She had already prepared a mission statement on her laptop, basing it on one of several previous documents she had stored on her back-up disk.
The printer fell silent. Angela retrieved her memory stick, clipped the printed sheets together and tucked them in her handbag. The finished document ran to about a dozen pages and, together with her British Museum identification, it would, she hoped, be enough to satisfy any official who stopped them. According to the statement, the purpose of their journey was to carry out a preliminary survey of the evidence for pre-Indus Valley civilizations in the Jammu and Kashmir regions of India, and to determine whether a full-scale investigation in the area would be justified. The Indus Valley itself ran just to the south of Leh, so it was a plausible explanation.
Such initial explorations occurred on a regular basis all over the world and that would hopefully be enough to
