The Lost Throne

“Fire away.”

“Where did they come from?”

Raskin glanced at his middle screen. It was flanked by several others, all of them filled with data for other projects. “As far as I can tell, the calls came from three different sources. But the majority of them were placed in one city: Saint Petersburg.”

“Saint Petersburg? We’re in Saint Petersburg.”

Raskin shook his head. “Sorry, dude. Wrong Saint Petersburg. I’m talking about Russia.”

Payne hung up, more confused than before. “Someone’s calling me from Russia? That makes no sense. I haven’t been there in years.”

Jones said nothing as he waited for the file to appear on his screen. When it did, he hit a few keys and the document started to print on his portable printer, which weighed less than three pounds and fit inside his laptop bag.

“Here you go,” he said to Payne as he handed him a copy of the phone logs. Then he printed a second copy for himself, so he could take notes in the margin.

According to the list, fifteen calls had been made to Payne’s phone from one number in Saint Petersburg, Russia. They had started at 3:59 A.M. and had ended at 11:01 A.M. That pattern changed at 11:28 A.M. when the caller switched to a pay phone-a fact confirmed by his final message.

“Any thoughts?” Payne asked.

“A few. Take a look at the last column.”

The phone logs were divided into six columns, five of which were pretty straightforward. The first showed the date of the call. The second showed the time it was placed. The third showed the duration. The fourth showed the caller’s number. And the fifth showed the location.

No problems reading any of those.

But the sixth was a different story. It was more complicated.

At the top of the column, there was a single word: TOW.

No description. No explanation. No help of any kind.

Payne and Jones tried to figure out what it meant by analyzing the column itself, but the data was an enigmatic mix of numbers and letters, separated by a dash. 18-A. 22-F. 4-C. And so on. A few of the combinations appeared more than once, always on successive calls, yet there didn’t seem to be a discernible pattern. At least not at first glance. And for all they knew, the letters might have been translated from the Cyrillic alphabet.

Payne asked, “Is TOW an acronym?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe time of something. Something that starts with a W.”

“Time of waking my ass up.”

“Somehow I doubt it. In fact, now that I think about it, time won’t work at all. It doesn’t correspond with the alphanumeric codes in the last column.”

“The what?”

“The things with the dashes.”

Payne smiled. “Any thoughts on what could?”

Jones shrugged. “It might be some kind of machine code-a basic set of instructions for the phone company’s central processing unit. I’m not sure why it would be listed, though.”

“It wouldn’t be. But I think you’re on the right track. We’re definitely dealing with a code. The only question is what kind. Why don’t you fire up your CPU and run a search? Who knows? Maybe Google can help us out.”

Normally, Jones would have told Payne to wait, insisting that he could figure it out on his own. After all, solving mysteries was a passion of his, which was one of the main reasons that he had opened a private investigations firm in Pittsburgh when he left the MANIACs. But in this case, time was crucial, so he sat in front of his laptop and ran an Internet search for TOW.

Hundreds of possibilities popped up on his screen, none of which seemed likely.

But Jones kept trying, searching page after page, until something clicked. And when it did, he shook his head in frustration, pissed off that he hadn’t thought of it sooner.

It was a look that Payne had seen many times. “Got something?”

Jones nodded. “It’s not an acronym. It’s an abbreviation. It stands for tower.”

“Tower?”

“As in cell phone tower. Each letter and number combo refers to a specific area in the city. If we get a tower map, we can figure out where our mystery caller was each time he called.”

“And how will that help?”

“If necessary,” Jones said, “I can access traffic cameras in each of those grids and look for familiar faces. Who knows? We might get lucky and get a picture of this guy.”

Payne frowned. It sounded like a lot of unnecessary work. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we just call the number and talk to him?”

8

Dial crept anonymously around the monastery-never mak ing eye contact, always blending in, never staying in one room for too long. He knew the moment he stopped was the moment someone would approach. And he wanted to avoid that at all costs.

In his mind, there was an appropriate time to discuss a case.

And that time was much later.

Built in 1475, Agia Triada had been remodeled on several occasions but remained true to its post-Byzantine roots. The interior of its church was architecturally ornate, both in design and material, while the artwork was colorful and vibrant. Dial did his best to ignore the religious frescoes that surrounded him, focusing instead on the crimson puddle on the main altar.

This was where the killings had occurred.

More than one person had died here-that much was certain. But he wouldn’t know an actual number until he was briefed on the blood work. From the looks of things, he guessed somewhere between five and ten. They had been killed on the stone slab, then immediately dragged toward the side door. He could tell that from the thickness of the blood trail. These victims, fresh from the slaughter, had continued to bleed as they were moved.

Following the path, he left the chapel and walked toward a four-foot restraining wall. It was made of stone and designed to keep people from falling over the edge. Only in this case it hadn’t done its job. Dial noticed a large patch of dried blood near its base. The red stain streaked up the side and continued to the top, as if the bodies had been picked up and dumped over the side.

Dial turned on his flashlight and leaned over the wall, careful not to touch anything. In the past few minutes a light fog had settled in the valley, obscuring the crime scene below. From this height all he could see were the surrounding peaks that rose above the mist like a lost city in the clouds. Yet somehow that seemed appropriate. The monks had chosen this place for its isolation, a way to avoid the dangers and distractions of the outside world. But in the end, they had neglected to consider a basic tenet of life: Just because you ignore the world doesn’t mean the world will ignore you.

Since half the police force was in the church looking for evidence, Dial decided to roam the outer parts of the monastery, hoping to answer the one issue that plagued him the most.

Why were the monks killed?

Was this a hate crime against the Orthodox faith? A robbery gone bad? Or something more psychotic-perhaps an ex-monk getting revenge against his former brethren?

The truth was he didn’t know and probably wouldn’t until he had a better grasp of the monastic way of life. In his mind, one of the biggest drawbacks of working for a worldwide organization like Interpol was how difficult it was to understand all the ideologies he encountered while traveling the globe. And since Dial had never visited this part of Greece, he knew he had a lot to learn about the local people and their customs.

For him, the quickest way to shed some light on Meteora was to find somebody to talk to. Not another cop, who would be inclined to discuss the case, but someone who could help him understand the culture of the local monasteries. Preferably someone who still lived in one.