star, one of the Vatican’s inner circle, if you will, and was there at the direct order of the pope himself.”
“To do what?” Annja asked.
Davenport grinned. “Spy on the Mongols, of course. Remember, it had been less than twenty-five years since Genghis Khan’s army had turned back at the Mohi River rather than continue his conquest of Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe. I’m sure more than just the pope was wondering when, or if, Guyuk was going to try again.”
“So this book—?”
“It is Curran’s personal account of his time among the Mongols,” Davenport said.
Annja frowned. “If Curran reported what he learned to the pope, why has the tomb remained undiscovered all this time?”
“That’s just it. Curran never had the chance to tell anyone what he learned, least of all the pope. He never made it out of Mongolia,” Davenport said.
Mason took up the story from there. “Apparently the group Curran was traveling with was attacked by a rival clan while deep within the Forbidden Zone, an area deep in the heart of the empire that the relatives of Genghis Khan had set aside forever as a monument to his glory. Curran managed to survive the attack itself, along with one other man. Badly wounded and left for dead, the two of them sought shelter in a mountain cave. That’s where Curran learned the location of the Khan’s tomb from his dying companion. Unfortunately for Curran, a winter storm trapped them in the cave for several weeks and he eventually succumbed from his wounds before he could make his way back to Karakorum.” Mason gestured at the diary. “It’s all in there—his impressions of Karakorum, his audience with Guyuk, the attack on the convoy, his ruminations as he lay dying all but alone in that cave.”
Knowing that the little book in the case before her contained the last thoughts of a man who had died cold and in a place far from home made her view it with even more respect than she had before. Still, something about Mason’s story bothered her.
“How do you know Curran’s companion wasn’t lying? That it wasn’t all some fever dream brought on by his impending death?” she asked.
Out came the hallmark Davenport grin. “Actually, I don’t. But nor do I have to prove that, at least not yet. All I need to know right now is whether or not the diary is the right age to actually be Curran’s. Once we determine that, we can worry about the rest. First things first.”
Annja thought about it for a moment. “Fair enough,” she replied. “I guess that means I’d best get to work.”
With the two men watching, Annja placed her backpack on the table next to the case and unzipped it. Inside were a digital SLR camera and a laptop computer. Both pieces of equipment had seen their fair share of adventures at her side and she’d come to rely on them in more ways than one.
She took out the laptop and started it up, then connected the camera to it. She fired off a few shots of the lab around her, just to test the connection. Satisfied that all was working the way it should, she put the camera down and turned back to her pack.
Annja fished out a pair of white cotton gloves from a side pocket of the bag and pulled them on. The soft material would protect the brittleness of the pages, as well as provide a barrier between them and her skin, keeping the damaging oil from her fingertips from doing the journal any harm. She might think it was a fake, but she’d treat it as authentic until she could prove otherwise. For the same reason, she laid out a wide piece of silk on the tabletop in front of her.
“May I?” she asked Davenport.
“Be my guest.”
She opened the small brass clasp holding the case closed and lifted the lid. Reaching inside, she drew out the slim volume and set it down in the area she had prepared.
Just like that, she was lost in the work. She might be a minor television celebrity—and a fierce adventurer, thanks to Joan’s sword—but that didn’t mean she’d lost her love of archaeology and the mystery and suspense that came with it. Discovering a new artifact, tracing its lineage, verifying its authenticity—it still moved and inspired her in ways that few other things could. Her awareness of the other people in the room faded as she gave herself completely to the task in front of her.
Annja picked up the camera and used it to take a full-size color photo of every single page in the book. She did the same with the inside and outside cover pages, both front and back. The pictures were immediately downloaded on to the laptop and organized sequentially. This would allow her to view the entire work without the need to handle the book itself, eliminating the possibility, no matter how slim, of it being damaged in the process. It would also let her magnify various sections, something she couldn’t do if she were working solely from the original.
Once she was finished, she put the camera away and replaced the journal in its protective case. Pulling up a chair, she settled in front of the laptop and began reading.
8
Annja was quickly engrossed in her work, so much so that she never even noticed when Davenport gestured to Mason and the two of them slipped out of the room behind her back.
The book had been handwritten in Latin in a thin, spidery script. The pages were faded and, in some cases, heavily stained, making it difficult to understand certain passages, but for a seven-hundred-year-old book it was remarkably well preserved.
She began to read.
The book was exactly what Davenport had claimed—the personal journal of a man who’d endured a long and arduous journey deep onto the Mongolian steppes on behalf of the church. Curran was an excellent writer and she soon found herself drawn into the story itself. She could sense the man’s loneliness, could feel his determination to do the job right and return home. She even ached along with him when his only companion succumbed to his wounds and died in the middle of the night. Curran’s death must have been sudden, for he hadn’t made any reference to the coming end in his journal. One day he was writing about trying to dig himself out and then the next, nothing.
She read through the entire work once, start to finish, looking for glaring problems that would instantly tell her the document was a fake. When she didn’t find any, she settled in for a more intricate examination.
The first thing she did was look for historical inaccuracies. She’d once examined a manuscript supposedly written by a Catholic priest who’d accompanied Vasco da Gama on his famous journey around the Cape of Good Hope. It had been an excellent forgery; the paper had passed the radiocarbon test, the text had been written in the dialect spoken in the area where the priest had supposedly lived at the time, even the ink had been correctly aged. The whole charade had only fallen apart when Annja reached the last page of the manuscript. The forger had added the words Societus Iesu , Latin for Society of Jesus, after the writer’s signature. Apparently he hadn’t done his homework on that little addition, for the Jesuits, a Catholic order founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola, wouldn’t come into being until fifty years after the events portrayed in the manuscript.
The trouble was that not only were Curran’s observations historically correct, as nearly as she could tell, such as the location of Guyuk’s summer encampment and the establishment of trade with parts of China, but they contained many small details that the average forger more than likely wouldn’t be aware of at all. Things like the stench that hung over the Mongol army at all times in the field due to their reluctance to bathe in rivers and streams, or the way Mongol horsemen would smear their exposed skin with yak grease to take the bite out
