"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 succ.u.mbed 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 bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sages, 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 succ.u.mbed 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 doc.u.ment 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 ma.n.u.script 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.n.u.script. The forger had added the words Societus Iesu 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 ma.n.u.script.

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 hors.e.m.e.n would smear their exposed skin with yak grease to take the bite out of the winter wind on the high plains.

She stopped looking for historical errors after a few hours and turned instead to linguistic ones. Language grows and changes, just like any other organic element, and a good historian can also spot a forgery by the way certain words or phrases are used within a text.

Annja struck out there, too.

Her doubts about the authenticity of the ma.n.u.script were starting to take a beating in the face of what she was reading. So far, the ma.n.u.script had pa.s.sed every test.

Knowing she'd been at it for hours, she got up and stretched a bit. She noticed a small serving tray had been left by the door at some point, and lifting the lid she discovered a plate of turkey sandwiches, complete with cranberry sauce and a bed of lettuce, along with a soft drink that was still icy cold. She gratefully dug in.

When she finished eating, she decided to give the text a rest and turn her attention to the map that had been hand drawn in the back of the journal.

She was in the midst of rereading the doc.u.ment for the sixth or seventh time when she saw a key piece of the puzzle. Several words on the page started with a funny little curlicue, as if the writer had left the pen on the page for a few seconds too long. At first, she thought it was just an artifact of the particular pen the author had used. Perhaps its point hadn't been cut properly and the ink had pooled where it shouldn't have. But then she began to notice that there wasn't a consistency to its appearance. On one page a word starting with the letter T T would have the little curlicue, but two pages later the same word would not. would have the little curlicue, but two pages later the same word would not.

Curious, she went back to the beginning and began to flip through the images of each page, looking for the strange little mark. Her trained eye began to pick out a pattern to its occurrences, something a little less than random.

"That's interesting," she told the empty room around her.

Grabbing a piece of paper, she went back to the beginning of the text again, but this time she wrote down every word where the strange mark appeared. She listed them in a vertical column, one after another, until she had reached the end. Scanning down the list, she quickly noted that the words seemed to form sentences and so she rewrote them in horizontal lines instead, guessing where one sentence left off and another one began. When she was finished, she was left with several paragraphs of text.

Her eyes widened as she realized what they were.

9.

They came over the wall like ghosts.

Unheard.

Unseen.

They didn't hesitate once they were on the ground on the other side but rather set off immediately for their objective, unconcerned with any of the defensive measures that had been put into place to prevent just the kind of thing they were attempting.

The mastiffs caught their scent within seconds of their appearance on this side of the wall. Trained to silently advance and render intruders immobile, the ma.s.sive dogs moved through the darkness, intent on teaching their prey a lesson about trespa.s.sing where they were not wanted.

The lead man caught sight of the dogs as they came around the corner of the house. They were large, a good hundred and eighty pounds if an ounce, and they were coming on fast, but he kept his concentration on his objective, the south wing of the main house, and trusted his companions to handle their part of the job.

The dogs were quick, but the two men stationed in the trees outside the estate were quicker. Seconds after the dogs came into view, the sniper team went into operation, adjusting for distance, windage and the animals' oncoming speed, and then firing.

Two shots.

Two hits.

The tranquilizer darts took another few seconds to work, so the dogs had closed to within fifteen feet of the lead man before they faltered and then crashed to the ground, unconscious.

Ignoring them, the team raced on.

The intruders made it halfway across the lawn before the dogs' handlers came around the side of the house on their usual patrol route. The handlers had only just begun to process the fact that their charges were nowhere to be seen when the team in the trees fired again.

Unconscious, the handlers dropped into the gra.s.s before they even knew what hit them.

The motion sensors and floodlights came next. A swath of earth twenty feet in width had been seeded with pressure plates attached to a series of high-intensity lights that were intended to blind and disorient intruders who made it past the dogs. The specific section of the lawn containing the sensors looked no different than any other and an ordinary intruder would have been hard-pressed to get beyond it.

But as they had already demonstrated, this was no ordinary group of intruders.