that the president wanted watched in his immediate circle.
It was a busy, complicated job. Fremenko had to stay up on all those people, many of whom were spies or in counter-intelligence, without getting caught. He lived every day expecting to catch a bullet from someone on the list.
He knocked on the president’s door, thinking that he was going to wake Nevsky and that could be a painful thing to deal with. But the alternative—not telling the president what he knew until morning—would be worse. That was the only thing that made Fremenko lift his hand and knock again.
“Come in.”
Fremenko waited a beat, just enough time to allow the president’s mistress to clear the room, then opened the door and went inside.
Nevsky stood in the middle of the room in gray pajamas. “What is it?”
Fremenko held up the printouts he’d run off. “Reports, sir. Apparently someone broke into our military databases.”
Nevsky frowned. “Do we know who it was?”
“No, sir. Not yet. The computer security teams are working on it.”
Another frown. Fremenko knew that those teams might not survive the morning. Other people had “vanished” when the president became disenchanted with them.
“Which files were seen?”
“General Cherkshan’s architecture for the Reunification of the Ukraine, sir. And we think they may have gotten into the Greek files as well.”
Nevsky cursed. In all the years that Fremenko had served the man, he had never heard the president lose his temper.
“There is one other thing, sir.”
Nevsky looked at him warily, and Fremenko began to wonder if he was going to get out of the room alive.
“What is it?”
“It is Anna Cherkshan, sir. She just caught a flight out of Moscow with the Afghans.”
Curiosity softened Nevsky’s face. “Where is she off to?”
“I checked the flight manifest, sir. The shipment is from one of the museums. It is taking exhibit pieces back to Athens.”
Nevsky cursed longer this time. When he had finished, he made one request. “Get Colonel Linko for me.”
45
Museum of the University of Athens
Plaka, Athens
Hellenic Republic (Greece)
February 21, 2013
Lourds woke with his face on his arm and under the amused study of Corporal Rahimi, the young soldier who loved zombies.
“This is fantastic.” Rahimi chuckled. He looked up past Lourds and talked to someone else in the room. “You should come watch. It is like watching the dead come to life again. I expect any minute for him to get up and start stalking around, saying, Brains! Brains!“ He held his arms out before him stiffly to illustrate.
Someone behind Lourds laughed, and he recognized Marias’s baritone rumble. “I don’t speak Dari, my friend, but that translates quite nicely with just the pantomime.”
Rahimi took a stage bow.
Lourds sat up too quickly and felt his senses swirl sickeningly. Then the world snapped back into place properly. “Very entertaining.” He glanced around the room and discovered that he was the last to rise. He’d been asleep at Marias’s desk with the scrolls and their translations before him.
Captain Fitrat sat quietly in one corner with a cup of tea. Salih sat on a window ledge that gave him a view over the front of the museum. Marias had exchanged his suit for khaki trousers and a blue shirt. He looked more like the scholar Lourds had met in the Vatican’s Bibliotheca.
At the time, Marias had been researching a paper on the Apostles’ lives during the earliest days of Christianity in ancient Greece and Turkey. Lourds had been digitizing some of the ancient manuscripts in one of the ongoing projects for the Bibliotheca. As a result of Marias’s needs and Lourds’s knowledge and the fact that both of them liked to prowl bars in the evenings and play soccer to let off steam, they had formed a lasting friendship.
Lourds glanced at his watch. It was twelve minutes after seven. He’d been asleep for no more than three hours. He could distinctly remember checking the time at four-something. After that, things got fuzzy.
“Did you go home?” Lourds looked suspiciously at Marias.
“Only long enough to shower and get a change of clothes. The others had grown stale.”
Lourds groaned. “Don’t talk to me about stale clothing.”
“Captain Fitrat had talked about waking you and taking you to my house, but I know you too well. If we had woken you, you wouldn’t have gone anyway. You’d simply have gotten back to work on that scroll.”
“You’re probably right, my friend,” Lourds said.
“Of course I am. It’s what I would have done in your place.” Marias walked around to his side of the desk. “I, too, have dreamed