moment. “Yeah, I remember her. Young? Pretty? Reporter for The Moscow Times?”
“That’s the one.”
“I do like her. Every quote in her piece was exactly what we said and not taken out of context for once.” Lourds started toward the closet and quickly reached the end of the phone cord. He wasn’t used to talking on corded phones these days. He stopped. “I’ve got to get off the phone and get moving if I’m going to find a plane.”
“Hurry.”
Lourds started to get off the phone, then caught himself. “Boris?”
“Yes?”
“Congrats on the find. You deserve it.”
“Thank you. And I do deserve it. And I’ll feel better once you’re here to straighten away the documentation. I want to know what I’ve truly found as soon as possible.”
“I’m on my way.”
15
39 Miles Southwest of Herat
Herat Province
Afghanistan
February 14, 2013
Anna Cherkshan strode through the dig camp and felt the excitement in the air. The emotion was like a live thing, a tiger that thrummed through the atmosphere. That was how she would write it. That the discovering was a living thing ripped free of a dead husk. Only she would use words that would turn Boris Glukov’s find into poetry, into something solid and enduring—something like Russia could be if they could only unclasp the dead fingers of the Old Regime once and forever.
Perhaps the piece would go beyond the simple news of an archeological discovery by a Moscow professor, but she knew her editors at The Moscow Times would enthusiastically embrace the idea. They would understand what she was saying about the world and about her place in it. That was something her father never understood.
General Anton Cherkshan, to Anna, was the epitome of the Old Regime. Her father wanted nothing to change. He claimed that capitalist freedom was something that the Russian people would never understand. The Americans had over two hundred years to experience and master freedom and its attendant prices.
The Russian people only had a little over twenty years. And this was now the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth. Things happened more rapidly now. Situations changed more rapidly. The Russian people had only thrown off the yoke of the Tsarist government less than a hundred years ago.
Anna sighed. She could hear her father ranting and raving about the story already. Over the years, she had grown tired of his voice in her head. It wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t shut it off. Sometimes she thought that if she didn’t love her mother so much, she would never see her father again. Then, when the anger and the frustration were not so deep in her, she knew that was not true. She loved her father. He had taught her so much of what she knew.
It was just a pity that he didn’t agree with how she used that knowledge.
Adjusting her sunglasses, she stared through the bright reflection of the snowdrifts surrounding the dig site. In many places, the snow was three or four feet deep, and trails had been made by people passing. Now, much of the snow in front of the cave had been flattened. So many people had braved the cold and gathered outside the opening, beyond the sawhorse barrier the Afghanistan National Police had erected, waiting expectantly for news of Boris Glukov’s discovery.
“Excuse me. Miss Cherkshan?”
Anna turned at the voice.
A tall, dark man with short-clipped hair and a beard that was more a neatly trimmed five o’clock shadow than anything else approached her. He wore boots, khaki pants, and a Russia Today Television coat with the distinctive RT rendered in gold and black on green.
Petite and slender like her mother, Anna only came up to the man’s shoulder. Also like her mother, she had strawberry blond hair, but she had gray-hazel eyes like her father. Her blue parka hung to her knees.
“Yes, I am Anna Cherkshan.” Anna stood her ground. All her father’s old warnings about talking to strangers echoed in her head, too, but these days, she mostly laughed at them. A news reporter could hardly talk to only people she knew. She would never learn anything that way. Or she would learn only what people wanted her to know.
“I am Yakov Fursin. With Russia Today.” He smiled, and it was a nice smile, but he was too old for her. She was only twenty-six, and he had to be nearly forty.
She took his proffered hand and smiled back at him. “Russia Today, eh? I think I got that from the coat. What can I do for you?”
“I was