Reformation (29 page)

As Valnor navigated
the desolate streets of Constantinople, he was relieved to hear the roar of Mehmed’s rampaging men grow more and more distant.  The most advantageous sections of the city to pillage for valuables lay to the south.  The opulent apartments and villas adorned with all manner of gold, jewels and artwork were difficult to miss. 

Other hotspots for looting and entertainment were the market and brothel districts in the eastern quarter of the city
, which left the northwestern quadrant relatively free from devastation so far.  The seemingly endless string of run-down apartment buildings that reached six to ten stories skyward would be the last to see looting, vandalism and rape from the occupying army, but it would eventually come.

Thousands of residents attempted to flee the chaos by jumping into the sea and swimming for safety.  It was a nearly impossible swim that only a few hundred might survive, but drowning was preferable to being raped endlessly or getting sold into slavery by the occupying army.

Those who knew their aquatic abilities were not up to the task worked feverishly to hide everything they had, including themselves.  Walking through the desolate streets Valnor heard a chorus of saws cutting and nails being hammered into place in an effort to blockade doors or make hiding places.  Some would succeed, most would not, but it was all they had therefore the helpless civilians worked diligently to finish before the inevitable trouble arrived.

Valnor found his way to the university campus n
estled among the six story tall apartment complexes of the Phanar district.  His progress was impeded by a blockade made of anything and everything the students and faculty could find.  Overturned wagons, crates, desks, and bookshelves were all strewn about making a ten foot high pile of rubble that might keep a few dozen soldiers out, but not the thousands who would eventually come once the wealthier districts were thoroughly sacked.

Valnor took a moment to
evaluate the barricade and spotted a book shelf he could use as a ladder leaning against the pile of rubble.  When he reached the top, he saw a hundred yard square courtyard defended by a few dozen students wielding swords while looking scared out of their wits.

“Halt,” one of them shouted in Latin.  He continued in the same language to see if Valnor unde
rstood the words.  It was a clever test considering most in the invading army would not comprehend the language.  “Identify yourself or we will cut you down.”

“Relax, I am a friend,” Valnor said while scaling his way down from the barricade to the courtyard.  “I am looking for one of your visiting professors,
Nicolaus Copernicus.  Is he still here?”

The armed student hesitated for a moment while his companions drew near to present a united front.  “Who is asking for him?”

“Tell Nicolaus his friend Orban is here to present an opportunity to him and his friends.”

One of the students ran to the right side of the courtyard and through a door in the center of that wing.  Ten minutes later
Nicolaus, and no fewer than fifty men all brandishing daggers and swords, stormed out of the building with anger venting from every fiber of their being.

Valnor knew his initial reception would not be friendly, but he hoped to get at least a few words in before the mob’s vigilante justice could be enforced.  Valnor decided to get his offer out in the open before the group arrived to do god knows what to him.
  “You have the look of a man with murder in your eyes.”

Nicolau
s pointed an accusing finger in Valnor’s direction.  “You ought to know.  You brought an entire army of men with that very same look in their eyes to the walls of our great city.  Then you gave them a weapon to blast a hole in those walls so they could carry out their murders.  Now it’s your turn.”

Nicolaus
quickened his marching cadence which forced Valnor to get right to the point.  “You can’t kill your only friend on the other side, the man with a plan to get all of you out of this besieged city alive.”

“How, as your slaves?”
Nicolaus demanded.  “Didn’t you make enough money selling your weapon of destruction to the highest bidder?”

“Actually
, it is I who intends to pay you,” Valnor got out just before Nicolaus swung and landed an angry fist to his jaw.  The blow sent Valnor to the cobblestone covered ground, and he remained on all fours looking up at his attacker.  “That is what this was all about.”

Nicolaus
looked ready to put the sword he carried to use, but those last seven words gave him pause.  “Explain yourself.”

“I am already rich beyond my capacity to spend in a lifetime,” Valnor began as he struggled back to his feet to look
Nicolaus dead in the eyes.  “I came here to unleash the bottled up knowledge hiding behind these walls to the rest of the world.  The collective enlightenment of these great minds must leave this place to bring light back into the darkened world.”

“Come with me to Florence.  Art, architecture, literature, mathematics, law, linguistics are all poised for resurgence if great men arrive to steer it along to share with the world rather than hide it away in a walled city.”

Valnor raised his voice to address everyone in the courtyard.  “I offer to sponsor all of you.  I will fund any of your artistic and scholastic endeavors if you will join me in Florence.”

The look of murder was no longer in the eyes of
Nicolaus, but feelings of hurt and betrayal still clearly lingered.

“I know you would sooner run me through and suffer the fate it brings upon you than follow my lead, but this is bigger than you and I,” Valnor said looking back at
Nicolaus once more.  “Look around you.  You hold the lives of every man in this university at the tip of that sword you wield.  Do with them as you see fit.”

Nicolaus
held the look of a man torn between two primal instincts: survival and revenge.  Gradually the hard lines of anger relaxed around his eyes to deliver a reasoned response.

“Get us all out of this city with our books and notes intact and those who wish to take your offer will follow you to Florence.  Those, like me, who find your very existence emphatically
vile will go wherever they see fit.  Do we have an accord?”

Valnor drew a deep breath through his nostrils and finally extended an open palm to seal the deal.  “We do.  Now get your things, we don’t have much time.”

Valnor’s misfit gaggle of bookworms following him out of the city drew only a passing interest from the Sultan’s rampaging army.  When troubled, all he needed to do was show the royal insignia of Sultan Mehmed II.  Per their arrangement, Valnor turned over his excessive wages for overseeing the construction of the bombard cannon in exchange for the right to remove as many as a hundred civilians from the city without question.

The Sultan was a man of his word as was
Nicolaus.  He and a few of his colleagues went back to his native Poland while the vast majority of the rescued scholars and artists accompanied Valnor back to Florence to share their light under his patronage.

Professor Russell stood
over the shoulder of Alex as she ran through the last in a series of tests.  They wanted to make sure the four ground receptors were well positioned to bounce signals received from the emitter hovering overhead in between each other to map out the interior of the Chinese pyramid.

While waiting, Brian took the time to consider just how much had changed for him and Alex over the last week and also how much was still the same.  Just like
it was in Egypt, he and Alex sat in a field tent ready to map a pyramid while a government observer looked on. 

This time it was a short Chinese man rather than the aging Dr. Andre
, who turned out to be an alien intent on their capture to keep the chambers discovered in the Great Pyramid and Sphinx hidden.  Brian trusted Chin no farther than he could throw the man, but he did think it quite unlikely that he was also an alien trying to keep a secret.  In fact, Chin was the one intent on making new discoveries, but it remained to be seen if Chin would also incarcerate Alex and him if anything important was discovered. 

Another prominent difference was the elevated sophistication of
the equipment at their disposal.  Overhead a state of the art helicopter hovered perfectly steady to give accurate readings rather than an aging aircraft that wobbled about while struggling to stay airborne. 

What remained unchanged from before was the laptop computer and C++ program Alex used to display the findings.  The tiny monochrome dots were nothing pretty to look at, but it was enough to give a well defined layout of the structure’s interior.

“Everything checks out.  The emitter is holding steady in position; I think we’re ready to give this a shot,” Alex reported.

“Let’s see what we get then,” Professor Russell ordered, which prompted Alex to press the side of her headset with a boom microphone extending from the earpiece to her mouth; another welcome upgrade from before.

“Begin,” she said, keeping the message short for the pilot who only knew a few key words of English.

“How long will it take to see the results,” Chin asked as he relocated himself to stand over Alex’s other shoulder to view her screen.

“With a steady helicopter holding the emitter, not long,” Alex responded without turning around.

No so
oner had she uttered those words when dots began appearing on the mapping display.  First the outer shape of the shrunken pyramid took form.  Next, a tunnel leading from the Terracotta Army pits due east was filled in culminating in a large chamber located inside the base of the pyramid. 

A twenty foot high ceiling was filled in for the chamber
as the dots continued to be laid higher and higher into the body of the burial mound.  When it was all done, a one hundred foot tall structure perfectly pyramidal in shape sat directly on top of the Emperor’s burial chamber. 

Despite the jarring magnitude of this discovery, these readings did not get Professor Russell’s juices flowing like they did
back in Egypt.  Perhaps it was because he had already experienced the wonder and excitement before and now it was old hat.  More likely though was the feeling that this was not truly his discovery.  The risks and effort the Chinese went to in order to have this test performed made him almost certain something would be found.  The result being that there really was no element of surprise this time around.

When Alex spoke up, Brian could tell from her
vocal inflections that she was equally unimpressed.  “Well would you look at that, another chamber, a big one.  Hard to believe no one even had a clue something that large was there.”

“Yes,
” Professor Russell added with a sideways glance toward Chin.  “It is very odd that nothing is showing up inside that gigantic chamber.  It’s as if something is interfering with the emitter readings from inside that chamber.”

Chin ignored the conversation between
the Americans.  Instead, he spent several minutes talking into the headset hooked onto his ear.  His words were spoken in Chinese, therefore the specific meaning was lost, but Brian got the distinct feeling that the sanctity of Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s burial chamber was very much in jeopardy.

“So what happens now?” Brian asked of Chin
once the man took off his headset and placed it on the table next to Alex’s keyboard.

“Now we take a little ride back to the Terracotta soldier pits,”
he answered politely as always, and gestured with his arm for the two archeologists to lead the way out of the tent.

“
You plan on disturbing the Emperor’s tomb to reach that other chamber don’t you?” Professor Russell accused.  “Why? For what reason?”

For the first time since meeting Chin, Brian watched the man’s accommodating smile that never wavered run flat.

“To further our knowledge of Chinese history of course,” the man offered, and grabbed Alex by the arm to forcibly move her along toward the door, but she was having none of it.

Alex rotated her arm backwards and twisted away from Chin’s grasp.  “
Right, and I’m from Mars.  If you were interested in preserving history, you would assemble a team of archeologists.  They would take months planning out the best way to open the chamber without disturbing the priceless and most likely fragile artifacts inside.  Last time I checked you are an intelligence agent.  Did you finish your PhD and a lifetime of field work in archeology in the last ten minutes while I wasn’t paying attention?”

Her last statement brought the smile back to Chin’s lips.  “This is China.  Things are done differently in my country than
in yours.”

“Differently
or stupidly?” Alex fired back.

Chin allowed
the smile to run away from his lips while quickly drawing his pistol and leveling the threatening instrument at Brian and Alex to deliver his response.  “Out the door,
now
.”

Alex nodded her head and
glanced toward Professor Russell as she began pacing toward the door.  “Yeah, that’s how it’s done in our country too, sometimes.”

Brian followed Alex toward the door
, but continued pleading his case as he moved.  “This is a protected Chinese national landmark.  It is illegal, immoral, and not to mention reckless to open that door without proper professionals on hand to preserve the findings.  You can’t do this.”

“
Why are you in such a hurry to desecrate this national treasure?” Brian asked with his pleas growing more insistent with every step taken toward the door.  Just before stepping out into the evening air he snapped his fingers and turned to face Chin with an index finger pointed right at the short Chinaman.

“Radiation,” Brian blurted out like it was the answer to a question worth a million dollars on a game show.  “That is about the only thing that could interfere with the emitter readings enough to
show us nothing.  You knew it was there all along, didn’t you?”

Chin raised his eyebrows in surprise at the statement
, then shook his head in mild disappointment.   “Americans, always thinking for themselves rather than doing as they are told.” 

“We do things different
ly in America,” Professor Russell deadpanned back.

“Fine,” Chin said
while turning Brian back toward the door to continue their progress.  “We have known about the radiation for a while now, but we were not certain if the readings came from the chamber we knew about already or from another source.  Before this discovery I was not certain it was worth the trouble of violating the chamber to reach the radiation source, but now I am.”

While walking toward the transport vehicles, Brian could not figure out why Chin was divulging this information to them.  He worked for the Chinese intelligence agency.  By definition
, this made him a secretive individual who horded information rather than dispensing it willingly.  This was out of character.

“So what, there’s a little radiation in there.  You guys already have the bomb.  What could you possibly get from this stuff that you don’t already have
?” Alex asked.  “Do you think it’s some sort of ‘ultra radiation’ that could power your whole country for a thousand years or something?”

“The radiation is actually quite benign in strength.  It is the frequency that interests me,” Chin said while intently watching the body language of his two captives.  Both Alex and Brian broke stride at the mention of frequencies.  Brian recalled all too well the discussion they were privy to while held captive inside the Sphinx.

“Interesting response,” Chin marveled.  “You should feel very privileged.  Only a dozen people, including your current and living
former Presidents, know about frequency Alpha.  I cannot say I know what it is, but I do know it is very important to my American counterparts.  We shall have to compare notes once we are done here.”

Wh
en they reached the Mengshi off-road vehicle that Chin guided them toward, Alex was the first to climb into the back seat.  Once settled she looked back at Brian as he climbed in with a hateful look that screamed ‘I told you so!’

**********

Frank heard the words Chin spoke to his men loud and clear through the bug he installed in Alex’s laptop.  Unlike the two archeologists, he was perfectly fluent in Chinese and understood the order to converge on the burial chamber entrance located near the Terracotta Army pits. 

Frank was on the move at a fast jog to try and reach the pits located a mile away ahead of Chin and his men.  He had no idea what came up on Alex’s screen, but having it described as big and pointing out a source of interference piqued his concern.  This was no longer an investigative mission to make sure secrets wer
e not leaked to a hostile nation; this was now a major concern requiring action.