The Spirit Banner (9 page)

* * *

R
ANSOM HAD LEFT WITHOUT
further comment, but that hadn't been the end of the fight. It had simply moved on to a different battlefield after that. While their lawyers fought it out in court, he and Davenport had taken it to the arena they knew best, doing everything they could to ruin the other's business plans wherever and whenever possible.
Ransom stared at the photo of the two of them together for some time, and then smiled.
"I've got you this time, you arrogant ass. And when I discover the location of the tomb before you, the world will remember Trevor Ransom's name forever. You'll end up being nothing more than a footnote while I bask in all the glory."

It took a day to make all the preparations, but once completed they wasted no time in getting under way. The plan was to travel aboard Davenport's private jet to Moscow, at which point they would transfer to a local charter service that would fly them into Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital. From there they would travel by convoy into the interior, following the directions Annja had decoded from Curran's hidden message.
After the raid, Mason had insisted that she either remain at the estate or, at the very least, change hotels and register under a different name. Annja had decided on the latter option. After doing so, she got a good night's sleep and was up early, ready for what the day would bring. She had a couple of hours before she had to meet Mason at the airport and she spent part of that time reviewing her analysis of Curran's hidden message. The entire expedition depended on a proper interpretation and she was feeling unusually concerned that she get it right.
After an hour's work, she still couldn't find anything wrong with her interpretation. Only one way to find out, she thought. If we don't find anything at that first location, we'll know we're way off. Simple as that.
Annja next turned her attention to a less interesting but equally necessary task—researching Trevor Ransom's background. If he was going to be interfering in their expedition, she wanted to know what he was capable of.
It didn't take her long to discover that he was capable of just about anything. By using a variety of online media databases, she was able to get a bird's-eye view of how the media had covered him over the past few years, and they certainly hadn't cast him in a favorable light.
Ruthless
was a word used fairly often. As was
uncaring. Vain, determined, arrogant, unkind
and
visionary
were all up there in the top ten, as well, the last from a Chicago columnist who'd reportedly been trying to curry favor for a job opening.
Ransom had flirted with legal trouble over half a dozen of his development projects, but nothing ever came from any of it. Witnesses disappeared or were bought off, documents vanished, a judge dismissed a case only to have his oceanfront property renovated by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of one of Ransom's companies a year later.
The pattern was clear. Ransom usually got what he wanted and not always by the most ethical means. She'd only known Davenport a short time, but from what she knew of him she couldn't imagine him doing business with a man like that. Their rivalry certainly seemed real enough, though, and Annja decided it wouldn't hurt to watch her back during the next few weeks as the search got under way.
She put the laptop away and set about packing for the trip, laying her gear out on the bed first so that she could be sure she had everything she needed. While doing so, Annja picked up the phone and dialed her producer at
Chasing History's Monsters,
Doug Morrell.
"Hi, Doug," she said when he answered.
Morrell, however, pretended not to know who was calling.
"Who is this?" he asked, suspiciously.
"You know damn well who it is, Doug."
"I know that it sounds like Annja Creed, but it can't be Annja because she's down in the Yucatán getting me this incredibly awesome story on Incan sacrifices to the moon god, right?"
Annja sighed. "It's Mexico, Doug. I'm in Mexico. You know, that big country right below Texas? And it was the Aztecs who sacrificed people to the sun god, not the Incas."
"Whatever. As long the special-effects department gets to reenact those sacrifices, I really don't care if they were carried out by aliens."
She heard him suck in a breath suddenly, the way he did when a brilliant idea occurred to him, and she knew whatever was coming next was not going to be good.
She was right.
"Wait a minute!" he cried. "That's it! We can do a story about how the Aztecs were visited by aliens who taught them…" His enthusiasm audibly deflated. "Damn!" he said. "Forget it. I just remembered that we did that one back in season two."
"Good thing, too," Annja said, with a laugh. "Because there's no way you were going to get me to do a story like that. Besides, I've got something better for you. I'm headed to Mongolia."
"Mongolia? Don't tell me you're finally going to do that story on the abominable snowman I've been begging you for?" His voice practically dripped with excitement.
"Not a chance, Doug. Besides, I said Mongolia, not Tibet."
"Mongolia, Tibet, whatever. I can never keep all those Chinese provinces apart."
Sometimes talking to Doug was an adventure in and of itself, Annja decided. Knowing it wasn't worth the time or the energy that would be needed to explain that Mongolia and Tibet were actually two separate countries, never mind the fact that they weren't part of China at all, Annja simply ignored the statement. Instead, she explained she was on the hunt for the lost tomb of Genghis Khan.
"Genghis Khan? Isn't he the guy who impaled all those Turks on stakes?
"No, that was Vlad Tepes."
"You're killing me here, Annja."
"I'm sure you'll survive," she said dryly. "Besides, did I mention the curse?"
She could almost hear him sitting up straighter. "Curse?"
Okay, so it wasn't really a curse, per se, but she knew she could spin it well enough that he wouldn't notice the difference. "Legend has it that anyone who lays eyes on the Khan's tomb will die quickly and violently. Just like the burial party."
She knew she'd hooked him when he came back with a breathless "What happened to the burial party?"
"They were ambushed after the burial and slaughtered to the last man. Sixty trained Mongol warriors, part of Genghis Khan's elite honor guard. And then those who did the deed paid the same price, so that no one would know just where the Khan was buried."
She told him about the journal and the clues it contained, but didn't mention anything about Davenport or the events at his villa in Mexico City. If she had, she'd never get Doug to pay for anything.
It turned out to be a good strategy. By the time she hung up, she had Doug's approval for the trip, which meant
Chasing History's Monsters
would pay her for the time she put in on the project provided she came home with enough of a story to let them stitch together a solid show about the leader of the Mongol horde and the terrible curse attached to his tomb.
Not too shabby, Annja thought. Now all she had to do was find the tomb. Piece of cake, right?
She finished packing and then caught a cab to the airport. She met Mason at the entrance to the private terminal and they walked out on the tarmac together to where the plane waited.
Davenport's private jet was a lushly appointed Boeing BBJ with several bedrooms, a fully stocked kitchen and bar and more than enough room for the three of them to stretch out and be comfortable on the long flight to Moscow.
Shortly after take off, Mason asked Annja if she'd had any luck with deciphering the message from Curran's journal.
Annja grinned. "It would be an awfully short trip if I haven't, now wouldn't it?" She dug her laptop out of her backpack, booted it up and then put the text of the hidden message she'd found in Curran's journal on the screen for everyone to see.

Mason looked at the screen and then back at Annja. "I'm glad this makes sense to you, because I have to admit, it's all gibberish to me."
"That makes two of us," Davenport said.
"It actually makes a lot of sense, once you look at it through the eyes of the Mongol warrior who dictated it to Curran, rather than through our own, twenty-first-century perspective," Annja said.
She pointed at the first set of phrases. ""Beneath the watchful gaze of the eternal blue heaven, the spirit of the warrior points the way." Sounds like a bunch of foolishness to us but to a Mongol in the thirteenth century, that's almost as good as Mapquest.
"The eternal blue heaven is another name for their chief deity, Koke Mongke Tengri. The Mongolians had roughly ninety-nine
tengri
, or heavenly creatures, of which he was the highest, the creator of all things, visible and invisible.
"In essence, that entire first phrase is simply saying that their god sees all and that he knows where the Khan rests. It is the second phrase in the pair that is the important one and is our first real clue. Remember, the soul of a Mongol warrior did not exist inside the man's body, but in his
sulde
."
"Explain that again," Mason said.
"His
sulde
, his spirit banner. The warrior would take strands of hair from his best stallions and tie them around the shaft of his favorite spear, just below the blade. Each time he would make camp, he would stand the spear upright outside his
ger
or tent. The hair was tossed about by the almost constant wind on the steppes and in doing so it soaked up the power of the sun, the wind and the sky. This power from nature was then transferred to the owner of the
sulde
, driving him onward, influencing his dreams and helping him live out his destiny."
Annja looked at each of them to be certain they were following her explanation. "When a warrior died, it was said that he and his
sulde
had become so intertwined that his spirit remained forever in the strands of horsehair."
Mason frowned slightly, thinking it through. "So the first two lines of the message are telling us to find the
sulde
of Genghis Khan and that it will point us in the right direction."
"Right," Annja said, smiling as if at a star pupil.
But Davenport broke the moment with a very practical concern. "How on earth are we going to find a spear that has been missing for eight hundred years?"
"We don't have to," Annja replied, a smug expression on her face. "We only have to find a spear that's been missing for a little over seventy years. And I've got a hunch that it never actually went missing at all."
From the confused expressions on their faces, it was clear the others weren't following her logic.
"Genghis Khan had two different spirit banners, actually. One was made with the hairs from black horses, for wartime, and one made with hairs from white horses, for times of peace. The white one disappeared ages ago, but the black one was behlieved to be the repository of his soul and was cherished and protected by his descendants. Until the mid 1930s, it was safely stored in the Shankh Monastery at the foot of the Shankh Mountains."
Davenport leaned back in his chair and looked at her thoughtfully. "What happened in the 1930s?"
Annja shrugged. "Communism. Stalin's thugs slaughtered more than thirty thousand Buddhist monks and destroyed almost every temple in the country inside of just a few years' time. Legend has it that the Khan's
sulde
was smuggled out of the monastery just before Stalin's troops arrived. It was supposedly hidden somewhere in Ulaanbaatar for a few years and then moved to another, more secret location. No one has seen it since."
"But you're confident that you can find it?" Mason eyed her with open skepticism.
She knew it sounded a bit egotistic, but that's exactly what she was. Confident. She'd given it a fair amount of thought and decided that the odds were in favor of her being right about the
sulde's
current location. That was good enough for her. But rather than answer him directly, she asked a question of her own.
"Tell me this. If you were going to hide something that important, where would you put it?"
"Hopefully in the last place anyone would think to look," he said.
Annja nodded. "Exactly! That is why our first stop is going to be Shankh. I don't think Genghis Khan's
sulde
ever left the monastery in the first place."
The other two digested that information for a few minutes and then Mason said, "Okay, let's say you are correct. We go to Shankh, convince the monks to give up the
sulde
or, at the very least, let us look at it. Then what?"
"We keep following the clues left to us by Father Curran." She pointed at the computer screen. "The second pairing of verses says we should search for the place 'where the blood of the world intertwines.'"
Davenport grunted. "Blood of the world?"
"Yes," Annja replied. "The blood of the world. To the Mongols everything has its own spirits, including the earth. Remember, the Mongols saw rivers and streams as being the lifeblood of the living, breathing world, which is why they never bathed in them."
Mason examined the verse more closely. "So all we have to do is find the intersection of the correct rivers and then 'the earth has its say.' What do you think that last bit is all about?"
This time, Annja didn't have a ready answer. "I'm not one hundred percent sure yet. I'm still working on that. I'm hoping that the discovery of the
sulde
will provide us with more information to decipher the rest of the clues. After all, the verse says it will point the way."
"All right. So we start our search at Shankh." Davenport turned to face Mason. "Is everything ready on the ground?"
Mason nodded. "We've got travel permits and search visas good for at least a month. I've hired local guides to help us negotiate the terrain and our gear has already been shipped to a warehouse in Ulaanbaatar where we will pick it up, along with our transportation. The rest of the team will meet us there on the ground."
They spent some time going over the maps, familiarizing themselves with what lay between the capital and their destination, and then decided to get some sleep.
Tomorrow was going to be a long day.