The Spirit Banner. Alex Archer

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      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 manuscript were starting to take a beating in the face of what she was reading. So far, the manuscript had passed 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 document 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 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 massive dogs moved through the darkness, intent on teaching their prey a lesson about trespassing 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 grass 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.

      The lead man never slowed. He charged into the designated area, his eyes on the wall that was getting closer with every step, confident that the sensors had been disarmed.

      No sirens split the night.

      No lights forced back the darkness.

      The lead man reached the outside wall of the manor house. Unslinging the grapple gun from where he carried it across his back, he took aim and fired. The small steel hook shot upward, arced over the edge of the roof and embedded itself in the tiles high above. A sharp tug on the climbing rope attached to the hook confirmed its placement.

      Hand over hand, the lead man and two others climbed to the roof, while the final two men in the team took up positions at the bottom of the rope, guarding the escape route for the others.

      Once on the rooftop they followed the route that they had all committed to memory, moving from their initial entry point at the end of the south wing to a section of the roof above the main manor house. Their leader used the four chimneys to orient the team and then advanced to a spot midway along the roof’s western edge.

      At his signal, his two companions began pulling up the roofing tiles and stacking them to one side. When they had created a space large enough for a man to fit through, one of them stepped to the side. The lead man, who by now had assembled a portable cutting rig from parts removed from his pack, passed the rig to his waiting companion.

      The item they had come for was less than fifteen feet away, separated from them by just a thin section of plaster and wood.

      The leader glanced at his watch.

      They were right on time.

      He gave the signal for his teammate to start cutting.

      A NNJA FOUND M ASON and his employer in Davenport’s study on the first floor. She wasted no time in getting to the point.

      “Something about the journal has been bothering me since this morning and I’ve only just now figured out what it is. If Curran died in that cave, who found the journal and how did you come to be in possession of it?” she asked.

      Mason glanced at Davenport and the other man nodded, giving permission for him to answer the question.

      “I handle a variety of jobs for Mr. Davenport. One of those happens to be scouting out new business opportunities. I was in Mongolia recently with a geological team, looking СКАЧАТЬ