The Milestone Protocol, Ernest Dempsey [100 best novels of all time txt] 📗

was no way to know if he’d lost them or if they had simply taken a shortcut. The dark streets of the Bulgarian city offered no comfort, no respite from his fears. Dim lights shone in the windows and on lamps that flickered in the night. A few drunken laughs echoed down the corridors of side streets and into the main promenade. It was as if the city itself had begun to follow him, too.

He shook off the irrational fears and forced himself forward. The hotel wasn’t far. He could make it there, tell the concierge someone was following him, and they would handle the rest. Maybe it wasn’t a perfect plan, but it would have to do until the person meeting him arrived.

The flight from Russia to Bulgaria had gone smoothly enough, and thankfully the two nations weren’t that far apart. He’d managed to find a place to stay for the night, and grabbed some food at one of the local street vendors upon arriving—thinking it safer to stay on the move until he reached his lodging. Still, something was off, and Kevin didn’t know what.

How had this happened? He’d told virtually no one about the discovery. Is that what they were after? The artifact? He’d kept the object secret, for the most part, only emailing a couple of colleagues in the archaeology and anthropology communities about what his research group found at the dig site to the east of Volgograd.

He and his team had been investigating a location they believed to be the spot where the lost city of Sarai might have stood centuries before. Instead, they had found a burial pit dating to around the fifteenth century.

What the team discovered had initially surprised them.

The grave was about twenty feet in diameter. Seven bodies lay inside, arranged in a circle with the feet in the middle where they surrounded a stone box. Kevin and the others from his team believed the object to be a small sarcophagus, possibly for a child, a young royal perhaps. None of the archeologists could figure out why the bodies had been buried in such a manner. They were warriors; that much was clear, and from the look of their weapons and armor, they’d been members of the Golden Horde, as would be expected for the region and timeline. After all, that’s why the team was there—to locate the fabled city of the horde.

Throughout the years, several archaeology groups had attempted to locate the exact spot where Old Sarai and New Sarai stood. All had failed—until Kevin Clark’s team finally succeeded, at least in part. Their discovery of the burial site east of Volgograd and close to the Akhtuba Channel was the closest anyone had ever come to finding the once-magnificent capital.

Upon pulling the stone container out of the ground, an English woman and anthropologist from Oxford, named Susan Plimpton, noted the emblem on the side of the container. The crescent moon next to the boxy lines with a hook left no doubt that they were close to Sarai, if not right on top of it.

The stone box had been sealed shut with mortar, which took painstaking effort to chisel away without damaging the container’s integrity.

When the lid was finally loosened, every member of the team stood over the table as the box was pried open and the contents revealed. Most had expected some kind of treasure to be hidden within, but what they discovered instead was a rectangular copper tablet.

The memory caused Kevin to tighten his grip on the satchel as he hurried through the cobbled streets of Plovdiv’s famed Old Town. Roman ruins dotted the cityscape. He knew the Theater of Philippopolis was close by and the stadium of the same name not far to the west. The thoroughfares were narrower than in other parts of the city, and while he took a mild measure of comfort from the pedestrians wandering down the sidewalks and on the mismatched street stones, he couldn’t suppress the fear simmering inside him.

He wondered if he’d done the right thing, securing the copper tablet in the satchel, sealing the artifact in a plastic bag to keep it safe from the elements. Of course he’d done the right thing, he thought. The rest of his team might be dead, and this was the only way to ensure their discovery wasn’t in vain.

No, he shuddered at the thought. They can’t all be dead.

Deep down, though, he couldn’t deny the truth.

He’d taken the tablet to Volgograd to have it properly analyzed by one of the labs at the university. When he returned, he found the dig site’s tents and supplies ablaze. He’d seen the smoke rising from a distance and pulled the car off to the side of the road.

As he stumbled down the city street, he grimaced at the thought, at the memory of the black and gray plumes billowing into the late afternoon sky.

He’d gotten out of the car and stared, paralyzed at the sight. In the distance, he’d seen the silhouettes of human figures, dark-clad intruders who looked like they were carrying guns, but from that distance he’d been unable to be certain. At first, his instinct was to run into the fray, find any potential survivors, and get them to safety. But that would have been foolhardy. What difference could he have made? He would have been cut down like the rest. The sound of gunfire kept him from making that mistake. Immediately, he had turned his SUV around and sped back to the city, driving as fast as he could.

Questions lingered in his mind. He wanted to know who was responsible for this unprovoked attack. His first thoughts flashed to the Russians. They’d been more than generous with time, resources, and permits for the project. Now, Kevin wondered if that had been a ruse. Why, though, would anyone want a group of archaeologists dead? It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. Not anymore.

During the drive back to Volgograd, Kevin couldn’t stop looking in the