The Oracle Code

36



Safe House

Kandahar

Kandahar Province

Afghanistan

February 19, 2013

“Good morning, Professor Lourds.” Just like yesterday, Captain Fitrat brought in a tray containing breakfast for Lourds and him. “Have you been up all night, or have you been to bed? I can never tell with you.”

Lourds leaned back from the desk, his shoulders slumping against the chair. He felt tired and drained, and his body ached from sitting for hours on end. Being still for long stretches while his body craved movement was the hardest part of being consumed by work. But when he got on a roll like this, when the ideas were flowing and some of the language he was working on was starting to unravel itself and reveal its mysteries, he couldn’t stop.

“You know, I could fix my own breakfast, Captain.”

Fitrat shrugged and set the tray on a corner of the desk that Lourds raked free of papers. “Your time is better spent working on this translation.”

“And your time would be better spent watching over Layla.”

“Yes, it would be. However, she gave me strict orders to watch over you, so I am.” Fitrat pulled over the same chair he had brought up yesterday. “I trust I am not intruding if I eat with you.”

“Not at all. I’m happy to have someone to talk to.” Lourds went to the bathroom, washed up, and returned.

In that time, Fitrat had spread out the morning’s feast. There were boiled eggs, sweet cakes, rice with meat, and fresh melon and a selection of berries. There was also a pitcher of strong qaimaaq chai, green tea seasoned with cardamom seeds.

“Everything is good?” Fitrat looked at Lourds.

“Everything is fantastic. Does your wife cook?”

Fitrat looked embarrassed and shrugged. “When I am not home, of course.”

Lourds took a boiled egg and salted it. “What about when you are at home?”

“Sometimes. If she wants to make something special. I prefer to cook. It gives me time to spend with the children, and I have time to teach them something important.”

“Something important?”

Fitrat poured tea. “A man should teach his children things, yes?”

Lourds nodded, bit into his boiled egg, and started chewing.

“Normally, a man teaches his son, and maybe his daughter, about the job that he does.” Fitrat gave a small smile devoid of humor. “My job is killing people, and to keep other people from killing people. A necessary thing, but not one I would want to teach my children.”

“Yes, but I thought you enjoyed your job.”

Fitrat paused to sip his tea and think. “I see the need for my job. I have an aptitude for this kind of work. So I learned to be very good at it.”

“But you don’t enjoy it?”

“I save lives. I like saving lives. That part I enjoy very much.”

“From what Layla told me, your parents wanted you to be a doctor. You could have saved lives doing that.”

“Perhaps. But I have discovered I have another side. One that enjoys chasing bad people.” Fitrat grimaced. “Sometimes, when I was younger and thought more about such things, I wondered if perhaps something was wrong with me. That in some ways I was a bad person.”

“I don’t see that.” Lourds spooned up the rice and spicy meat, which was delicious. “I think what you’re experiencing is a sense of competition. Man against man.”

“I have come to this conclusion as well. It is this competition that draws me so fiercely. I enjoy winning.”

“That’s part of the warrior spirit. It’s why we insist on playing games against each other. Baseball. Football. Soccer.”

“Layla mentioned that you were a soccer player.”

“I enjoy the game very much.”

“Plus, it gets you out of work so you can come back to it refreshed.”

“That, too.”

Fitrat nodded toward the scrolls. “How are you coming with them?”

“The translation is taking shape slowly. The final scroll is written in code, as I said, and it’s very complicated. Almost every paragraph has got some new twist to it that requires further refinement.” Lourds picked up his notepad. “Callisthenes says that Aristotle felt his young protégé was marked for greatness as soon as he laid eyes on him. So Aristotle set out to make him the best student he could be.”

Fitrat broke a piece of flat bread and took a bite.

“But early in their relationship, Aristotle took Alexander to Delos in Greece.”

“You said a few nights ago that Delos was one of the most important sites in the Greek islands because so much of the Greek history and mythology took place there.”

Lourds nodded. “Exactly. According to Callisthenes, Aristotle took Alexander there when he was sixteen to get a better accounting of him as a man.”

“What does that mean?”

Lourds shrugged. “The scroll isn’t clear about that, but I get the sense that Aristotle wanted to make sure Alexander cherished the Greek ways. According to Callisthenes, Aristotle felt that Alexander was too inured to Greek life and was starting to look for something new. Remember, Alexander was Macedonian by birth. He’d adopted the Greek ways, too, looking to enrich his life.”

“That would explain why Alexander was so taken with Persian customs.”

“In the other scrolls I read, Callisthenes pulls apart from Alexander over that very trait of embracing the Persian culture. He felt that Alexander should remain a true Greek. He didn’t.”

“I took the liberty of looking up Callisthenes.”

Lourds was pleasantly surprised. “So what did you find?”

“That he was supposed to have died five years before Alexander. And that Alexander himself might have ordered the execution of Callisthenes or caused him to be locked up where he died of sickness or torture.”

“Yes, but history also holds that Callisthenes wrote the history of Alexander from beginning to end. We don’t know if there was more than one historical scribe named Callisthenes who worked with Alexander, or if later historians simply attributed their works to Callisthenes so the whole body of records would remain intact. That secret may have died when the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground. What we do know is that Callisthenes—whoever he, or they, were—is accepted as the official scribe of Alexander the Great. In fact, many of Callisthenes’s works were later translated into what became known as the Alexander Romance. Some of them by Callisthenes himself.”

Fitrat nodded. “I read about that too. Those were supposed to be fictions written about Alexander.”

“Exactly. And some of those stories ended up scattered throughout literature as well as religious documents.”

“Like the Koran.”

“Yes. The story of Dhul-Qarnayn, The Two-Horned One.”

Fitrat shook his head. “Dhul-Qarnayn lived. He was a prophet, and he was known to Alexander. Dhul-Qarnayn ordered the wall built that kept Gog and Magog from the people he met on his trip to the East.”

Lourds decided not to go into the possibility that Cyrus the Great was also the source for Dhul-Qarnayn. That was a different matter anyway. He had his hands full trying to figure out where Alexander’s tomb lay. “Getting back to Callisthenes’s story about Aristotle taking Alexander to Delos, Callisthenes—whichever one it turned out to be, and the one usually attributed to keep the records at that time was Aristotle’s nephew—claimed Aristotle walked his young charge across the island and extolled upon him the virtues of the Greek culture.”

“All to brainwash Alexander?”

“According to what I’ve deciphered, that wasn’t all. You didn’t happen to look up Delos, did you?”

Fitrat shook his head and picked up another boiled egg.

“That’s fine. I’ll tell you about it when we get there.”

Surprise lifted Fitrat’s brows. “We’re leaving the safe house?”

“Yes.” Lourds glanced irritably at the scrolls. “Whatever merry little chase this scroll is leading us on, it points to that place. That’s where the Delian League met, and that’s where we will find some of the answers we seek.”