The Atlantis Code Read Online Free PDF Page A

present the piece a fair number of times at different committees, including the dean’s house for a celebration on the translation’s acceptance. The reading, rendered with an orator’s skill that had developed naturally from Lourds’s years as a teacher, had been a major hit and had set academic tongues to wagging scandalously. She didn’t know his world at all if she thought mere words could embarrass or frighten him here.
    He read the first section of the document aloud, then translated it. Leslie stopped Lourds before the first session of foreplay got serious. “All right,” she said, blushing. “You know the text. Move on to the next one.”
    “Are you sure?” Lourds said. “I’m quite familiar with this.” He purposefully didn’t clarify whether he was familiar with the text . . . or the technique presented. His words were every bit as much a challenge as hers were.
    “I’m sure,” she said. “I don’t want the network bigwigs twitching.”
    “Wow, man,” Neil said, grinning from ear to ear. “That’s brill. Didn’t know porn could sound so . . . so . . . bitching.”
    Lourds didn’t bother to correct the misrepresentation of the piece. It wasn’t intended to be porn—not exactly. It was more a diary of the writer’s experiences—a reminder of his past. But read aloud now, its use had changed. Once a listener heard words, the words as well as the meaning became subjective, and it became applied to that individual’s views on life and the moment. For Neil, it probably
was
porn.
    The third piece was Ethiopian, written in Ge’ez, which was
abugida
. As a grapheme form, transcribed in signs, it denoted consonants with inherent trailing vowels. Besides Ethiopia, the form was also used by certain Canadian Native American tribes—the Algonquian, Athabascan, and Inuit—as well as the Brahmic family of languages—South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia. It had penetrated the East as far as Korea. The piece was a length of elephant tusk used by a trader to record his journey into what was then called the Horn of Africa. From what Lourds gathered from the record, it had been intended as a gift to the man’s eldest son, a marker and a challenge to go farther and dare more than his father did.
    Evidently Lourds’s translation matched what Leslie had in her notes, because she kept nodding as he read.
    The fourth piece seized Lourds’s attention completely. It was a ceramic bell, probably once used by a priest or shaman to call a community to prayer or announcement. It was divided into two sections: there was a clapper at the top and a reservoir for holding herbs at the bottom. A faint ginger smell clung to the piece, indicating that it had been recently used. A ring at the top invited speculation that it had hung from a shepherd’s crook or a similarly shaped staff. The piece had the burnished look of an object that had been handled and cared for continuously over many centuries, perhaps even over millennia. The reservoir might even have held oil at one time to provide an ancient lantern for the bearer.
    The inscription on the bell truly set it apart from the other pieces Lourds had sitting before him. In fact, the most fascinating aspect about the bell was the writing that went around it.
    He couldn’t read it. Not only that, but he’d never seen anything like it in his life.
     
     
    In the alley behind the building where the television people had their rented rooms, Gallardo got out of the car. He stepped quickly to the back of the vehicle, followed by Farok and DiBenedetto.
    Pietro released the trunk latch from inside. The lid rose slowly, revealing the duffels stashed within. Unzipping the top duffel, Gallardo took out a Heckler & Koch MP5. He added a specially modified silencer to the weapon as Cimino joined them.
    Cimino was a thick, squat man who spent all his time in gyms. His drug of choice was steroids, and he kept himself painfully close to overuse, staying just this side