Free The Atlantis Code by Charles Brokaw

confirmation.”
    Natasha shook her head in mock sadness. “My big sister, who went to university to learn to prowl through someone’s garbage.”
    They bickered for a moment as they always did; then Yuliya told the story of the cymbal as she knew it. As always, Natasha was more interested than Yuliya had thought she’d be.
    And in this case, that interest was much deserved.
     

ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT
AUGUST 19, 2009
     
    “You believe there’s more than one language on the bell?” Leslie walked arm in arm with Lourds down one of the side streets not far from the hotel.
    “Yes. At least two,” Lourds agreed.
    “But you don’t know either one of them?”
    “No, not yet.” Lourds looked at her and smiled. “Does that shake your confidence in me?”
    Leslie looked into his clear gray eyes. They were beautiful eyes, warm and honest and . . . sexy. Definitely sexy. Just looking into them made her tingle.
    “No,” she answered. “That doesn’t shake my confidence at all.”
    “I’ll break those languages,” he told her.
    “It’s what you do.”
    “Yes. It is.” Lourds munched on a piece of the baklava they’d gotten from an outdoor café serving the late-night crowd. “Have you heard of the Rosetta Stone?”
    “Of course.”
    “What do you know about it?”
    “It was . . .” Leslie thought about her answer. “Important.”
    Lourds chuckled. “Yes, it was.”
    “And it’s kept in the British Museum in London.”
    “That’s true as well.” Lourds took another bite of baklava. “The important thing about the Rosetta Stone was it was written in two languages, Egyptian and Greek.”
    “I thought it was three.”
    “Two languages, but there were three scripts used. Hieroglyphic, demotic Egyptian, and Greek. When Napoléon’s army found that stone, the artifact gave us, eventually, a path to understanding the ancient Egyptian language. We knew what the Greek inscription said. By assuming all the passages said the same thing, scholars eventually cracked the meaning of the hieroglyphs. All they had to do to crack the hieroglyphic code was to match the hieroglyphics to the meanings we had from the other two sections. Finding that stone allowed the decryption and translation of all the writings from ancient Egypt that we’d stared at, for millennia, on tomb and temple walls, without having a clue what they said. Of course, it took over twenty years, and a number of brilliant minds to get there, even with the existence of the Stone.”
    “Do you think the bell is like the Rosetta Stone?” The ramifications of that cascaded through Leslie. “A missive from antiquity in two languages waiting to be translated?”
    “I don’t know,” Lourds replied. “I don’t know, for example, if the two languages say the same thing. That was one of the reasons the Rosetta Stone was so important. It repeated. And I can’t read either language—another reason the Rosetta Stone was such a breakthrough. We could translate the Greek. But I’ve got no frame of reference. All I know is that two languages are written on it that I can’t understand. And I don’t like it. I’m not accustomed to drawing a blank with ancient languages.”
    “It would be so brill if the bell were some kind of Rosetta Stone.”
    “The Rosetta Stone had only
one
language on it that we didn’t understand. And it was a single message that repeated three times. I don’t believe that’s the case here.”
    “You believe there are two different messages?”
    “I don’t know yet. But the length of the passages and the structure differences in the text indicate to me that might be the case. All of which means that it’s going to take longer to work out than I like. I’ll apologize in advance for my distraction. This is a puzzle that calls to me.”
    “Not a problem. I totally understand.” Leslie finished the baklava. “You aren’t alone, you know. When I put pictures of the bell on the Internet on some appropriate academic boards