Free The Sacred Cipher by Terry Brennan

you listen to me for a minute?” Annie interrupted again, this time sitting
     up on her side of the bed. Bohannon returned to his back and looked up at the dark
     shadow of his wife with a startled, quizzical look on his face. “The Rosetta Stone
     is in the British Museum, and there are three languages on it, right?”
    Bohannon nodded his head at the shadow.
    “And one of them is this extinct Demotic, the script that’s used on that scroll, right?”
     Again the nodding shadow. “And you need somebody or something to help you figure out
     the symbols on the scroll, right?”
    “Yes . . . yes . . . and yes,” he said petulantly. “I know all that. What’s the point?”
    Annie gave Tom grace in that moment, consideration for his many days of endless work
     and limited sleep. She reached over gently, stroked his cheek, folded herself down
     and back into his body contour.
    “Tom, you may already have your key,” she nearly whispered to him. “And the key is
     not far away.”
    “What . . . what do you mean?” he said, turning to her.
    “Richard Johnson,” Annie said carefully, lovingly, tightening her grip with her left
     arm.
    “Oh . . . oh, no,” Bohannon nearly groaned. “No—no—no. I don’t care. If I have to
     take this to my grave and it’s still a secret, I don’t care. No, not Johnson. Anybody
     but Johnson.”
    Annie Bohannon released his arm and rolled away. “Good night, sweetheart,” Annie whispered
     into the darkness. “God bless you.”
    Sleep would likely elude him that night. This was a battle that only he could fight,
     that only he could determine. Tom would have to decide whether the key to the scroll
     was worth consulting a man he hadn’t spoken with in more than a decade.

7
    It truly was a beautiful building. Standing across 35th Street late Friday afternoon,
     waiting for the light to change, Bohannon once again gazed at the strikingly beautiful
     architecture of the Collector’s Club. He had often stared at the building as he walked
     to his dentist’s office, admiring the details of the late nineteenth-century brownstone
     that housed the club’s offices. The club was one of the world’s greatest resources
     on stamp collecting, but Bohannon’s visit had nothing to do with the philatelic. He
     was looking for his old nemesis, Dr. Richard Johnson
Sr.
, former chair of the Antiquities College at Columbia University, fellow of the British
     Museum and now—in his retirement—managing director of the Collector’s Club in Manhattan.
    Bohannon banged heads, and egos, with the erudite Dr. Johnson about fifteen years
     earlier when one of Bohannon’s investigative blockbusters for the
Philadelphia Bulletin
claimed millions of dollars had been swindled from investors for phony “rare” antiquities—a
     scoop Bohannon remembered vividly because it had led to numerous journalism awards,
     some very generous expressions of thanks from some of those who had been duped, and
     a bitter castigation from Richard Johnson.
    Standing on the far side of 35th Street, Bohannon recalled Dr. Randall Swinton, former
     antiquities curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who had concocted a plot to
     pave his retirement. Shortly after aging out of the museum’s leadership, Swinton approached
     several less-than-pure collectors with the deal of a lifetime. Over his two decades
     with the art museum, Swinton informed his victims, he had managed to “liberate” scores
     of priceless treasures from ancient civilizations. And he was willing to part with
     these treasures for only half of their real value, considering the circumstances of
     the transactions. Only one condition did Swinton place on his buyers: they could never
     display the items in public, or they would all end up in prison.
    It was a masterly deception. During his many trips to the Near and Far East, Africa,
     and the Pacific Islands, Swinton had kept a weather eye for masters of forgery, those
     indigenous and