Arkangel

Book 18: Sigma Force

by James Rollins

Genres: Action & Adventure; Military Thrillers; Suspense; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

From the #1 New York Times master of international thrillers comes the story of a global hunt across the top of world, pitting nation against nation, as ancient myths of a lost continent prove all too real.

The execution of a Vatican archivist within the shadow of the Kremlin exposes a conspiracy going back three centuries—to the bloody era of the Russian Tsars. Before his murder, he manages to dispatch a coded message, a warning of a terrifying threat, one tied to a secret buried within the Golden Library of Tsars, a vast and treasured archive that had vanished into history.

As combative forces race for the truth behind this death and alarming discovery, Sigma Force is summoned to aid in the search—not only for this missing trove of ancient books, but to follow a trail far into the Arctic, to search for the truth about a lost continent and a revelation that could ignite a global war. But Sigma Force has its own difficulties at home after an explosive attack on the National Mall—one aimed at the heart of their covert agency—has left them vulnerable and exposed.

The growing conflict—both on Russian soil and deep in the Arctic—will reignite a centuries-old war between the newly resurgent Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican, while sabers rattle across the nations of the Arctic Circle, threatening to turn those icy seas into a fiery conflagration.

Facing enemies on all sides, it will be up to Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force to unravel a mystery going back millennia—and uncover the truth about a lost civilization and an arcane treasure that could save the planet…or destroy it.  

 

Release date: August 6, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 448

Sample

Prologue

May 23, 1764

Spitzbergen Archipelago

The bow of the ship’s tender grated across broken shale and frozen sand, making landfall on the rocky island of Spitzbergen. Those aboard had come to seek the counsel of the damned, for even dead men had tales still to tell.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Poruchik Orlov warned, clutching a Russian Orthodox crucifix to his chest.

Commandant Vasily Chichagov couldn’t argue with his lieutenant, but that didn’t change matters. “We have our orders,” he reminded him with a bitterness as icy as the morning breeze.

Behind them, three large frigates—the Chichagov, the Panov, and the Babayev—rocked amidst shattered ice floes that covered the seas. Though it was spring, the Arctic remained trapped in winter. Most of these waters would not melt until midsummer—if even then.

Vasily clenched his fists as much against the numbing cold as in frustration. He pulled deeper into his fur-lined coat, his lower face wrapped in a wool scarf. He waited for the oars to be stored and the tender to be secured before heading ashore.

While waiting, he glanced back to the trio of ships. The lead one bore his name, which was both an honor and at times an embarrassment. Vasily had joined the Imperial Navy when he was sixteen, quickly gaining fame and rank, and now served as deputy commandant of Arkhangelsk Port on the coast of the White Sea. The three frigates had left the port a fortnight ago. Their assignment was to survey and inspect the whaling camps that were established across this frozen archipelago each spring.

As soon as the seas began to melt, the competition here grew fierce for the best spots—not just by Russians, but also by Norwegian and Swedish whalers. During this volatile period, Vasily’s naval forces would maintain order and protect the Russian stations. Within a month’s time, after each camp had dug in and established itself, his ships could head home. Skirmishes would continue throughout the summer, but nothing that would require the intervention of Russian imperial forces. After this crucial period of settlement, the whalers would begrudgingly respect one another’s stakes and claims. So it had always been, going back two centuries, to the time when Willem Barentsz, a Dutch mariner, discovered these islands while searching for the elusive Northeast Passage to China.

Vasily sighed and stared across the ice-choked seas to the east. Last summer, he himself had tried to find that route, but to no avail.

Gruff voices drew him around to the island. Across the beachhead, men gathered around a bonfire set before a scatter of stone shacks. Arms pointed toward them, surely wondering at the tender’s arrival.

According to reports, this station had been set up a month ago. Already, a carcass of a bowhead whale floated in the shallows. Even with its flukes sawed off, its body stretched fifty feet. The tons of blubber flensed from its body lay stacked in dark hillocks. Elsewhere, crews manned copper pots, boiling oil from the fat. Closer at hand, racks dotted the shoreline, hung with drying U-shaped drapes of baleen. Off the beach, the remains of the stripped whale had become a floating feast for hundreds of seabirds, which wildly assailed the carcass with raucous cries.

The presence of the whale continued to serve another purpose. It was the anchor to which this camp was set. With this success, no other crew would dare accost or contest this beachhead. Among this superstitious breed of hard men, it boded ill luck to trespass upon another camp after they’d had a successful hunt.

Even Lieutenant Orlov knew this. “Why have we landed here, Commandant? These whalers seem adequately settled, are they not?”

“Da, but it is not these men we seek.”

With the tender secure, Vasily waved Orlov ashore, ignoring the man’s curious glance back. Vasily had not shared the true reason they’d come ashore.

As Vasily climbed free of the boat, he absently patted his jacket pocket. It held a letter from Empress Catherine II, written by her own hand. It contained a secret directive that had only been handed to him after his trio of ships had set sail across the White Sea.

The man who had delivered that missive sat at the tender’s stern.

As if sensing Vasily’s thoughts, Mikhail Lomonosov stood and crossed the boat. He was a sepulchral figure dressed all in black, from heavy frock to a wide brimmed hat. He had kept to his cabin during the journey here, ensconced with books and maps. Only a handful of people knew he had traveled from Saint Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, bearing the empress’s decree.

Though only in his fifties, Lomonosov had already earned the civilian status of state councilor—equivalent to that of brigadier general in the army or captain-commander in the navy—outranking even Vasily. The man had achieved this lofty position by proving himself a genius in a wide spectrum of pursuits. He had a long list of accomplishments across esoteric fields: physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography, minerology, even history and poetry.

Lomonosov joined him on the beach. “I’ve forgotten how frigid it is this far north.”

This was not stated as a complaint but spoken with a wistfulness. It reminded Vasily of a detail in the man’s biography. Lomonosov hailed from these icy lands. He had been born in the village of Mishaninskaya in the Arkhangelsk Oblast. As a boy, he had traveled with his father, a prosperous fisherman, across these very seas on trade missions. So, this journey here was as much a homecoming for the man as it was in service to the empress.

“Now that we’ve made landfall,” Vasily groused through his scarf to Lomonosov as the councilor joined him, “perhaps you could share what was left unwritten in the empress’s letter.”

“Once we’re alone,” Lomonosov stated with a taciturn expression. He pointed to a tall figure approaching them. “That must be Captain Razin, head of the whaling crew.”

Vasily agreed. The heavily bearded Cossack appeared oblivious to the cold, wearing only pants and an open-collar shirt. What little skin showed was salt-scarred and burnished to the color of dark copper. There was nothing welcoming in his manner, a sentiment reinforced by a sheathed saber at his side and a holstered pistol over his shoulder.

He spit into the sand before speaking, a heavy gobbet that splattered near

Vasily’s boot. Orlov took a threatening step forward, but Vasily motioned him back.

“Finally,” Razin said, “I sent word of the bodies a month ago. Before much longer, they’ll be thawing and stinking. My men won’t go near that cursed stretch of beach until they’re all hauled off, and I need that space if we hope for a successful hunting season.”

“We will secure the dead in short order,” Vasily assured the captain. “But first we wish you to show us what you found among them.”

Razin sneered, glanced around the five-man party, then mumbled under his breath as he turned away. “Should’ve burned them all when I had the chance.”

Lomonosov heard him. “You were right to send word back to Saint Petersburg. The bodies mark a team from the Imperial Academy, explorers who vanished two years ago while trying to discover the Northeast Passage. You and your crew will be rewarded for your service to Russia.”

Razin looked back. “Rewarded how?”

“The recompense will be commensurate with what we find here today and where it might lead.”

Razin frowned, clearly struggling with the councilor’s verbiage.

Vasily translated. “You’ll share in any bounty gained from the recovery of these men.”

“As I should,” Razin concluded and grunted for them to follow.

Lomonosov turned to Vasily. “Best we limit this first survey to just you and your lieutenant.”

Vasily nodded and waved for the other seamen to remain with the tender, then set off with Orlov.

Vasily quickly drew alongside Lomonosov. “Now that there are fewer ears, maybe you could explain the reason behind all this subterfuge. Why does the discovery of a lost crew from the Imperial Academy require a sealed order from Empress Catherine? Many have sought the Northeast Passage, me included.”

“It’s because this team was dispatched by Catherine herself—and not to search for a route between the Atlantic and Pacific.”

Vasily drew Lomonosov farther aside from the other two men. “Then what were they searching for?”

“At the moment, the secrecy is less about what they were searching for and more about what they might have found—especially due to the record that Captain Razin made of their belongings. I was sent to confirm what the captain described and determine the best course of action from here.”

Vasily sighed, resigned to the fact that he would have to let this play out.

In silence, they followed Razin across the camp and through oily clouds of boiling blubber. The stench choked the throat and lay thick on the tongue. Once upwind of the station, the air eventually 

cleared, growing cold and crisp. The sky remained an aching blue, but a dark line at the horizon warned of incoming weather.

They hiked another quarter mile, following high cliffs that bordered the rocky beach. Razin seemed to be leading them nowhere. There was no sign of any dwelling in sight.

Razin finally stopped, lifted an arm, and pointed. “You’ll find them in there.”

It took Vasily another full breath to spot a shadowy break in the cliff face. It marked the mouth of a cave. He searched the neighboring seas but failed to spot any evidence of a shipwreck. The doomed crew must have abandoned their ship, maybe after it had been trapped and crushed by winter ice. It was a sadly frequent tragedy this far north, one he came close to experiencing himself when he sought out the Northeast Passage. He grimaced as he imagined the crew trekking across the frozen sea to reach land and seeking shelter where they could.

Not that coming here had done them any good.

“I’ve work to see to,” Razin said sourly. “I’ll leave it to you crows to pick among the dead.”

When no one objected, the captain turned and headed back to the smoke-shrouded camp.

Lomonosov did not wait and set off toward the cave. Vasily and Orlov hurried after him. Once at the entrance, the lieutenant ignited a lantern and lit their way down a short tunnel.

The walls were heavily coated in ice that reflected the lamplight. Meltwater ran underfoot. The tunnel emptied into a small cavern—now an icy crypt. Four bodies were stacked at the threshold, tangled and frozen together, creating a macabre dam across the entrance. The dead men had either been washed there by the tides of melting and freezing waters or perhaps they’d been purposefully stacked there to act as windbreaks for the other five crewmembers who lay sprawled inside the cave.

To enter, Vasily and the others had to climb over the dead men. As they did, hollow eyes stared up at them. Jaws hung open in silent screams, showing blackened tongues and white teeth.

A misstep by Orlov shattered a frozen hand under a bootheel. The lieutenant hurried away, as if fearing retribution from the dead.

Once inside, Vasily fought down his revulsion and circled a ring of stones, dark with ash, marking an old firepit. The crew must have burned their sleds after using them to transport gear and food. Still, at the back of the cavern, one object had been spared the flames. Even as the crew froze to death, they hadn’t torched this artifact. It spoke to the value placed upon it.

Lomonosov stepped briskly toward this prize.

Off to the side, Orlov lifted his lantern toward a neighboring wall. A long row of names had been chiseled into the rock, likely an accounting of the crew, an epitaph written by the dead.

A gasp by Lomonosov drew Vasily’s attention back around. The councilor stood before the large artifact preserved at the back of the cave. It was a huge horn of ivory, curved, and longer than a man’s outstretched arms.

“What is it?” Orlov asked.

“A maimanto tusk,” Lomonosov answered. “Also dubbed mammon’s horns. Many such finds have been discovered in washed-out riverbeds of the north, often by the Samoyed clans of Siberia. They’re believed to be from a long-dead species of sea elephant.”

Vasily shrugged. “But why did the crew go to such lengths to drag it here, to protect it?”

Lomonosov waved to Orlov. “The lamp . . . bring it closer.”

Vasily nodded for his lieutenant to follow this instruction. Lomonosov pointed to a section of the tusk.

Across most of its curved length, the coarse exterior husk had been shaved down to the ivory beneath, creating a canvas for an ancient artist. Fine scrollwork had been engraved into the ivory. Unfortunately, age and weather had shattered the handiwork into fragmented pieces.

Still, there remained enough to reveal glimpses of some city, one marked by pyramidal structures.

Lomonosov choked on his words. “It’s . . . it’s just as Captain Razin described . . .”

“But who etched it?” Orlov asked. “Was it one of the crew?”

Lomonosov ignored the question. Even Vasily knew this couldn’t be true. This was far older than any of the dead men.

Lomonosov confiscated Orlov’s lamp and set about examining the length of the tusk. He illuminated every surface, occasionally revealing other glimpses: a broken tower, a decorated throne, a sliver of a moon.

“What’s being depicted here?” Vasily asked.

Lomonosov stiffened and brought the light closer to the ivory. He stared at a section for several breaths—then passed the lamp to Vasily. “Hold this.”

After Vasily took the lantern, Lomonosov stepped back and fumbled through the inner layers of his heavy frock. Vasily used the moment to study what had triggered such a reaction in the man.

The lamplight revealed another scrap of scrollwork, just a sliver, but enough to reveal a trace of writing, one that looked more crudely inscribed, perhaps a hasty addition.

Vasily squinted at the letters. “This writing . . . it almost looks—”

“Greek,” Lomonosov confirmed as he withdrew a small book from an inner pocket. “I believe it’s a name. One that has echoed across millennia.”

“What name?” Orlov asked, looking warily back at the bodies.

Lomonosov leafed through the pages, then stopped and showed Vasily a passage. “This is written by Pindar, a Greek lyricist of the sixth century B.C., from the tenth section of his Pythian Odes.” 

Vasily frowned and shook his head, failing to understand the significance.

Lomonosov sighed and tapped a finger under a single word in that passage. “Does this not look familiar?”

Vasily stared between what was written on the page and what was engraved on the horn. “It looks like the same word—at least a fragment of it—has been carved into the ivory. But what does it mean?”

“Like I said, it marks a name, a mythic place.” Lomonosov returned to study the depiction of the pyramids.

“What place?” Vasily pressed him.

“Hyperborea.”

Vasily scoffed with disbelief. All who sailed these seas had heard of the legendary lost continent to the north, a land free of ice, richly forested and populated by a nearly immortal people. Many explorers had gone in search of—

Vasily straightened as understanding struck him. He gave Lomonosov a hard look. “Is that what these poor souls had gone looking for—not the Northeast Passage, but Hyperborea?”

“At the request of Empress Catherine,” Lomonosov confirmed.

Vasily clenched a fist. “Then they were doomed from the start.”

Lomonosov kept his gaze on the curve of tusk. “It was indeed a daunting task given to them. To quote Pindar, ‘Neither by ship nor on foot could you find the marvelous road to the meeting-place of the Hyperboreans.’”

“In other words, a fool’s errand.”

Lomonosov stared at Vasily with a raised brow. “Do you dare call our empress a fool?”

Vasily winced, reminding himself to be more cautious with his words, lest he be hung for treason.

“Catherine is no one’s fool,” Lomonosov insisted. “In fact, she has done that which no man or woman has ever accomplished.” The man shook his head, and his lips thinned, as if reminding himself to be careful with his own words. “Suffice it to say, she did not send them off without any guidance.”

Vasily wanted to press this last detail further, but he knew Lomonosov would not relent. So, he changed tack. “Regardless, why does the empress seek out this lost continent? I’ve heard stories about the inhabitants of Hyperborea, of an elixir that grants centuries of life. Securing such a treasure has been the ambition of many explorers. Is that what she hoped to discover?”

Lomonosov sighed heavily. “Again, you call her a fool without stating it outright. The only immortality she seeks is to lift the Russian Empire to greater prominence, to have us shine brighter than the Europeans who look down upon us as savages. The discovery of Hyperborea—even remnants thereof—would bring far greater glory to the empire than even the discovery of the Northeast Passage.”

Vasily doubted this was true, but he returned his attention to the curve of tusk. “And you believe this might be proof that the first expedition had 

been successful?”

“I . . . I do not know, but it is a hope. A place to start.”

Vasily sensed the weight of the other’s words and what he left unspoken. “And you intend for us to finish it.”

“That is why Empress Catherine sent me with her decree.”

Vasily glanced back at the icy crypt, praying he and his men wouldn’t suffer the same fate. He noted Orlov standing to the side, near the tip of the horn. The lieutenant’s neck was craned back. He stared not at the tusk, but at the wall behind it.

With the lantern still in hand, Vasily stepped over to Orlov and raised the light. Like the names of the dead chiseled into the cavern wall, someone had chipped out a final warning into the rock.

Orlov read it aloud. “‘Never go there, never trespass, never wake that which is sleeping.’”

Vasily turned to Lomonosov. The councilor’s gaze remained on the tusk, on the ancient metropolis etched into the ivory. The man’s eyes glowed in the lamplight.

In that moment, Vasily knew the truth.

No dead man’s warning would stop them.

First

The Golden Library

1

May 10, 1:03 P.M. MSK

Moscow, Russian Federation

The silence of a tomb hung over the subterranean vault, but it was not sarcophagi that lined its floor. Instead, a dozen steel-strapped chests were arrayed in a semicircle under an arched brick roof. The only noise was the echoing drip of water from the labyrinth of tunnels that the group had traversed to reach this site.

Monsignor Alex Borrelli entered the space with a shiver that was part delight and part trepidation. His heart pounded in his chest. He felt like a trespasser, maybe a grave robber.

“Porazitel’nyy!” Vadim blurted out with youthful enthusiasm. “Just as I described, da?”

“It is indeed astounding,” Alex confirmed.

Vadim was a student from Moscow State University. A week ago, he and a motley group of fellow subterranean adventurers had stumbled upon this locked vault far below the streets of Moscow. Luckily, the young man had recognized the importance of his discovery and alerted the city’s archaeological museum.

At the time, Alex had taken the discovery to be a sign of heavenly providence, especially as he was already here in Moscow. As a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology, Alex worked closely with the Apostolic Archive back in Rome. Alex’s professional interest was in the history of the holy library, on establishing the provenance of its collection. Over the decades, he had uncovered many astounding and sometimes sordid tales behind various volumes.

In fact, this was why Alex had come to Moscow, to meet with his counterpart at the Russian Orthodox Church. For the past several years, the patriarchate’s Holy Synod had been demanding the return of hundreds of tomes held in the Vatican library, which truthfully had been stolen from the country during the era of the tsars. The pope had personally sent Alex to oversee these discussions. The task would take some judicious diplomacy to discern who had rightful claim to the books in question. Some were of extreme historical value, and most were priceless.

Then a few days ago, word had leaked to Alex of the discovery deep beneath Moscow, of a cache of ancient books sealed up in a vault. His counterpart within the Russian Orthodox Church—Bishop Nikil Yelagin—had invited him to accompany the archaeological team, to help ascertain if the books were of any import. There were only a handful of others who had the knowledge and expertise to judge the significance of what might lay below.

Still, Alex knew this invitation was as much a part of diplomatic wrangling as it was a matter of his personal expertise. His inclusion served as a demonstration of cooperation by the orthodox church.

“How should we proceed?” Igor Koskov asked, joining him in the doorway.

“With care.”

Alex turned to Igor. The lanky, dark-haired Russian was an archivist from Moscow’s Museum of Archaeology. The young man was barely out of his twenties, four decades younger than Alex’s seventy-two years.

“We should photograph everything before any books are moved,” Alex warned. “Then go about meticulously cataloging each volume.”

Igor nodded, letting Alex take the lead. “I’ll spread the word to the others.”

Igor crossed to his colleagues, a group of archaeologists, five men and a woman. No one was older than forty. After much gesticulating and some stern looks Alex’s way, the team set off into the chamber, hauling in their gear. Like Alex, the team was dressed in dark blue coveralls and wore safety helmets topped by battery-powered lamps. The group started setting up tripods, 

measuring the room, and taking photographs, not only of the chests, but also the vault’s walls and doors.

Alex respected their thoroughness.

Another did not. Clearly impatient with such meticulous work, Vadim waved to Alex. The student waited beside a trunk, one that had been left open by his friends. It stood to the left of the door, out of the way of the bustle.

“Come see,” Vadim urged him.

“Don’t touch anything,” Alex warned. “The books will be very fragile.”

Vadim scowled, but in a good-natured way, as if the young man was tolerating a scolding grandfather. “Не пережив

й. I would not let anyone touch anything. We only peek in trunks, da? No more.”

“Very good.”

Alex crossed to the open chest, trailed by Igor, whose eyes glinted with curiosity.

Inside the trunk, rows of leather spines were cradled within oak racks. It appeared more trays lay below the topmost one, stacked one atop the other.

Alex waved the beam of his helmet’s lamp over the upper collection. He read a few of the titles. “Plato’s Timaeus and Critias . . . Aristotle’s De Partibus Animalium . . . Ptolemy’s Almagest.” He leaned closer. “That looks like a Byzantine copy of Corpus Hippocraticum.”

The books were centuries, if not millennia, old. And all well preserved.

Alex rubbed an ache in his chest as his breathing tightened with excitement.

“Neveroyatnyy . . .” Igor mumbled with awe, plainly equally amazed.

The archivist reached and hovered a finger over the leather-bound volume of Corpus Hippocraticum. The book was a collection of sixty ancient Greek medicinal works, attributed to the physician Hippocrates. But it was not the subject matter that most interested the man.

Igor turned to Alex. “A Byzantine copy, you said.”

“Maybe Byzantine,” he cautioned, knowing what the archivist hoped this meant.

“If so, it could be evidence that these trunks, these books, came from the Golden Library.”

Alex glanced over to the archaeologists as they labored across the room, whispering in Russian to one another. He knew the hope that they all held.

For centuries, hundreds of men and women—historians, explorers, adventurers, thieves—had been searching for the Golden Library, a treasure trove of volumes hidden away by Ivan the Terrible and lost after his death. But it wasn’t even Ivan’s collection. It was his grandfather—Ivan the Great—who had gathered together that vast library during the fifteenth century. A majority of it came as a dowry when the emperor married his second wife, Sophia Palaiologina, a Byzantine princess, who carried the collection with her after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. It was said to hold the most treasured volumes of the Library of Constantinople, including manuscripts from the ancient Library of Alexandria.

Alex looked enviously across the arc of chests. According to records, the Golden Library contained documents written in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Egyptian, even Chinese texts from the second century.

“If we could ever find

it,” Igor extolled, “just think what we might uncover? I read how a nineteenth-century historian—Christopher von Dabelov—claimed to have seen a list of the library’s titles. That list included all hundred-and-forty-two books of Titus Livius’s History of Rome. Only thirty-five of those volumes still exist today. Dabelov also noted an unknown poem written by Virgil. And a full version of Cicero’s De Republica. Can you just imagine what such a discovery would mean?”

Alex tried to temper Igor’s enthusiasm. “I know of Dabelov’s account. It’s highly suspect, likely a fraud. In fact, the Golden Library may no longer exist. It could’ve been burned or destroyed long ago.”

Igor shook his head, refusing to accept this. “Ivan the Terrible valued that collection, hiring hordes of Russian translators to work through the library. It is well documented that he purposefully hid the collection somewhere underground—either in Moscow or elsewhere. There are stories that he discovered mystical texts that would grant Russia great power. So firm was this belief that many of the scholars working on the translations quit and fled, fearing Ivan would use black magic found in those books to wreak great harm.”

Alex cast him a skeptical gaze.

Igor shrugged. “No matter the truth of such legends, it is well known that Ivan believed the future of Russia was tied to that library. If he truly put such stock in its collection, he would have hidden it well and not let it be destroyed.”

Vadim interrupted their discussion, likely indifferent to the esoterica of lost libraries. He pointed into the trunk. “Look. Something shine in there. Down deeper.”

Alex leaned closer, following his finger. “What do you mean?”

“Under the top books.” Vadim stepped in front of them. “I show you.”

The student reached to the handles of the oak rack, preparing to lift it off and expose what he had spotted.

“Don’t!” Alex called out.

“Ne!” Igor reinforced.

Vadim ignored them and lifted the top tray of books out of the trunk.

With the damage done, Alex waved the young man off. “Be careful. Carry the rack off to the side and gently place it down. Somewhere dry. We’ll want photos of that tray and books.”

Vadim sighed heavily and lumbered off with his burden.

Alex shook his head and watched after him.

“He was right,” Igor said, drawing back Alex’s attention.

Alex stepped closer and shone his light into the trunk’s depths. The next layer held similar books, but the middle row was taken up by a nine-volume set of tomes. Alex noted the titles on their spines.

“My God, it’s a complete series of Histories by Herodotus.” Alex gaped at the Greek books from the fifth century B.C.E. “No intact collection has ever been found. I wager this set is older than the Codex A at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. That copy has served as the model for most modern translations.”

“But why is that fourth book in the series the only one covered in gold leaf?”

Alex frowned. It was puzzling. All nine volumes were leatherbound, but the fourth in the series was adorned with gold. Its reflective shine must have caught Vadim’s attention.

Unable to stop himself, Alex reached a finger and carefully slipped the book free. Equally curious, Igor stepped closer, raising no objection. As Alex pulled the volume out, something snapped inside the trunk, ...