Treasure of Khan

As the procession approached the residence, Pitt strained to identify Borjin among the greeting party on the porch but he was too far away to see any faces.

"Any sign of Tatiana in the welcoming committee?" he asked as he began wheeling the car out of line and toward the building on the right.

"There's at least one woman standing on the porch, but I can't make out if it is her," Giordino said, squinting through the windshield.

Pitt guided the car toward the garage and drove through its open bay doors. The flat tire flopped loudly on the concrete floor as he brought the car to a stop beside a segregated bay flanked with tool chests. A grease-stained mechanic in a red baseball cap came ru

"Pfffft," he said, pointing toward the flat tire.

The mechanic walked around the front of the car and examined Giordino's handiwork, then looked through the windshield and nodded. He turned and walked to the end of the bay, returning a moment later with a floor jack.

"Might be a good time to take a walk," Pitt said, climbing out of the car.

Giordino followed him as they walked toward the open garage door, then stopped as if to mill about while waiting for the tire to be repaired. But rather than watch the mechanic, they carefully scrutinized the interior of the garage. Several late-model four-wheel drives were parked in front, while the rest of the building was filled with large trucks and some excavating equipment. Giordino rested his foot on a maintenance cart parked by the door and studied a dusty brown panel truck.

"The enclosed truck," he said quietly. "Looks a lot like the one at Baikal."

"Indeed, it does. How about the flatbed over there?" Pitt said, motioning to a cab and flatbed sitting nearby.

Giordino glanced at the truck and flatbed, which were empty save for some canvas and ropes strewn over one side.

"Our mystery prize?"

"Perhaps," Pitt replied. He peered across the grounds and then at the building next to the garage.

"We probably have some temporary immunity around here," he said, nodding toward the building. "Let's take a walk next door."

Proceeding as if they knew where they were going, they strolled to the brick building next door. They passed a large loading dock and walked through an adjacent glass entry door. Pitt expected to find a reception area, but the entrance led instead into the middle of a large work bay that opened onto the empty dock. Test equipment machines and electronic circuit boards were scattered around several workbenches, being tinkered with by a pair of men in white antistatic lab coats. One of the men, who had small birdlike eyes set behind wire-rimmed glasses, stood and looked at Pitt and Giordino suspiciously.

"Stualét?" he asked, recalling the Russian word for "toilet" that he picked up in Siberia.

The man studied Pitt for a moment, then nodded and pointed down a corridor that ran from the center of the room. "On the right," he said in Russian, then sat down and resumed his tinkering.

Pitt and Giordino walked past the two men and turned down the corridor.

"Impressive language skills," Giordino said quietly.

"Just one of the nearly five words I know in Russian," Pitt boasted. "I just recalled Corsov saying that most Mongolians know a smidgen of Russian."

They moved slowly down the wide tiled corridor, which stretched twenty feet across, and whose ceiling was nearly as high. Skid marks on the floor indicated the movement of large equipment up and down the corridor. The hallway was lined with large plate-glass windows that revealed the interior of the rooms on either side. Small labs, stockpiled with various electronic test and assembly equipment, occupied most of the building space. Only an occasional office and desk, decorated in Spartan blandness, broke up the technical areas. The entire building was strangely cold and silent, in part because only a handful of technicians appeared to work there.

"Looks more like the back of a Radio Shack than an Exxon gas station to me," Giordino said.

"It does give the appearance they are interested in something other than pumping oil out of the ground.

Unfortunately, that may mean that Theresa and the others weren't brought here."

Passing by the restroom, they continued down the corridor until it ended at a thick metal door that closed over a high floor sill. Glancing around the empty hallway, Pitt grabbed the handle and pushed on the heavy door, which opened inward. The thick door swung back slowly, revealing a vast chamber. The room occupied the entire end of the building, with a high ceiling that rose over thirty feet. Row after row of cone-shaped spikes protruded from the walls, ceiling, and even the floor, which lent the appearance of some sort of medieval torture chamber. But there was no danger from the spikes, as Pitt confirmed when he squeezed one of the foam-rubber cone tips between his fingers.

"An anechoic chamber," he said.

"Built to absorb radio-frequency electromagnetic waves," Giordino added. "These babies are usually the property of defense contractors, used for testing sophisticated electronics."

"There's your sophisticated electronics," Pitt said.

He pointed to the center of the room, where a large platform stood on stilts above the foam floor. A dozen large metal cabinets were jammed onto the platform next to several racks of computer equipment.

In the middle of the platform was an open center section, where a torpedo-shaped device hung from a gantry. Pitt and Giordino climbed across a catwalk that led from the door to the platform.

"This ain't the stuff of roughnecks," Pitt said, eyeing the equipment.

The cabinets and racks contained over forty computer-sized modules linked together with several yards of thick black cable. Each rack had a small LED display and several power meters. A large box with dials marked ERWEITERUNG and FREQUENZ sat at the end, next to a monitor and keyboard.

Pitt studied the markings on the equipment and raised a brow in curiosity.

"My high school foreign language skills may be a little rusty, but those dials are marked in German. I believe that last dial translates to 'Frequency' "

"German? I would have thought Chinese or Russian would be more in vogue."

"Most of the electronics equipment looks to be of German manufacture as well."

"There's some serious horsepower involved," Giordino said, counting the array of transmitter cabinets cabled in sequence. "What do you make of it?"

"I can only guess. The large cabinets look like commercial-grade radio transmitters. The racks of computers must be used for performing data processing. Then there's the hanging tripod."

He turned and examined the device dangling from the center of the platform. It consisted of three long tubes fashioned together and standing nearly ten feet high. The lower ends flared near the floor, bound with a thickly matted material. The opposite ends, standing well above Pitt's head, sprouted a thick bundle of cables, which trailed to the computer racks.

"They resemble some sort of amplified transducers, though bigger than I've ever seen. It could be a beefed-up seismic-imaging system, used for oil exploration," he said, studying the tripod-shaped device that hung vertically.

"Looks more advanced than any drill operation I've ever seen."

Pitt glanced at several manuals and notebooks lying beside the equipment. He flipped through them casually, noting that they were all written in German. He opened what appeared to be the key operating manual and tore the first few pages out, stuffing them in his pocket.