The front cover was missing, as were several folios. She quickly checked the remainder, splinters of cracked glass tinkling out as she turned the pages. She realized that her attacker now had the first four sheets of parchment, almost a fifth of the whole thing.

She had copies of the text, of course. But clearly there was something that could only be learned from the original, just as she’d thought-otherwise why go to such extreme lengths to steal it?

That was something she could figure out later, however. Right now, she needed to reach somewhere safe, where she could get first aid.

And have a very long shower.

Popadopoulos soundlessly opened and closed his mouth like a fish as Nina spread out what was left of the book containing the ancient dialogue of Hermocrates on her office desk. Pieces of broken glass spilled from the bent frames. “This-this-this is a catastrophe!” he finally managed to say.

Nina scowled. “I’m fine, thank you.” It was now evening, most of her day having been spent in a police station trying to explain the events that had left several men dead in a downtown office building, and three more burned, crushed or drowned in New York’s subways and sewers. “By the way, our ponytailed pal now has the first four pages.” She picked through the book to show him the missing section, more smashed glass crunching. “I don’t suppose you have any idea who he was or who he works for?”

“I was about to ask you that very question!” said the little historian, flustered. “I have no idea! The only person I have dealt with directly about the Hermocrates parchments…is you.” He regarded her with sudden suspicion from behind his glasses. “Perhaps this is all your doing, hmm? Hmm?”

Nina rubbed her temples in exasperation. “Yeah, because whenever I hire a gang of psychos to steal ancient documents, I also ask them to try to kill me!”

“You survived.”

“So did you!” She regarded him quizzically, arching an eyebrow. “Anyway, how did you survive? What happened to you?”

“Let us not speak of that,” Popadopoulos said hurriedly. He bent down, lowering Nina’s desk lamp to illuminate one of the pages. “Oh, no, no! Look! The parchment has been damaged!” He indicated the vertical slit made by the blade.

“It’s like that on every page, I’m afraid. It got skewered by a sword.” Popadopoulos’s eyes widened. Nina continued before he could express his outrage. “And be glad it did, because if it hadn’t, I’d be dead and our friend would have the entire thing.”

Popadopoulos’s expression suggested he was weighing the pros and cons of that particular scenario. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t insisted on removing the text from my archive in Rome,” he finally said, turning the page over. The sheet of glass backing it broke into pieces and fell onto the desk. Nina gingerly lifted the shards away from the fragile parchment as he examined the blank side of the page for more signs of damage. “Such a thing would never have happened there, no, no, no.”

Nina was about to ask if he was sure about that when Hector Amoros entered the office. “Nina! Mr. Popadopoulos! I’m glad you’re both all right.”

“Thanks. One of us is too,” she replied. Popadopoulos pursed his lips in annoyance, then continued his careful survey of the pages beneath the lamp.

“How are you feeling?” Amoros asked.

“Like I’ve been stuck with about fifty injections of antibiotics. I think I’ll live, though.”

“That’s a relief. It turns out you’re not the only member of the IHA who’s been involved in an… incident today.” He looked at Popadopoulos. “Mr. Popadopoulos, could I ask you to wait outside, just for a moment? I need to discuss something with Dr. Wilde in private.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to jump out the window with it again,” Nina said, gesturing at the scattered pages on the desk. Popadopoulos harrumphed, then left the room. She looked back at Amoros. “What do you mean?”

“I just got off the phone with Eddie.”

“What?” Nina said, suddenly concerned. She’d all but forgotten him in the chaos of the day. “What happened? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. He’s on his way back to New York right now; he called from the plane. He’s been trying to contact you all day, actually.”

Nina glanced at the phone on her desk, noticing for the first time that its message light was flashing. “Oh… Well, I did kind of have other things on my mind.”

“Indeed.” Amoros rubbed a thumb through his salt-and-pepper beard thoughtfully. “You said that the men who attacked you today were Chinese?”

“East Asian, certainly. I didn’t have a chance to check their passports.” The link struck her. “Wait, you think there’s some connection between them and Eddie going to China?”

“Eddie went to Shanghai,” Amoros explained, “because he said he had a lead regarding the sinking of the SBX rig at Atlantis three months ago.”

“What kind of lead?”

“Some classified IHA files were downloaded from the rig via its satellite link just before it capsized. Eddie says he has copies of those files. They included information about the lost Plato texts,” he nodded at the pages on the desk, “and IHA personnel files. Eddie’s…and yours.”

Nina felt a chill. “You’re saying the rig was deliberately sunk? And that it’s got something to do with what just happened to me?”

“There might be a connection, yes. What it is, we don’t know yet… but I assure you, we’re going to do our damnedest to find out. If someone was willing to kill everybody aboard the rig just to cover up stealing our files, it must be for something big.”

“Jesus.” Nina went back to her desk and leaned against it, shaken. “Where did Eddie get these files? Who had them?”

Amoros’s face became more grim. “According to Eddie, Richard Yuen.”

“What?” She remembered him from the party aboard René Corvus’s yacht. Arrogant, smug, cocky, overbearing… but she hadn’t imagined he might also be a killer.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of this, Nina, don’t worry. But there’s not much I can do until I see the files for myself.”

“So when will Eddie get back?”

“Sometime early in the morning, around five a.m. He’s going to come straight here.”

“Right.” She remembered something Amoros had told her earlier. “Wait, when you said he’d been involved in an incident…”

“The important thing is that he’s fine,” Amoros quickly assured her. “And so are you. And you still have the Plato text.”

“Most of it,” she reminded him glumly.

“What do you want to do with it?”

“I think Pops out there wants to bundle it up and jump straight on a plane back to Rome,” said Nina, gesturing at the door. “But we need to keep it safe, until we can find out why Yuen’s willing to kill to find out the location of the Tomb of Hercules.”

“We don’t know for sure that it’s Yuen behind this,” Amoros pointed out.

“Eddie seems to think so.”

“Let’s wait until we get all the facts before we start making any accusations. Especially against one of the IHA’s own directors.” He headed for the door. “I’ll go find Popadopoulos, try to convince him to let us keep hold of the text for now.”

“Thanks,” said Nina. He nodded and left the room. She sighed, suddenly feeling more exhausted than ever. What the hell had Chase been up to in Shanghai?

She sniffed. There was an odd smell, and it wasn’t her-

“Shit!” Nina whipped around to see that one of the pieces of parchment was still directly beneath the hood of her lamp, the leathery sheet beginning to shrivel under the heat from the bulb.

She snatched the lamp away, flapping a hand and blowing on the ancient document to cool it. Her heart raced in panic at the thought of the text going up in smoke right there on her desk, but to her enormous relief it had survived, if more crinkled than before. The smell wasn’t burning…