The lower reading room of the Bodleian Library was the main reading room for the study of Classics and Ancient History. Hobbs knew the classical Greek section was on the north side and that the central Tower Room now displayed new books in the classical Greek collections. However, today Hobbs wasn’t interested in anything those collections had to offer; his interest lay solely in a rare text which could confirm the location of a hoard of treasure.

  Hobbs did not want the treasure for himself. Rather, he was afraid the treasure would fall into the wrong hands. Small portions of the treasure had already been found, but the majority of it had never been discovered. It could fund the terrorist activities of some small countries and even the nefarious activities of world powers. He shuddered at the thought.

  Hobbs took a few steps and then stopped again. This time, he couldn’t hear any footsteps. Maybe he had been wrong. It was early evening and people were sure to be around, despite the fact he hadn’t seen anyone in this particular section of the reading room. Maybe someone had simply paused to look at a book. Having managed to assure himself he was safe, he pushed on.

  The sixth century B.C. King Croesus of Lydia was famous for his untold wealth. After all, that’s where the expression ‘As rich as Croesus’ had come from. Hobbs knew Croesus had funded many public projects and had been generous to the Greeks.

  It was only by coincidence Hobbs had stumbled across an ostracon that mentioned the copper scroll. The broken piece of pottery stated that a copper scroll held the whereabouts of the main repository of Croesus’s treasure.

  Copper scrolls were uncommon. There was the famous one, 3Q15, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1952 at Qumran. That scroll too was a list of treasure, of sixty-four locations along with an inventory of treasures in each location. If that treasure were to be found today, it would be worth billions. That scroll was dated some six hundred years after the Croesus copper scroll, but one thing was certain, the treasure of Croesus would be worth billions also. Hobbs had to stop the scroll from falling into the wrong hands.

  It was only when an old friend of his, Dr. Abigail Spencer, had invited him to give a paper at the Conference of Iron Age Anatolia in celebration of the release of the Lydian Dictionary Project, that he remembered the ostracon. At the time, he had only translated the first part, which told of the fall of the Lydian Empire and the dispersal of the treasure.

  After he published an article on the ostracon, a man from Ephesus had contacted him to say he had a copper scroll mentioning the Croesus treasure. He said he wanted to protect the treasure and asked Hobbs not to publish further on the matter. At first, Hobbs thought the man was a fraud, and had not bothered to reply to his email.

  After Abigail got in touch, Hobbs translated the whole shard of pottery. He had no wish to give a paper at the conference but thought his research would help Abigail.

  As soon as he finished translating, he knew he had to uncover more information. The ostracon mentioned a copper scroll listing the locations of the treasures. He had emailed the man from Ephesus back, and the man had told him the copper scroll did not, in fact, mention all the treasure. He said it was broken.

  This struck Hobbs as true, because he knew the 3Q15 scroll was broken into two pieces when discovered. The man told Hobbs the ostracon was likely a copy of an earlier inscription which detailed the treasure in full. He said he had no idea of the inscription’s classification or location.

  Hobbs had tried to find out the man’s interest in the matter, and had failed convincingly. Still Hobbs, by a fortunate coincidence, was sure he knew the very inscription.

  Hardly any Lydian inscriptions survived, just over a hundred, and most were fragmentary. However, Hobbs’s doctorate had been on Hipponax of Ephesus, an ancient poet who spoke Lydian. He knew the very volume he needed: a single volume containing Greek translations of sixth century Lydian ostraca in the Bayriver Collection. These were earlier translations made before the last few decades’ significant advances in word meaning. He wasn’t a lexicographer and so he wanted Abigail’s opinion on this.

  Despite the fact the volume was the only one in existence, it was on the shelves.

  Hobbs stopped and looked around the library. For a moment, he stood still, struck by its beauty and grandeur.

  There was the footfall again—he forced himself to hurry on.

  Hobbs spotted the volume he needed but was sure he was being followed. He didn’t want to lead anyone to it, so he skirted around and pulled another book from the shelf, one of Ammonius’s commentaries on Aristotle.

  He pretended to read it and then put it back. He then went back to look for the volume he needed, made a mental note of where it was, and walked straight past it. He continued to another bookshelf in the nineteenth-century section and selected a rare book, a Greek patristic text from the library of Dr. Robert Holmes.

  Hobbs sat at the long table and pretended to study the book. If the man from Ephesus had set him up and someone was following him, then he would be sure to lead them to the wrong book.

  Hobbs leaned over the book. He took off his gold-rimmed, tortoiseshell reading glasses, polished them on his plain white shirt, and popped them back on the end of his nose.

  The footsteps were closer now. Hobbs looked up into the face of a man. This man did not look as though he were either a student or member of the academic staff. He looked more like a mercenary, a trained killer. Hobbs shook himself to dispel such foolish thoughts.

  He smiled at the man who was looking straight at him. The man afforded him a slight nod. The man had an aquiline nose and high cheekbones. Hobbs idly thought he looked like the image of Scipio Aemilianus, the Roman Emperor. The man walked over and selected a book and sat down at a nearby table to read it.

  The hair stood up on the back of Hobbs’s neck. He didn’t think this man was a scholar. He didn’t have that slightly worn look about him, nor did he show any excitement at reading a rare book.

  Hobbs stood up, put the book back on the shelf, and walked away briskly.

  As he did so, he heard footsteps. He looked around to see the man reaching for the Greek patristic text he had just put back on the shelf.

  The man saw him watching and ran at him. Hobbs took off at a sprint. He had played football in college and occasionally went for a jog, but he was in no fit shape for running. As he ran, he thought about pulling books off the shelves to delay his attacker, but he couldn’t bring himself to harm a rare book.

  Hobbs ran ever faster, all the while painfully aware of the footsteps closing on him.

  He rounded the corner, but the man had beaten him to the exit. Hobbs turned around and ran back the way he came. He tried to call for help, but he was running too fast to manage a shout.

  Hobbs rounded a corner and ran straight into the man’s stony chest.

  The man pulled a knife on Hobbs, but just as the tip reached Hobbs’s body, someone called out. The man swung away as he drove the knife in.

  His attacker took off, leaving Hobbs dying on the ground.

  Hobbs looked up into the face of a young student bending over him. “Tell her Revelation two, verse two.”

  Those were his last words.

  3

  PENNSYLVANIA

  Dr. Abigail Spencer paused as some latecomers arrived. She let out a long sigh. Abigail’s hours had been cut to part time, and her under-qualified colleague, Dr. Harvey Hamilton, had been promoted over her simply as he was having an affair with the Dean, a woman who doted on his every move. Money would have been tight for Abigail if it hadn’t been for the retainer paid to her by a covert government organization.

  Abigail had recently been captured by agents of Vortex, a sinister group, but had managed to escape with a government agent, Jack Riley. After Riley recruited her, she hadn’t heard another word from him. At least the money kept coming on a weekly basis.

  Abigail looked up and saw that everyone was seated. She gestured to the screen once more. “And of course, to this day, no one has discovered what really happened to Croesus,” she said. “According to Herodotus...”

  A male student in the front row interrupted her. “What about the treasure?”

  Abigail pulled an expression of distaste. “Treasure!” she said with disgust. “That’s why the Egyptian civilization is so well-known at the expense of several other civilizations such as the Hittites.”

  She noted some of the students exchanged glances. They’d been on the receiving end of her displeasure over treasure before.

  “Has the Croesus treasure ever been found?” the young man persisted.

  Abigail nodded and then shook her head. “No, only in part. In 2006, it was discovered that two artifacts from Croesus’s treasure had been stolen from a Turkish museum and replaced by fakes. One was a hippocamp and one was a golden bird. They were eventually returned.”

  “What’s a hippocamp?” the same student asked. His question was met with groans.

  “A winged horse sea creature,” the student sitting next to him said.

  Abigail pushed on. “These were part of the treasure known as the Lydian Hoard or the Karun. There were three hundred and sixty-three Lydian artifacts.”

  “But there would have been much more Lydian treasure than that. Why wasn’t all the treasure found?” someone asked her.

  She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s very rare that a whole stash of ancient treasure is found at once. Take Tutankhamen, for example.”

  She would have said more, but someone called out, “The curse!”

  Abigail resisted rolling her eyes. If there was one thing the students liked more than treasure, it was curses.

  Just then, she looked up as someone else entered. She pointedly looked at her watch and up again. To her surprise, it wasn’t a student, but Jack Riley.

  She stared at him fixedly. Some of the other students turned around to look. Instead of taking a seat, he continued down to her and bent close to her ear. “You have to come with me now.” His tone was insistent.

  She made to object, but his hand was already on her elbow, leading her out a side door, giving her barely enough time to reach for her jacket. “What’s this about?” she asked him.

  “I’ll explain when it’s safe,” he said.

  She gestured behind her. “But the students! What will they think?”

  Riley did not respond. He was looking around and guiding her through the corridors at speed. “We have a mission.”

  “A mission?” Abigail parroted. She could hardly believe her ears. Could the timing be any worse? “But I have to give a paper at an important conference next week,” she protested. “I haven’t heard anything from you for weeks and now you turn up and say there’s a mission?”

  Riley stopped his long strides to turn to her. “Your life could be in danger. Have you heard from Professor Hobbs lately?”

  Then he was off again, leading her along. Abigail was entirely confused. “Jason? What’s this got to do with him?”

  “He was murdered a few hours ago in Oxford.”

  Abigail was aware her mouth had fallen open. She grabbed Riley’s arm. “England? He was murdered? What was he doing in Oxford?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Riley guided Abigail to the left. “Why are we going this way?” she asked.

  “In case someone is waiting out the front for us.” Riley’s reply was curt.

  Abigail had no doubt a gun was inside his jacket. Abigail knew nothing about guns. Her knowledge only extended to ancient languages and ancient lands. They didn’t have guns in her area of expertise. Sure, she knew the difference between a Thracian broadsword and the hoplites’ short sword, the xiphos, knowledge that would be of absolutely no help in her current predicament. Moments ago, she didn’t even know she had a predicament.

  They reached the side door. She saw a black car with tinted windows outside. “Wait here,” Riley said. He looked out the door and then stepped outside, still looking around. He opened the door to the black car. “Get in as fast as you can.”

  As soon as Abigail stepped into the daylight, bees whizzed past her. It took her a moment or two to realize they were bullets. The next thing she knew, Riley was half pulling, half pushing her inside the car. He jumped in behind her, slamming the door. “Get down,” he said as he sped off.

  Abigail didn’t need telling twice. She stayed on the floor as the car swung this way and that. After the car straightened up and accelerated, she said, “Is it safe to get up now?”

  “Sure,” Riley said. “It’s a bullet-proof car.”

  Abigail wondered why he had told her to stay down. She was still trying to take it all in. It was all so surreal. “What’s this all about?” she asked for a second time.

  “It’s all about the Croesus treasure,” Riley told her. “There is apparently a copper scroll that gives its location.”

  Abigail scratched her head. She was going to ask a question, but Riley pushed on. “Apparently, the treasure was dispersed and hidden in several locations.”

  Abigail nodded slowly. “Jason Hobbs recently published a paper on an ostracon that stated that, although there’s believed to be a repository of the main treasure. Anyway, please go on. What happened to Jason?”

  “Someone from Ephesus contacted him purporting to have a copper scroll which gave the location of one of the stashes of the Croesus treasure. Hobbs went to the Bodleian library.”

  “What was he looking for?” Abigail said.

  Riley shot a look at her. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  She wished he would keep his eyes on the road, driving at such speed. “I don’t have a clue. You’ll have to tell me more.”

  “We don’t know. This has all just happened. We were only alerted to it because we had someone tailing one of Vortex’s men.”

  Abigail caught her breath. She knew the mysterious organization, Vortex, employed mercenaries who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted.

  Riley was still talking. “Our man was waiting outside the Bodleian Library when word came that someone was dead. When we discovered it was Professor Hobbs, we wondered what he had that Vortex would want. We went through his phone records and email exchanges and discovered he’d been corresponding with a man from Selcuk about the copper scroll.”

  “Selcuk? That’s right next to the ruins of ancient Ephesus.”

  Riley nodded. “The man told Hobbs there was an earlier translation of the copper scroll.”

  Abigail tapped her forehead. “Of course! Hobbs did send me an offprint of his most recent article on the ostracon.”

  Riley shot a look at her again. “I’m hoping you can explain his dying words.”

  Abigail was still upset over the loss of her former colleague and friend. “What were his words?”

  “He said, ‘Tell her, Revelation two, verse two.’ Do you have any idea what that means?”

  Abigail didn’t have a chance to respond, as a car pulled up beside them and slammed into them.

  4

  EPHESUS

  Eymen Bulut wasn’t a paranoid man. At least, he hadn’t been until now. A respectable jeweler, Eymen had gone about his life in obscurity. Decades ago, Eymen’s father had let him in on the secret of the copper scroll.

  His father had issued the dire warning that the scroll must not fall into the wrong hands. Eymen’s father had died in a car accident only weeks after Eymen’s sixteenth birthday, on which occasion he told him the whereabouts of the scroll and promised to tell him more about it later. Now, at the age of forty-seven, the burden still lay heavily on Eymen.

  For years, Eymen had kept an eye on all the relevant academic journals, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Anatolian Studies on JSTOR, Belleten, the Journal of Greek Archaeology, and other journals that mentioned Lydia, searching for any mention of the Croesus treasure. He had read every report, monograph, and article published by Harvard’s The Sardis Expedition. When he read Professor Hobbs’s paper, he had tentatively reached out to him.

  From their correspondence, Eymen became certain that Hobbs was not after the money.

  Still, their latest correspondence had been different somehow, and Eymen wondered if someone was intercepting their emails.

  And so it was with great trepidation he caught a bus to the ruins at Ephesus to meet with Professor Jason Hobbs.

  Eymen wanted to speak with Hobbs in person. He considered himself a good judge of character. Hobbs wanted to go to Eymen’s apartment or jewelry store, but Eymen had refused, saying he would meet him at Ephesus. It was only a thirty-minute walk away, but Eymen wasn’t taking any chances. That is why he took the bus.

  Eymen walked through the ruins of Ephesus as he had done many times before. He had grown up in Selcuk, but no matter how many times he visited the ruins of Ephesus, the fact he was walking over the same ground people thousands of years ago had walked still filled him with awe.

  He had told Hobbs to meet him in the Bouleuterian. It was a fitting place as it was where city matters were discussed in ancient Ephesus. Theatrical performances were also held there.

  Eymen walked behind the Basilica Stoa and into the Prytaneum. The crowds weren’t as prolific as usual, given it was late winter and thus not the tourist season. A pang of anxiety hit him. What if Hobbs was simply there to procure the scroll and wanted the treasure for himself?

  Eymen had been consumed with misgivings before. Now it was too late. He would have to push forward and meet the man.

  Eymen took a firm hold on the handle of his leather briefcase and looked around for Hobbs.

  His eyes fell on a tall man. He had a slightly stooped, wearied expression and was wearing a tweed coat. Surely, this was the academic he was supposed to meet.

  The man caught his eye and smiled and waved. He walked over to him. “Eymen Bulut?” the man said, offering his hand.

  Eymen nodded. “And you must be Professor Hobbs.”