The Eden Deception

by Nathan Swain

  “It’s unlike any I’ve seen here. It’s much bigger and has strange markings.”

  Reso sighed with frustration. “What did they do with it?” he asked.

  “Tests. Laboratory tests.”

  A long pause. Samir wondered if his failure to win Olivia would be the end of his stay in Cambridge. “Leave now,” he imagined Reso ordering. “You will come back home and return to working in the fruit orchards. Apparently, that’s all you can do.”

  But Reso’ response was unexpectedly welcome. “Samir, you have done well. You need to listen carefully to me now, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is a critical moment for our people. Perhaps the most important moment of the past thousand years.”

  “Why? What is happening?”

  “Do you remember I told you that the sacred tablet had fallen into the hands of the US Army?”

  “Yes.”

  “I believe that the tablet is the same object you describe the American bringing to Professor Nazarian.”

  “Why would the Americans bring it to her?”

  Reso paused to collect his thoughts. “This is not a great surprise. They must have translated the tablet. Naturally, they brought it to Professor Nazarian as the acknowledged expert of Eden.”

  “She cannot help them. She believes the Garden is in Iraq near Nasiriyah.”

  “Yes, but she is a renowned scholar. She will learn much from the tablet. Perhaps enough to find the actual location of the Garden.”

  “We cannot allow that.”

  “I’m glad you agree.”

  “I will kill her now and put an end to this.”

  “No! No my son”—Reso tried to calm himself, remembering Samir’s instinct for violence—“You may kill the American, but not her.”

  “Then what is to be done with her?”

  “You must do exactly what I say.”

  Chapter 28

  Dashni Nazarian was in his element. The prime minister assigned Dashni the task of fielding “Questions to the Prime Minister”—the half-hour verbal slug-fest occurring in the British House of Commons each Wednesday, when members of Parliament, including the minority leader, lobbed questions at the prime minister or his designee, hoping to land a rhetorical knock-out punch pithy enough for the evening news.

  Most of the exchanges were bombast and histrionics, with little substantive debate. But Dashni loved the combat. The two main parties, Conservative and Labor, literally facing off in the rectangular Commons with leaders engaged in linguistic battle over a narrow conference table, embodied for Dashni the essence of liberty—an open and adversarial exchange of ideas. It summoned in his mind images of the English lords and barons confronting King John in the fields of Runnymede, hashing out the Magna Carta—the Great Charter—to secure their liberties.

  He was pleased the prime minister—who Dashni viewed as having near subhuman intelligence—asked him to field questions today. The invasion of Iraq had not gone as planned. Saddam had been deposed quickly enough, but no WMD had been found. And as the insurgency in Iraq grew, analysts and experts began pointing to signs of an impending civil war between Sunni and Shia. The coalition countries were losing faith.

  Shortly after 9/11, Dashni began whispering in the prime minister’s ear about an alliance with the US to depose Saddam. At first, the prime minister was unconvinced, but eventually he was swayed by US pressure, lobbying from UK defense contractors and energy companies, and not a little badgering from his foreign secretary. Most influential was the nightmare scenario of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons manufactured by Saddam being detonated on UK soil. After 9/11, it was not an unreasonable fear, the prime minister concluded. But as more time passed after the invasion without the discovery of WMD, the prime minister decided it only was fair that Dashni answer for it.

  But Dashni by nature only played offense. As he waited on the front bench, sitting next to his fellow government ministers on the Commons floor, he was glowing with anticipation for a stimulating brawl. He was impressively outfitted in a Gieves & Hawkes navy wool self-stripe suit, white twill shirt and a purple diamond floret silk tie by Drake’s. His cufflinks were sterling silver embossed with two golden lions from the Royal Arms of William the Conqueror, which he had adopted as his own personal crest.

  “Questions to the foreign secretary,” the Speaker of the Assembly trumpeted, the curls of his white wig jostling above his shoulders.

  Peter Carlyle, a thirty-five-year old political phenom, and the minority party’s chief minister on foreign affairs, rose to speak. “Is the foreign secretary willing to admit that, no WMD having been found by the coalition, the pretenses for this war were false?”

  A cascade of shouts, cheers, and bellows arose from the five rows of back benches across the Commons. A brief pause, and the clamor was met in force by a guttural stew of moans and jeers of condemnation by the back-benchers behind Dashni.

  “Mr. Speaker, I must admit that I am puzzled by the right honorable gentleman’s question,” Dashni responded. “To suggest that this country’s entry into war was based on pretense is not only a ghastly and unfounded condemnation of this body, but of the right honorable gentleman and his own party, as he and they reviewed the intelligence supporting this war, recommended this war to his and their own constituents, and more to the point, voted for this war, as they rightly should have.”

  Dashni’s back-benchers stomped their feet in enthusiasm. “Hear, hear.”

  “Mr. Speaker,” Dashni continued, “the right honorable gentleman’s question is a white wash of history. In this House, it was discussed and debated for days the reasons for deposing Saddam and his murderous regime. Among them: during his more than twenty-year rule, Saddam killed and tortured thousands of Iraqi citizens, including gassing and killing thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq during the 1980s, brutally repressing Shia and Kurdish uprisings following the 1991 Gulf War, and a fifteen-year campaign of repression and displacement of the Marsh Arabs in Southern Iraq. This is a man who obtains confessions from his own people by burning them with hot irons, dripping acid on their skin, mutilating them with electric drills, cutting out their tongues. He tortures children through electric shock while their parents are made to watch. It is a sad day indeed when this House loses its nerve regarding this man, the worst demagogue this planet has seen since the Führer.”

  The back-benchers washed Dashni in a chorus of cheers, hear-hears, and feet stomping. Dashni’s feet vibrated happily.

  Carlyle, staggered but determined, responded: “Is it not telling that my right honorable friend now relies on human rights to explain the reasons for the war, when we all were witness to this government’s principal argument for war—Saddam’s alleged possession of WMD.” Carlyle’s supporters rallied behind their young standard bearer. “There is no evidence of WMD, is there?” he asked, jabbing a rhetorical finger in Dashni’s chest. “Answer my question, sir.”

  It was Dashni’s long-held belief that military intervention was almost always justified on human rights grounds. He was candid about the basis for his opinion. Iraq’s dictator bombed the Kurdish resistance in the mountains, killing Dashni’s mother and siblings when he was just ten years old. Only his precocious nature and good luck saved him from a life of destitution. As a boy, Dashni would have done anything to save his family. Now, as a leader of one of the greatest countries on Earth, he considered it his moral obligation to put an end to the barbarity of Iraqi strongmen.

  With the threat of WMD, it was Saddam’s own people, especially the ethnic minorities in and around Iraq, who were most likely to be targeted by biological and chemical weapons. If Saddam stayed in power it could hardly be doubted that one day they would be. But Dashni never saw WMD as a primary reason for intervention, nor the alleged linkage between Saddam and al Qaeda, the evidence of which was laughable. Overall, he was damned tired of talking about WMD, but he knew he had to defend it. It had become the allied countries’ sole obsession.


  “It is disheartening that the right honorable gentleman can so blithely cast aside Saddam’s inhumanity. There was a time when the leaders of this country bravely confronted brutal and murderous dictators, without a petty reliance on national interest. But setting aside the right honorable gentleman’s meager view of Britain’s role in the world, Mr. Speaker, it is fascinating to hear that the right honorable gentleman has information that this government does not have, namely, that there is no WMD in Iraq. Has he received reports that we have not, reaching this conclusion? Has he himself scoured the palaces and bunkers of Baghdad? The dugouts and ditches of Mosul? Does he have a new career as a weapons inspector? The idea may not be a bad one, in light of his dimming prospects for reelection as a minister.”

  Dashni’s defense, inciting gales of laughter from his supporters and even a quarter-smile of appreciation from his opponent, was a classic example of British political rhetoric, combining substantive acumen with a touch of personal venom. Dashni was confident that he had carried the day, pushing back the tide of anti-war sentiment once more, if only for a while.

  But as Dashni continued to field questions from the other MPs on the mundane issues of day-to-day governance, from housing prices to university tuition, in the back of his mind he knew that WMD was a problem. The British and American people had become obsessed with finding it. The US in particular was turning Iraq upside down looking for it.

  Before the invasion, British intelligence reported that Iraq had plans to weaponize the lethal gas VX, and that 550 mustard gas shells and 450 aerial mustard bombs were unaccounted for by weapons inspectors. British intelligence believed that 10,000 liters of anthrax once in the possession of Iraq had gone missing. The claim by the Americans that Saddam had attempted to purchase Uranium from Africa was obvious hokum. But the evidence as a whole pointed to a large amount of WMD still in Iraq.

  Before the beginning of the war, Dashni was consumed with the question of what would happen if WMD were never found. He quickly arrived at an answer: the war would continue, and the ruling elite would continue to defend the decision to intervene, citing human rights, links to al-Qaeda, and democracy building. Unlike his colleagues, his chief concern was the fate of Iraq if WMD was found.

  Would the Allies lose interest in hunting down Saddam? he asked himself. Would they abandon the Iraqi people just as democracy was beginning to take flight? Would they let the country fall back into the arms of the homicidal dictator and his Baathist thugs?

  Dashni believed they would. It was an outcome he couldn’t allow.

  Chapter 29

  Professor Allison worked at a fevered pace in his lab. He was sure Eastgate’s tablet was a fake, yet it was such an ambitious fake, he wanted to understand how and why it had been made. A tenured professor for more than thirty years, archaeology rarely piqued Allison’s interest anymore. But when a new intellectual puzzle passed his way, he pursued the answer with the tenacity of a dog chasing a sweet, marrowy bone.

  Tonight, Allison’s curiosity about the tablet had gotten the better of him, keeping him in the lab past 1 a.m. Just hours after Eastgate brought the tablet to Cambridge, Allison was already finalizing his radiocarbon date analysis, which determined the age of biological objects such as human remains and the bones of animals. Among other high-tech toys, the lab was equipped with an Accelerator Mass Spectrometer, which he used to determine the approximate carbon date of an object by analyzing as little as one gram of its contents.

  Shortly after Eastgate and Olivia left, Allison extracted a speck of stone from the rough, upper edge of the tablet. He ran the sample through the AMS machine as he consumed his dinner from the American burger place down the street. Five minutes later, Allison held the print out of the results in his hand, leaving blotchy thumb prints of burger grease on the paper.

  Samir, who was still fuming from Olivia’s lies and betrayal, looked at Allison through the small porthole window in the door to the lab, watching Allison stuff his puffy, pallid face with chips and lick blobs of ketchup off of his fingertips. Samir’s anger swelled into rage. Everything about England was beginning to nauseate him. The fat, pale professors in their tweeds. The gossiping and cynical students. The business drones who chattered on their blue tooth devices on the tube. It had all become too much.

  Back home, Samir was revered in his village and by his family, if not by his father. He was strong. In fact, he was deadly. He was ready to feel like himself again.

  Samir looked through the window at the clock in the lab. It was 1:30 a.m. He wasn’t sure how long he had been standing at the door, watching Allison fatten himself. But his view of the doddering professor was now obscured by a layer of condensation on the glass. Samir curled the sleeve of his shirt over his hand as he rubbed it clear, making a squeaking sound on the window. When the fog cleared, Allison was staring at the test results, giggling.

  What a pathetic fool, Samir thought. He has no idea what’s about to happen.

  Allison placed the print out of the tablet’s carbon date into a pocket inside his tweed jacket. He heard the familiar sound of shoes squeaking against the newly-scrubbed floor, but he didn’t look up. The evening cleaning crew was just finishing its work, he assumed.

  “Hello,” Allison said, an impish grin painting his face.

  “What’s that in your pocket, old man?” Samir asked.

  “I beg your pardon?” Allison said, still distracted.

  After six months of observing Cambridge’s stuffy protocol of conduct between student and faculty, Samir relished the opportunity to address Allison with the contempt he deserved. Samir didn’t know Allison personally, but he knew his type. Pompous, entitled and lazy, Allison probably believed he had earned everything himself, that he had won success through self-reliance and hard work. Samir knew it was all bullshit. Allison, like the other Cambridge dons, was the beneficiary of a corrupt empire whose riches continued to flow to the sons of British aristocracy.

  “In that ridiculous, moth-eaten tweed jacket that you’re wearing. What did you put in the pocket?” Samir uncoiled two fingers from his right hand and poked them into Allison’s shoulder.

  Samir had Allison’s attention. Allison recognized Samir as one of Olivia’s students. In fact, he had needled her more than once about Samir’s tendency to appear outside the archaeology building whenever Olivia was around.

  “Who do you think you are?” Allison asked. “I’ll have you thrown out of this university on your entitled—”

  Samir didn’t let Allison complete his threat. He turned to the tripod that Allison had used to scan the tablet, which was still standing in the center of the lab. Samir hoisted it in the air by its midsection and swung it into the left side of Allison’s jaw, sending the professor to the ground with a cracking thud.

  It was an immensely satisfying swing. At that moment, crashing through Allison’s geriatric skeleton, Samir felt the release of rage that had been building for months.

  Allison was badly wounded. He instinctively raised his left arm in self-defense and attempted to stand.

  Samir looked down at his own feet and noticed that his left shoe was untied. As Allison struggled to rise, Samir knelt and patiently tightened the laces.

  At the last possible moment, before Allison stood high enough that Samir would have to modify the plane of his stroke, Samir turned from his shoe, picked up the tripod again, and came down on Allison’s head, generating a loud crack. Allison fell hard to the ground, his face planted into the linoleum floor.

  Spattered with blood, Samir knelt over Allison’s body, inspecting his work. The blow had done-in half of the old scholar’s cranium. Allison’s body twitched here and there, and Samir danced in a circle around it, snapping his fingers in reenactment of a dance from his village, as the old scholar passed through his final death throws. Minutes later, Allison’s body had stilled.

  Samir walked over to the table and finished the plate of chips.

  Chapter 30

  Eastgate awoke to
the gentle sway of the River Cam rolling beneath him. He had rented a houseboat in Cambridge, docked on the river between Jesus Lock and Baits Bite Lock. Eyes squinting, he peered outside the small rhombus-shaped windows in his cabin. The first hints of sun from the east began glinting from the white sails moored on the boats all around him and casting triangular shadows onto the banks of the west dock. Despite the clear blue sky overhead, the water was brown and murky.

  Eastgate scratched his head and yawned. Makes the Tigris look like an alpine spring.

  Eastgate’s bed in the master bedroom sat across from a built-in bookshelf, which was stocked with a familiar array of paperbacks found in bed-and-breakfasts and home rentals worldwide: James Clavell’s Shogun, Gore Vidal’s Burr, and half a dozen James Michener novels. Eastgate’s glasses sat atop a paperback Norton Library edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which he put down in the middle of the night after losing a half-hearted battle to keep his mind off of the tablet.

  The cherry wood paneling in the bedroom and kitchen reminded Eastgate of the boat he called home once every few years when his CO forced him to take vacation. It, too, was probably gently bobbing in the water right now, its sleek white deck glowing in the moonlight over Sea Island, Georgia. The boat, the Yellow Jasmine, had belonged to his parents. They lived on it during the summers when Eastgate was a child, following the trade winds from Sea Island to the Bahamas and back, occasionally docking for Eastgate’s father to give a private lesson or play in a golf tournament.

  It was a safer world then. The threat of nuclear war and mutual assured destruction kept the Soviets in check. There were proxy skirmishes between the great powers in South America and Africa, but nothing that could touch US shores. For most Americans, all of that changed on 9/11. For Eastgate, it changed when a hotel in Bombay, India was ripped apart by a terrorist’s bomb, killing his parents and hundreds more.