by Nathan Swain
She was fortunate enough to have felt the jolt once before when on a moonlit night in Southern Iraq she took an evening stroll across the plateau of a mound in the desert and caught a glimpse of what appeared to be columns of sand. After a few weeks of digging, Olivia realized she had found something extraordinary: the remains of Tell Eatiq.
She remembered all of the questions she had after discovering the first evidence linking Tell Eatiq to Eden, and the lengths she went to make sure her analysis was on solid ground. If it wasn’t, she would have been laughed out of Cambridge for even suggesting a connection to Eden. She personally reviewed each symbol on each relief and sculpture a dozen times. Scores of carbon dates were obtained from all over the site to make sure none of the artifacts the dig had unearthed were younger or older than expected. In the end, all of the evidence held up to scrutiny.
Olivia wanted to apply the same intellectual rigor to Rich’s journal entry. It read like surrealist fiction. But nothing else in the journal suggested that Rich was exaggerating. His accounts were matter of fact and reportorial. Rich had no intent of turning his journal into a number one best seller, or leverage his discovery into national celebrity. Olivia simply had no reason to doubt Rich’s account.
She wished she could share her discovery. Allison would have been the first person she told. Under normal circumstances, she would have quickly informed her department head, who then would have sent an exclamation-point laden email to the university provost. She would have published a paper about the tablet and its carbon-dating and the link between the symbol and Rich’s journal. A press conference would have been called. Scholars would have jostled for a role on the team searching for the site described by Rich.
But this wouldn’t happen. Allison was dead. She had finally received an email from her department chair officially reporting the murder to the faculty. The tablet had been stolen. Coming into contact with this mystery had meant danger and death. No, for now, she would not share the discovery with anyone other than Eastgate. But she wouldn’t bury it in the archives either. She had an obligation to her profession—to Rich and to Allison and even to her father, who set her on this path so many years ago—to uncover the buried truth. If it meant undermining her own theory linking Tell Eatiq with Eden, so be it.
“Five more minutes and I was going to go looking for you,” Eastgate said, as Olivia strode through the building lobby, returning from the special collections room.
“Were you worried?” Olivia asked.
“Just bored. You’d think a library would have more interesting books in its gift shop.”
“Forget the gift shop. I found the perfect present for you in the special collections room.” Olivia coyly patted her messenger bag.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Oh yes.”
“What is it?”
“The missing piece to the puzzle.”
Chapter 41
Countless ops over the years of breaking into the homes of warlords and terrorists had taught Eastgate a simple but important lesson: don’t forget to turn the lights out when you leave. It was an easy mistake to make, but it would tip off the most unobservant target that he’d been plundered. So Eastgate had made sure to turn out all of the lights in the safe house before they left, and when they returned from the British Library, he and Olivia exited the cab three blocks from the safe house to inspect it from afar. The lights were on.
“Gotcha,” Eastgate said.
They stood in front of a kabob and chicken restaurant, immersed in the fragrant aroma of dill and mint. Eastgate scanned the intersection.
“What is it?” Olivia asked.
“Those lights were off when we left. We have a visitor.”
Under ordinary circumstances, Olivia would be entirely safe waiting on the street corner while Eastgate checked out the apartment. But there was a one-in-three chance they were under heavy surveillance. If he left Olivia alone, Samir or his cronies could swoop in and overpower her in a matter of seconds. They would need to enter the safe house together.
They crossed the street and hurried into the building. The pounding sound of their feet vibrated in the stairwell. Eastgate unfolded Pearl’s machine gun like a jigsaw knife as he marched up the stairs. He reached into his shoulder holster. “Here, you need this,” he said, handing Olivia the M11. “If someone tries to grab you, shoot them. If someone tries to shoot you, shoot them first.” Eastgate remembered giving the same instruction to Hadi in Baghdad before the assassin Noah overtook him. Knowing Hadi would never fire a gun and that it was more likely to fall into Noah’s hands, he intentionally kept it unloaded.
But Eastgate trusted Olivia with a live weapon, at least for the limited purpose of reentering their apartment. She had shown herself to be a tough, intuitive operator. After seeing Allison’s corpse, she also understood the stakes. With the Flaming Sword, the rules were simple: kill or be killed.
Eastgate pinned the machine gun against his shoulder and approached the front door to their flat, waiving Olivia to stay behind him. He had trained for urban warfare back in the US before the invasion of Iraq, and he was pretty confident that he was more adept at hand-to-hand combat or close gun play than whoever stood inside the apartment. Eastgate counted the paces off to the door and choreographed his next move. Olivia, down on one knee, waited for a crash.
Eastgate screwed his left leg into the ground and sent the heel of his right boot hurtling into the patch of wood above the door knob. The wood splintered with a crack and the door flew open.
The Van Halen song “Jump” played over the hi-fi inside. There was no sense in being stealth. Their entrance had taken care of that. “Anyone home?” Eastgate yelled. Leading with the nose of his machine gun, he checked each room in the flat, finishing with the kitchen, where a slight man wearing a t-shirt was sitting with his back to the entrance.
“Put your hands where I can see them,” Eastgate said, a half-closed eye taking aim over the barrel of the machine gun.
The man turned and thrust forward a carton of Chinese food and chopsticks.
It was Pearl. “Help yourself, Jane.”
Chapter 42
Eastgate introduced Pearl to Olivia with mixed emotions. He was their only ally in the UK, and a highly effective one at that. Without him, they would probably both be dead. But Eastgate worried that connecting Olivia with Pearl would put her in even greater danger. Pearl was a powerful antibiotic, but he came with risks.
At the moment, his most obvious liability was his libido. Pearl could not take his eyes off Olivia. His ogling became so blatant the word “letch” began to cross Eastgate’s mind.
Easy, Pearl. Haven’t you ever seen a beautiful woman before?
After further consideration, Eastgate wasn’t sure if Pearl had even been on a date before. But he was positive he had a world-class internet porn collection. He was the kind of guy who wasn’t really comfortable doing anything unless it involved computers. Probably even sex.
“I’ve collected a dossier on Professor Nazarian’s boyfriend,” Pearl said.
“Would you two please stop calling him that?”
“I’m sorry. Were you two never intimate?”
Olivia’s blood boiled. This man is a real shit.
“What does that have to do with anything, Mr. Pearl?”
Pearl took a swig of Diet Coke and sloshed it around in his mouth before swallowing. “I was just curious. I don’t see many women. I don’t even know what’s expected these days. Is sex on the table on the first date?”
Eastgate caught himself smiling at Pearl’s bizarre interlocution. He liked his strange friend. But the gentleman in him had to intervene.
“Uh, Pearlsy. Why don’t you just show us what you’ve got?”
Pearl removed a manila folder from his messenger bag and opened it up on the marble island countertop. It was a dossier of Samir, complete with a written biography and photographs.
The thought of learning the truth about S
amir filled Olivia with equal parts curiosity and disgust. She had been fascinated by the mystery of Samir since their first meeting. She looked for clues about him in the way he dressed and spoke. She memorized the titles in his apartment bookshelves. She even had the registrar send her his marks in his other courses: all middling. She thought all of these fragments would eventually aggregate and harmonize into the portrait of a fascinating man.
In retrospect, she had been naive, she concluded. She projected dash, romance, and sophistication onto him. In reality, he had none of these qualities. Worse, as she had engaged in these silly musings, Samir apparently had been leaving her threatening letters from the Flaming Sword and stalking her from Cambridge to London and who knows where else. All the while, he was probably plotting Allison’s death, maybe even plotting her own. Olivia had been blind to it all.
“His real name is Samir Zana,” Pearl said. “Born in Turkey. Orphaned. He was adopted into a large clan. Enrolled at Cambridge last year. No known aliases, no criminal background.”
“Turkey!” Olivia shouted, enraged. “He told me he was Palestinian by birth.”
Pearl smirked. Welcome to the world of shadows, Professor.
“Any idea why he was following you?” Pearl asked.
Eastgate began to respond. “Well, as a matter of fact, Pearl—” Olivia interrupted. “Will, may I speak with you for a moment?”
Olivia looped her arm around Eastgate’s and led him to an adjacent room. “The last person to help us is dead. Do you really want to bring him into this? He seems a bit”—Olivia paused, searching for the right word—“juvenile.”
“Pearl deals with stuff a lot nastier than this on a regular basis. He knows what he’s getting into.”
Oliva shrugged. “He’s your mate.”
Eastgate approached Pearl, placing his hand on Pearl’s bony shoulder. Eastgate noticed for the first time a layer of green-yellow grime on Pearl’s teeth. Dude, do you ever brush?
“Are you coming in for a kiss, or what?” Pearl asked.
Eastgate hesitated. “Have you checked for bugs?”
“Of course I did. The place is clean. That’s why it’s a ‘safe house,’ ” Pearl said, using air quotes to make his point.
“Are you sure you want to know what’s going on here, Pearl? Say so now or forever hold your peace.”
Pearl shifted in his seat for a moment. “Go ahead. Maybe I can help.”
“This one may be a bit outside your area of expertise.”
Chomping on a mouthful of chicken and rice, Pearl made a circular motion with his chopsticks. Get on with it.
“Samir Zana was looking for an ancient cuneiform tablet,” Eastgate said. “It’s what I was carrying when that assassin tried to nab me in Baghdad. I took it to Professor Nazarian because she’s an expert on Assyriology, the ancient Near East. Unfortunately, this Samir character was following us. He killed Professor Allison to get the tablet.”
Pearl stared blankly at Eastgate, as if his friend was merely going over the mundane details of last night’s baseball game.
“Professor Allison being the dead guy from Cambridge who’s all over the news?”
“Yes, sadly. He and Professor Nazarian were very close.”
“I know I’ll regret asking,” Pearl said, “but my curiosity is getting the better of me. What’s so special about this tablet?”
Olivia gave Eastgate a stern look. Eastgate pretended he didn’t notice. “It appears to describe the location of the Garden of Eden.”
“I thought that was already discovered by that Cambridge—”
Pearl looked at Olivia, a glow of comprehension dawning over his face.
“Oh, I see, you’re that Cambridge—”
“Babe? Bimbo? Bitch? Yes, that’s me,” Olivia said.
“OK,” Pearl uttered nervously, shifting in his seat, unnerved by Olivia’s mindreading.
“This recent evidence appears to raise serious doubts about my prior discovery,” Olivia said, angry that Pearl made her defensive about her own scholarship.
“OK,” Pearl said, “so what do you want to do now?”
Eastgate had been asking himself that question since he brought the tablet to Olivia. What would she want to do? After the ambush at the checkpoint, his personal mission had been clear: discover the truth about the tablet. Only by uncovering its secrets could he learn why the old man at the checkpoint promised him unspeakable harm, and why his search had left a trial of death on his heels.
He realized Olivia might have different motives. Her fame and professional reputation were tied to Tell Eatiq. If uncovering the secrets of the tablet meant finding the real Eden and invalidating her great discovery, Eastgate wondered how motivated Olivia would be to keep digging.
Fortunately, Olivia was unequivocal. “We need to find the site described in the tablet and corroborated by Rich’s account. Discovering the location of the real Garden of Eden described in Genesis 2 would be of inestimable value to mankind. It would help us dissolve sectarian conflicts, deflate fundamentalist beliefs.”
Eastgate smiled at Olivia’s eloquence. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
“Good for you, Professor,” Pearl added. “ ‘For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.’ ”
Olivia stared blankly at Pearl.
Eastgate shook his head in bemusement.
“Thomas Jefferson,” Pearl said, “Letter to William Roscoe, December 27, 1820.”
“Indeed,” Olivia said.
“Thanks for the inspiring quotation, Pearlsy. We really needed that.”
In college, Pearl quoted Jefferson incessantly. He discovered Jefferson’s writings in high school and arrived at the University of Virginia a fully-cooked Jefferson nutcase with a near encyclopedic knowledge of his correspondence.
“Ahem.” Olivia cleared her throat. “Do you wish to share any more sage wisdom from one of your country’s great slaveholders, or can we continue?”
Pearl looked as if he was about to jump across the table and wring Olivia’s neck.” Jefferson wanted to free his slaves!” Pearl shouted, making a slashing motion with his chopsticks.
“Yes, but his sex drive got in the way, didn’t it?” Olivia retorted, an apparent reference to recent genetic testing showing that Jefferson likely fathered a child of his slave Sally Hemings.
Pearl was about to stand up, but Eastgate intervened. “Easy, Pearl. You kind of asked for it.” Pearl sat down and stewed.
Olivia continued. “Whomever Samir Zana is, Flaming Sword grand master or mere henchman, he and the Flaming Sword clearly wish to use Eden for other purposes.”
“Such as?” Eastgate asked.
“Maybe they want to continue sectarian conflicts, to breed more discord and violence in order to further their own ends. I’m not a political scientist, but I believe it’s the case that corruption and abuse flourish when civil society collapses.”
“You think this is about money?” Pearl asked.
“Money, power, influence. Isn’t that what all of your clients are after, Mr. Pearl? I don’t think the Flaming Sword is any different. They may operate under the guise of protecting the Garden of Eden from evildoers. In reality, I suspect their motives are not so pure.”
Pearl looked out the window and scanned the street below. “These people know you had the tablet. Unless they’re total morons, they’re going to assume you transcribed it and have all the information about it that they do. You have to presume they’ll continue to hunt you.”
The image of Allison’s cracked skull, his hair caked with dried blood, flashed into Olivia’s thoughts.
“The only way you survive this is by locating Eden. If the Flaming Sword exists to keep the Garden’s location secret, you’ll destroy them by making it public.” Pearl withdrew a finger from his mouth, making a popping sound against the inside of his cheek. “Finding Eden pulls the plug on the Flaming Sword.”
>
Eastgate walked over to Olivia. “You’ll need to stop your dig in Iraq.”
“I have friends in the coalition government who can come up with a story,” Pearl interjected. “How about a malaria outbreak?”
Olivia was amused. If you only knew what friends I have in the British government. But she could not turn to her father for help. He would be too suspicious of her motives, he would want to know more. And by involving Dashni, Olivia realized, she’d be putting his life in danger, too.
She considered Pearl’s offer instead. “That would be fine, thank you. Everyone will be thrilled—the Arab countries that considered the dig modern-day imperialism. The UN, which didn’t want to provide funding or security. Most of all, my father, who didn’t think I’d be safe in Iraq. Boy, if he could see me now.”
Chapter 43
The Flaming Sword was rumored to have a well-established cell in London. Local members set policy and planned operations. But they relied heavily on an ad hoc security force to execute their plans. According to Sandwith’s book, the Flaming Sword organization referred to them as the “minders.” Most of them were young Kurdish men living in London on expired visas. Few of them had integrated into British society. They studied the Quran, attended mosque, and earned money on the side working for the Flaming Sword. A seemingly bottomless slush fund financed their operations. No one knew where the money came from.
Samir had been chauffeured by a half-dozen men from Heathrow to Cambridge when he first arrived in England. They dressed like private security and drove a flotilla of Mercedes. Olivia heard rumors about the luxurious caravan from students. Perks of being mates with the King of Jordan, she assumed.
The men were a constant presence in Samir’s life. They followed him to clubs and pubs. If he purchased football tickets, two of them would end up with tickets four rows behind him. They kept tabs on him at the University—watching him in Cambridge coffee shops, following him on his morning runs. They were an extension of his father’s eyes. Samir looked on them as a nuisance. Recently, however, they had demonstrated their value.
