Tree of Life

by J. F. Penn

  At least Morgan had made it out. Two of the men had gone after her, leaving him with one young man and Desomond, who stood in the corner watching the beating with narrowed eyes.

  They were in a concrete room in the basement of a house only a few blocks from the synagogue, definitely soundproof and clearly used for this kind of ‘discussion,’ judging by the blood spots on the floor. There were two chairs and a single bare bulb dangling above, lighting the room with a harsh glare.

  The young man gave a last kick, then dragged Jake up and onto a chair, securing his hands behind him with a cable tie.

  Desomond stepped forward. “What do you want with the Eden manuscript?”

  Jake took a shallow breath, drawing air into his lungs with a painful wheeze. There seemed little point in lying, especially as the map fragment seemed to be close.

  “We’re trying to get to the pieces before someone else finds them first. Someone who uses fire and dynamite and murder to reach their goal.”

  Desomond frowned. “Why now? The pieces have been hidden for generations.”

  Jake explained about the attack on the Ets Haim Synagogue in Amsterdam and their journey to Lisbon and Macau, as well as their run-in with Frik Versfeld.

  Desomond paced back and forward, his shoulders slumping more as he learned of the stolen pieces until he finally turned to the young man. “Go, I don’t need you anymore.”

  The fighter looked disappointed and gave Jake a hard look before walking out.

  Desomond wrung his hands together and wiped sweat from his brow. “I heard about Ets Haim. We thought it was an anti-Semitic attack, unfortunately common enough.”

  “What do you know of the fragments?” Jake asked. “Perhaps we can help each other?”

  Desomond pulled the other chair across the room and sat opposite Jake. “There have been protectors of the piece for generations, tasked with making sure that no one ever puts the whole thing back together. To be honest, I’ve always doubted that the map was real. After all, Eden cannot possibly exist and even if there was once a garden, how could that be a danger to us now?” He shrugged. “But there is much about my faith that I don’t understand, so I didn’t question this task. No one ever asked about it until you arrived. That’s why I reacted as I did.”

  Jake tugged at his bonds. “Any chance you want to take these off me? And maybe tell your men to go easy on my partner?”

  Desomond narrowed his eyes. “Not so fast, my friend.”

  Morgan jogged along the street, staying in the shadows. A blue sedan sped past, then shrieked to a halt in the road just meters away.

  They had found her.

  Morgan turned and ran down an alley. She was only a block from the library now. She might just make it.

  Footsteps pounded the pavement behind her. It was only one man — but he was getting closer.

  People walked the surrounding streets, but none paid any heed. This was an area of town where it was better not to witness anything untoward.

  Just as Morgan reached the middle of the alley, the blue sedan pulled across the end, blocking her in. She looked around quickly, assessing the scene. Three metal dustbins surrounded by bags of rubbish. Discarded boxes. Not much else.

  The man sprinted into the alley and stopped a few meters away. He was short but all meaty muscle, his t-shirt stretched tight against bulging biceps.

  A wide smile spread across his face as he saw she was cornered. “If you come with us now, you won’t get hurt — I promise.”

  His eyes said something different.

  Morgan took a step back, shifting her weight and raising her hands with open palms in the Krav Maga fighting stance. She smiled back. “If you leave me alone, you won’t get hurt — I promise.”

  He walked toward her with a confident swagger born from always being the bigger man, always being the dominant one in a fight.

  Morgan let him come.

  He grabbed for her shoulders with both hands.

  She stepped back with her right leg, thrusting her arms up between his hands with crossed wrists —

  Thrust her arms apart in a twisting motion, driving his arms away —

  His eyes widened in surprise.

  She slammed her flat palms over his ears to stun him, stepped forward, and drove her knee into his groin.

  It was over in a few seconds. Just as it should be.

  The big man doubled over, hands wrapped around his head as he rolled to the ground.

  As Morgan sprinted away, she heard the blue sedan rev up. It wouldn’t be far behind.

  Desomond glared at Jake. “Tell me why you’re chasing after the map. Why should I give you the fragment?”

  “I’m with an organization called ARKANE. We find and protect precious religious artifacts — amongst other things. We have a vault in London, where the pieces can be safe.”

  The old man shook his head. “They’ve been safe for generations by keeping them apart.”

  Jake shifted in his chair to ease the pressure on his bruised ribs. “That may be, but now someone wants to find Eden and they will stop at nothing to bring the pieces together.”

  Desomond sagged in his chair and suddenly looked older than his years.

  “The elder who passed this sacred task to me died decades ago. I’m the only one who knows of the fragment here in Jamaica. To be honest, there’s no one I can pass it on to. The community is small and every year that goes by, I worry that I will die with the knowledge.”

  “Let me help you,” Jake said softly. “We found this place, so others after the fragment will come soon. They may already be on the island. If we take the piece now, you and the community will be safe.”

  “It will only be safe once you’re gone.” Desomond stood up and pulled a penknife from his pocket, flicking open the sharp blade.

  13

  Desomond walked around the back of the chair and cut through the cable tie. Jake massaged his wrists to get the circulation moving again and stood up to stretch.

  Desomond sheepishly indicated Jake’s shirt, now covered with dust and dirty footprints from the beating. “I’m sorry about all this.”

  Jake gingerly felt around his ribs. Not too much worse than before, but then he knew how to protect himself even on the ground. “It’s OK. Your guy clearly needed the practice.”

  He thought of Frik back in the burning church on Macau. These amateurs were lucky that they picked on the right South African. “Can you call off the men looking for Morgan?”

  A flash of concern crossed Desomond’s face. “Of course. Come. We’ll return to the synagogue. You should tell her to meet us back there.”

  As soon as they got outside, Jake called Morgan. The phone rang and rang before she eventually picked up, her breath ragged.

  “You alright?” she asked, her voice more concerned for him than her own safety.

  He should have known she’d be fine. Sometimes, Jake wished he could help his partner more, but Morgan had a core of strength that he couldn’t even find in himself some days. After all, he was the one beaten to the ground, and she was out running around the city.

  “I’m fine.” Jake glanced over at Desomond. “Just a misunderstanding. Can you come back to the synagogue?”

  “On my way.”

  Morgan turned from the call to see the blue sedan pulling up across the street. This time she stood her ground.

  The man she had beaten looked out the window, his face mottled with rage. He mouthed some swear words at her, recognizable in any language, but clearly they’d been told to leave her alone. The driver pulled away.

  She turned and jogged back to the synagogue. Whatever Jake had done, he’d managed to turn the situation around, whereas she’d resorted to violence. Morgan wished she had the even temper and sense of humor that Jake brought to every mission, despite the dire circumstances they sometimes found themselves in. She was lucky to have him as a partner. They complemented each other’s abilities — most of the time, at least — and he watched her
back as she watched his. This time, though, she worried about his personal history with the hitman, Frik Versfeld. Would their shared past jeopardize the mission?

  She rounded one last corner to find Desomond standing just inside the gates of the synagogue, Jake sitting on an ornate bench beside him. Her partner looked a little green, and he clutched his ribs over a dirty shirt. He hadn’t escaped completely unscathed.

  Jake stood up when he saw her, his hands dropping from his rib cage. She smiled at his attempt to hide his pain, but they had worked together long enough that she knew his tells. The tightening of the corkscrew scar at his temple, the tension in his jaw, the way he moved in a slightly jolted fashion.

  “Desomond’s got something to show us,” he said.

  Morgan smiled. “About time.”

  The old man led them into the museum, and this time, he didn’t hesitate. He opened a large sea chest at the back of the room and pulled out several knitted blankets, a pile of baby clothes, and what looked like lost property from the community. A ragtag collection of unwanted objects and underneath it all, a small metal safe.

  Desomond pulled it out with a haunted look in his eyes. “Jake has convinced me that this will be safer with you.”

  He placed it on one of the display cabinets and entered the combination. The safe swung open to reveal a small glass case. Desomond put his hand inside and rested it on the fragment.

  He looked up at Jake. “I’m entrusting you with my sacred duty. The Lord knows I’ve carried it long enough.” He pulled out the glass case and looked down at its muted colors. “You must not let the pieces touch one another again. The risk is too great. Humanity was expelled from Eden for a reason, and we must never try to return there.”

  Jake nodded. “I’ll keep it close to me.”

  Morgan noted that he did not actually promise anything, and for that, she was grateful. This Jewish community had such a rich history and traced its lineage back to Brazil, to Portugal, and to Amsterdam. She wanted to honor their origins, but they still needed to find the next piece.

  She bent to look at the fragment in Jake’s hand. It showed four rivers swirling around a Hebrew word. Arar.

  Cursed.

  A sense of foreboding rose within her as she examined the ancient writing, but she pushed it aside. “Do you know the origins of this piece? Which community did it come from originally?”

  Desomond nodded. “It’s from Recife in Brazil.”

  Paris, France

  Camara pointed to a mountainous area east of the Tigris in the governorate of Nineveh. Sebastian bent to look more closely until his cheek almost brushed against hers. The professor didn’t move away and for a moment, Martin thought perhaps he should leave them alone to catch up.

  A second later, Camara stepped away, her face slightly flushed.

  She switched on the samovar and as the water boiled, she gathered three tiny glasses and placed a sugar cube at the bottom of each. “If we’re going to talk about the Middle East, then let’s do it with traditional hospitality.”

  As she siphoned the tea from the samovar, the smell of mint and herbs filled the air. Martin took a sip of the dark green liquid, grateful for the sugar as it tasted like some kind of foul medicine. Sebastian drank it without comment, so Martin sipped at his glass, determined to give it a try.

  Camara placed her tea down to cool a little before drinking while she shuffled aside some books on her desk until she found a particular one. A battered copy of the Bible in French, its brown leather cover soft from use over generations.

  “The location of Eden is complicated by the names of the rivers in the book of Genesis, chapter two.” She opened the Bible and translated for them. “‘A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.’ The Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates.”

  “So we just trace the path of the rivers, right?” Martin followed the Tigris on the map from the mountains of south-eastern Turkey through to the Persian Gulf, and then the path of the Euphrates to the west. Together they framed the ancient land of Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, now modern Iraq, Kuwait, and eastern parts of Syria and Turkey. He frowned. “Where are the Pishon and the Gihon?”

  Camara smiled at his dawning realization. “Exactly. That’s where scholars differ in their interpretation.”

  Martin turned from the map. “Can it be discerned from historical documents?”

  “Many have tried, and all have failed.” Camara put down the Bible and pulled an oversized tome from a shelf behind her desk, a folio of maps and documents collected over a lifetime of study. She opened it to a black and white print of a mappa mundi, a holy map of the world from the Middle Ages.

  “There are different ideas. The Jewish historian, Josephus, identified the ‘land of Cush’ that borders Eden in Genesis with the African kingdom of Kush, south of Egypt. A twelfth-century theologian, Honorius of Autun, writes of the four rivers going underground in Asia then surfacing far away, the Gihon as the Nile, the Pishon as the Ganges.”

  Martin frowned. “But Eden would need to be at the source of all four and that’s geographically impossible.”

  Sebastian finished the last of his tea, put down the glass and pointed at the map on the wall. “What about Armenia? If you follow the rivers back, they could start in the southern slopes of the Taurus Mountains and split into four streams lower down.”

  Camara nodded. “That possibility is favored by some scholars.” She paged through the folio to a map of a verdant green paradise. “Others have suggested the source is Mount Amara in Ethiopia. The word amara means paradise in the Ethiopian language and the area is abundant with fruit trees and has year-round sun and rain. It featured in Milton’s Paradise Lost, although Milton himself located Eden in Assyria.”

  She turned another page to a photocopy of scrawled, spidery handwriting. “Then there are the words of Christopher Columbus, who claimed to have found the four rivers emptying from the Orinoco River into the Gulf of Paria just off modern-day Venezuela. A rugged mountain rose above it with an unreachable summit. He said, ‘If this river does not flow out of the earthly Paradise, the marvel is still greater. For I do not believe that there is so great and deep a river anywhere in the world.’”

  Martin shook his head. “All these possible places. If there’s evidence for so many, how are we meant to find the most likely location?”

  As he looked at the image, the map undulated, the green expanding and contracting like some kind of mutant lung. He felt a little woozy and placed a hand on the wall to steady himself.

  Sebastian sighed. “Or is Eden just an allegory? Was there ever really a physical garden?” He leaned against the wall, his body sagging as if he had reached the end of his energy reserves.

  Camara lifted her glass of tea and turned to one last page. “If you think of Eden as an actual garden, the same one that bloomed at the beginning of time, it cannot possibly be true. But I am of the same mind as John Calvin, who included this map in his commentary on Genesis and put it east of Babylon. The Gihon was the western branch of the Euphrates and the Pishon the southern branch of the Tigris.”

  She took a sip of the tea and grimaced. “This tastes strange. Did you…?”

  Camara’s voice faded as the world dimmed. Martin’s vision narrowed to the lines on the wall in front of him. He fell to the floor, his limbs immobile, his skin clammy, his mouth dry. The last thing he saw was Camara’s terror as she ran to help.

  Camara bent over Sebastian’s prone form and tugged at his shoulders to turn him onto his side in the recovery position in case he vomited. His face was pale and a cold sweat formed on his brow. His breath was fast and ragged. His colleague, Martin, lay on his side with the same affliction.

  The tea. Someone had doctored it — but with what?

  She had only taken a sip of the bitter brew, but both men had drunk a full glass. It could be any number of poisons, and many dangerous plants were even grown here in the l
ab. Possibilities ran quickly through her mind, a litany of toxins and their terrible effects. Although her life’s work revolved around the wonders of botany, Camara understood that Nature was not her friend.

  Now it might kill the only man she had ever loved.

  Despite his betrayal all those years ago, Camara couldn’t help the rush of excitement that flooded her as Sebastian had stood in the library. The years had marked them both, but she still saw glimpses of the man she had known underneath. She would not let him go so easily this time.

  She reached for her office phone to call the emergency services. It was dead. Not even a dial tone. She grabbed her mobile. The network was gone. Something blocked it.

  Camara darted to her office door —

  It opened before she could reach it.

  A young man stepped inside, dark curls cropped close to his skull with a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. He wore jeans and a t-shirt of a local band that stretched over a muscled torso. Just a student she had never seen before.

  “Please, help me,” Camara said. “We need to call an ambulance. My phones aren’t working.”

  But as the young man closed the door behind him, he looked at her with the intensity of a fanatic. She’d made a terrible mistake.

  Camara opened her mouth to scream.

  The stranger stepped quickly over the bodies of the prone men and pushed her against the desk, one cool hand over her mouth.

  She struggled, fighting his iron grip, desperate to get away, as he wrestled her slight frame into submission.

  A prick of a needle on her neck.

  As cold spread throughout her body in a chill paralysis, Camara’s last thought was of Sebastian. How could she have found him once more only to lose him again so soon?