by D J Mcintosh
I drifted off, but not for long. I ached for Nick and Bennet, lost forever to me now, and felt too overburdened to sleep. Only much later, when I saw Marya nod off, did I finally give in. My tears flowed freely then.
Marya straightened up and came over to me; she must not have been sleeping after all. She looked at me with a question in her eyes.
“My friends are dead,” I whispered, turning away.
She stared openly now. Took in my skin, cut and battered from the caves, saw the grief written plainly on my face. She let out a little puff of breath, then bent her head and left the room. I barely heard her when she returned minutes later. She placed something in my open palm. Nick’s watch. He never took it off. If he’d gone over the cliff as Alaz had said, there was no way I’d be holding it now.
I sat bolt upright. “Where …”
She pressed her fingers to my lips and shook her head. “Not dead,” she whispered.
I could have wept again, this time with relief. “Where are they?”
“Alaz take them to Eden.”
Forty-Five
“What do you mean? Where is it?”
The look she gave me was pained and helpless. “Not know.”
Footsteps sounded downstairs. Just the old man, Mernoush, unable to sleep—or was Alaz coming up? Marya, clearly frightened, gestured to me to be silent. She extinguished the kerosene lamp and sat back down. The sound of footsteps grew less distinct. I heard her let out a sigh, and then she was silent.
Why had Alaz lied to me about Nick and Bennet? And what was he planning to do with them? Hold them for ransom? Extract information? My mind raced. Why he’d done it didn’t matter right now. I had to find them.
I racked my brain for a clue I might have overlooked. According to David Rohl’s book, if Eden really was an original name for this part of the Middle East, it denoted a vast area, hundreds of square miles surrounding Tabriz and Lake Urmia. It wasn’t a dot on the map. I wondered what was worse, believing Bennet and Nick were dead or learning they were alive with no way to save them.
I pretended to sleep until Marya went downstairs. Then I dragged my jacket onto the bed, unzipped the inside pocket, and hit pay dirt. My credit cards were still tucked inside. So were the keys to Nick’s Jeep—I hadn’t returned them after our trip to Tabriz for equipment. The boots I’d left in my hotel room sat beside my bag. I wedged the keys and credit cards into the toe of the boot and stuffed a sock in to keep them concealed. Eventually I slept, but fitfully.
March 13, 2005
The next morning I felt well enough to walk around the room and then go downstairs to use the bathroom. I looked terrible—what a relief it was to pour warm water into the basin and have a good wash. I ran my hand over my chin, feeling naked without my beard. The birthmark on my jaw glared like an ugly red scar. I changed into some clean clothes from the bag Alaz had retrieved from the hotel.
It was mid-afternoon when Alaz came to see me. Much as I wanted to beat him to a pulp, I held myself back. I lay on the bed, pretending to be a lot weaker than I was. He went over to Nick’s pack and rifled through it.
“What are you looking for?”
“His keys. I need to take his rental car back to Tabriz.”
That Jeep was my lifeline. “Nick always kept the keys on him. You’d have to go back to the cave.”
“No.” Alaz rubbed his hand across his forehead.
“Nick used his credit card for the deposit,” I continued in what I hoped was a matter-of-fact way. “You’ll need it to settle the bill.” None of this was true. Nick had paid cash, but Alaz wouldn’t know that.
He muttered something under his breath and rushed down the stairs. I heard the front door slam when he went out.
I spent the remainder of the day planning my next moves. I wasn’t sure whether I could make it to the Jeep, let alone find where Nick and Bennet were being held, but I had to try. That evening, when Marya brought my tea, I took a deep breath, explained my intentions, and asked for her help. My aim was to leave the house the moment Alaz went out again, whenever that would be. To my great relief Marya nodded solemnly in assent.
Just before dawn I heard a rustling downstairs and low voices. I looked out the window to see Alaz’s tall form emerge from the front door. He greeted two shorter men. One took up position directly across from the house; the other walked off with Alaz. I prayed they’d be gone long enough.
Marya beckoned me to follow her. I stuffed our passports into my pack and then extracted the car keys and credit cards from my boot and shoved them on. She led me up a narrow staircase to the third floor.
The structure of Kandovan houses was determined by the conical stone outcrops from which they’d been hollowed out. Pockets in the stone provided natural indentations for windows and doors. Tunnels joined some residences internally; others were connected by exterior wooden slat bridges. The Nemat home had two old wooden doors, several windows, and happily, a third-story bridge spanning the space to the house next door. One of the upper doors led out onto this bridge. I made to go through it but Marya held me back. She gestured for me to leave the door open and to accompany her back down the stairs.
I followed her, matching the sound of my footsteps as best as I could to hers so as not to wake the old man. Stone steps don’t creak—a big advantage. When we reached the front door, Marya hesitated and looked down at her feet. Then, as she quietly opened the door, light fell on her face. It was wet with tears. She motioned for me to stay back, pushed the door almost closed, and hurried over to the man Alaz had posted as guard. I could hear them speaking urgently, and through the crack I saw Marya gesturing to the third-story bridge with a concerned look. The guy took the bait. He ran over to the house next door, up to the bridge, and then through the narrow stone gap between the two roofs, in hot pursuit of a phantom me. I whipped out the door, and with a backward look at Marya that I hoped conveyed my gratitude, strode as fast as I could manage in the opposite direction.
Marya had given me an old black jacket that belonged to Alaz and one of his hats. I tugged the hat down to my eyes and headed for where I dimly remembered Nick’s car might be. Every step hurt. Every corner I rounded I expected to come face to face with Alaz’s guard. And if I hadn’t spotted the donkey man’s house, I might have ended up seriously lost. When I finally saw the Jeep I could barely keep from yelling for joy.
I rushed over, threw my pack in the back, and eased myself into the driver’s seat. Tabriz was only an hour away. I’d find a hotel and work out my next steps. I hit the door locks, gunned the motor, and took off.
In Tabriz, I checked into the most Westernized hotel I could find. Since they required a passport, I had no choice but to register under my own name. I hoped Alaz would think I was heading straight for the Turkish border.
Once in my room, I made coffee. Fleeing through Kandovan had spent my reserves and my knee was complaining, but the caffeine did a lot to help revive me. For now I was safe. Nick and Bennet were alive. That felt like a miracle.
I plugged in my phone, sat on the bed, and let out a deep breath. Then I began sorting through everything I’d brought with me. I had Nick’s sat phone and watch, his and Bennet’s passports and ID, my credit cards, my books, the volume of Samuel’s journal that talked about Eden, and Helmstetter’s exasperating number code. If I had any chance at all of finding Nick and Bennet, that code was my only hope.
Back in Pergamon, when I’d applied the alphabet to the numbers, only some of them translated into words:
Thirty Forty
Eight. Six.
30 34 32 33 45 Two
Six 76 55 68 65
Zero Seven
Five 31 34 47 30
Nine 101 80 93 90
51 30 43 40 55 59 57 58 70
What had Veronica Sills said about The Steganographia? That Helmstetter used it as a guide. Then it struck me: Thomas Ernst, the German professor, had deciphered Trithemius’s code. Could Helmstetter have used that same code in his number colum
ns? When I was packing my books in New York I’d stuffed in Ernst’s account. I dug it out now, my heart beginning to pound.
Ernst furnished the answer. Number patterns in Trithemius’s code, he explained, seemed to point to repeated messages. Ernst discovered that when these similar-seeming groups of numbers were repeated, each number in the repeated group had been increased by twenty-five. Twenty-five, Ernst said, represented how many letters there were in the alphabet during Trithemius’s time. Once I went back to the original numbers and applied that logic to the rows I hadn’t been able to figure out, I could fill in all the missing words. They turned out to be a six, two eights, and three zeroes. But what on earth did the columns mean anyway? I fiddled around with them and then swore in frustration.
My stomach reminded me I was starving. I ordered room service, figuring the best thing I could do was to forget the puzzle for a while and come back at it, fresh, after I’d eaten. I used the time to take stock of everything I’d gleaned up until now.
The early people who dwelled in this region, and in Anatolia, were among the first to domesticate plants and animals. They could certainly have constructed primitive walled gardens to protect their bounty from wildlife and human enemies. It was much warmer and wetter five thousand years ago, so the Bible’s description of Eden—“And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east … and out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good to eat”—was entirely plausible. Even now, orchards abounded along the highway before you hit the industrial corridor on the outskirts of Tabriz. The notion that even a corner of the original Eden still existed somewhere on these arid plains, though, seemed laughable.
Yet Helmstetter clearly believed it did. To achieve his dream of immortality he first sought his “place of power” at Pergamon; for some reason he found the Turkish site wanting, and so went to Kandovan. His was not a quest taken lightly. He gave up a great deal in search of his Eden: his reputation, growing celebrity in America, his wife and mistress, and ultimately, his life. For I did believe Alaz’s story that Helmstetter had disappeared permanently. From the description given by those who knew him best, the magician had a gigantic ego. No one like that would choose to fade into obscurity.
A polite tap on the door signaled the arrival of lunch. The server wheeled a tray into the room, acknowledged my generous tip, and left. While I ate, I thought more about Helmstetter. Like his ancestor Faust, he’d pushed the boundaries of the occult in pursuit of knowledge, believing he could unlock the path to immortality. The question was, did he find it in a place he believed to be Eden?
I turned back to the number columns and attacked them with renewed vigor, reminding myself I was looking for a physical location. And then I saw what had been staring me in the face. The period that followed the eight in the left column and the six in the right. In another minute I’d solved it.
Forty-Six
March 14, 2005
Tabriz, Iran
They were geographic coordinates.
Iran was north of the equator and east of the meridian. Coordinates showed latitude first. So 38. 8 6 0 5 9 0 would be the latitude, 46. 2 0 7 5 0 8 the longitude. I grabbed my phone, brought up Google Maps, and keyed in the coordinates. The familiar red teardrop marked a spot two-thirds the way down one of the long gorges scoring Mount Sahand. Along the thin line of dark green ran the faint blue trace of a waterway and a road that would take me close to my destination. Had Alaz and his confederates hiked overland, using mules, to reach it?
Even on a poor road, the drive would take less than an hour. I stuffed what I needed in my pack along with Alaz’s black jacket and the hat Marya had given me. In the hotel tuck shop I bought a big bottle of water and some nuts and chocolate bars. The concierge directed me to a pharmacy not far away where I bought some Tylenol.
I first had to double back on the same road that led to Kandovan and worried I might meet Alaz driving in the opposite direction. To my relief, the route soon branched off to the left. This road was in much worse shape. As the Jeep steadily climbed the mountain slopes, the crumbling surface grew narrow with erosion and began bending in a series of heart-stopping switchbacks. Finally I came to a village on one side of a fast-flowing stream. Beyond it, the slopes of the gorge were heavily shrouded with trees. According to my GPS, I was closing in. At any rate, I’d gone as far as I could on the road. The area was crisscrossed with narrow tracks like the one we’d taken to the salt caves. I decided on one that ran closest to the coordinates, parked behind a grove of ironwood trees, and hoped the Jeep was sufficiently hidden. Then I got Nick’s gun out from where he’d stashed it under the back seat and headed into the forest.
The buds were swelling on the trees, the branches heavily covered with green lichen. The path began to climb almost immediately. It seemed little used; I couldn’t spot sheep droppings or any other signs of animal, let alone human, activity. The path veered away from the mountain stream, the sound of its clear rushing water tumbling over rocks fading into the distance.
My route led upward. Knowing only that I was nearing the coordinates but with no certainty of finding anything, I carried on this way for over two hours. It was tough going, what with all the protruding tree roots and the stones and scree carpeting the ground, and whenever my knee screamed loudly enough I was forced to stop. It was past three now. I couldn’t stay out here much longer.
That’s when I saw a rough series of steps cut into the side of a steep rock wall maybe forty feet high, topped with what looked to be another dense wood. It was completely silent here, as though this small corner of the world had been forgotten, somehow left behind. A bird with giant wings soared in the sky far above.
I tightened my pack around me, took a few deep breaths, and began the climb. The steps were shallow and so steep that I could grasp an upper stair with my hand and pull myself up. When I reached the top I found no pathway, just a few open spaces between the trees. But on the ground I saw an occasional broken twig. Someone had been along here recently. A deep wet blanket of last year’s dead leaves covered the forest floor. I crept along as quietly as possible. After twenty minutes a clearing emerged ahead. I squeezed my way through the trees. Thankfully, they were quite mature here, the lowest branches reasonably high off the ground; I had only to duck beneath them. I snuck up to the clearing and stopped.
The tree line ended at a natural red-stone platform from which another rock wall rose, forming a cliff so high it would be impossible to scale. But I wouldn’t need to. For hollowed into the rock face was a house with doors and windows, just like the ones in Kandovan. I took Nick’s Glock out of my pack, knelt behind a large tree trunk, and watched.
I didn’t have to wait long. Ten minutes later the door opened and a man stepped out—the same man who’d left with Alaz the previous morning. He wore no jacket, just a shirt, and carried a gun in a shoulder holster. Standing a mere twenty feet away, I had him directly in my sights. He looked rapidly to his right and left, scanning the trees. I aimed for his midriff and fired.
He screamed and went down, blood gushing from his hip then lay still as death. I ran to the house for cover, pressing my back to the facade behind the open door. From inside the house I could hear the racing of heavy boots. A second man burst through the door and screeched to a halt when he saw his comrade lying in the dirt. I shot him in the back. He toppled over the first man, writhing and kicking. I waited, counting out the seconds. No one else came to their aid. The man I’d shot in the back screamed at me in no language I understood. His eyes turned up and he fainted. His gun lay in the dirt a few feet away. I picked it up, retrieved the second gun from the other man’s shoulder holster, and stuck both deep in my pockets. I kept my grip on Nick’s Glock and went inside.
The place was dusty and unkempt. Like the Nemats’ house, it had white plastered walls, floor cushions, and a faded, threadbare Persian carpet thrown over a rough stone floor. A flame curled up from oil in a stone basin, giving off a weak
light. The room had a strange odor I somehow recognized but couldn’t quite place.
Bennet lay curled up in one corner with a cushion at her back, her feet and hands bound, her mouth gagged. I rushed to her side. She looked up at me as if she’d seen a ghost.
I knelt down beside her. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s me.” I brushed my lips along her cheek and held her hand while I yanked the gag from her mouth. She whimpered as I struggled with the cable used to bind her wrists and got it undone. Much as I wanted to take her in my arms I couldn’t waste a minute. “Where’s Nick?” I said.
“Through there,” she whispered hoarsely. She lifted her hand in the direction of a curtained doorway leading into the recesses of the house.
“Shake your hands and legs to get the circulation going,” I said over my shoulder.
In the next room Nick was slumped against a wall, his shirt-sleeve torn and a crude bandage wrapped around his right arm, leaking blood. Despite the injury his arms had been crossed and bound tightly to his sides. The skin around his ankles bled, too. Duct tape had been plastered over his mouth. As I reached for the tape he shook his head furiously and glared at my hands.
“What’s the matter?” I ripped the tape away.
“Where’s the damn gun, you fuck!” he spat, his voice barely audible.
I’d left it beside Bennet when I undid her ties.
He made a muffled sound halfway between a moan and a cry and stared at the curtained doorway behind me.
I turned to see Yersan with Nick’s Glock in his hand. Behind him, Alaz pushed Bennet forward.
“Mr. Madison,” Yersan said. “I have a great debt to repay to my poor friends outside.”
He trained the pistol on Nick. “Make any further attempt and your friend will die.” Alaz shoved Bennet toward me. Yersan motioned for us to stand facing the wall.
