Angell knew that the key to this mystery was here, somewhere, in this ancient land that gave birth to the world's three monotheist religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They all traced their origins to Abraham, and for whatever reason the old city of Kutha—Gate to the Underworld—was now known as Tell Ibrahim. Ibrahim: the Arabic for Abraham. Abraham and the Underworld. Abraham and the Quraish, for this was their ancestral home.
They made it to Tell Ibrahim without incident. It was already dusk, and they inched their way as close as they were able to the site. It was a new moon, so the stars were visible. In the north, the Dipper and the Pole Star. There were streets on all sides, and there was some light foot traffic. Aubrey noticed that the pedestrians all seemed to be walking towards the park.
And they were all armed.
The mercs didn't like what they saw. They muttered among themselves. An enclosed area, filled with armed men, in the gathering gloom of twilight passing to night. Their leader decided they should split up, with one team going to the far side of the park while the other would stay with the client.
The night was closing in on him. Tendrils of shadow were reaching around the armored Mercedes, slithering beneath and above the chassis, growing in size and daring in intention. Angell felt his heart pounding and he didn't know why. It was peaceful here. There was no sound of gunfire, no roadblocks, nothing that would suggest this was anything other than a sleepy Iraqi town. But Angell was terrified.
He was having a panic attack, like he would have back in his apartment in Red Hook when exhaustion was not enough to put him to sleep. There were sounds out there, sounds he could not identify. Animal sounds. The sinister buzz of nocturnal insects. And something else.
“Do you hear that?” It was Aubrey who broke the silence in the car.
“What?” Angell could hear the terror in his own voice, and he was afraid everyone else could hear it for miles around.
“That sound. Like women singing. Or humming.”
The mercenary escort exited the two vehicles, the Humvee and their own Mercedes. They arranged themselves around the cars and sniffed the air like a pack of wolves. As they did so, the sound grew louder and Angell could identify it, even though the realization was like a knife to his heart. He stepped out of the car, his attention drawn to the source of the sound, his legs weak with fear.
“It's ululation,” he explained. “It's common in this part of the world.”
“Why are they doing it?”
“That's the question. It can be heard at weddings, but also at funerals. Sometimes as a greeting. I think it's safe to say it's not a wedding.”
Of course it's not a wedding, Angell thought to himself. He recognized the setting. The arrival of armed civilians from all over the town, converging on the site of Tell Ibrahim itself.
It was the same ululation that the Martians had made in that H.G. Wells novel, The War of the Worlds. There, it was the sound the aliens made as they went into battle.
To Angell, it was all of those things. But mostly it was a greeting. “They are welcoming ... something,” he said aloud, without realizing it, the sound of his voice strange to him in the Mesopotamian darkness. “Calling it. They're calling it.”
“That's our signal,” Aubrey said to Angell and to the men.
As they approached the clearing in the middle of the darkening park the sight that greeted them was like something out of a horror movie or a snuff film. There were dozens of armed men: Shiite pilgrims with Kalashnikovs, stoned-looking teenagers sharing a joint and a rifle with a folding stock, heavily-painted transvestites with mascara and machine guns, and some kind of religious leader in their midst. An aged Imam.
Heavy weaponry was evident everywhere they looked, from home-made armored cars—old banged-up jalopies souped up with turbos and sheet metal patches—to rocket launchers, new-looking and shiny assault rifles, and at least seven curved scimitars that were older than Adam's sin. It was like something out of Mad Max, Iraqi style.
One of the transvestites was dressed in a yellow halter top and orange hot pants, and she was holding an M-16 between her legs like a witch riding a broom. Her movements were both pious and obscene, like a naked priest celebrating Mass in a blasphemous frenzy.
And in a rough circle around the wacked-out warriors were the women.
They were all dressed in black burqas, their hands raised to their faces as they ululated in ebbs and flows of trilling, moaning wails like a chant they had learned as crack babies in their mother's womb. Angell could see them everywhere, standing straight up like soldiers, all facing the center of the park where, he noticed, the grass was smoldering with an odor like the sickening incense from a thousand massacres.
And the Imam, wandering among the players like a sheikh among the satanic semazen: whirling dervishes spinning like tops on an axis that plunged straight as an arrow to the deepest parts of Hell, the Devil—Iblis—furiously shaking their stems and causing them to spin even more manically. The Imam was a tall, grey-bearded man in a long black robe and a black turban, his chest crossed with bandoliers like a Mexican Zapatista. He held a carved wooden staff in his hand that was in the shape of a serpent coiled around someone's spinal column. He had a sleepy but dangerous look in his eyes as he maneuvered effortlessly among the crowd, mumbling some sort of prayer under his breath with saliva dripping out of the side of his mouth.
And the players—all of them, Shiite pilgrims and transvestite terrorists, teenage dopers and black-robed wailers—were spinning now in the ritual that was banned in Turkey under Ataturk, the mystical rite of contact with the Unspeakable, the Ineffable. But this was not Rumi's dervish dance. This was not what the tourists came to see in Istanbul, high on Turkish coffee and black market kif. No; these were demonic dervishes, their dizzying spin designed to drag them down, to open the buried, rusted-over portal to Gehennna, Gudua, the Underworld.
Kutha.
And in the god-abandoned center of that accursed chapel or charnel house or whatever it pretended to be was a small statue on a tall wooden base. As Angell set his eyes on it, the alarm in his heart growing by the second, the ululations reached a frantic pitch and he could finally make out something more than just a sound. The light from a hundred tiny fires lit up the hideous features of the statue: a thing that was not a god, not a human, yet some kind of hybrid of the two; but only if it was a god wracked by disease and madness that had mated with a human teratoma if that teratoma had elongated fingers and teeth like rusted razor blades. It was the same figure as the one in Aubrey's file; the one that polluted the desk of George Angell and the nightmares of Henry Wilcox.
And the ululation. It grew to a drumbeat, a chorus, a strangled shout. It was an imprecation, a curse, a prayer to the spirit and soul of all the filth that ever soiled the planet Earth. It was that one word, that entreaty from a doomed prisoner to his torturer to end it all, to stop the pain, to just get it over with and kill him, and by so doing purge the entire planet of all life:
Qhadhulu
They were spotted. One of the stoned-out teenagers was not so stoned he didn't see heavily-armed American mercenaries gazing down at them. Or maybe he thought he was hallucinating on some fucked-up hashish. No matter. He nudged his friend, who poked his other friend, and the three of them looked up.
The drooling Imam felt the change in the current and looked, first at the teenagers then in the direction they were staring. A deranged smile sharpened his features and he raised his serpent cane, pointing directly at Angell as he did so.
Those who were armed raised their weapons and began firing in disorganized but nonetheless lethal fashion at the spot where Aubrey and Angell now took cover as their escorts provided covering fire from two sides of the park. Bullets pinged and sparked off some ancient stonework behind Angell's head. A second front opened up on the opposite side of the park as the other mercenaries started pouring disciplined fire into the crowd. They knew who they were looking for, and wanted to do as little damage as poss
ible but in a firefight like this—with crazed cultists firing automatic weapons and rocket launchers—it would be difficult to get to their target and keep him alive.
This was the first time that Angell found himself in the middle of combat rather than simply a spectator, as he had been at Mosul, and he felt strangely calm. The threat of physical danger didn't seem to bother him. Instead, his eyes were focused on the obscenity in the middle of the clearing and the efforts by some of the cultists to surround it and protect it.
Aubrey's hand was on his head, keeping him down, while he spoke into the commset to the mercenary commander.
“Do not shoot the Imam! We need to talk to him!”
At that moment, one of the oddly-dressed transvestite guerrillas raised his rocket launcher and aimed it directly for the spot where Aubrey and Angell were hiding, as if sensing their presence and knowing that they were the real target. Just as his eyes—heavily ringed with kohl—met those of Angell his head exploded into a red mist as a round from one of the mercenaries met its mark. The cultist dropped his launcher and fell to the ground, headless. Angell ducked behind his cover and started gasping in great heaves.
“Head shot,” said Aubrey, calmly and dispassionately.
Chaos had erupted with the first rounds fired. The cultists were scattering all over the park, some making for the streets that ringed the site. The mercenaries were not looking to stop them. They were not there to engage in a bloodbath, but to locate a man they had to interrogate as quickly as possible.
As they started to sweep the park and make their way to its center a fine mist grew up around them. It was gray, with what appeared to be fireflies or fairy lights sprinkled around it. It was surreal, almost pretty, until the men noticed the smell that accompanied the mist. It was an odor they knew all too well. The scent of burned flesh and rotting corpses. It was as if someone had opened the door to an abattoir, one that had been shut up for centuries.
Covering their noses as best they could, but with their focus still on their mission, they crept closer to the central area of the site where once ancient Kutha had flourished. There were weird, small fires burning everywhere. Strange that the mist did not ignite from all the open flames, the flying ordinance, and abject terror made flesh. They were about to stop a crowd of the burqa-clad women on the suspicion that one of them might be their quarry in drag—after all, the transvestite terrorists were the most lethal of the group anyway—when a shout from one of their comrades drew them to the center of site, next to the column with the evil-looking idol on top.
“That's it,” Aubrey said, grabbing at Angell's shoulder. “Let's go down.”
The professor looked at the spook as if he were insane.
“They're still shooting down there! The place is in chaos!”
“Nonsense. They're just mopping up now.” He turned to Angell and said, with a wink, “It's safe to surf!”
With that, he practically picked Angell up off the ground and dragged him down the small rise they were on to the center of the action. This is where the professor would earn his salary.
Behind a small outcropping of ancient stones, an Iraqi teenager—mind clear now since he was so totally stoned out of it—raised his old Armalite with its multi-colored barrel and its stock adorned with cartoon stickers and pink graffiti and took aim at the academic. Angell was the one person there who did not seem to belong at all, and therefore had to be the most important person in the place. If he killed him then the Imam would be pleased and their Grand Mahdi—the priest of all priests, the one the Imam said was lying underground at Kutha, the Lord of Kutha, Kutulu, just waiting for the right moment to call his people together—would rise and smell the incense.
“Qhadhulu shay altheemon,” he whispered to himself. “Qhadhulu is great.” Then, growing bolder, he added “Qhadhuluhu akbar,” his voice a little higher, almost a shout, the blasphemous, artificial construction instantly condemning him to a Muslim hell.
And pulled the trigger.
Jason Miller stood on the roof of a building over a thousand yards from the epicenter of the firefight. He watched the proceedings through his binoculars, and then reached down for his sniper rifle, a customized version of the MK 21. Laying the rifle on a sandbag rest, he chambered a .338 Lapua Magnum round and took aim through the telescopic sight at the head of the drugged-out teenage shooter pointing his piece-of-shit gopher gun in the direction of the professor.
Miller took a breath, and let it out slowly.
There was no wind.
He fired.
The teenager did not know he was dead. He thought he was just stoned. He saw ... well, nothing. Something was wrong. He had no eyes, no sight, but he ... saw ... something. He felt it, too. Felt its fingers probe his brain and then make a grab for his heart muscle. It squeezed. His heart exploded like a water balloon.
But it wasn't his heart.
He was already dead.
Angell started at the sound. A shot had been fired from the teenager's rifle but it went up into the air. Did the youth think he was shooting at God?
At Angell's feet lay the wounded Imam, a sucking chest wound, blood pooling all around his waist and groin and chest. The man's eyes were glazing over. There was almost no time.
“Talk to him!” shouted Aubrey, above the sound of small arms fire and the cries of the wounded.
Angell was looking into the eyes of the aged Imam who was breathing his last. He wasn't sure the man could see him, even though his eyes were open. He was looking, but what he saw wasn't in this world or even this dimension.
He spoke to him first in Arabic, then in Kurmanji. The old man answered in Farsi. He was Iranian. And delirious.
“I came here for the Ayatollahs,” he whispered, with a wistful stare as if he was recounting his autobiography. Or entertaining his grandchildren. “I was sent to infiltrate the Shiite resistance against Saddam. Then the invasion. Then I saw ... impossible things.”
He seemed to be drifting. Once he did, the oceanic tide would carry him away forever.
Angell shook him gently by the shoulder. Around them, the sound of gunfire was diminishing as the darkness deepened.
“The book? Who has it? Where is it?” he asked in Farsi.
The old man smiled, then coughed.
“They call him the First Priest, the King of this World. The one who speaks to the Old Ones. They were waiting for him. Calling him. They don't know anything about a book.”
Angell nodded.
“But you do.”
“In Arabic, the Kitab al-Azif. Yes. It means the sound of the jinn. You understand? Jinn?”
Angell was growing impatient, but he was moved by the fact that this old man was dying in his arms. The old Iranian's mind was wandering, and he was mixing Arabic with Farsi and even some Urdu. He was obviously educated and had lived for years underground, a spy in Saddam's camp, living one step ahead of the Mukhabarat.
It suddenly dawned on Angell that this man had known Fahim. They were both strangers in a strange land, each with their own reason to be afraid of Saddam's secret police.
On a hunch, he spoke the name.
“Fahim? Yes. My friend. Fahim. And the beautiful Jamila.”
He raised his head, with a great deal of effort, and his eyes cleared for a moment as he looked around at the carnage that surrounded them. He grasped Angell's hand.
“Where is she? Where is Jamila?”
“She was here?”
“Yezd,” he said. For a second, Angell thought he said “yes” in English, but then realized he meant a city in his native Iran.
“Yezd?”
“They will go ... yes, Yezd. They will go to Yezd. To Arad. The book must be taken to the People. The People of the Book.” At that he started to laugh, but his body went rigid.
Angell closed the old man's eyes with the palm of his hand, and looked up at Aubrey who had been watching intently the entire exchange.
“He says the group here didn't know anything about a book
. But they did know about the ... that thing on the column. They were trying to wake it up, or something. But he said that Jamila was here, but left to go to Iran.”
“Iran?”
“To the city of Yezd. It's in the middle of the country. They have a large Zoroastrian temple there. Eternal flame. The whole thing.”
“How the hell ...?” Aubrey started thinking aloud.
“Zoroastrians. Iran. Shiites. Yezidis. Yezd. I suppose there is some logic to it. I just wish I had more proof that what the Imam was saying was true.”
Angell gently pried the dead man's hand from his own and realized that there was writing on the old man's palm in ink. “Will this do?”
Someone had drawn a map, using the hand's own contours and lines in the palm as if they were hills and roads, with a small dot and a word in Farsi: Dakhmeh.
“What is that?”
“It's a map. Of Yezd. Well, of one place in Yezd. Dakhmeh.”
“Dakhmeh?”
“The Towers of Silence.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Towers of Satan
Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched.
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Baghdad Airport
Iraq
Incredibly, to Angell, they had managed to leave Tell Ibrahim without encountering any more militants. After a hurried conversation with their escort and an encrypted call to Monroe, arrangements were made to ferry Aubrey and his charge to the Iranian border. This was a hazardous affair, for Iraq was falling and the Iranians were sending troops in a constant stream across their mutual frontier to prop up the Shiite faction in its struggle with the official Iraqi (i.e. Sunni) government as well as the new force in the area, the Islamic State. They had good intelligence on where the safest place to cross would be, but then they would be on their own in getting to Yezd.
The Lovecraft Code Page 16
