The Sanctuary

by Raymond Khoury

  Her face clouded over with grief as memories of that painful separation came rushing back. A passive acceptance, one she’d nurtured over many years, took control and pushed the melancholy feeling away and yanked her back to her present predicament.

  A few illustrated pages from the cabal’s chamber, alluring in their beauty and their mystery, stared down at her from frames on the wall opposite her desk. She tore her eyes off them and pulled out the stack of Polaroids Farouk had left with her. She pulled out the one showing the ancient codex, and a chill crawled down the back of her neck as she remembered his unsettling news.

  Someone she knew was dead. Because of it.

  Where had Farouk’s friend found it? And what was in it? All those years ago, their search, hers and Tom’s, had come up blank. Why would this book be of any more importance?

  She remembered Farouk’s last question: Who else is after this book?

  Given the turmoil around her, this was the last thing she needed right now. But there was no escaping it. She didn’t want to go to meet Farouk, but she knew she couldn’t disappoint him. He was counting on her. He needed help. He was scared. The more she remembered the fear that gripped his face, the more apprehensive she became of that meeting.

  Another thought kept haranguing her.

  She had to let Tom know.

  If she could reach him, that is. They hadn’t exactly kept in touch. In fact, she hadn’t seen him or spoken to him again after he’d left Iraq.

  Not even when she’d found out she was pregnant.

  She put down the picture and pulled out her personal organizer. It was a large-size, leatherbound Filofax that had been with her for decades and could barely close for the paperwork, cards, and notes that had been stored between its battered covers over the years. She rummaged through its pockets and sleeves until she found the old card. It had his name, Tom Webster, printed in a stark, copperplate type on its front, along with the institute’s name and logo. She’d resisted using it, and with time it had gotten relegated to a remote corner of the Filofax and of her mind.

  Thirty years. It was a pointless call to attempt.

  Farouk’s plea rang in her ears. You have to ask him, Sitt Evelyn. Something inside her tore and made her give it a shot.

  It took a few moments for the signal to bounce off a few satellites before the familiar ringing of a U.S. landline was shortly followed by a woman’s voice that, in an overly friendly tone, informed Evelyn that she was through to the Haldane Institute.

  Evelyn hesitated. “I’m trying to reach an old friend,” she said eventually with a wavering voice. “His name’s Tom Webster. He left me this contact number for him, but…well, it’s been a while.”

  “One moment, please.” Evelyn’s heart contracted as the phone operator checked her records. “I’m sorry,” the operator came back, somewhat inappropriately chirpy. “I don’t show anyone here by that name.”

  Evelyn shrank back in her chair. “Are you sure? I mean, could you check again, please?”

  The operator asked Evelyn to confirm the surname’s spelling, ran it again, and came up with nothing. Evelyn heaved a doleful sigh. The operator must have caught it, as she then added, “If you like, I can check our personnel records and get back to you. Perhaps your friend left some forwarding details.”

  Evelyn gave her her name and her Beirut cell-phone number, thanked her, and hung up. She hadn’t really expected to reach him there, it had been far too long for that, but the bubble of excitement still left her feeling tense and restless.

  She checked her watch. It was almost seven. She frowned. She’d agreed to meet Mia for a drink at her hotel. The timing couldn’t have been worse. She thought of calling her and canceling it, but she couldn’t bear the thought of sitting alone for two more hours, captive to the memories rattling around in the attic of her mind, waiting to go out on a rendezvous that she was dreading more by the minute.

  She decided a drink with her daughter, surrounded by good music and some distracting faces, might help nurse her through the wait. She just had some ducking and avoiding to do, on a particularly troublesome subject. At least until she understood what was going on.

  She closed the file and laid it down on her desk, stuffed the Polaroids and her cell phone into her handbag, and headed for the hotel across the street from her apartment.

  Chapter 4

  T he telex machines were history. The middling Chinese restaurant was gone, replaced by a gleaming new Benihana. The circular and eponymous News Bar was also long gone—supplanted by the equally imaginatively named Lounge, complete with dark Wengé paneling, piped Café del Mar compilations, and passion-fruit mojitos—as was Coco, its resident parrot, who, with his eerily faultless imitation of an incoming artillery shell, sent many an uninitiated visitor scurrying for cover.

  The hotel’s fifteen minutes of fame stretched out over most of the 1980s, when it was the favorite haunt of “the pack” in Beirut. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings—they’d all stayed here. At a time when rival militias had turned West Beirut into the modern era’s standard-bearer of urban chaos, before the honor was usurped by Mogadishu and then Baghdad, the Commodore was a sanctuary of filet mignon, electricity, working telex machines, and a bar that never ran dry, thanks to a dauntless hotel manager and some hefty protection payments. Truth be told, the manager probably did his job too well: Most of the reporters who were in town to cover the fighting rarely ventured away from the cushy safety of the hotel, filing their eyewitness reports from the front desk rather than the front line.

  Those days were, mercifully, long gone—for the most part, anyway. And the face-lift that had brought the city back to life didn’t pass by the hotel, now known as the Meridien Commodore. Despite the fancy makeover, it was still the hangout of choice for the visiting news media, even sans Coco. The pack was loyal, a loyalty that was much in evidence since the sudden eruption of the brief but brutal war that had hogged the headlines around the globe all summer. The Commodore was back to its former glory, fueled by alcohol, adrenaline, and the best broadband connection in town, again displaying that intangible knack of making its guests feel as if they were part of an extended Sicilian family—which was comforting to Mia Bishop, given that her experience in war zones was nonexistent.

  Not that it was something she was particularly keen to redress.

  She hadn’t exactly chosen genetics as a ticket to adventure.

  “I KNOW IT’S probably none of my business, but…are you sure you’re okay?”

  After chatting with Evelyn about how her own work was progressing, and trading anecdotes and observations about the myriad aftereffects of the war that would color their lives for the foreseeable future, Mia finally popped the question. It had been gnawing at her from the moment they’d sat down, and although she felt uncomfortable asking, she felt even less comfortable not offering her mom an opening if she needed one.

  Evelyn shifted slightly at the question, adjusting her position on the deep sofa, then took a lingering sip from her wineglass. “I’m fine,” she confirmed with what seemed like a forced half-smile, before her eyes wandered and lost themselves in the soothing glow of the wine. “It’s nothing.”

  “You sure?”

  Evelyn hesitated. “It’s just…I saw someone today. Someone I hadn’t seen for a long time. Fifteen years, maybe more.”

  Mia flashed her a loaded smile. “I see.”

  Evelyn caught her drift. “It’s nothing like that, believe me,” she protested. “It’s just a local fixer who helped out on our digs. In Iraq. Pre-Saddam. I was down south with Ramez—you met him, didn’t you?”

  Mia nodded. “I think so. Last week, in your office? Small guy, right?”

  He was the only colleague of Evelyn’s that she’d met. She’d only been in Beirut for three weeks, flying in on one of the first planes to land at the airport since it had reopened after its runways were blitzed by Israeli warplanes in the opening day of the war.

  Her introduction to the bizarro
world of postwar Beirut had been pretty swift: The massive Airbus had lurched to an abrupt stop seconds after touching down, then veered off the tarmac sharply, revealing a bulldozer and a cement truck that were nonchalantly repairing a huge bomb crater in the middle of the runway. Mia could still picture the workers’ casual wave to her and the rest of the shaken passengers on board.

  Beirut was open for business, craters in the runway or not. And she could finally get going on the big Phoenician project she’d been gearing up for all year, albeit a few months later than scheduled.

  She’d been approached while working with a small team of geneticists in Boston who had undertaken the prodigious task of tracing the spread of mankind across the globe. That project, which involved collecting and analyzing DNA samples taken from thousands of men living in isolated tribes on all of the continents, had confirmed with breathtaking finality that we were all descended from one small tribe of hunter-gatherers who lived in Africa around sixty thousand years ago, a discovery that didn’t go down too well in more “sensitive” circles. Mia had joined the team just after getting her postgraduate degree, which was shortly before their central findings were announced; since then, the work had been somewhat anticlimactic and repetitive, consisting mostly of collecting more and more samples to beef up the overall picture. She’d thought about moving on to other cutting-edge areas of research, but the most interesting work in genetics was being hampered by the presidential aversion to stem cell research. So she stayed put—until the offer popped up.

  The man who’d made the approach was a representative of the Hariri Foundation, a charity with seriously deep pockets set up by the billionaire former prime minister of Lebanon, before his assassination in 2005. The proposal the charity’s rep put forward was vague, but compelling: Simply put, he wanted her to help them figure out who the Phoenicians were.

  Which kind of threw her.

  Surprisingly, and despite that they were mentioned in many ancient texts written by those they interacted with, little was known about the Phoenicians firsthand. For a people who were credited with inventing the world’s first alphabet and whose role as “cultural middlemen” sparked the revival in Greece that led to the birth of Western civilization, they didn’t leave much behind. None of their writings or literature had survived, and everything known about them had been pieced together from third-party reports. Even their name was attributed to them by others, in the case the ancient Greeks, who called them the Phoinikes, the red people, after the luxurious reddish purple cloth they made using a highly prized dye they extracted from the glands of mollusks. There were no Phoenician libraries, no troves of knowledge, no papyrus scrolls squirreled away in alabaster jars. Nothing from two thousand years of enigmatic history that came to a brutal end when their city-states eventually fell to a series of invaders culminating with the Romans, who, in 146 BC, burned Carthage to the ground, spread salt over its ruins, forbade resettlement in the city for twenty-five years, and obliterated the last major center of Phoenician culture. It was as if any trace of them had been wiped off the face of the earth.

  But the name stirred great passions in Lebanon itself.

  Following the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, some Christian factions in Lebanon had effectively hijacked it, using it to create a subtle distinction between themselves and their Muslim countrymen by painting those as later migrants from the Arabian Peninsula after the rise of Islam who had a less worthy claim to the land. Every argument in the region, it seemed, ultimately boiled down to four simple words: “We were here first.” Tensions had escalated to a point where the word Phoenician had become taboo in official circles. There wasn’t a single mention of it to be found anywhere in Beirut’s National Museum, where exhibits’ tags now sported more politically correct terminology such as “Early Bronze Age.”

  Which was a shame—as well as, quite possibly, a distortion of history. Hence the project.

  Mia was aware that she was stepping into a political minefield. The project’s aims were altruistic enough: If it was possible to use DNA samples to establish that all of the country’s inhabitants, Christian and Muslim alike, were descendants of one culture, one people, one tribe, it could help defuse long-held prejudices and inspire a feeling of unity.Two local experts had been hired to work with Mia: a highly respected historian who taught at the university, and a geneticist to assist her. The former was Christian, the latter, Muslim. But as Mia soon found out, tribal allegiances were of paramount importance to the people of the region, and redefining history wasn’t necessarily welcome.

  Still, with the big three-oh closing in on her, no husband or kids to worry about, a social diary as bleak as a liquor store in downtown Kabul, and an intriguing and generously funded project to call her own, it was really a no-brainer, even more so since it was an opportunity for her to get to know her mother.

  To really know her.

  So she’d signed on the dotted line and packed her bags—then proceeded to unpack just as swiftly and watch CNN for two months until the fighting stopped, the cease-fire was finally agreed to, and the blockade was lifted.

  “IT’S LITERALLY under the mosque,” Evelyn was telling Mia. “Could be one of the earliest chapels on record; it’s pretty amazing. I’ll take you down there if you like. Ramez is from a small town near there and he heard about it.”

  “And this guy just showed up there, out of the blue?”

  Evelyn nodded.

  Mia studied her mom. Something in the firm honesty in the woman’s voice assured Mia that her mom wasn’t just being coy, but the nervous flutter was still there. “Can’t imagine what they’re going through out there,” Mia commented ruefully. “Was he looking for work?”

  Evelyn winced with discomfort. “Yes. Sort of. It’s…complicated.”

  She didn’t seem to want to go into it any deeper. Mia decided to leave it at that. She acknowledged Evelyn’s reply with a slight nod and a reciprocal half-smile and took another sip of her own. A pregnant silence hung between them for a moment, then a waiter glided over, filled Mia’s glass from the almost empty wine bottle in the ice bucket, and asked if they wanted another.

  Evelyn sat up, snapping out of her reverie. “What time is it?”

  She checked her watch as Mia shook her head at the waiter. As he walked away, Mia noticed a man with close-cropped, jet-black hair, deep-set eyes, and a pockmarked face, standing at the bar, smoking, and glancing sideways at them—a cold glance, maybe just a touch too focused—before turning away. She hadn’t been in Beirut long, but she knew that in this town, men took more notice of her than she was used to, with the appeal of her winsome features amplified by the distinctly foreign air of her paler, slightly freckled skin and her honey-blond hair. She would have been disingenuous if she’d denied enjoying the flirtatious glances, and in this case, she would have shrugged off the man’s glance as a compliment, especially if the guy were cute, only not even this guy’s mother would have thought of describing him as “cute,” and there was nothing remotely flirtatious about his look. In fact, his shuttered glance creeped her out. Which, again, wasn’t a first, not in this town—the flip side to her exotic-foreigner appeal was that a lot of people were angry, and suspicious, particularly of foreigners, since the brutal war had erupted around them unexpectedly. But somehow he didn’t fit, he didn’t look as if he was in here to have a good time, the expression on his face was just too stone-cold, too remote, like an android’s, and—

  Evelyn cut through Mia’s little fog of paranoia by suddenly getting up. “I’ve really got to go. I don’t know what I was thinking,” she chided herself as she collected her jacket and her handbag from the sofa. She turned to Mia. “I’m sorry, I really can’t be late for…I’m supposed to meet someone. Can we get the bill?”

  Mia could see the urgency etched into her mom’s face. “Go. I’ll take care of it.”

  Evelyn moved to rifle through her handbag. “At least let me—”

  But Mia reached out and put her hand on h
ers, comfortingly, stopping her. “Don’t worry about it. Just go. You can get the next one.”

  Evelyn gave her a smile that was loaded with such intense signals—gratitude, concern, unease, and maybe even, Mia suddenly thought with an unexpected tightening in her chest, fear—and hurried off.

  Mia watched her weave through the first few drinkers standing around their corner and disappear into the cloudy haze of the crowd. The bar was buzzing with its customary loud, big-drinking, and even-bigger-smoking clientele. She sat back, sinking into her seat, not sure about what to think, and as she cast her eyes around the room, she caught sight of the android at the bar making his way out as well.

  He seemed rushed.

  Too rushed.

  The realization tripped a fuse inside Mia’s already unsettled mind. She tried following him with her eyes and lifted herself off the armchair, craning her neck after him, but he was already lost in the sea of people crowding the bar and blocking her view of its entrance.

  Malignant thoughts came flooding out from the dark recesses of her imagination, and the room suddenly seemed to recede and shift out of focus. The two—or was it three?—glasses of wine didn’t help. She settled back into the chair, dazed and rattled, calming herself down. And then she saw it.

  Evelyn’s cell phone.

  Tucked into the side of the sofa, one end sticking out, barely visible.

  Her mind zapped into a fast rewind—and in her mind’s eye, she remembered seeing her mom taking it out of her handbag when they’d first sat down and putting it down on the sofa, by her side, as if willing it to ring somehow.

  Mia didn’t hesitate.

  She just grabbed it and bolted after her.

  Chapter 5