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Frank put his hands over his face and leaned back in his leather desk chair.
This was it. What he’d spent the last four years waiting for. A clue.
It wasn’t a prop, of course. He’d become well versed in the language of the black market and knew the entire listing was code. It was an ancient box found in the Judean wilderness in 1954. Furthermore, in this auction, every dollar bid was $1,000.
He turned his computer back on, went to eBay, and pulled up the auction. He clicked on the photo to enlarge it. It was exquisite. The gold leaf on the outside of the box, the black onyx interior. He moved through the series of photos. Incredible. The hinges, too, were the right kind for Judea of 2,000 years before.
But what had caught his attention were the jewels: ruby, carnelian, turquoise, lapis, jade, mother-of-pearl. This was a rare instance when it was possible that even the canny dealer might not fully understand the significance of what he had.
Frank McMillan was aware that many of his compatriots thought he’d gone to Iraq a pragmatist and returned an obsessed man. He had been dealing there with two powerful men, both of whom believed that the place called Eden actually existed. Both men had died in their quest.
If, by any stretch of the imagination, it was true–if Eden did exist–the implications were staggering. One of his partners, Coleman Satis, claimed his own mother had been born there. She had told him stories of Eden’s incredible wealth, of jewels so abundant they were used for home décor. More to the point, she’d told Satis of an advanced society with a wealth of technological and medical advances that would be worth billions to the outside world. And she said they had no army at all. No defense. Anyone with power who found this hidden society could walk in and take over. The ramifications of being that person were enormous.
There was a saying that Satis’ mother had passed along to him, a saying that had driven Satis, who was already one of the most powerful men on earth: Who Rules Eden Rules the World.
Sounded like a worthy job description, at least to Frank.
Satis’ mother had been so persuasive that Coleman Satis–the ultimate pragmatist–had been willing to risk everything, including his life, to find and conquer this place.
Now Satis was dead.
Frank himself wasn’t completely convinced it actually existed. But there were loose ends. Unsolved mysteries. And he was not a man who could tolerate loose ends or the feeling of being thwarted.
He’d come back from Iraq knowing two things. One was that these six jewels–ruby, carnelian, turquoise, lapis, jade, mother-of-pearl–were connected with the mystery. They were the jewels listed in the book of Genesis as jewels plentiful in Eden. He still didn’t know how they figured into whatever the hell happened in Iraq, but he knew they did. At the heart of the incident had been a bracelet worn by an Arab girl with those six jewels.
The other thing he knew but could not explain was that a female American Army chaplain, Jaime Lynn Richards, who’d been involved in the secret Eden operation, had disappeared off the face of the earth, from Iraq, for three years. Then she had returned as mysteriously as she’d left, and reassumed her duties, seemingly without anyone in the Department of the Army batting an eye.
Which was impossible. All the Army knew how to do was bat eyes.
The new post-9/11 policy of data sharing between agencies was extremely helpful to Frank on this score. It had enabled him to keep tabs on Jaime Richards since her return, to at least know where she was and what she was up to. Her file said she was five foot seven; from his interview with her four years ago, he knew she had piercing green eyes that saw straight through him, that seemed able to read his thoughts. At least it felt that way at the time. Obviously, she hadn’t read them well enough.
Frank pulled out her file and looked at the current photo. Her blond hair was a shade lighter, undoubtedly bleached by the desert sun. She was still in good shape, and had even acquired some pleasing curves. Frank had buffed up in Tunisia; now his biceps and quads were like iron. He laughed softly. Jaime Richards and Frank McMillan, versions 2.0.
According to Frank’s information, Richards had missed a promotion board while she was away. At the next board, later this month, her Officer Record Brief–which listed where and when every officer was assigned–claimed that for those three years she was attached to the Office of the Chief of Chaplains in D.C. Frank understood that the Army wouldn’t keep her listed as in Iraq–why give someone three years of combat pay when they didn’t have to? But there was no explanatory note that she was kidnapped, only that she was on “duty elsewhere.” And her personnel microfiche had three single pages labeled “classified” where evaluation reports should be.
What did that mean? In this particular case, what the hell did that mean?
Where had Jaime Richards been? And what did it have to do with Eden and the six jewels?
If there was a chance–the smallest chance–that she’d been in Eden, that she knew about Eden, that she could get there again, Frank had to find out.
From Tunisia, all he’d really been able to do was hear (although several months after the fact) that she’d reappeared and be kept apprised of her location. Now he was back, he was in Geneva, in a situation where he had mobility. He had been waiting for something to turn up, for another ticket into the mystery that was Eden.
This box was it. It had the key jewels, the jewels that to those in the know, signalled “Eden.”
Did it have a direct connection to Jaime Richards? There was one way to find out. He’d follow the box, and see who else was following it, too.
He would also keep very close watch on Jaime Richards.
He already had a man on it. His last name was Maynard and he was undercover in Iraq as a Department of the Army civilian working for Army Material Command.
Frank took out his BlackBerry and e-mailed him: Anything to report?
The response took only two minutes: Nothing. She spends most of her time in her office counseling, working in their operations center, or visiting soldiers in the hospital. Although she won’t stay put. I spent Christmas Eve dodging mortars because she was climbing frigging guard towers to hang out with the guards. However, no apparent nonmilitary activity. No contact with anyone of interest. She’s going on mid-tour leave tomorrow. Good riddance. Let our guy in Germany sit outside her place.
Frank stared at the words. Just stared at them.
The box had appeared, and Richards was on the move.
Was the timing coincidence? Or could the eBay listing and the chaplain’s leave be connected?
Frank’s response to Maynard was flagged as urgent: Wherever she’s going, you’re going.
It was all he could do not to add: you moron.
Ah. Frank was back, and the hunt was on.
WEDNESDAY
January 24, 2007, 12:10 a.m.
(3 days, 11 hours, 20 minutes until end of auction)
Logistics Support Area Anaconda
Balad, Iraq
* * *
Jaime Richards had twenty hours. Twenty hours to fly from Balad, Iraq, to Tallil–make a pickup–and continue on to Ali Ah Salem, Kuwait; Frankfurt, Germany; and deliver her package safely in Switzerland.
She couldn’t even count the number of things that could go wrong. She was officially taking her mid-tour leave, and soldiers knew the plane they were on to start the journey out of Iraq could leave today, tomorrow, or, God forbid, a week from today. Or they could get stuck in Kuwait. Last time Jaime’s boss had flown out on leave, the emir of Kuwait died, and the whole country–including the airfields–had shut down for three days.
Jaime had twenty hours.
She was packing her bags in the trailer that served as her hooch when she got a call. A COSCOM (Corps Support Command) soldier from one of her subordinate units was critically injured and was being rushed into surgery. It was a class
ic chaplain’s dilemma. She needed to continue packing, there was no way she could miss her flight, and she desperately needed a couple of hours of sleep before the start of her new mission.
But there was a boy, and he was badly hurt.
To her mind, there really was no choice.
She headed for the operating room in the series of large interconnected tents that comprised the hospital, to observe the surgery and pray for the young soldier while the neurosurgeon worked on his damaged skull, which had been split wide open when the Humvee tire he was inflating exploded in his face. The rim had caught him on the forehead, right at the hairline about two inches above his eyes.
“Michael, are you with us?” Once the surgery was complete and Jaime knew she wouldn’t get in anyone’s way, she stepped up to the patient’s side.
He had begun to stir, and squeezed Jaime’s hand, on which she wore a disposable purple latex glove. She was amazed that someone could wake up and be aware of his surroundings after having his brain exposed only minutes before.
The young man was lucky to be alive, and even luckier that his skull had taken most of the impact, protecting the brain housed within.
“Doc,” she said over her shoulder to a man who was making notes on the patient’s clipboard. “That wire mesh you put in his forehead molds perfectly. You can hardly tell this guy had a piece of his skull broken out.”
“I told you,” he responded. “I’m the best.”
She could see him smile beneath his mask but knew that he wasn’t kidding.
If I ever need neurosurgery, she thought, I want someone with that kind of confidence working on me!
Still in the maroon scrubs she had donned to watch the procedure, she followed the gurney as they wheeled the young man back to the ICU for observation during his first hours of recovery. If they were certain he was stable, they might put him on the next plane for Landstuhl–the military regional medical center–later that morning.
Jaime remembered when she had taken that flight, almost a year before, after being picked up along the highway in southern Iraq. She’d been away for nearly three years. The official story went that she’d had amnesia and spent the time with Iranian goatherds. In fact, although she had spent some time with goats, most of it had been spent in the place known as Eden. While most people in the world never suspected or believed it, the place that had come to be known as the Garden of Eden still existed. It was hidden–in fact, at any given time only twelve persons, known as Swords, knew the way in and out. At the end of an unusual adventure during her first tour in Iraq, Jaime had been invited to go to Eden, and she’d accepted.
She’d found Eden to be an altruistic society, whose citizens worked to help those in what they called the Terris world. There she’d spent a year in contemplation and gardening, and she was content. Until Clement had invited her to study at the place they called Mountaintop to join those they called the Integrators. The Integrators were citizens of Eden who moved back and forth between the two worlds. They included Messengers, who lived in the Terris world and delivered messages between other Integrators; Operatives, who had received special training in how to intervene in Terris affairs; and the twelve Swords who took people back and forth between the Terris world and Eden during the rare opportunities they called door openings.
Jaime discovered she felt called to be a person of action, and had trained to become an Eden Operative. Though the required training was three years, she’d been sent back a year early on special assignment.
That was nearly a year ago. Now Jaime was back in Iraq, in her Terris job, on assignment as a chaplain with the U.S. Army.
The unit with which Jaime had originally deployed to Iraq had finished their tour while she’d been gone. She’d been stationed in Germany the previous August when one of the chaplains assigned to the 5th COSCOM HQ had become ill and was shipped home. Jaime received the “Tag, you’re it!” phone call on a lazy Sunday afternoon while relaxing in her rental home in the little burg of Hochspeyer. In less than two weeks she was back in Iraq.
Jaime checked her watch as she entered the ICU. Twelve forty a.m. She needed to get to the COSCOM Operations Center and clean up a few loose ends before catching her flight to Kuwait. Her original plan was to catch a few hours of sleep before finishing up. But she was now wide awake. Perhaps she should head for the COSCOM, do what she needed to do, then see if sleep was still an option.
Confident her soldier was doing well, Jaime returned to the women’s dressing room, which was in truth a storeroom with a curtain hanging over the doorway. She removed her scrubs and donned the new ACU, or Army Combat Uniform, with the gray/green digital pattern. She laced up her desert boots, and pulled her dog tags off a hook hanging above her head. Her brother Joey–Joe, now, but he’d always be Joey to her–had kept them during the three years she had been missing in action. Jaime had retrieved them on her first visit Stateside when she reappeared. She looped them over her head and her blond hair, still obediently in its French braid. As the tags dropped inside her T-shirt, the various trinkets she had added over the years jangled reassuringly. They weren’t regulation, but it was comforting to know they were there.
As Jaime left the hospital compound she passed a smokers’ pavilion used by the staff on breaks. It was unlit, and she could barely make out the form of a man with a large backpack at his feet, and another one shaped like a teardrop slung across his shoulder, leaning against one of its support pillars. Mortaritaville, as the soldiers called Logistics Support Area Anaconda, was not well lit at night, to make it more difficult for insurgents to find targets for their mortar rounds.
That’s odd, she thought. Why would someone bother to come all the way out here, stand alone in the dark, and not even smoke?
As Jaime rounded the corner to walk the dark block to her headquarters, she didn’t notice the man from the pavilion pick up his backpack, sling it over his shoulders, and follow her down the street.
January 24, 2007, 12:50 a.m.
(3 days, 9 hours, 40 minutes until end of auction)
Judean wilderness west of the Dead Sea
Israel
* * *
Hajj al-Asim lay awake on his thick goat-hair mat in the chief’s tent. Lying next to him was his third wife, Asad. Although she was usually a heavy sleeper, she had been tossing fitfully all night. He assumed her emotions were embroiled in the upcoming wedding. But then, it was always a difficult transition when your husband took another wife.
The Hajj was not worried about the wedding preparations that had the whole camp in an uproar. That was the women’s job, really, although the men certainly would celebrate like there was no tomorrow, as his Western friends might say.
He was not even worried about the dissent shown at the men’s meeting hours earlier when he had announced to them that the time had come to sell the box. Not everyone had been happy. The pragmatists, yes. The dreamers, no. This is how the clan is known they said, if we sell it, who will we be, the clan that used to have the box?
No, the Hajj had a much more pressing concern.
Abihu el-Musaq, the dealer who was selling the box, was a serious man. He had made it clear to the Hajj that their deal was a business arrangement, that once the box went up for sale, if the Hajj reneged on his side of the deal, the consequences would be severe.
The Hajj had under his sleeping rug the printout that showed the item was for sale. The terms of the agreement were in force.
And the box was gone.
It had been stolen.
This put the Hajj in a very delicate position. Of all the dozens–soon, hundreds–of people arriving for the wedding, how could he find the thief, without letting anyone suspect the box had been stolen? For once the dealer knew the box was gone, there would be hell to pay.
The Hajj had to keep it quiet.
He had to find and retrieve the box.
“Rashid,” he spoke, as he had thousands of times over the years, “Why did you have to find that damn box? Look w
hat it did to you. Look what it’s doing to me.”
And he fell asleep yet again with the smirk of his cousin haunting his dreams.
January 24, 2007, 1:45 a.m.
(3 days, 9 hours, 45 minutes until end of auction)
Logistics Support Area Anaconda
Balad, Iraq
Never again.
After her first assignment as an Eden Operative back in the Terris world, Jaime had quit. She’d returned her First Mission ring, had sent notice that she refused any future assignments. But Clement, the head of the Integrators in Eden–the man who gave Operatives their assignments–knew her a little too well. Instead of an active, frontline assignment, he had offered her an assignment that involved economics research and tracking of world financial issues. Jaime had always had an interest in international affairs, and this was something she could do while on active duty. No one’s life was on the line. Why not?
Now, on her mid-tour leave, the assignment was becoming more interesting. Not dangerous, but more interesting. Right up her alley.
Sent an update on the soldier in surgery to his commanders and unit chaplain. Answered all important e-mails. Finished drafting a paper for the Commanding General. Turned on my “out of office” reply…
Jaime went over the checklist in her mind. What had she forgotten to do? She couldn’t think of anything. If she wanted to grab even a couple hours of sleep–and it was always wise to be rested and alert on assignment–the clock was ticking.
She was at her computer station in the Joint Operations Center. Even though it was the middle of the night, she was far from alone. The night shift staff was currently responding to a convoy crisis. The place looked like a NASA flight center with large screens up front surrounded by an amphitheater of workstations with computers, phones, headsets, and printers.
Treasure of Eden Page 2
