The Babylonian Codex

by C. S. Graham

  Jax tucked Julie Bosch’s information into his pocket. “Set up a Gmail account. I’ll be babyloniancodex1. You be babyloniancodex2.”

  Matt frowned. “It’s risky.”

  Jax shrugged. “It’s a risk we’ll have to take.”

  Chapter 44

  They found Julie Bosch at the visitors center of Arlington Cemetery, tapping away at a computer while a wan-faced teen with dark curly hair waited solemnly.

  “Here it is,” said Julie. “Your brother is in Section 60.” She jotted the lot and grid numbers on a slip of paper and handed it to the kid with a sympathetic smile. “Take Roosevelt Drive past Section 7 and turn right on McClellan.”

  As the young man moved away, she turned to Jax and Tobie. “May I help you?”

  Jax laid James Anderson’s Homeland Security credentials on the counter before her. “We need to talk to you about Noah.”

  All the animation drained from Julie Bosch’s face. She cast a quick glance around and leaned forward to say quietly. “This isn’t a good time. We’re very busy and—”

  “Take a break,” said Jax. “Now.”

  They walked through a sea of white marble tombstones. Hundreds of thousands of them, sweeping in undulating, green-swathed phalanxes over the gently rolling hills. The temperature was plummeting, the clouds above heavy with the promise of snow. Tobie kept her hands buried deep in the pockets of the peacoat and let Jax do most of the talking.

  “We’re looking for your husband. Noah Bosch.”

  Julie Bosch drew in a deep breath that flared her nostrils and widened her eyes. She was a slim woman in her late twenties, with creamy skin, soft brown eyes, and delicate features that quivered slightly, as if with fear. “We’re separated,” she said in a tight voice that hinted at origins below the Mason-Dixon Line. South Carolina; perhaps Charleston.

  “But you haven’t been separated for long, have you?”

  “No.”

  Tobie saw Jax swallow a spurt of impatience. He said, “You have no idea where he is?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea why he might be in Spain?”

  “Spain?” She shook her head, her soft brown hair brushing the tops of her shoulders. “No. I’m sorry, but I really can’t help you.” She started to turn back toward the visitors center. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Not so fast,” said Jax, reaching out to snag her arm. “You do know what Noah was working on when he lost his job at the Post, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” She threw another of her quick, frightened glances around, as if the inhabitants of those rows and rows of silent graves might be listening. “He was obsessed with the dominionist influence here in D.C. He was always ranting and raving about their involvement in everything from the death squads in Latin America to the big push to bomb Iran. I kept telling him he was committing the journalistic version of suicide. Those people have become way too strong to touch. Just to acknowledge they exist is stupid.” She blew out an angry breath “But of course he never listened to me.”

  “So he talked to you about his research?”

  “Are you kidding? He was always trying to tell me what kind of chicken to buy and where to get my prescriptions filled. Just because this company or that was owned by a dominionist.”

  “You didn’t listen to him?”

  “Huh. Name me a corporation that isn’t run by sycophants and crooks of some stripe or the other.” She swung her arm toward the monument-bedecked capital across the river. “Just like all those fine senators and representatives. They’re nothing more than a bunch of whores. They’re supposed to be representing the people. But the truth is, most of them are in bed with the insurance companies and the banks and the military contractors. Everyone with any sense knows it. But do people care? No.”

  “Noah cared?” asked Tobie.

  Julie swung her head to look at her. “Noah was an idiot. He had this stupid vision of a country that was actually governed by the people and for the people, rather than by a bunch of plutocrats who rake in billions while the rest of us slave away, struggling just to keep our heads above water.”

  Tobie gave a wry smile. “An idealist.”

  “Yeah. Like I said, an idiot.”

  Jax said, “Did he ever talk about something called the Babylonian Codex?”

  Julie Bosch laughed. “He drove me nuts with that thing. He was convinced the dominionists were using this so-called lost chapter”—she curled her fingers into mocking air quotes—“as a blueprint for their final push to take over the country. Assassinate first the vice president, then the president. It was the craziest thing I ever heard him come up with.”

  Tobie caught her breath, her gaze flying to meet Jax’s.

  He said, “Did Noah know what the lost chapter said?”

  “Of course not! There was some guy in Iraq who was working on translating it before the war. But he supposedly refuses to talk to anyone whose country participated in the invasion.” Her brows drew together in a frown. “Maybe that’s what Noah is doing in Spain. Maybe someone there knows about his precious ‘secret chapter.’ ”

  “Spain participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” said Jax. “They only pulled out after their right-wing government fell.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know then. It’s all so stupid. As if anyone would actually try to take over the country and run it according to their interpretation of divine law.”

  “You mean, like the Taliban did in Afghanistan?”

  “This isn’t Afghanistan!”

  “Yet the vice president did actually die two days ago,” Tobie pointed out.

  Julie Bosch gave an exasperated huff. “Yeah. Of a heart attack. Right in front of everyone. Nobody killed him.”

  Jax threw Tobie a warning look. “Do you have any idea where Noah was getting his information?”

  Julie shrugged. “He had some source. He was always hush-hush about her. But the truth is, I don’t think he knew who she was himself.”

  “She?” said Jax.

  “He thought it was a woman, although he never knew for sure. She only communicated with him through e-mail.”

  Jax said, “Did he ever tell you anything about her? Anything at all?”

  Julie thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Not really. He used to call her Linda.”

  “Linda?”

  “That’s what she called herself. Linda Lovelace. You know, from that 1970s porn flick that prompted Woodward and Bernstein to call their source Deep Throat. Personally, I thought it was kinda sick. I mean, who names themselves after a porn star?”

  They drew up at the top of a rise. From here they could look out over Arlington’s acres and acres of dead soldiers, sweeping nearly up to the massive walls of the Pentagon. For some reason, the proximity of the two suddenly struck Tobie as creepy.

  Julie said, “There really is nothing else I can tell you.”

  Tobie studied her soft, haunted eyes. “Did you know Noah was in Davos two days ago?”

  “You mean when Bill Hamilton—” Julie broke off. She took a step back, then another. “I don’t want to know about this,” she said, her voice rising in near hysteria only to fall to a strained whisper as her instinctive caution reasserted itself. “I don’t know anything about this. You hear me? Anything.”

  And with that, she turned and fled.

  Jax and Tobie sat at a corner booth in the shadowy recesses of a pizzeria in Clarendon. The place was a study in clichés: red and white checked tablecloths, vino bottles covered with melted wax, travel posters of Tuscany and Sicily framed in rustic wood and hung above faux-stone wainscoting. But a real wood fire blazed up hot and bright on the hearth, the warmth slowly thawing frozen fingers and toes.

  Jax took a long, slow swallow of his red wine. “We’ve been wondering what in the hell the Babylonian Codex had to do with all of this. Now we know.”

  Tobie shook her head. “How can anyone take a lost chapter of a book written nearly two thousand years ago and interpret i
t as a godly authorization to kill the administration of the United States?”

  “If you’re deluded enough to think you have a mandate from heaven to impose some warped version of your religion on everyone else, I can see believing that God wrote down his instructions and then kept them hidden for a couple of millennia until it was time for you to act on it.”

  “Somehow, I can’t see good old St. John scribbling away in his cave on Patmos composing verses about zapping Vice President Hamilton’s heart with a microwave weapon at Davos.”

  Jax laughed. “No. But that’s the nice thing about Revelation. It’s so convoluted and symbolic you can make it say just about anything you want it to.”

  Tobie said, “We need to get our hands on that chapter.”

  “True. Only, how exactly do you propose we do that?”

  She watched him take another sip of his wine. Sometimes he was so calm and cool she wanted to shake him. She leaned forward. “We know where it is, right? At Carlyle’s lodge in Idaho. All we need to do is break in and steal it.”

  Jax laughed again.

  She glared at him. “What’s so funny about that? You break in to places all the time.”

  He paused while their waitress—a perky little blond who looked about sixteen—dumped a steaming hot mushroom and spinach pizza and two plates in the middle of their table. “Enjoy!” she chirped and flitted away.

  “Well,” said Tobie. “Why not?”

  “Because someone like Carlyle is going to have his antiquities collection protected by a museum-level security system and private guards, that’s why not. Unless you can remote view the floor plan and a dozen other very important details, we’d be walking into a high-security facility completely blind. Never a good idea.”

  “Okay,” she said, digesting this. “So maybe we can’t get our hands on the codex itself. But he would have made digital copies of it, right? Isn’t that the way they translate these things? They work off high quality photographs rather than the originals. So we steal the photos. They’re probably on a disk.”

  Jax lifted a steaming slice of pizza and put it on the plate in front of her. “Here; eat. You never eat.”

  “I eat all the time. Just not when I’m tense.”

  “So have some wine, relax, and then eat.” He took a piece for himself. “If I’d known you weren’t going to eat, I’d have ordered pepperoni.”

  “This is better for you than pepperoni.”

  “Right. Like pizza is good for me? Between the oil and the cheese, it’s a lost cause.”

  “The digital copies of the codex,” she said again. “We could steal them. Couldn’t we?”

  “Maybe. If we knew where they were. Which we don’t.” He took a bite of pizza, chewed, and swallowed. “Carlyle probably has the images stored with the original. As far as he’s concerned, it’s pretty sensitive stuff, right? Seems to me that if we want to find out what those lost verses say, we need to go to the paleographer who first translated them.” Jax looked up from his pizza. “What was his name?”

  “Dr. Salah Araji. But he doesn’t talk to Americans, remember? Apart from which, he doesn’t have the codex anymore. Carlyle stole it.”

  Jax reached for another slice of pizza. “Carlyle stole the codex from the National Museum. But Dr. Araji wouldn’t have been working from the original either. He’d have made digital copies, too. And I bet he still has them.”

  Tobie felt her stomach give an unpleasant lurch. She was glad she hadn’t eaten any of the pizza. “But Araji is still in Iraq.”

  “So? We go to Iraq.”

  She stared at him. “Are you nuts?”

  “No.”

  “We can’t go to Iraq!”

  Jax swallowed a mouthful of pizza. “Trust me, it’s a hell of a lot easier to go to Iraq than to break into Carlyle’s compound.”

  She sucked in a deep, quick breath. “I . . . uh . . . I really don’t fancy the idea of going back to Iraq. The last time was not . . . fun.”

  He drained his wineglass. “I hear things are great there now. Hardly any suicide bombings. And the number of IED incidents is way down.”

  “Oh, that’s so encouraging.” She leaned forward. “I still have nightmares about that place. I don’t even like hearing the name of it. I swore I’d never go anywhere near it again. Ever. In this life or the next.”

  “You know what they say: it’s better to face your fears than to run away from them.”

  “Not when your fears are getting killed in a war zone!”

  “It’s not like we’re going into combat.”

  “The entire country is a battlefield!” She raked her hair out of her face, her mind racing. “There’s no way I can get there, remember? Davenport will have put my name on every watch list in existence.”

  Jax reached for his wineglass and smiled at her over the brim. “I wasn’t planning to fly commercial. I think I can get us a ride with a friend.”

  She flopped back against the high, padded booth. “Not Bubba again.”

  “What’s wrong with Bubba?”

  “Nothing. I just . . . um . . . I don’t have a passport. They require visas in Iraq these days, you know—unless you’re part of the occupation. And then there’s all those checkpoints and—”

  “Not a problem. I know a guy who can fix all that. His name is Ernie DeMoss, and he does great work.” Jax pushed to his feet. “Bring what’s left of the pizza. You might decide you’re hungry later.”

  “Hungry? On my way to Iraq?” She reached for her wine and downed it all in one long pull. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Chapter 45

  Tobie’s new passport———complete with an “official” visa for Iraq—took just over an hour.

  Tracking down the current whereabouts of Dr. Salah Araji was a little more difficult. It involved a string of delicate phone calls and some covert back-and-forth e-mailing with Matt to elicit the information that the scholar had abandoned Baghdad after the death of his family and returned to his native village not far from the ruins of ancient Babylon. He spent his days as a volunteer toiling to save the devastated site and his nights hunched over a computer writing long, impassioned articles that no one in the corporate media was willing to publish.

  And he steadfastly refused to have anything to do with anyone whose native language was English.

  “This doesn’t sound promising,” Tobie said as they drove toward an obscure airfield in northern Virginia. “I think we’re wasting our time.”

  “You just don’t want to go to Iraq.”

  “Of course I don’t want to go to Iraq. No one who’s sane wants to go to Iraq.”

  By the time they reached the small airstrip outside Leesburg, the sun had completely disappeared behind heavy clouds and the first flakes of snow were beginning to fall.

  They found Bubba Dupuis hunkered down beside the near wheel of a plain white Gulfstream G550 with absolutely no identifying markings. He was a big, fleshy Cajun with a badly receding hairline and a salt and pepper ponytail that hung halfway down his back. Last time Tobie saw him, he’d been sporting a drooping mustache. But that was gone now, replaced by swooping sideburns right out of the old Wild West. He wore torn jeans stuffed into biker boots and a red hooded sweatshirt under a denim jacket. Straightening, he stood with his fingertips tucked into the pockets of his jeans and a grin splitting his face as he watched Jax climb out of the gray Toyota. “What’s the matter, Jax? You finally wreck that cute little German sports car of yours?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I don’t get it. How come you manage to wreck every car you drive except your own?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do,” said Tobie and Bubba in unison.

  Bubba laughed and came to enfold her in a big bear hug. “I hear you been havin’ a hard time of it.”

  It struck Tobie as a stupendous understatement. But all she said was, “I was doing okay until Jax decided he wanted to take a little side trip to Iraq.”

  Bubb
a laughed again. “Y’all are lucky you caught me when you did. If I hadn’t had a lousy flat tire I’d’a been outta here hours ago.” He squinted into the thickening snow. “We better get goin’ if we want to beat this storm.”

  “Exactly where in Iraq are you headed?”

  “Najaf. That’s about a hundred miles south of Baghdad.”

  “That’ll work,” said Jax.

  As they settled into the jet’s plush leather seats, Bubba secured the door and intoned, “Thank you for flying Bubba Air. Remember that your seat cushions are not flotation devices, so if we have to ditch in the water, you’re shit out of luck. And if you die, we can’t be sued because we don’t exist.”

  “Thanks, Bubba,” said Tobie. “That helped a lot.”

  Bubba grinned. “Service with a smile, that’s our motto.”

  Once, he had been a marine pilot. But an aversion to taking orders had ended his military career prematurely. Now, he called himself a contract pilot, although “soldier of fortune” might have been more accurate. For the last four months he’d been flying mysterious cargo and passengers in and out of Iraq for the CIA.

  “At least we’re going someplace warm,” he said, sliding into the pilot’s seat. “Did Jax tell you about the time he made me land on an ice lake in Kazakhstan?”

  Jax took the copilot’s seat and reached for the headphones. “She doesn’t need to hear this, Bubba.”

  “Yes she does,” said Tobie. “What were you doing in Kazakhstan?”

  “Lake Balkhash. It’s just over the border from the Uygar Autonomous Region in China.”

  “The what?”

  “You know; the Uygars. Chinese Muslims. Jax was breaking some Uygar dissidents out of prison in Urumqi. So there I am, parked out on this friggin’ frozen lake, when Jax and a couple of Uygars come riding up on shaggy ponies with half the Chinese army chasing them.”

  “It wasn’t half the Chinese army,” said Jax.