by Graham Brown
Praise for Graham Brown
BLACK SUN
“Will appeal to Clive Cussler fans … a good thriller that fans will not want to put down.” —RT Book Reviews
“Armchair travel for the adrenaline set … Brown infuses nonstop action with spiritual, scientific and ideological elements, without ever pausing for breath.” —SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD, author of A Bad Day for Pretty
BLACK RAIN
“Action-packed … The fast pace … will keep readers forging ahead.” —Publishers Weekly
“A unique and compelling thriller that will keep your interest start to finish. Black Rain is fast-paced, dangerous adventure at its very best. A sequel is in the works, and I can’t wait to read it.” —Fresh Fiction
“A successful thriller—exotic location, innocents in danger, overwhelming odds against the good guys and the inability to know who they can trust—this enjoyable read is very frightening.… A lively read.” —RT Book Reviews
“Black Rain is an adventure that’s not only a terrific read, but is smart, intelligent, and poised to shake up the whole thriller community. Every copy should come with a bucket of popcorn and a John Williams soundtrack to play in the background. Loved it.” —LINWOOD BARCLAY, #1 internationally bestselling author of Fear the Worst
“Black Rain sizzles with tension and twists that both entertain and magnetize. The plot envelops the reader into a brilliantly conceived world, full of strange and amazing things. Graham Brown is an exciting new talent, a writer we’re going to be hearing a lot from in the years ahead. I can’t wait.” —STEVE BERRY, New York Times bestselling author
The Eden Prophecy is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Bantam Books eBook Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Graham Brown
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52781-3
Cover art and design: Carlos Beltran
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1_r1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Epilogue
Other Books by This Author
PROLOGUE
Southern Iran, 1979
The desert wind cried like a beast in pain. Ahmad Bashir listened to it as he crouched in the shelter of a hastily erected tent. As the wind howled outside, the tent’s thin walls flapped and strained against the poles and stakes that held them in place. The storm was getting worse, not better.
He tried to ignore it, turning his attention to the excavated grave in front of him. There, illuminated by a lantern and the daylight filtering through the canvas of the tent, a partially excavated skeleton rested at the bottom of a five-foot-deep trench.
A stone tablet had been unearthed near the skeleton’s feet and a tube of some metal remained clutched in its hand. Bashir examined the metallic tube. It appeared to be made of copper, frayed strands of leather still clinging to it in places. Bashir guessed it had once been wrapped in an animal skin of some kind, a fabric that had been devoured by the desert over the last seven thousand years.
Behind Bashir, a sunburned young man with curly blond hair and long sideburns fiddled with a transistor radio, trying to listen to the BBC news over the noise of the storm. Each time he managed to improve the reception slightly, the thrashing wind seemed to rise up a notch and drown it out once again.
“Come on,” the young man said, twisting the dial in tiny increments.
Bashir glanced at him. “Put it down, Peter.” He waved the young man over. “Come look at this instead.”
Peter McKenzie was an American anthropologist just out of graduate school. He and several others had come to southern Iran to work on Bashir’s excavation. The main effort was taking place twenty miles to the east, where Bashir believed they had found one of the oldest settlements in Iran—older even than the city of Ur, across the border in Iraq. They’d also found directions to a trade route, which had led them to the grave they now stood over.
After discovering it, Bashir and McKenzie had erected the tent to protect the site from the elements, but Bashir had never expected to end up sheltered beneath it himself. A raging sandstorm had seen to that, trapping them for the past two days. With nothing else to do, they’d continued the excavation, at least until events in Tehran had distracted McKenzie.
“It’s getting bad,” the young man said.
“How can you tell?”
“I can make out some of what’s going on,” McKenzie insisted. “They’ve shut down the airport. Flights are being diverted to other countries.”
As demonstrations against the shah and American interests grew, most of Bashir’s Americans had left, but McKenzie was one of two who had stayed on. A decision he now seemed to be regretting.
“They want the shah returned to stand trial,” McKenzie announced. “They’re taking hostages.”
There had been unrest for months. After decades of persecution, the tables were turning. And while Bashir thought change was overdue, he had grave concerns about the men who were leading that change.
Some expected them to institute democracy, but most believed they would return Iran to the Middle Ages if they won. Bashir prayed to Allah that it would not be so, but the pendulum had swung so far in one direction under the shah that it was bound to overshoot in the other once he was gone.
“Tehran is a long way from here,” he said. “Do you really think they’re going to drive through a hundred miles of desert in the middle of a storm just to look for a couple of Americans?”
McKenzie looked around, listening as the wind sandblasted the tent. He seemed to find that logic sensible.
“Anyway,” Bashir said. “You’re very tan now. I’ll put a burqa on you, cover your face, they’ll think you’re my woman.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” McKenzie said.
&n
bsp; Bashir smiled. “How do you think it sounds to me?”
The young American looked no less distraught, but eventually a smile crept over his face. He shook his head, began to laugh, and put the radio down, careful to leave it on.
He crawled over to the trench. “What are you so excited about anyway?”
“Look closely,” Bashir said, pointing to the metal tube. Markings could be seen on it. Not drawn or painted, but pounded into the surface as if they had been stamped by some great hammer.
McKenzie’s eyes grew wide. “Like the copper scroll from the Dead Sea.”
“Exactly,” Bashir said. “If our theory is right, this could be as old as the dwellings we found. Seven thousand years. It could tell us priceless things.”
Climbing around in the trench, careful not to disturb anything, Bashir moved to the stone tablet. He swept away the sand with a horsehair brush and studied the symbols. Only then did he realize the tablet was not made of stone but was some type of clay or adobe, fired or dried in the sun. It seemed extremely dense but it would still be a far softer surface than stone.
He moved carefully, blowing air into the crevices and using delicate strokes to reveal the carved markings beneath.
McKenzie aimed a flashlight at the surface.
With the added illumination Bashir could make out the style of writing.
“What do you see?” McKenzie asked.
A wave of elation rose through Bashir, mixed with melancholy disappointment.
“Proto-Elamite,” he said, referencing the writing on the stone. Proto-Elamite: one of the most ancient forms of writing known to man. Unfortunately, it was also unreadable. It had never been translated.
Bashir ground his teeth. Whatever secrets were contained on the clay tablet would remain just that. He glanced back at the copper scroll, guessing the information clutched in the skeletal hand would be written in the same style.
“Bad luck,” McKenzie said, obviously realizing the same thing. “But it’s still an incredible find.”
Bashir nodded, but he wasn’t really listening. His eyes had been drawn to a mark in the center of the tablet. A circle with four notches on it, like a compass rose. Within the circle was a square and within that square was a vertical rectangle.
The symbol was different from the Proto-Elamite script, in both the way it was drafted and the depth of its carving. Certainly it matched nothing else on the tablet. And yet he’d seen it somewhere before.
The sound of a zipper racing upward and the sudden blast of wind distracted him. He turned to see Jan Davis, the other American, standing in the entryway, holding the flap open. He looked panic-stricken.
“Close the tent,” Bashir said as sand and dust came blasting in.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Davis said, ignoring Bashir and talking straight at McKenzie.
“Jan!” Bashir shouted.
“They’re coming,” Davis replied. “They came to the other dig looking for the Americans.”
McKenzie looked at Bashir.
“They’re coming here next,” Davis insisted. “Men with guns, riding in trucks. We have to leave.”
“Are you sure?” McKenzie asked.
“They shot Ebi and Fahrid, accused them of being traitors. The rest of us ran.”
“Are they okay?” he asked.
Davis looked haunted by what he’d seen. “I don’t think so.”
Bashir turned back toward the tablet, his mind spinning. He felt instantly sick. Ebi and Fahrid were Iranian like him, from his own university. Two of his best students, now dead at the hands of the revolutionaries.
“Ahmad, we have to leave,” McKenzie pleaded.
Bashir knew Peter was correct. Knew he had misjudged the extent to which his country had gone mad.
“Listen,” Davis said, turning the radio to full.
Through the static they heard the reporter intermittently.
“… they’ve taken the American embassy now, they’re parading around in the streets, burning flags, shouting death to America …”
“We have to go.”
Bashir nodded, slowly coming to terms with it. But as McKenzie stood and gathered a few things, Bashir found his mind drifting inexplicably back to the tablet. Where had he seen that symbol before?
Jan Davis disappeared from view. McKenzie was halfway out of the tent. “Ahmad, you have to come.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said.
“You won’t,” he said. “They know you work with Americans. They’ll take it out on you when they can’t find us.”
Bashir couldn’t fight the logic, but he did not want to leave. He felt they were close to something important, something that mattered more than revolutions and guns and the ugly transfer of power.
“This symbol,” he said, pointing to the tablet. “I’ve seen it.”
The wind howled and the tent shook and Bashir’s mind whirled.
“It doesn’t matter,” McKenzie said.
“It does!”
“Not if you’re dead.”
McKenzie looked away and then stuck his head back inside. “The truck’s leaving.”
There was no choice. Bashir knew he had to go. He looked at the symbol one last time, burning it into his brain, and then he went to leave. At the last moment he turned back and grabbed the copper scroll from the skeleton’s grasp.
Stepping out of the tent, Bashir was determined not to let the revolutionaries destroy what he’d found. He ripped one stake from the ground and the wind did the rest, filling the tent like a balloon and carrying it across the desert like a kite.
Forty yards away, a big diesel truck waited. McKenzie and Davis were already running toward it.
“Come on!” McKenzie shouted.
Fighting the wind and shielding his eyes, Bashir made his way to the truck. He climbed into the back along with the two Americans and three others. The cab up front was already full.
In the distance behind them, he could see sunlight reflecting off several vehicles. There was no time to spare.
The truck lurched forward and Bashir lost his balance. He stumbled, put a hand out to brace himself, and dropped the scroll. It hit the back edge of the truck bed and tumbled out onto the sand as the truck accelerated away.
Bashir cringed. He stepped to the edge, ready to jump, but the truck was moving too fast. He grabbed McKenzie. “Tell the driver to stop. Tell him to stop.”
Between the roaring of the diesel engine and the howling of the wind, his words were barely audible.
“It’s too late!” McKenzie shouted.
“No!” Bashir said.
Desperate beyond reason, he tried to climb out but McKenzie held him back.
“Let me go!”
“No, Ahmad. It’s too late.”
By now the truck was rolling away at thirty miles per hour. The revolutionaries were approaching from the east. There would be no jumping free, no stopping or turning back.
As this reality seeped into Bashir, he stopped straining. McKenzie relaxed his grasp and then cautiously released him. Bashir squinted through the storm at the scroll, and his heart sank.
It might take hours or even days for the grave to fill with sand, but the scroll would be buried in minutes. And without any marker to lead the way, it would disappear from the world as if it had never existed.
CHAPTER 1
New York City
Present day
Claudia Gonzales flashed her ID badge at the security checkpoint outside the United Nations General Assembly building. There was no real need to do so; the guards knew her well and at this hour of the morning—just after six on the East Coast—she was one of the few diplomats on the scene.
They waved her through posthaste. With a briefcase in one hand and a tall mocha latte in the other, Gonzales made her way to a secure elevator and up to the eleventh floor of the iconic monolith.
Reaching her office before any members of her staff did was a habit she’d kept since graduating from law school
. For one thing, it set a good example; it was difficult for her staff to slack off or complain when the boss was working harder than anyone else. It also had a practical purpose. Not only did the early bird catch the worm, but for the busy people of the world, the early morning hours were often the only available moment to actually look for the proverbial morsel.
In an hour the phones would start ringing. Shortly after that, the appointments would begin and then the afternoon teleconferences, followed by press briefings and public hearings. In the blink of an eye it would be closing time, and the pile of work on her desk would look exactly as it had eight hours before.
To Claudia Gonzales, that was the equivalent of running in place.
She stepped into her office, set down the latte, and turned on her computer. As the machine booted up, she stepped outside, checking the items on her assistant’s desk that had come in during the night hours. The world ran 24/7, even if government offices didn’t.
There was a report on the continuing blockade of Gaza, another on a human rights situation in East Timor, and an internal-use envelope that lay unopened.
It read “Diplomatic Materials, Private and Confidential.” It was listed as coming from the secretary general’s office, with Gonzales’s name scrawled in the recipient’s slot. She grabbed all three items and returned to her office.
Fairly certain there were no earth-shattering details in the two reports, she placed them in her inbox and proceeded to open the big manila package.
Inside was a legal-sized envelope on the secretary general’s stationery. Intrigued, she took a sip of her latte, placed it down, and used a letter opener to slice the top of the envelope. There was an odd rubbery feel to the envelope, almost as if it were waterproof. It made her wonder how much the secretary general spent on his office supplies.
She pulled out a folded sheet of paper and began to read.
You will be punished. You will all be punished. We have waited and suffered too long.
Her mood instantly changed. The UN got a hundred threats per week, mostly from crackpots and mentally unstable individuals who imagined the UN taking over the world with black helicopters. What made these people think the UN was even remotely capable of dominating the world boggled her mind. In the best of times, they had trouble keeping the peace in remote, undeveloped areas.
