should fly home?'
'What? Why?'
'The dig is over. My salary stops in a month. I could fly home now.'
'Without finding out what happened to Franz?'
'Yes.' She stared out of the window. 'He is…dead. Shouldn't I just accept it?'
The sun was dying outside. The muezzin were calling across the ancient city of Urfa. Rob got up, went to the window; creaked it open, and gazed out. The cucumber man was cycling down the pavement shouting his wares. Veiled women were in a group outside the Honda shop talking into mobile phones through their concealing black chadors. They looked like shades, like ghosts. The mourning brides of death.
He went back to the sofa and gazed at Christine. 'I don't think you should go. Not yet.'
'Why not?'
'I think I know what the numbers mean.'
Her face was motionless. 'Show me.'
'Do you have a Bible? An English one?'
'On that shelf.'
Rob paced to the shelf and checked the spines: art, poetry, politics, archaeology, history. More archaeology. There. He took down a big old black Bible. The proper authorized version.
At the same time Christine took Breitner's notebook from the desk.
'All right,' said Rob. 'I hope I'm right. I think I'm right. But here goes. Read out the numbers in the notebook. And tell me what they're next to on the page.'
'OK, here's…twenty-eight. Next to a compass sign, for east.'
'No, say it like the two numbers are separate. Two eight.'
Christine stared at Rob, perplexed. Maybe even amused. 'OK. Two eight. By an arrow pointing east.'
Rob opened the Bible to Genesis, thumbed through the thin, almost translucent pages and found the right page. He ran his finger down the dense columns of text.
'Chapter two, verse eight. 2:8 Genesis. 'And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed'.' Rob waited.
Christine was staring at the Bible. After a while she murmured, 'Eastward in Eden?'
'Read another one.'
Christine scanned the notebook. 'Two nine. Next to the tree.'
Rob went to the same page in the Bible and recited, 'Book of Genesis. Chapter two, verse nine. 2:9 'And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil'.'
Christine said in a low voice, 'Two one zero. Two ten. By the river squiggly thing.'
'The line that turns into four rivers?'
'Yes.'
Rob looked down at the Bible. 'Chapter two, verse ten. 'And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads'.'
'My God,' said Christine. 'You're right!'
'Let's try one more, to make sure. A different one, one of the big numbers.'
Christine went back to the notebook. 'OK. Here are some bigger numbers, at the end. Eleven thirty- one?'
Rob fanned through the pages and recited, feeling like a vicar in his pulpit, 'Genesis. Chapter eleven, verse thirty-one. 'And Terah took Abraham his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sara his daughter in law, his son Abraham's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there'.'
'Haran?'
'Haran.' Rob paused, sitting down next to Christine. 'Let's try one more, one more of the others, one of the numbers next to a drawing.'
'Here's a number by a picture, seems to be a dog or a pig…or something.'
'What's the number?'
'Two hundred and nineteen. So, two nineteen?'
Rob found the relevant passage: ''And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them…''
Quietness filled the flat. Rob could still hear the cries of the cucumber seller floating up from the dusty streets below. Christine gazed at him intently. 'Breitner thought he was digging up-'
'Yes. The Garden of Eden.'
They stared across the sofa at each other.
21
Forrester was researching human sacrifice, in his London office. His coffee sat on his desk next to a photo of his son holding a beach ball and a picture of his snowy-blonde daughter, beaming and happy. It was a photo taken just before her death.
Sometimes when the black dog of depression was at his heels, Forrester would lay the photo of his daughter face down on the desk. Because it was just too painful, too piercing. Thinking about his daughter sometimes gave Forrester a kind of sharp chest pain, as if he had a fractured rib digging into his lungs. It was such a physical pain that he would almost vocalize it.
But most of the time it wasn't quite this bad. Usually, he was able to look past the pain-to other people's pain. This morning the photo stood on the desk ignored, his daughter's happy still-alive smile white and bright. Forrester was transfixed by his computer screen, Googling away at 'human sacrifice'.
He was reading about the Jews: the early Israelites who burned their children. Alive. They did this, Forrester learned, in a valley just south of Jerusalem-Ben-Hinnom. Wikipedia told the DCI that this valley was also known as Gehenna. The valley of Gehenna was Hell to the Canaanite, the 'valley of the shadow of death'.
Forrester read on. According to historians, in ancient times Israelite mothers and fathers would bring their firstborn children down to the valley, outside the gates of Jerusalem, and there they would place their screaming babies into the hollow brass stomach of a huge statue dedicated to the Canaanite demon god Moloch. The brass bowl in the centre of the enormous statue of Moloch also functioned as a brazier. Once the babies and children were in the brass bowl, fires were lit under the statue, which heated the brass, thereby roasting the children to death. As the children screamed to be saved, priests would pound enormous drums to drown out the shrieks and save the mothers from undue distress, from having to listen to their children burning alive.
Forrester sat back, his heart pounding like the drums of an Israelite ritual. How could anyone do such a thing? How could anyone sacrifice their own children? Unbidden, Forrester thought of his own children, his daughter, his dead daughter. The firstborn of the family.
Rubbing his eyes, he scrolled through some more pages.
The sacrifice of firstborn was a common motif in ancient history, it seemed. All kinds of peoples-Celts, Mayans, Goths, Vikings, Norsemen, Hindus, Sumerians, Scythians, American Indians, Incas, many others-sacrificed humans, and many of them sacrificed the first child. Often this was done as a so-called 'foundation sacrifice' when a strategically important or sacred structure was being built: before the main construction took place the community would sacrifice a child, usually a firstborn, and they would bury the corpse under the arch or pillar or door.
Forrester inhaled, and exhaled. He clicked another link. The sky outside was bright, the sunshine of late spring. The DCI was too absorbed in his macabre task to notice or care.
Aztec sacrifices were especially blood-thirsty. Homosexuals would be ritually killed by having their intestines ripped out through their rectums. Enemy warriors would have their living hearts torn from their chest cavities by priests whose heads were daubed with the human offal of their previous victims.
He read on. And on. Supposedly the Great Wall of China was built on thousands of cadavers: yet more foundation sacrifices. The Japanese once venerated a hitobashira-a human pillar-beneath which virgins were buried
