then he smiled at Lizzie. He said to Rob, 'Cloncurry was of course paying the Kurds all along. Paying more than us, paying more than you. We had known something was up for a while. The Breitner murder, for instance. The Yezidi didn't mean to kill him, just frighten him. But he was killed. Why? Someone had persuaded the men at the dig to… go that extra mile. Your friend Cloncurry.'
'OK. And then…?'
Kiribali sighed, and flicked some dust from his shoulder. 'I have to confess, we didn't know anything for a time. We were perplexed and confounded. But then I got a call, very recently, from your excellent policemen at Scotland Yard. But we were still in the pickle, Robert. Because we didn't know where you were.' Kiribali smiled. 'And then Mumtaz! The little one, he came to me. He told us everything, just in time. It is always so good to have…contacts.'
Rob looked at Kiribali, barely registering what he was saying. Then he looked down at his hands. They were still slightly rusty with dried blood: Cloncurry's blood. But Rob didn't care, he didn't give a damn: he had saved his daughter's life! That was all that mattered. Rob's thoughts were a jangle of anxiety and relief and a weird bruising joy.
They drove on, quietly. And then Kiribali spoke again. 'You do know I am going to take the parchment, with the map, don't you? And the skull. I shall take that too. The whole Black Book.'
'Where are you going to put them?'
'With all the other evidence.'
'You mean the museum vaults.'
'Of course. And we have changed the keycode!'
A large police van overtook them, its brake lights ruby in the dusk.
'Please understand,' said Kiribali. 'You are safe. That is good. We shall hold the Kurds for a while, then let them go. Radevan and his foolish friends.' He smiled urbanely. 'I shall let them go because I have to keep the peace here. Between the Turks and the Kurds. But everything else will be locked away, forever.'
The car drove on. The warm evening air was delicious as it breezed through the windows: sweet and soft. Rob inhaled and exhaled; he stroked his daughter's hair. She was half asleep now. And then Rob noticed that they were passing the Gobekli turn off. It was just visible in the rising moonlight.
Rob hesitated. Then he asked Kiribali if they could go and look at Gobekli Tepe, one last time.
Kiribali asked the driver to stop the car, and he gazed across at Rob and Christine and Lizzie. The two girls were asleep: the policeman's smile was indulgent. He nodded, and radioed the other vehicles-informing them that they would all meet later, in Urfa. Then the driver turned the car and drove off-road.
It was the same familiar route. Over the shallow hills, past the Kurdish villages with their open sewers and straying goats and minarets floodlit a lurid green. A dog yapped, and chased the car. It chased them for a half a mile, then ran off into the gloom.
They drove further into the darkness. Then they crested the rise and were on the low hill, overlooking the temple. Rob got out of the police car, leaving Lizzie with her head laid in Christine's lap; both of them asleep.
Kiribali got out too. Together, the two men strolled the rolling path that led to the temple.
'So,' said Kiribali. 'Tell me.'
'Tell you what?
'What you were doing in the valley? The Valley of Killing?'
Rob thought for a moment, and then he explained, tentatively. He gave a brief outline of the Genesis Secret, the most cursory sketch. But it was enough to intrigue: in the moonlight Rob could see Kiribali's eyes widening.
The detective smiled. 'And you believe you understood? That you really worked it all out?'
'Maybe…But we don't have any photos. It was all lost in the flood. No one would believe us. So it doesn't matter.'
Kiribali sighed, rather cheerfully. They had reached the top of the little hill, by the single mulberry tree. The megaliths were visible, casting a shadow by moonshine. Kiribali slapped Rob on the back. 'My writer friend. It matters to me. You know I love English literature. Tell me what you think…Tell me the Genesis Secret!'
Rob demurred; Kiribali insisted.
Rob sat down on a rocky bench. He took out his notebook and strained to read his notes in the moonlight. Then he closed the book, and stared across the undulating plains. Kiribali sat beside him, and listened to Rob's account.
'The Biblical accounts of the Fallen Angels, the passages in the Book of Enoch, the secret imparted in Genesis 6: I believe these are a folk memory of interbreeding between hominid species, the first men…'
'I see.' Kiribali smiled.
'And this, I believe, is how the folk memory arose. Sometime around 10,000 BC a species of man migrated from the north to Kurdish Turkey. These invading hominids were physically large. They may ultimately have evolved from Gigantopethicus, the largest hominid ever known. Certainly, judging by cultural influences nearby, these larger hominids came from central east Asia.'
Kiribali nodded. Rob went on, 'Whatever their origin, let's call these invading hominids the Northern men. Compared to Homo sapiens, the Northern men were more advanced, and certainly more aggressive. They had mastered pottery, and building, carving and sculpting, maybe even writing; whereas Homo sapiens were still living in caves.'
The detective remained silent, thinking. Rob elaborated. 'Why were the Northern men smarter and more ruthless? The solution is in their origin: they came from the north. Scientists have long speculated that fiercer climates produce a sharper, more strategic intelligence. In an Ice Age you need to plan ahead, merely to survive. You also need to compete more brutally for what resources there are. By contrast, warmer and kinder climates maybe produce a higher social intelligence, and more friendly co-operation…
'But the Northmen had a problem; hence their migration. We can speculate that they were dying out, like the Neanderthals before them. It seems, indeed, that the Northmen suffered a genetic flaw which predisposed them to intense and evil violence. Perhaps the harshness of their environment instilled in them a fear, of a vengeful God. A deity who hungered for blood, for the propitiation of human sacrifice.
'Whatever the reason: the Northern men were killing themselves, sacrificing their own kind. A dying civilization, like the Aztecs. In desperation they sought a kinder locale and climate: the Edenic climate of the fertile crescent. They migrated south and west. Once there they began to breed with the humbler peoples of the Kurdish plains; and as they intermingled with the hunter-gatherers, the humble cavemen, they taught them the arts of building, carving, religion, society: hence the startling advance in culture represented by Gobekli Tepe. In fact, I suspect Gobekli was a temple built by the supermen to inspire awe in the huntergatherers.'
A goat bleated, somewhere in the gloom.
'For a while, Gobekli Tepe must have seemed to the little hunter-gatherers like paradise. A Garden of Eden, a place where the gods walked amongst men. But things began to change. Food resources may have run low. As a result the Northern giants put the little hunters to work: to reap the wild grasses of the Kurdish plain, to toil as farmers. The mysterious move to agriculture had begun. The Neolithic revolution. And we humans were the helots. The slaves. The toilers in the field.'
'You mean this was the Fall of Man,' Kiribali said. 'The expulsion from Eden?'
'Perhaps. To deepen the mystery, we also have strange hints of changes in sexual behaviour around this time. Maybe the Northern men liked to rape the small cavewomen, rape them with pigs like the statue in your museum, maybe they taught the women to 'kiss the phallus' as the Book of Enoch has it. The women certainly became aware of their sexuality-like Eve, found naked in Eden-as they copulated with the newcomers. And as the two hominids interbred, the unhappy genes of violence and sacrifice were passed on, albeit in a diluted form. The genes were inherited by the children born of these unions.'
A lorry hooted in the far distance as it took the main road south to Damascus.
'So yes, it was the Fall of Man. The community of Gobekli and the surrounding plains was now thoroughly brutalized, traumatized and hypersexualized. This was no Eden any more. Moreover, the farming itself was coarsening the landscape. Making life harder. And the reaction of the Northern men to these ominous signs? It was to take up the old traits again: they began to sacrifice, to appease the cruel gods of nature, or the demons in their minds. And they needed to appease these gods with human blood. To fill jars with living babies.' Rob glanced at the empty deserts to the east.
