She bit her lower lip. ‘Sorry. Can’t share. I had to sign a confidentiality agreement.’
‘I’ll need to know.’
‘Then you’ll want to talk to Frank. Because if I can’t publish in the
‘You have a number for this middleman, Frank?’
She shook her head. ‘Everything was handled by e-mail. The couple times he did call, the number came up “restricted”.’
‘Of course it did.’
‘Cloak and dagger. Just as you guys like it.’
‘You can give me this e-mail address?’
‘When I’m back to my computer, I suppose.’
He dug in his pocket and pulled out a business card, slid it over to her. ‘If you could forward it to me, that’d be great. And try not to lose the card, please,’ he taunted.
‘Funny,’ she said. She dropped the card into her clutch purse and snapped it shut like a clamshell. ‘I remember when I lost that ID. Frank freaked out when I couldn’t find it. There was so much equipment in the cave, debris too. Lord knows where it wound up. But he got me a new card within minutes. Super-tight security there. Guys with guns outside, the works. Lots of crazy stuff going on. I’d hear the fighter planes flying overhead … bombings, gunfire off in the distance. Not the safest place to be at that time.’
‘Any other scientists there?’
‘A handful of others on rotation. Some coming, some going. Archaeologists, mostly. But we were kept apart, no consorting or information sharing. Really frustrating way to work. The others had higher clearance than me. I was only allowed in the entry passage - the first leg of what was probably a maze of tunnels. There was a guard stationed where the entry tunnel forked, scanning IDs. Like a checkpoint.’
He needed to fish for a connection to the Arabs who were now holed up in the cave. ‘Any chance it had something to do with Islamic militants?’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
Flaherty shook his head sharply.
‘What I saw in that cave had been there over 4,500 years before Muhammad was even born. Terri
A few tables away, Flaherty noticed a man, with a thin face and Dumbo ears, sipping coffee. The guy seemed preoccupied with their discussion, but quickly diverted his attention back to a museum map laid flat on the table. Flaherty lowered his voice. ‘Anything else?’
‘I was only there a few days, taking pictures, making rubbings of the walls. Once I cracked the alphabet, I was asked to give all the materials back. Then they put me back on a plane, no pictures, no records, no copies, nada. The most incredible thing I’ve ever seen and all I’ve got to show for it is up here.’ She tapped her temple. ‘But memories don’t offer a high degree of provenance,’ she said with great sarcasm. She watched him scrawling more chicken scratch, his fingers pinching the Bic way too tightly in a crooked grip. ‘I’m not in any trouble, am I?’
Flaherty’s eyes didn’t move from the notepad. ‘I’ll need to report this all back to my boss, see what she has to say. There’ll be some fact checking, of course.’ He finally looked up. ‘I’ll keep you posted. But we’ll probably need to meet again. So try not to skip town,’ he said with a smile.
‘Not even for some sunshine?’
‘Not unless you bring me.’ He said it too fast to catch himself, and he felt the blood rush into his cheeks. ‘You know, because we may need you to answer more questions …’
‘Of course,’ she said, grinning.
16
LAS VEGAS
Finished with cleaning the carpet, Stokes took a breather next to a metre-high display case shaped like an obelisk. The artifact contained in its pyramidal glass tip captured his attention: a clay tablet, no larger than a hymnal, etched in lines, pictograms and wedge-shaped cuneiform. An amazing work created by the first masters of celestial study - the ancient Mesopotamians.
He’d never divulged to anyone how he’d truly procured this treasure map to the origins of Creation hidden deep within the Zagros Mountains. Even his closest confidants, like Frank Roselli, had clung to the story that he’d recovered the relic from an antiquities smuggler who’d looted it from the vaults beneath the Baghdad Museum after the capital first fell. Amazingly, everyone had accepted the story.
But that explanation - the lie - was far too simple.
This tablet represented Stokes’s pledge to those who’d truly bestowed the artifact, and its secrets, upon him. The pledge that had transformed a warrior into a prophet.
And it all began on a calm day in 2003, when Randall Stokes lost his leg …
While US forces bombed Baghdad, Stokes’s Force Recon unit had still been routing out Taliban from the Afghan mountains, just like they’d been doing since October 2001, when Operation Enduring Freedom responded to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. Shortly after Iraq’s capital had been seized, his unit had been redeployed to northern Iraq to pursue Saddam loyalists who were fleeing Mosul and heading north over the mountains for Syria and Turkey.
The Department of Defense had issued a deck of playing cards listing Iraq’s most-wanted men in four suits, plus jokers. In the first two weeks, Stokes and his six-man unit had captured two diamonds, one heart and one club. By the end of the first month, they’d hunted and killed fifty-five insurgents, without one civilian casualty. The worst injury his unit sustained was a non-lethal bite from a Kurdistan mountain viper whose fangs punctured more boot than skin.
Things had gone smoothly.
Perhaps that should have clued Stokes that his luck was sure to turn.
On an uncharacteristically mild Tuesday in late June, Stokes and fellow special operative Corporal Cory Riggins were heading south to Mosul for a weekly briefing with the brigadier general. Their Humvee was forced to a stop in a congested pass where a group of Iraqi boys had turned the dusty roadway into a soccer field. The kids made no effort to move.
‘I should just run over them,’ Riggins said. ‘A few less fanatics in our future.’
‘Never did like kids, did you?’ Stokes said, hopping out from the Humvee. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
Stokes had made it only four paces from the truck when one of the boys scored a goal that sent the soccer ball rolling up to Stokes’s feet. He didn’t think much about the fact that the kid playing goalie didn’t come running after it. The kids simply jumped up and down, waving their arms for Stokes to kick it back. Grinning and shaking his head, Stokes cranked his leg back and planted a swift kick on the ball.
That was the last time he’d seen the lower half of his right leg.
What Stokes didn’t know was that the soccer ball had been packed with C-4 and had been remotely armed the moment it rolled to a stop, waiting for the force of Stokes’s kick to compress its concealed detonator.
The explosion was fierce, lifting Stokes into the air and throwing him back against the Humvee. He dropped to the ground at the same moment a combat boot smacked the window above him, spraying blood. The boot plunked into the sand beside him. He remembered seeing the jagged bone and stringy meat sticking out above its laces. Only when he looked down at what remained of his right leg - nothing but peeled raw flesh just inches below the knee - did he realize that the boot was his own.
There was no pain. Just the woozy haze from shock and an overwhelming urge to vomit.
The boys scattered as the trio of militants broke cover to ambush the Humvee. With their machine guns raised up, they shredded the Humvee’s interior, before Riggins could escape or return fire.
Then they circled around Stokes, jeered him as he spat bile into the sand. Since his eardrums had been blown out, he couldn’t hear what they were saying, and his eyes, coated in blast residue, struggled to focus.
Then came the beating.
The Arabs mercilessly kicked him about the face until he spat out teeth. Next, they simultaneously pummelled his ribs and testicles. When they began stomping on his bloody stump, Stokes passed out.
They’d done everything possible to maim him. Yet for some reason, no doubt wicked, they let him live.
