Oh yeah, she’s definitely from Florida, he smiled.
The sidewalks had yet to be shovelled and she was having a tough time getting the wheels of her rolling attache case to spin. The snow won, and she settled for dragging the case over the fresh powder. En route to her car, he guessed.
Luckily, she didn’t spot him cruising by, because he certainly didn’t want to come off as a stalker.
As Flaherty continued slowly along the slippery roadway, he noticed the north door open a second time. Out came another familiar face: the nosy guy with the Dumbo ears from the cafe. The guy’s beady eyes immediately went to Brooke Thompson, scanned the area, then snapped back to Brooke Thompson. They were the leering eyes of a real stalker.
Bundled warmly and revelling in the beauty of the fresh snowfall that blanketed the Fens, Brooke Thompson plodded through the snow while towing her attache case like a dog pulling a dogsled.
To her right, she noticed that the reflecting pools had frozen over and the snow now reached up to the nose of Antonio Lopez Garcia’s monumental bronze doll’s head, crowned with a dollop of pristine snow. If there was artful expression in plopping a huge head on to the museum’s lawn, the message was lost on her. Seeing it today did manage, nonetheless, to evoke a deep response — it jogged memories about the etchings Brooke had studied in that Iraqi cave, which included a graphic retelling of a woman’s beheading. Those images, though masterfully crafted, were not intended to illicit artistic appreciation. They were meant to convey a warning.
Maybe if Brooke had been allowed to decipher the entirety of the story chronicled on those walls, she’d know it completely. And she was certain that it was there, deeper in the cave’s recesses. During the excavation she’d been told that other writings and images had been discovered in the protected areas for which she lacked proper clearance. Perhaps if she hadn’t been able to crack the language using only the writings found in the cave’s entry tunnel, they’d have let her examine those other finds.
She had figured out enough of the story to know that whoever the beheaded woman had been, the devastation that followed her into that ancient Mesopotamian settlement was of a grand scale. And those ancient storytellers had attributed all of it to her.
During the dig, one of the commissioned archaeologists had come outside the cave entrance to get a clear satellite signal for a phone call. She’d overheard his conversation concerning some carbon-dating results. Though he’d not specified the types of organic specimens that had been dated, she’d guessed at some traces of food, flowers, or maybe bone. Certainly plausible since the famous Shanidar cave, also in Iraq’s Zagros Mountains, had yielded ten Neanderthal skeletons, as well as decayed flowers used during their ritual burial.
The archaeologist had specifically mentioned ‘a tight confidence interval around 4004 BC’. In the context of Iraq, this date was impossible for Brooke to forget since a seventeenth-century Irish archbishop named James Ussher had meticulously reconstructed the chronology of biblical events to come up with a very precise date for Creation: Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. And like most theologian scholars, Ussher placed Eden’s locale in ancient Iraq, land of the four rivers mentioned in Genesis 2 — the Tigris and Euphrates, plus the long-ago dried-up Pishon and Gihon.
What could they have found inside the cave that could be so important … and so ancient?
The secrecy of the excavation never sat well with her, particularly since nothing she’d witnessed there had ever surfaced in academic journals. And being that that cave was easily the most important archaeological discovery of the last hundred years, such a withholding seemed downright criminal. Who was really behind the dig? And why had the operation been conducted by the US military so soon after the invasion of Iraq?
It wasn’t all that uncommon for benefactors sponsoring excavations to remain aloof. But recalling the extensive background check she’d gone through with the facilitator known only as ‘Frank’, now she couldn’t help but think she might have taken part in something nefarious. And this Agent Flaherty who’d just bought her tea and quizzed her on stuff he should already know? Why hadn’t he been apprised of what had taken place at the dig?
She continued past the museum and clambered over a dirty snow berm that lined the kerb along Forsyth Way. Across the street, the only car that remained was her Gumby-green Toyota Corolla. Thanks to a snow plough the car had practically been buried beneath ice and snow.
‘Great,’ she mumbled, making her way across the slushy street. Luckily, by now she’d learned to keep a shovel in her trunk for just such occasions.
Pulling out her car keys, she went to the rear of the car and tried working the key into the frozen trunk lock. But since she’d refused to take off her mittens, she fumbled the keys and they plopped into the snow. When she dipped down to fish them out, she heard a small popping sound. Something whisked overhead an instant before the lamppost behind her let out a resounding clang.
Startled, she spun to look at the post. She remained in a low crouch. ‘What the hell …?’
Another small pop sounded and something thwacked into the Corolla’s rear quarter panel, hit the inside of the trunk, and dimpled the sheet metal outward right in front of her face. She screamed and tumbled back into the snow.
That was when she realized that somebody was shooting at her.
20
The marine colonel stood at the base of the slope next to Big Mama — the boulder slightly taller than she was and streaked with some of the MRAP’s camouflage paint. He was glaring up at the partially reopened cave where Jason’s men were helping the marines clear more debris. The larger stones were being manhandled out and tossed down the slope. The smaller debris was being ferried out in buckets along a human chain. With the sun dropping fast over the horizon, they were working double-time against the imminent nightfall.
‘Once the sun’s down, we’ll need to keep any lighting to a minimum,’ Crawford told Jason. His eyes combed the surrounding mountains. ‘No need to draw more attention to ourselves. Plus we’re light on batteries and I wasn’t planning for a sleepover.’
‘Should be clear skies tonight,’ Jason said. ‘We’ll have plenty of moonlight. The guys probably won’t even need their NVGs. The only place we’ll need some lighting is in the tunnels.’
Crawford circled his gaze to the two snipers posted outside the cave entrance. ‘If it was up to me, I’d skip the formalities and firebomb the fuckers. Yup …’ Crawford exhaled. ‘Al-Zahrani or not, I’d vote for Arab barbecue. These slick bastards have nine lives. If they’re on the grill, I say light the fire.’
Jason knew the colonel was only half sincere. ‘Washington wants him alive. Intel says he’s plotting to—’
‘Don’t preach the rhetoric to me, Yaeger. I know the score. This war’s gotten too goddamn civil for my taste, is all I’m saying. You saw what that prick did to those cathedrals last month. Killed almost 500 civs in one day. In less than a year he’s racked up another thousand or so by sending his martyrs into subways, bus stations and malls strapped with C-4. No warning. No conscience. Just wants to put fear into every human being that doesn’t bow down to Allah. And this psycho’s just getting warmed up. Wants to make a nice impression on his boss. That way when Bin Laden’s diseased kidneys finally give out, he can take Al-Qaeda to the next level. If we still had some balls in Washington maybe we’d get this done the old-fashioned way.’ With arms crossed tight over his chest he gave Jason a sideward glance.