The Eden Deception

by Nathan Swain

  “Eastgate. Captain William Eastgate, United States Army Special Forces, and I assure you it’s not a fake.”

  Olivia fumed. A warmonger even. Perfect.

  The auditorium had filled and the head of Olivia’s department walked across the stage to introduce that evening’s famous speaker. Eastgate was a distraction and beginning to draw attention. “Ahem, if you’ll excuse me?” Olivia said, nodding at the crowd. “Can the rest of us get on with our lives now?”

  It hadn’t occurred to Eastgate that Olivia could look at the tablet and be anything but astonished. He had been moving at breakneck speed for days, and lives had been lost because of the tablet. It seemed ridiculous that Olivia would glance at the tablet as if it were a grocery list and simply move on with her life. He wanted her immediate reaction to the tablet. He wanted to ask her about the symbol on the pin worn by the old man and his grandson. He wanted to know what the hell “the ox, the eagle, the lion are unbroken” meant. But the reality, he realized, was that Olivia thought he was crazy. He had no choice but to retreat.

  With a polite nod, he jumped down from the stage, creating a loud thud with his hiking boots, and scrambled up the aisle to the back of the auditorium.

  In the few seconds before turning from Eastgate, and pivoting to her audience, Olivia pondered what she had seen. The tablet was interesting. Its column structure and size were unlike any tablet she had ever seen.

  Olivia’s department chair stepped forward: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen….”

  It was the symbol at the bottom of the tablet, however, that intrigued her the most. I’ve seen it before. But where?

  Chapter 25

  “You’re lucky I have no life,” Olivia said to Eastgate, as he followed her into a make-shift lab in the archaeology museum. Eastgate had approached Olivia again after the lecture, and she half-heartedly relented to his request to formally examine the tablet. Her decision was partly motivated by curiosity, that symbol on the tablet was worth a second look. But she also was driven by fear.

  The attention of strangers was not new to her. Her celebrity had made her the subject of fascination among some of Britain’s amateur Assyriologists, many of whom she had decided were mental. She regularly received letters and emails proposing new interpretations of her research, or novel theories regarding the location of the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Just last week a retired school master in Surrey left her a five-minute voicemail suggesting that the “lost chapters” of the Bible were buried in Glastonbury, alongside King Arthur’s tomb. Of course, he didn’t identify where King Arthur was buried, so the information wasn’t very helpful. Olivia and some of her colleagues listened to it on repeat while getting high in the faculty lounge. They were in hysterics.

  But the nutters were not entirely a laughing matter. Olivia believed they were dangerous. Some of the most serious acts of archaeological malpractice had occurred at the hands of amateurs who took to the field with little regard for proper technique. Others, she believed, were unhinged from reality, and could be nursing any manner of dangerous neuroses. The letters from the Flaming Sword, which threatened her if she failed to stop her research, were the most disturbing of all. These were not the fans she had hoped to attract.

  She had no idea who Eastgate was, and what dangers he might pose if she refused to inspect the tablet. She decided the best way to diffuse Eastgate’s zeal—for the time being—was to indulge him.

  “If you’re not interested, I’ll leave you alone. You won’t hear from me again,” Eastgate assured Olivia, as she opened the door to the archaeology lab. The odor of a heavy coating of chlorine pinched his nose passages. “But I think you’ll be more than interested.”

  Olivia sighed audibly. “Most of these are interesting until they’re discovered to be a fake, which frankly, Mr. Eastgate, I suspect this will be. Which is why we’re here.”

  Eastgate grimaced. He was accustomed to being treated with the respect of a Special Forces officer. Olivia appeared to regard him as little more than a crank.

  Olivia led Eastgate across the lab to Professor Allison, who had received an email from Olivia requesting that he meet her at the lab and begin setting up equipment to examine the tablet. “Professor Allison, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Eastgate, the gentleman who accosted me at my lecture this evening.” Allison smiled, the scraggly whiskers of his white beard pointing like straw. He enjoyed Olivia when she was wound up like this.

  “I know that you’re very eager for answers, Mr. Eastgate. I can see that familiar zeal in your eyes. The zeal of those who think they’ve cracked the codes of heaven. But here on Earth there are proper procedures to be observed.”

  “I understand.”

  “First, we’re going to create a 3D scan and model of your precious tablet, so that if the silly putty melts we’ll still have a record of your wonderful prank. Second, we’ll translate it. And if it reads, ‘you just got punked,’ I will be most displeased. Third, we’ll attempt to date the tablet using radial carbon techniques. My guess, it lands somewhere around 1998.”

  Olivia normally had little reason to doubt that a tablet was real. Cuneiform tablets were not rare. The oldest dated back to approximately 3,400 BCE, about the same age as Tell Eatiq. Because the ancient people of the Near East were devoted record keepers—memorializing in clay everything from the sale of a bushel of wheat to beer recipes—millions of tablets were still buried in Iraq and Syria. Although more than 300,000 tablets had been discovered, only a fraction had been translated and catalogued. That included many of the tablets in the museum’s storeroom. The discovery of a new tablet simply wasn’t that important.

  But this tablet was different, Olivia recognized. If it was real. Allison placed the tablet on a display frame. “Most unusual,” Allison muttered, pulling at his shirt collar. “Most unusual, indeed.”

  Eastgate nodded in acknowledgment. If he only knew.

  “I must agree with Professor Nazarian that your tablet simply is too good to be true,” Allison said. “It’s an unusual shape. Approximately ten inches tall and eight inches wide. That’s—how would you Americans put it?—rather super-sized by Ancient Near-East standards. Many of the clay tablets in our own collection are no larger than two-by-two.”

  “That sounds like evidence of authenticity. If someone wanted to make a fake, wouldn’t they model it like most other tablets?”

  Trying to respond, a horrendous coughing fit swallowed Allison’s words. As Allison searched for a handkerchief, Olivia looked out the window of the lab. The sky was pink. The clouds a piercing white. Despite herself, she wondered what Samir was doing. I’ve treated him terribly. I’ve got to put things right.

  Allison’s raw hack at last subsided. He blew his nose as if to sound an end to it.

  “The type of writing depicted here is very old,” Allison continued, making a final pass over his face with his handkerchief. “When the early Sumerians first began to write on clay, they communicated through pictures. The pictures proved to be very useful in expressing many ideas. The picture of a foot could be used not only to mean the anatomical human foot, but also the idea of walking. The picture of a star could be drawn to mean a star, but it also could be the sky where the stars lived or the gods who were identified with the sky. A human mouth could mean mouth or it might reference speaking. A mouth with food in it could signify eating, and a mouth with water in it could signify drinking.”

  Eastgate nodded along. “Not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

  “Yes, but the Sumerians wanted more out of their writing than the Egyptians. They understood pictures were subject to interpretation and that they couldn’t help the scholar describe abstract concepts, like loyalty or integrity, or the name of a specific person. If an ancient scholar who only knew how to write in pictures wanted to write the name of a specific person named Kuraka, for example, he might have tried to draw an image of him, but it would have to have been extraordinarily detailed and the reader’s understanding of the picture wou
ld have depended on him personally knowing Kuraka.”

  “And who really knew Kuraka anyway?” Eastgate cracked, searching for a smile from the academics. None was forthcoming.

  “Indeed,” Allison said, unamused.

  Allison cleared his throat again. “Faced with this limitation, scholars eventually—and I’m fast-forwarding thousands of years—used the sounds identified with pictures to create words that could not otherwise be pictured. For example, if the scholar wanted to write the name of our friend Kuraka, he could combine the picture for mountain, which was pronounced kur, with the picture for water, which was pronounced a, with the picture for mouth, which was pronounced ka. In this way, it eventually became more convenient to use pictures as symbols for sounds than for concrete things.”

  “Fascinating,” Eastgate said.

  “Hence, the birth of the cuneiform alphabet and modern writing as we know it.”

  “And you’re saying this tablet uses pictures, not the alphabet?”

  “Yes. Dr. Nazarian can jump in at any time,” Allison said, shooting a look of put-upon annoyance at Olivia, “but this writing appears to be a hybrid of symbols and an early form of cuneiform.”

  Eastgate and Allison stared at Olivia, who said nothing.

  Allison continued. “Most incredibly, you see the writing appears to begin in the upper-right corner and move downward in columns, much like Mandarin Chinese. This is a characteristic of very ancient writing, before the ancients discovered it was easier to hold the tablet in their hand and write from left to right.

  Allison removed a smoking pipe from his vest pocket and rubbed it against his vest. “In short, Mr. Eastgate, your tablet is either one of the most remarkably complex and ancient artifacts I have ever seen, or an elaborate fake. Very likely the latter, I’m afraid.

  Eastgate considered whether it was the right time to tell them the full story of how the tablet came to him, of Omid’s analysis, the chase through Baghdad’s tunnels, and the deadly ambush outside the checkpoint. The tablet was not just remarkably complex—it was dangerous. Even deadly. He owed them the truth. Soon.

  Chapter 26

  Allison carefully placed the tablet upright on a table in the middle of the museum’s make-shift lab. “You see, Mr. Eastgate, a regular photograph of a tablet just won’t do.” A cloud of pipe-smoke diffused into the air above Allison’s head, and scented the lab with the aroma of cherry tobacco. “They are three-dimensional creatures. Tablets aren’t flat pieces of paper, but round ovals. The cuneiform characters are impression in clay, so they have not only width and length, but depth. Also, the writing on the front side runs over the edges onto the reverse side. I’ve spent the better part of my career visiting tablet collections in Berlin, Istanbul, Ithaca, all over, with my little Leica camera and sketchbook. But some very recent technology has brought us into the 3D world.”

  “3D scanning. Virtual tablet scanning. I’ve studied it,” Eastgate said. “The work of Boggs and Timko is particularly promising.”

  Olivia did a double-take, and looked down to see if her jaw had actually hit the floor. “You’ve read Boggs and Timko’s paper?”

  Eastgate was amused by Olivia’s shock. “I did some reading on the plane over. A 3D scan seemed like the most logical next step.”

  This one has done his homework. He’s a full-on sociopath.

  “Don’t be scared, Mr. Eastgate,” Olivia said, turning off the lights. “I assure you lightning and fire will not shoot out of the tablet and explode our heads.”

  Allison activated the 3D scanner.

  Beams of red, green, and blue cut through the darkness of the lab, spreading like searchlights across the tablet’s surface. Eastgate glanced at Olivia across the room. Her eyes glowed brown and blue.

  In two minutes, the lasers returned three separate images, each corresponding to the laser’s wavelength. Allison repositioned the laser, scanning the tablet from behind and at side angles, then combined all of the images into one.

  A floating three-dimensional image of the tablet appeared on Allison’s tangerine-colored iMac. “Voila,” said Allison, tapping the monitor with his pen.

  Eastgate felt a wave of tension release from his body. He had kept the tablet safe—safe from Noah, from the gunmen at the checkpoint, and from whoever was pursuing him now. The information on the tablet was preserved, and in the hands of experts and people he trusted. It was a battle won.

  “Shall we unwrap our present?” Allison asked.

  Without waiting for an answer, Allison pecked out an order on his keyboard, which caused the 3D image of the tablet to unwrap. The front, sides, and back revealed themselves in one long scroll. “Think of it as a treasure map,” he said.

  “Is there anyone you know who can read this?” Eastgate asked.

  “Either by great foresight or dumb luck, you happen to have before you only one of a handful of people in the world who might be able to read it. Professor Nazarian is arguably the foremost expert on proto-cuneiform pictography,” Allison said, looking up at Olivia, who arched her eyebrows in tacit acknowledgment.

  Olivia’s curiosity had been piqued. Even if this was a hoax, she could no longer feign indifference. While other teenagers smoked cigarettes outside the local Best One or yammered on the telephone, Olivia spent her adolescent years studying pictograms and the world’s most ancient clay tablets. Chasing these brief moments of wonder and discovery was the reason she got up in the morning. She had experienced more of them in her relatively short career than any academic deserved.

  Olivia swiped the 3D printout from Allison’s hand and furiously scribbled her translation at the bottom of the paper in the same vertical-line, right-to-left pattern of the tablet. In less than five minutes, she was done.

  “Extraordinary,” said Allison, striking another match to reignite his pipe. “You have certainly self-actualized, haven’t you?”

  “Very easy, actually, if you understand the underlying structure of the symbols.”

  “What does it say?” Eastgate asked impatiently.

  Olivia gasped slightly, her pulse accelerating as she finally absorbed the significance of the translation. She handed it to Allison.

  The old scholar put on his glasses. The paper bobbed in the stream of AC flowing into the room.

  “Extraordinary,” Allison said. “I’ll read it to you. First column: The home of man is a plain. Second column: Next to a great water spring. Third column: Surrounded by mountains. Fourth column: That gives birth to the Euphrates and Hiddekel. Fifth column: The tree in Eden has this mark.”

  Allison walked across the room to a chalk board. “And then there’s this symbol at the bottom.”

  The chalk screeched as Allison dragged it across the dull board, looking back and forth from the paper to the board as he finished drawing the sweeping curves of a familiar symbol.

  “Infinity,” Eastgate said.

  Allison stepped away from the board and bit his lower lip. A speck of blood emerged from the surface. “In the beginning”—Allison paused—“was the end.”

  Olivia picked up the chalk, filling in a gap in Allison’s drawing. “And a new beginning.”

  Chapter 27

  Samir was scheduled to meet with Olivia after her talk but she sent a text message canceling on him for the third time in a row. “I need to prepare for another lecture tomorrow,” it read. “Going straight to my flat after this talk… pouring a glass of wine… reading all night. Sorry!”

  Olivia had no idea that when her text landed Samir was parked outside Madingley Hall, ready to spring out of his car after the lecture with yet more roses. But at the sight of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed man leaving the building at Olivia’s side, Samir sent the roses flying out the car window, followed by a wad of frothy mucous. “What are you doing!” Samir shouted, pounding the steering column with his fist.

  For days, he feared Olivia’s attraction to him was starting to weaken, and his heart ached at the thought of failing to win her. Much to his su
rprise, he had grown to admire and respect her. It didn’t hurt that she was stunningly beautiful. With Olivia on his arm on their jaunts through high-society London, he felt like he had found a partner worthy of his attention, someone who deserved him.

  But that night outside Madingley Hall, confronted by what he saw as the undeniable evidence of Olivia’s betrayal, Samir’s perspective began to change. It was her behavior that was the problem. Who was the man by her side after the lecture? An old boyfriend? A colleague she met at a conference and hooked up with? Despite her Kurdish ancestry, it turned out Olivia was no different from most other Western women. That’s why she had withdrawn from him. She was unworthy.

  Samir followed Eastgate and Olivia from a discreet distance in his car. He set up surveillance across the road from the museum lab, looking through binoculars at Olivia’s perfect face, painted with grotesque purple eye shadow, as she flirted with the blonde-haired stranger. Her eyes melted for him, following his every move. When the lights went out in the lab, Samir was seething. What are they doing in there? Has she no shame?

  He needed to speak with Reso. His father would not be expecting his call, but it couldn’t wait.

  “Samir, you should be meeting Olivia tonight,” Reso said, answering his phone.

  “She canceled again and lied to me. She won’t take my calls. I’ve failed to win her.” There was a long silence.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, further efforts would be pointless.”

  Reso said nothing.

  “There’s more,” Samir said.

  “What?”

  “Something strange. She left her lecture this evening with a man. Someone I haven’t seen before. He’s white, blonde-haired. He has an American accent. They went to the lab in her department building. I’ve been watching and listening.”

  “Very good. What have you learned?”

  “The American brought something to her.” He paused. “A tablet.”

  “A tablet? Are you sure?” Reso asked, clearly agitated. “What did it look like?”