The Bible of Clay

by Julia Navarro

  Shamas' eyes shone with eagerness and excitement, and Abram realized that of all the men, women, and children in his tribe, this boy was the one who might best understand God's plan.

  "I will tell you the story of Creation, Shamas. I will begin with the day on which He decided to separate the light from the darkness. But now I want you to go back home. I will call you when the time is right to begin."

  4

  outside, at that hour of the day in seville, the

  thermometer registered 104 degrees. Enrique Gomez Thomson ran his hand over his head, on which there was not a single hair. His blue eyes, sunken in their sockets but with the hard gleam of steel, were glued to the computer screen. Despite his eighty-plus years, he was fascinated by the Internet.

  The ringing of the telephone startled him. But he was not surprised to hear the voice of George Wagner when he answered. His longtime comrade went straight to the point, as he always did.

  "Enrique, Robert Brown just called me. The girl spoke at the conference in Rome." "And said . . ."

  "Everything we wanted to prevent her from saying—she's put it all out in public."

  "Have you talked to Frank?" Their old friend and business partner would surely want to hear the bad news as soon as possible. "We hung up not a minute ago." "What are we going to do?"

  "What we'd planned if something like this happened. Alfred was warned."

  "And have you set the plan in motion?"

  "Yes."

  "Will Robert be able to carry it out?"

  "Robert? He's smart, and he takes orders well. He does what I tell him to do and doesn't ask questions."

  "When we were kids, you handled the puppets we got at Christmas better than anyone."

  "Men are a little more complicated than puppets."

  "Not for you. And the time has definitely come to put a stop to this. What about Alfred? Have you heard from him again?"

  "No, not so far."

  "We ought to talk to him."

  "We'll talk, but it's useless. He's clearly going his own way. He wants to play the game by his own rules, and we can't allow that. He's given us no choice—he's put his granddaughter out in front on this and we have to keep her in check. I've got her monitored wherever she goes. They're not going to take what's rightfully ours."

  "You're right, George, but I'm not looking forward to a confrontation with Alfred. There has to be some way to make him listen to reason."

  "After all these years, my friend, Alfred has decided not to listen to reason. It's a complete betrayal of everything we pledged to each other. Treason. There's no way around it."

  Enrique ran his hand over his head again as Wagner terminated the call. He looked up as his grandson, Alvaro, dressed in riding clothes, burst into the room. In spite of the troubling phone call, Enrique smiled at the sight of the tall, thin, nice-looking young man.

  "Hello, abueh. I stopped by to see if you'd like to have lunch with me." Alvaro ran his arm across his forehead and laughed. "Gosh, am I sweaty."

  "So I see. Not too bright, my boy, going riding in this heat. Where's your father?" "In his office."

  "All right. And thank you for the invitation, but I need to work." "But, abuelo, you should retire! Let it go. Come to the club with me for lunch."

  "You know I hate those people at the club."

  "You hate everyone in Seville. You don't go anywhere anymore, abuelo—abuela is right, you're an old bore."

  "Your grandmother is always right. And I am an old bore, but I can't bear those people."

  "That's because of your English upbringing, old man."

  "Where's your sister?" "She's gone to Marbella. She was invited to stay with the Kholls." "And she couldn't be bothered to say good-bye. You two are worse every day."

  "Don't be so old-fashioned! Besides, Elena hates being in the country. You, Papa, and I are the only ones who like the house here— abuela, Mama, and Elena can't abide it. They hate all the bulls and horses." Enrique nodded in rueful agreement as Alvaro returned to his original entreaty. "So, will you come to the club, then, or not?"

  "Not. I'll stay here, thanks. As hot as it is, I've no interest in going out anyway. Now leave me be—I have to think."

  When the old gentleman was alone again, he smiled to himself. His grandson was a good boy, not nearly so scatterbrained as his sister. The only thing he reproached them for was their all-too-frequent involvement in the social whirl of Seville. He had always made it a point not to socialize too much and focused almost exclusively on his business.

  In that respect, his wife Rocio had been a blessing. She was the daughter of a provincial representative to the Spanish parliament in the Franco regime, who had gotten rich after the war through the black market. Over time, his father-in-law had reluctantly brought Enrique into the business, though Enrique had later broken away into import-export, where he'd become a very wealthy man. He would always be grateful to his wife. Without her, he'd never have gotten where he was today. But whatever his success, Enrique Gomez Thomson had always been careful to call as little attention to himself as humanly possible. His was a respectable Sevillan family that had never allowed itself to be the butt of gossip. No scandal had ever touched any of them. Nor would one, if he had his way.

  His thoughts turned to Frankie and George. They had been fortunate too, although in truth, no one had ever given them a thing. They'd just been smarter than the others.

  Robert Brown slammed his fist down so hard on the desk that he hurt his hand. He'd been on the phone for over an hour. First Ralph had called to tell him about Clara Tannenberg's little speech at the conference in Rome. Just thinking about it gave him a pain in his stomach. Then he'd had to break the news to George Wagner, who'd dressed him down for not having prevented the whole episode in the first place.

  Clara was a spoiled child, and pigheaded to boot. She always had been. How was it possible that Alfred had such a granddaughter? His son, Helmut, had been different. The boy had never given Alfred a bad night. A shame he'd died so young. He was an intelligent young man who always carried himself with discretion—Alfred had taught him to be invisible and the boy had learned well. But Clara . . . Clara behaved like a headstrong little princess. Alfred allowed her to do things he'd never allowed Helmut even to think of; he was putty in her hands.

  Helmut had married Amira, an Iraqi woman with a cascade of black hair and the profile of a goddess carved in ivory. Alfred had approved heartily of the advantageous marriage. With it, his son had become a member of an old Iraqi family that was not just influential but also wealthy—very wealthy, indeed. They had ties with powerful friends in Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and the other capitals of the region, which meant that they were respected and their opinions valued across the Middle East. In addition, Ibrahim, Amira's father, was a cultured, educated man of great refinement.

  Amira was distinguished by nothing but her beauty, yet Helmut had seemed utterly enchanted by her. Of course, the woman might have been more intelligent than she seemed. With Muslim women, one never knew for sure.

  Alfred had lost his son and daughter-in-law in a car accident when Clara was a teenager, and he had spoiled his granddaughter royally ever since. Robert had never liked Clara. It set his teeth on edge when she called him Uncle Robert; he was irritated by her self-assurance, which bordered on insolence, and bored by her incessant chatter regarding her grandfather's archaeological ambitions.

  When Alfred sent her to the United States to study and asked Robert to watch over her, he could never have imagined how tiresome that undertaking would be. But he couldn't say no to Alfred, who was, after all, a business partner and special friend of George Wagner. So he arranged her enrollment at the University of California at Berkeley. Fortunately, she'd fallen in love with and married Ahmed Husseini, an intelligent man with whom one could actually deal. Alfred and Robert had hit it off perfectly with Ahmed, who had turned out to be a tremendous asset in Alfred's business. The problem was Clara.

  The conversation
he'd had with Ralph Barry had given him a splitting headache just when he was about to have lunch with a close adviser to the President of the United States and some friends, all men of business interested in the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. But the conversation with George had been even worse. Wagner had ordered him in no uncertain terms to take charge of the situation, now that the Bible of Clay had been publicly announced and Alfred and his granddaughter were making their move to find it for themselves. Normally, they all would have shared in its profits, but it was now clear that Alfred had abandoned their long-standing partnership. Wagner's edict had been unambiguous: Get the Bible of Clay—if it actually existed, of course.

  Robert pressed his intercom for his secretary. "Smith, get Ralph Barry for me again, please."

  "Yes, Mr. Brown. And, sir, Senator Miller's assistant just called to confirm that you'll be attending the picnic the senator's wife is having this weekend."

  Another stupid woman, Brown thought. Every year she organized the same farce: a picnic at their farm in Vermont, where guests were forced to drink lemonade and eat sandwiches as they sat on cashmere blankets spread on the ground. But Brown knew he'd have to go, because Senator Miller was a Texan with interests in the oil sector. The secretaries of defense and state, the attorney general, the national security adviser, the director of the CIA, and who knew who else would be at the damned picnic. And so would George Wagner. It was an ideal occasion for some high-stakes dealmaking in full view of the oblivious crowd.

  A buzzer signaled that Barry was on the line.

  "Is there anything that ties Clara Tannenberg to us?" Robert asked him without preamble.

  "No, no, of course not. I told you not to worry. The onus of her behavior lay squarely on her and Ahmed. Mundo Antiguo has no connection to that speech whatsoever."

  "All right, I suppose that puts us more or less in the clear. You still should have kept her out."

  "I told you, Robert—I couldn't. Once Alfred allowed her to attend, nobody could have kept her from signing up for the panel on Mesopotamia, much less from talking. Believe me, I tried to convince her—there was no way. She insisted that she had her grandfather's consent, and she said that ought to be enough for you."

  "Alfred must be gaga."

  "He might be, who knows? At any rate, his granddaughter, at least, is absolutely obsessed with this Bible of Clay. . . . Do you think it actually exists?"

  "It seems likely, from what we know. But we had no intention of making that information public—at least not yet. But that doesn't matter now. We'll make sure we're there, if and when it's found, and we'll secure it for ourselves. We'll just have to cut Alfred out of this one."

  "But how?"

  "In view of what's happened, we have to change our plans. We were going to assemble our own team, quietly. But she's left us no choice.

  One way or another, they're going to put a group of archaeologists together and push ahead with their excavation, so we'll find a way to make sure they have financing. We'll figure something out. And then we'll place our own man in the excavation."

  "Jesus, Robert, the situation in Iraq is not exactly propitious for an archaeological excavation. All the Western governments have put out travelers' warnings. It could be suicide to go there now. We ought to wait."

  "Am I hearing you right, Ralph? This is the best time to go to Iraq, man. We'll be there, and we'll do it our way. Iraq is the new land of opportunity—only a fool wouldn't see that."

  Barry didn't argue further. After a pause, he went back to the events at the conference. "A professor named Yves Picot, who's very well regarded in the field, is the only one who seemed to show any real interest in what Clara was saying. He told me he'd like to talk to Ahmed. If he goes, maybe we can slip a man into his team."

  "Let him talk to Ahmed first. Trust Ahmed. He knows what he's supposed to do. But first ask him to send his wife to Baghdad, or to hell—anywhere, but get her out of there before she ruins us all."

  Ralph laughed to himself. Robert Brown's misogyny was notorious. He hated women—and was clearly uncomfortable in their presence. He was a confirmed bachelor who'd never been known to have emotional relationships of any kind. It was even hard for him to be cordial to his friends' wives. Unlike practically every other businessman in the world, his secretary was a man—Smith, a polyglot, stick-up-his-ass sixty-year-old who'd spent his entire adult life at Robert's side.

  "Okay, Robert, I'll see what I can do to get Clara back to Baghdad. I'll get Ahmed to help me. But she is not an easy woman—she's arrogant, and she's stubborn."

  Like her grandfather, thought Brown. But without his intelligence.

  The president's adviser enjoyed Mediterranean cuisine, so they chose to lunch at a Spanish restaurant near the Capitol.

  Robert Brown was the first to arrive. He was punctual to a fault. It infuriated him to wait; he hated people who were late for appointments. He hoped the president's adviser wouldn't be delayed by some last-minute emergency.

  One by one the others came in: Dick Garby, John Nelly, and Edward Fox. They all were owners or directors of construction firms, oil interests, equipment companies. The man from the White House was the last to arrive, and he was in a foul mood.

  He told them that negotiations with the Europeans over the Security Council's support of military action against Iraq were getting complicated.

  "There are fools everywhere. The French, of course, can be counted on to go their own way every time. But the Germans have stabbed us in the back; that red-and-green government is more worried about what the liberal press will say than about keeping its commitments."

  "We can always count on the UK," Dick Garby put in.

  "Yeah, but it's not enough," Bush's adviser replied. "We have the Italians too, and the Spaniards, Portuguese, Poles, and several other countries, but what are they worth? A hundred soldiers each? Even the Mexicans are waffling now, and the Russians and Chinese are rubbing their hands together, watching us twist in the wind."

  "When do we invade?" Robert Brown asked straight out.

  "As soon as the boys from the Pentagon tell us they're ready. We'll soften up the country with aerial raids first. I figure five or six months at the outside. This is September, so figure March, sometime in early spring. I'll let you know."

  "We need to start getting the Committee for the Reconstruction of Iraq up and running," Edward Fox said.

  "Yeah, we've thought about that. I'll call you in three or four days. It's a big pie, but you've got to be in line early to get the best pieces of it. Tell me which parts you want and we'll start working on it."

  Almost all of them ordered bacalao al pil-pil, a specialty of the Basque: cod cooked with olive oil, garlic, and a chili pepper for spici-ness in a pan rotated over the fire constantly to bring out the delicious juices of the fish. As they ate, the men laid the foundation of their future business dealings in Iraq. There was so much that was going to be destroyed, and so much that would have to be rebuilt. . . .

  Lunch was profitable for everyone. They agreed to meet again, over the weekend, at the Millers' picnic. They could continue their talks then—if their wives would let them.

  The office of the Mundo Antiguo Foundation was located in a steel-and-glass building not far from the White House. The views were wonderful, but Robert had never really been able to bring himself to like Washington. He preferred New York, where a branch of the foundation conducted its business in a large brownstone in the Village that dated from the eighteenth century. It had been the foundation's first headquarters, and despite the fact that it no longer was of the slightest practical use—though Ralph Barry, too, preferred to work there—none of the directors had ever had the heart to dispose of it. When he was in New York, Robert held his most important meetings there, or sometimes in the private office he maintained on the lower floor of his own home, a splendid duplex overlooking Central Park.

  "Smith, I need to talk to Paul Dukais. Right away, please," Robert said as he returned to the offi
ce after lunch.

  Dukais' hoarse voice came on the line less than a minute later.

  "Paul, my friend, I was calling to see if we could have dinner together."

  "Sure, Robert, of course. I'd be delighted. When?" "How about tonight?"

  "Tonight? I can't," Dukais said, his voice apologetic. "My wife is dragging me to the opera. It'll have to be tomorrow night."

  "There's not much time left, Paul. Fuck the opera—we're about to start a war."

  "If I'm going to war, I've got to be sure the domestic front is at peace, my friend, and Doris is always complaining that I never go with her to these social events—which she claims give us what little respectability we have." Dukais laughed. "I promised, Robert—promised Doris and my daughter both. So even if we declare the Third World War, I'm going to the opera tonight. We can have dinner tomorrow."

  "No, let's make it breakfast. We need to get moving. Come to my house; it's best to meet there, anyway. Is seven all right?"

  "Jesus, Robert, take it easy. I'll be there at eight."

  Brown closed himself up in his office. At seven-thirty Smith knocked softly at the door.

  "Do you need me, Mr. Brown?"

  "No, Smith, thanks. Go home. I'll see you in a day or two."

  He worked for a while longer. He'd drawn up a detailed plan for the next few months. The war was about to start, and he wanted to have everything in place.

  On his way out of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome, Ralph Barry passed a thin, dark-haired man arguing with one of the security guards to let him in. As he waited for the taxi he had called, Barry was struck by the young man's insistence. He wasn't an archaeologist, a journalist, or a historian—he flatly refused to reveal his identity—but he was determined to enter. Just then, Barry's taxi pulled up, and his mind turned to his upcoming meeting.