Ahmed smiled. "I suppose Picot explained that the mission to Safran is due in large part to my wife's personal insistence. Given the situation our country is in now, it's not easy to obtain the resources for an excavation. But she loves archaeology more than anything, and she's one of our foremost experts on Mesopotamian culture, so she managed to convince Professor Picot to help us excavate what appears to be the ruins of a temple or palace—we still don't know which."
The door to Husseini's office opened and Karim, his assistant, came in, smiling broadly.
"Ahmed, everything's ready for the shipment to Safran. I called Ayed Sahadi to tell him that the truck is on its way. I couldn't reach him, but I got lucky—I talked to Clara."
Ahmed Husseini raised his hand to stop Karim from saying any more, while Gian Maria's eyes lit up. He'd finally found Clara Tannenberg.
He'd have to go to Safran. He felt like an idiot for not having considered the possibility that Clara Tannenberg was part of Picot's mission. He flashed back to the official at the archaeological conference in Rome asking him contemptuously whether he was interested in joining the expedition that Clara Tannenberg was trying to organize. And the newspapers, of course, had reported on Clara's talk, in which she had insisted on the existence of certain tablets she called the Bible of Clay. . . . So, if Yves Picot was there, it was in order to try to find those tablets. Why hadn't Gian Maria been able to connect the dots?
Karim left the office without another word, knowing he'd pay later for his transgression.
"Your wife is in Safran ... of course. . . ."
"Yes, of course," Ahmed Husseini replied, disconcerted.
"Of course; it's only logical," Gian Maria continued, his inner monologue escaping in half sentences.
"So, tell me how I can help you," Ahmed prompted uncomfortably.
The priest recovered his composure. "Well, I wanted to speak with Professor Picot and see whether he still wanted me in Safran for a couple of months. I don't have any more time—I'm in Iraq to help; I work with an NGO, Aid to Children. I can't stay much longer, but if Professor Picot wouldn't mind my going and giving a hand there, even for just a little while ..."
Ahmed's demeanor clearly reflected his doubts, as though Gian Maria was making up his story as he went along. He'd have him looked into before he'd allow him access to Safran. His tone was curt.
"I'll speak with Professor Picot, and if he agrees, certainly I have no objection to helping you reach Safran. You know that we are in a state of alert, so unfortunately one can't travel wherever one might like, especially without permission. Questions of security, you understand."
"I do understand, but how long will it take to get permission?"
"Don't worry, I'll call you. Give my secretary your telephone number and address."
By the time Gian Maria left the ministry, he was bathed in sweat. There was no turning back now; he had to prepare for whatever happened. Ahmed Husseini would investigate him and find out who he was. Gian Maria had seen his pleasant mask slip. Maybe Aliam was right: Ahmed Husseini was a man of the regime, and he could have Gian Maria detained or thrown out of the country anytime he wanted.
Ahmed Husseini lost no time—as soon as Gian Maria left his office, he called in Karim.
"Have the Colonel investigate that man. He claims to be an acquaintance of Picot. Wants to go to Safran. If Picot agrees, I'll put the papers through, but first I want to know more about him."
Twenty-four hours later, Karim brought in a two-page report detailing the Colonel's findings. On the third line of the first page, Husseini discovered precisely why this Gian Maria was more than he seemed to be. He decided to call Picot.
Yves Picot laughed when Ahmed told him the story of the wandering priest.
"But why are you so shocked that he's a priest?" he asked Husseini. "I certainly wouldn't object to your sending him here—we've got much more work than we can handle, so a specialist in Akkadian and Hebrew would be wonderful. If your investigators have finished vetting him, put him on a helicopter and send him in."
"I'll have to see—I still have some checking to do."
"He's harmless, Ahmed. He's here to help your people."
"Do you think the Vatican is interested in the Bible of Clay?" Ahmed asked.
"The Vatican? Ahmed, don't be paranoid! The Vatican isn't going to send a priest to spy on us." Picot couldn't help laughing again. "You're an intelligent man. Does it really surprise you that there are good people who want to try to help alleviate your people's suffering?"
"But why didn't he just say he was a priest?"
"As I say, he didn't hide it. It's on his passport, and this is Iraq, where everybody spies on everybody else. How many spies have you got among the workers?" Picot asked, still chuckling.
"You should be more careful," Ahmed warned him. The Mukhabarat was surely recording their conversation.
"Well, you decide. Hold on, here's Clara."
"I have no objections to his coming," Clara assured her husband shortly afterward. She looked toward the sky and smiled. "Besides, he's a priest—we could use all the luck we can get."
Ahmed Husseini was waiting for Gian Maria at the door of Faisal's house to drive him to the airport. From there, a helicopter would take the two men to Safran.
After a long and bittersweet talk, Gian Maria bade good-bye to Nur, Faisal, and their children. Of course, Faisal thought it utter foolishness for a bunch of foreigners to go around looking for buried treasure in Iraq while people were dying for lack of food and medicine, but Nur quickly quelched that conversation with an open invitation for Gian Maria to return whenever he liked.
A short time later, Ahmed and Gian Maria were in the helicopter. "I'm glad you're coming too, Ahmed," the priest said.
"I want to see how things are going out there."
The noise of the helicopter blades made further conversation impossible, so the two men sat silently, each lost in his own thoughts.
Ahmed told himself that he hoped he hadn't made a mistake with this priest, despite the fact that after an exhaustive investigation he'd reached the conclusion that he was harmless.
When they landed in Safran a few hours later, Clara couldn't help running to Ahmed the second he jumped out of the helicopter. She had missed him, more than she liked to admit.
Fatima looked on from a short distance, praying that Ahmed might change his mind about divorcing Clara.
But they embraced only briefly—both of them knew there was no going back on the decision they had made.
Yves Picot greeted Ahmed warmly. He liked him; maybe that was why he hadn't made a move on Clara. His initial disdain for her had evaporated as they worked together, and he was more attracted to her than he'd have liked to admit—especially to Fabian, who was always kidding him, telling him his crush was all too obvious. But despite his reputation at the university, there was no room in Picot's personal code of conduct for flirting with a friend's wife, and although Ahmed wasn't a typical friend, Picot liked him enough to respect his marriage.
Picot turned to Gian Maria and gave him an affectionate pat on the back.
"What do you want us to call you—Father? Brother?" "No, please, just call me Gian Maria."
"Good. I have to tell you, I found you a little strange. But it never crossed my mind that you were a priest. You're so young." "Not really. I'll be thirty-six in a few days." "You don't look a day over twenty-five!"
Gian Maria smiled and looked at Clara out of the corner of his eye, waiting to be introduced. But he was immediately confronted by the three students he'd traveled with from Amman.
"Why on earth didn't you tell us you were a priest?" Magda scolded him.
"You didn't ask," he answered lamely.
"Oh yes we did—we asked what you did and you said you had a degree in ancient languages," Marisa reminded him.
"You just didn't want to tell us—what's that about?" Lola insisted.
"Yeah, why not just out with it?" Magda seconded.
<
br /> Fabian came over with Marta and other members of the team.
"You're certainly the popular one," he said. "I'm Fabian Tudela. Come on, I'll introduce you to the rest of the team and show you where you can sleep."
When Gian Maria was finally introduced to Clara, he blushed, which caused her to burst out laughing.
"They told me you blushed," Clara said. "But do you work?"
"Yes, of course. I came here to help you. ... I, I mean, to help you find the Bible of Clay."
"We will. I know it's here."
"I hope you're right."
"It will be a wonderful experience for you, as a priest, if we do, won't it?"
"Will there be time?" he asked timidly. "Time?"
"Yes, I mean . . . you know, the war. Everyone is saying that the United States and its allies are going to attack."
"That's why we're working as fast as we can. But when it comes to the war, I'm very optimistic. I don't think anything will come of it; it'll all turn out to be gunboat diplomacy."
"I fear it won't," Gian Maria replied sadly.
Fabian led him to a small house in a row of identical structures.
"You can sleep here. It's the only place with room for another cot," he explained, showing him into the computer house.
Ante Plaskic greeted him with unconcealed ill temper. He would much have preferred the relative privacy and independence he had enjoyed so far. But he knew that he shouldn't—in fact, couldn't afford to—protest the presence of this new and unwelcome tenant.
Nor did Ayed Sahadi seem very pleased at Gian Maria's arrival. It was probably the first time he and Ante had seen eye to eye on anything, though for very different reasons.
"I'll try to be as little bother as possible," Gian Maria said to Plaskic.
"You do that," replied Plaskic.
Gian Maria didn't know why he inspired such hostility in the Croatian and the foreman, but he decided he wasn't going to worry about it. He would have enough to do trying to protect Clara Tannenberg.
His secret weighed heavily on his conscience. He'd never imagined that one day such a dreadful dilemma might present itself in his confessional. He had heard the horror that can nest, like a viper, in the human heart, and he had wept in the knowledge that he was impotent to comfort those souls twisted by grief, even those determined to exact the most terrible vengeance—souls who had known a hell in life, whose hearts had been dried to ash, drained of every drop of human compassion.
Now he had to win Clara's trust, find out whether she had any family besides Ahmed, and prevent what he knew, deep inside, to be inevitable, unless God intervened. But could he do it?
After carefully studying all the information provided to him by Tom Martin, Lion Doyle had reached one conclusion: Alfred Tannenberg was virtually untouchable—he had twenty-four-hour protection wherever he went, and his home, the Yellow House in Baghdad, was guarded by members of Saddam's armed forces as well as his own hired thugs; his house in Cairo was also under official protection.
Doyle knew that he could get in and out of Iraq or Egypt, but the risk was tremendous—and from what Tom had told him, the old man was already on the alert over trouble with some old colleagues, so he'd redoubled his security. The granddaughter, then, had to be the passport into Tannenberg's house—hopefully, through the front door. And Clara, from all indications, was near Tell Muqayyar with an archaeological expedition composed largely of Europeans. In any event, she was to die too. It was simply a matter of getting all the targets, or as many of them as possible, into the same room at the same time.
He called Tom Martin and told him he needed help getting identification papers and an authentic press card.
"Journalists from all over the world are flocking to Iraq to cover the war. I'm going in as a reporter."
"You're nuts! War correspondents know one another—the same ones go to all the hot spots every time there is a hot spot!"
"I'll go as a freelancer. But I need somebody—some magazine, some newspaper—to give me an ID and to be willing to vouch for me should anybody ask. They need to say they're going to buy my photos. I've already bought some secondhand equipment, so aside from the ID, I'm good to go."
"Jesus." Tom Martin wiped his hand over his face. "Give me a couple of hours, Doyle. I'll see what I can do. I think I know somebody." "The sooner you get it, the sooner I leave."
Less than two hours later, Lion Doyle was entering a two-story house on the outskirts of London. A sign on the door announced the offices of Photomundi.
The head of the agency was waiting for him. He was a short, thin man with small, sharp-looking teeth.
"Did you bring an ID photo?"
"Yes, here."
"Good—just give me one minute," the man said as he went toward the scanner.
"Tell me about the agency," Lion asked.
"We do a little of everything, from wedding pictures to catalogues, even press photos if a client comes in looking for them. If a magazine needs a photographer for a specific shoot, they call me, I send the photographer, photographer takes the pictures, magazine pays me, end of story. I also help out the government. When a friend of a friend comes in looking for accreditation—like you—they call me, they pay me, and I don't ask questions."
"What if the photographer gets into some sort of jam?"
"That's his problem. I've got no one on the payroll. I just hire freelancers I call in as I need them. I'm a subcontractor, and I subcontract. In this case, somebody tells me you're going to Iraq, you want to take pictures to sell to some newspaper or magazine when you get back. So I give you the press pass, which says you're a photographer for Photomundi, and that's the end of my role in the affair. If you come back with photos, I'll call a couple of friends of mine in the media to see whether they're good enough to buy. If they don't want them, you're out the money for the trip, not me. So, to answer your question, if you get into some sort of jam, it's not my problem. Got it?"
"Got it."
Half an hour later, Lion Doyle left Photomundi with a press card identifying him as a freelance photojournalism Now all he had to do was pack his bag, pick up his ticket, and board the plane to Amman.
The team members were exhausted, but their spirits were soaring. Two days ago, as the group led by Marta finished clearing a new room, they'd found two figures—winged bulls about fifty centimeters tall— and nearly two hundred tablets almost perfectly intact.
Gian Maria was up to his ears copying and translating the tablets. Yves Picot was as merciless as his old boss at Aid to Children.
But Clara was always very pleasant to him, and she came in quite often to help decipher the complicated language of the ancient inhabitants of Safran. Nevertheless, Gian Maria sensed her desperation, which seemed especially acute that afternoon. Every muscle of her face seemed tense and drawn.
"You know something, Gian Maria?" she said. "I know we're making progress; the temple is turning out to be an archaeological treasure. But sometimes I wonder whether Shamas' tablets are actually here."
Gian Maria's response didn't help. "What if Shamas' record of the story doesn't exist, and never did? What if Abraham never told his version of the story of creation?"
"He had to—it's in my grandfather's tablets. Shamas wrote clearly that he was going to inscribe it."
"But Abraham may have changed his mind, something may have happened."
"I know they exist—what I don't know is where they are." Her voice quavered. "I thought we'd find them here. When the bomb exposed the roof of the temple and we found shards of tablets—some with Shamas' name on them—I thought it was a miracle." Clara's eyes filled with tears.
It struck Gian Maria that it really did seem like a miracle that so many years later, the Tannenbergs had now found more tablets inscribed by Shamas. He was a man who believed that everything happened according to the will of God, but in this case, given everything else he knew, he wasn't at all sure what exactly God was trying to say.
"What if the
y weren't in the temple?" he asked.
"What do you mean, not in the temple? Do you think they could be somewhere else?" Clara's face lit up, and her big blue eyes shone with renewed hope.
"Well, the scribes had clearly defined roles as administrators of the temple: They kept the accounts, oversaw the contracts. . . . We've found a catalogue of the flora of the region, a list of minerals—everything routine. So maybe Shamas didn't leave the tablets containing the story of the creation in the temple. They would have been precious, special. Maybe he kept them in his home, someplace else."
Clara was silent, thinking about what Gian Maria had just said. He might be right. So far they'd only uncovered administrative work. But the fact was that in ancient Mesopotamia, scribes also transferred their peoples' epic poems to tablets, and the story of creation, even Abraham's version, was just that—an epic poem. Perhaps such accounts would not have been kept in temples. She weighed the possibility of expanding the perimeter of the dig. The problem was, there was no time. Her grandfather had called from Cairo, and for the first time she'd heard doubt, just a hint of pessimism in his voice. His contacts in Washington couldn't have been more direct: Iraq was going to be attacked, and this time the Americans wouldn't stop with just air raids— they were going to invade the country.
Not to mention how difficult it would be to persuade Picot to expand the perimeter. He was as desperate to find the Bible of Clay as she was. And he, too, was beginning to lose hope. But he refused to probe beyond the designated area they had already marked out, because that would mean pulling some of the workers off the main dig. No, the excavation of the temple was the first and only priority. Still, she'd talk to him. Gian Maria might be right.
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