The Genesis Plague (2010)

by Michael Byrnes

  Hazo was delivered to the restaurant’s doorstep in less than ten minutes. He hopped out and made his way into the foyer, where he was immediately overtaken by the heavenly redolence of cumin, mint, frankincense and rich tobacco. From behind a podium, a pretty hostess in a shiny taffeta dress glanced out the door to the idling Humvee then gave his attire a disapproving once-over. She offered a cautious greeting.

  Hazo told her he’d come to speak with his cousin. She perked up and rounded the podium. Threading her arm through his, she proceeded to take him through a pointed archway leading off the main dining room and into the sumptuous hookah lounge.

  Arabian-style arches set atop honey marble columns separated a dozen cosy seating areas adorned with Persian rugs, silk ceiling swags, and ornate Moroccan lamps set to a warm glow. Patrons lounged on plush floor cushions, puffing dreamily from hookah pipes. This was their safe zone, he thought - the womb where war and economic chaos had no place. Towards the rear of the lounge, they found Karsaz among a group of young Americans in business suits, talking in his animated, mayoral style.

  The hostess led him to the service bar at the room’s centre. ‘Just a moment. I will tell him you are here.’

  She walked over to Karsaz and waited patiently with hands folded behind her back until the rotund, moustached owner addressed her. She pointed in Hazo’s direction. When Karsaz made eye contact with Hazo, his face brightened. After telling the waitress to bring his guests a complimentary dessert, he hurried over to Hazo with hands spread wide.

  ‘Choni!’ Karsaz greeted him with delight. He came up and wrapped his thick arms around Hazo, gave a big squeeze.

  ‘Bash’m supas, ey to?’ Hazo replied.

  ‘Things are good, thank God,’ he boasted. ‘My cousin, why do you wait so long to come and see me! Are we not family?’

  Hazo gave a boyish shrug.

  ‘You look like hell,’ Karsaz teased.

  ‘And you still need to lose weight,’ Hazo jabbed back.

  Karsaz burst out laughing. ‘This is true! So true! My wife, she tells me this every day.’ He hooked a heavy arm over Hazo’s shoulder and held him tight. He swept his hand over the lounge. ‘How do you like this, eh? Finally we finished the renovations.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Hazo replied truthfully. ‘You are a blessed man.’

  ‘Yes. I’m very happy with this.’ He gave another affectionate squeeze with his arm. ‘Come, let us sit and talk.’

  Karsaz kept the arm around Hazo’s shoulder and towed him into the bustling dining room, stopping twice to introduce his cousin to some of the regulars. Finally, they settled into a booth set off in a quiet corner, and Karsaz asked the waitress to bring some coffee.

  Under the bright light, Karsaz contemplated Hazo’s languid appearance. ‘Really, Hazo … you’re not looking so good. Makes me think you’re still patrolling the mountains with those American mercenaries.’

  Hazo flashed a guilty smile.

  Karsaz tsked in disapproval. ‘I worry for you, cousin. Outsiders don’t understand this place. And these foolish Americans? They think terrorism can be found on a map,’ Karsaz said, ‘even though it is but a few men drifting like ghosts around the world. Why do you bother with them?’

  ‘I try to explain things to them, help them, so that innocent lives may be spared,’ Hazo explained. ‘It was you who said, “See with your mind, but hear with your heart.”’

  Karsaz chuckled. ‘Ah, cousin! Remember: I also told you, “Do not shoot the arrow which will return against you.”’ He reached across the table and clasped the side of Hazo’s neck with his meaty right hand. ‘Perhaps your cause is a noble one,’ he appeased. ‘Though being a Christian in Iraq, I wonder if I understand anything that goes on here.’

  They had a good laugh and Karsaz pulled back his hand.

  The waitress returned and set down a saucer and mug for each of them. Hazo immediately sipped the Turkish coffee, or qahwa, savouring the spicy cardamom.

  ‘I suppose no one can ever proclaim to understand our people,’ Karsaz warned. He fingered his mug and sipped some coffee. ‘So many conflicts. So many old scores yet to be settled. War is in our blood, is it not?’

  Hazo nodded.

  ‘We’ll never cooperate,’ Karsaz lamented. ‘Maybe it’s not so bad that you don’t have a family of your own. Less grief and worry.’

  The comment stung Hazo, but he managed a tight smile before moving on to business: ‘I don’t mean to rush, but I have little time,’ he eased in. ‘The reason I am here … I was hoping you might help me.’

  Tilting his head, Karsaz replied, ‘I do have a family, so I trust you won’t put me in harm’s way. You know what they do to informants?’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘I understand.’ From his pocket, Hazo pulled out the photos. ‘Please, if you could take a look at these pictures.’ He began with the headshot of the female scientist. ‘This woman was here a few years back. Perhaps with others. Do you recognize her?’ If he was really lucky, the woman - like most tourists - would have walked through Karsaz’s doors.

  ‘Many, many people walk through these doors …’ Karsaz replied with obvious scepticism. Retrieving a pair of bifocals from his suit jacket pocket, he put them on and gave the photo a cursory glance. A surprised look came over him. ‘Ah … yes.’ He held up an index finger and tapped it at the air. ‘Yes, I remember this one. Years ago. She wore shorts and a teeshirt. Ooh, what a sight, I’ll tell you,’ he confided. ‘The legs, the …’ Midway through the vision, he cupped a hand over his chest and gave the memory a cold shower. ‘Anyway, as you might imagine, the women were not pleased. The men weren’t kind, either. Dangerous for such a very pretty woman who has no shame. I actually mentioned these things to her, you know, to help her. It’s the way I am …’ he said, tapping his hands to his chest.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘She did eat here a few times. Very friendly, polite. Always left generous tips. Those Americans and their tips. When will they learn?’ He shook his head.

  ‘Do you remember when she was here?’

  ‘Not long after the Texas cowboy blew up Baghdad.’

  ‘Was she alone?’

  ‘No, there were others too, I’m sure of it.’ He took a long moment to juice the memory. ‘The others were all men. Five, maybe six. Some military men, yes … and two wearing Levi jeans. I’d like a pair of those,’ he confessed. ‘I’d look like John Wayne … or maybe James Dean, no?’

  Hazo smiled. ‘Do you remember why they were here?’

  Karsaz shrugged. ‘Lots of soldiers back then. Reporters too. Nothing unusual.’

  ‘Do you remember any talk of them going up into the mountains, excavating perhaps?’

  This confused Karsaz. ‘I’m sure the only digging they did was for Saddam and Osama.’

  ‘I mean digging for artifacts.’

  A look of confusion preceded another shrug.

  Hazo moved on to pictures from inside the cave. ‘And these … Any idea what these images might mean?’

  ‘What is this?’ Karsaz said to himself, as he studied the haunting images. ‘Looks like something one might find over the mountains in Persepolis. Or maybe in the temple ruins of Babylon … or Ur, perhaps. You remember? Back in school we saw things like this on our trips, yes? Saddam was rebuilding the old empire in hopes of inciting the Jews and Christians to scream Armageddon. Thought he was the new Hitler. Brought a new Holocaust to our people. That evil man.’

  Hazo tried to keep him on track. ‘These etchings are different from anything I’ve ever seen in Babylon. See this woman?’ He tapped the picture. ‘This goddess figure is highly unusual.’

  ‘Maybe it is Ishtar?’ Karsaz guessed.

  The Assyrian goddess of sex and war? Hazo considered, contemplating the picture again. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘What is this she carries in her hands?’ Karsaz said, scrunching his eyes. ‘And why does it glow like this?’

  ‘I thought you might know, cousin.’
/>   Karsaz shook his head. ‘This is like nothing I have ever seen.’ He studied the images a few moments longer, considering the connection to the American woman. ‘The woman in the photo … did she find these things in the mountains?’

  Perceptive, as always, thought Hazo. ‘It would be best that I not say too much about it.’

  ‘I see,’ Karsaz said. ‘There are many secrets in those mountains. I suppose if anyone were to know about them, it would be the monks. The Chaldeans know many secrets. After all, they profess to be direct descendants of the ancient Mesopotamians who once inhabited those mountains.’

  ‘I think you’re right.’

  ‘There is that monastery in the mountain north of Kirkuk …’ For three seconds Karsaz spun his hand to conjure the name, but came up blank. ‘You know the place I speak of?’

  ‘I do.’

  Karsaz neatly arranged the photos, handed them back to Hazo. ‘I would suggest you go there. See if the monks might answer your questions.’

  14

  LAS VEGAS

  Stokes punched his security code into the keypad and the mechanical jamb bolts disengaged. He cranked down on the handle, gave a push, and the door whispered open. The fowl stench of excrement drifted out at him. ‘Good lord,’ he gasped, holding back his gag reflex. He set the air filtration system to the max. Then taking the handkerchief from his blazer’s breast pocket, he covered his mouth and tentatively proceeded into the vault.

  At the room’s centre, Roselli was sprawled face up on the carpet in a spread eagle, blue complexion, murky eyes opened wide and frozen to the blank ceiling. Whatever he’d had for dinner and breakfast, both liquid and solid, had found its way into his trousers. Post-mortem bowel release; Stokes had seen it many times in the killing fields.

  ‘Oh, Frank. Why couldn’t you just keep your cool, like the old days?’ he said, crouching down and rummaging through the corpse’s pockets until he found a key ring and Roselli’s PDA. ‘All right fellas,’ he called back to the door. ‘Get in here.’

  A broad-shouldered man came in wearing a sour expression. Behind him a second man, shorter by at least five inches, came in pushing a heavy duty Rubbermaid tilt truck. Both men were wearing periwinkle baseball caps and coveralls embroidered with a crisp logo for a fictitious company whose speciality was document shredding. The truck parked near the service entrance bore the same insignia, along with a slogan: ‘YOUR SECURITY IS OUR SPECIALTY’.

  Stokes stood and stepped aside. ‘It’s not pretty. I’ll throw in extra for your trouble.’

  ‘How do want to do this?’ the taller one asked, all business.

  ‘Let’s go with heart attack at the wheel.’ Stokes tossed the keys over.

  ‘Like a telephone pole … something like that?’

  ‘Sure. Just nothing too dramatic,’ Stokes reminded. On a previous assignment to eliminate a pesky senator who’d been poking around into the project’s financing, this same duo had roughed up the body enough to raise a coroner’s suspicion. An investigation ensued, which luckily led only to dead ends.

  ‘And no witnesses, you hear me?’ Stokes warned. He slipped Roselli’s PDA into his inside breast pocket.

  ‘No witnesses,’ the taller man replied.

  ‘All right. Get him out of here.’

  The shorter man wheeled the tilt truck closer.

  The two men each claimed a spot on opposite sides of the corpse, hooked an armpit and a knee, hoisted the body up on a three-count, then dropped it into the tilt truck with a thud. The taller man folded down the stiff legs while his partner got back behind the handles.

  Stokes stared down at the wide brown stain left behind on the rug. A call to housekeeping would raise too many questions. He settled on cleaning the mess himself.

  As he made his way out from the vault, a small ring tone chirped inside his jacket. Stokes paused in confusion and pulled out Roselli’s PDA. A confirmation flashed on the display: ‘2 MESSAGES DELIVERED.’

  Liberated from the vault’s thick walls, the PDA had finally caught some airwaves.

  ‘Great,’ Stokes huffed.

  Navigating the BlackBerry’s menus, he hunted for the draft copy of Roselli’s first message. But he found nothing. Almost immediately, however, ‘undeliverable’ error messages started bouncing back from the intended recipients’ e-mail accounts. Stokes was relieved to see that the addressees were the scientists who’d partaken in the 2003 cave excavation. The message began with a warning about Stokes’s malicious intentions. Next came a rally call for each recipient to contact authorities with all information pertaining to his or her time spent in Iraq. Also included in the e-mail were hyperlinks to classified material and documents that detailed the project’s true mission. What Roselli hadn’t anticipated was that Stokes’s NSA contact had already deactivated and thoroughly emptied said e-mail accounts - stage one of the clean-sweep that would be complete only when each name in this e-mail wound up being the subject for an obituary. That task was well under way.

  ‘Nice try, Frank. Always a step ahead of you.’

  The PDA’s grimy keyboard was making his fingers sticky; some tacky white powder that could only have come from the doughnuts that had led to Roselli’s equally doughy belly. Disgusted, Stokes paused to wipe his hands with his handkerchief before hunting for the second stealth e-mail.

  But sifting through the SENT and DELETED items, he could not find a second draft. If Roselli set the message to automatically delete upon transmission, there’d likely be no way of retrieving it or determining the recipient.

  After two more minutes, however, Stokes did manage to determine the e-mail address to which the second message had been sent. The domain was registered to Our Savior in Christ Cathedral - Stokes’s personal e-mail account. Rushing over to his computer, Stokes went into his e-mail client. Some spam about cheap health insurance and solar heating systems managed to sneak through, but nothing from Roselli.

  What tricks did Roselli have up his sleeve? he wondered.

  Cursing, Stokes tossed the PDA in his desk drawer.

  From a utility closet adjacent to the elevator, he collected some cleaning supplies and made his way back into the vault. He began by thoroughly spritzing the air with odour neutralizer. Then off came his blazer and he got down on his knees to squirt the soiled mess with commercial-duty rug cleaner. He used a scrub brush to attack the stain, blotted up the resultant frothy goo with paper towels, and repeated the process. The heinous act reminded him of shitter detail back in the Corps. Though nothing could match that raunchy mix of kerosene and flaming excrement - truly the stuff of nightmares.

  Satisfied, Stokes rounded up the supplies and filled a trash bag with the waste.

  15

  BOSTON

  ‘Your green tea with honey,’ Agent Flaherty said, and set a paper cup in front of Brooke Thompson, waiter-style.

  ‘Thanks. You’re pretty good at table service.’

  ‘Got me through college.’ He set down a second cup for himself - black coffee - then sat in the chair on the opposite side of the cafe table. He took a second to peer out the floor-to-ceiling window at the wind whipping the snow drifts that carpeted Calderwood Courtyard. ‘God, I hate the cold.’

  ‘Then you might consider moving. Because last time I checked, the Boston summer lasts about two weeks.’

  He chuckled. ‘I grew up in Southie, youngest of seven. Leaving isn’t an option. How about you … leaving Florida to come here? Not exactly the picture of sanity.’

  ‘I prefer beaches and sun, but I had to follow the work.’

  Like many pallid Bostonian Irish, Brooke thought, the guy looked like he could use some time at the beach. Though it was that same UV avoidance that probably accounted for his unblemished complexion. If he’d graduated in ‘95, she assumed him to be thirty-six, maybe thirty-seven. But with thick black hair cropped in a short, corporate cut, he easily could pass for thirty. He was wearing a navy blazer - so trademark Boston - and she could tell by the way his arms and
shoulders filled it that he was an athletic guy. Brooke was a stickler for a good nose and ears, and he had both; the right mix of pretty boy and man’s man, naturally handsome, light on the manscaping. His magnetic eyes suffered an identity-crisis between blue and green. Despite the bad one-liner he’d opened with back at the auditorium, Agent Thomas Flaherty had passed her first-ten-seconds test with flying colours, she decided.

  ‘Mind if I take notes?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine by me.’

  He sipped some coffee, then took out a small notepad and a Bic pen. ‘Let’s talk about Iraq, starting with when you were there and why.’

  ‘Hold on, Agent Flaherty …’

  ‘Tommy.’

  ‘Right. Tommy. First you need to tell me why I should be talking to you.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He did his best to keep it simple. ‘There was an incident in the Iraqi mountains. Some of our guys were working under cover, patrolling the area. They got into a shooting match with some, how shall we say, hostile locals. An ID card with your name on it was found in the middle of it all.’

  ‘ID card?’ She considered this. ‘Oh yeah. I did lose one of those. It was more like a security badge.’

  ‘That’s a good start. So tell me how you lost it. That way I can explain to my boss how you weren’t associated with the other side.’

  His deadpan expression showed he wasn’t joking. ‘Look … yes, I’d received an offer to assist in an excavation in the northern mountains. I accepted. I arrived there September 2003. The fourteenth, to be exact.’

  This did jibe with the passport activity provided to him. To keep her honest, he jotted down the date anyway.

  ‘All expenses paid,’ she added. ‘It was a great resume builder, an incredible opportunity … especially since Western archaeologists hadn’t turned a shovel in that region for decades … thanks to politics, of course. Since this was only months after the US invasion, everything was very hush-hush. And I wasn’t told anything specific until I’d arrived in Baghdad.’