“I’ve never heard that story.”
“That’s odd. It’s a famous story, after all. Especially in the United States, your husband’s country. Maybe you’ll recognize the young man’s name. Ever heard of Joseph Smith?”
“Smith?”
“The founder of the Mormon religion,” Dujok said, smiling, without lifting his eyes from the computer screen. “Or, rather, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith was the founder and the prophet. As a matter of fact, before that golden book disappeared, there were several witnesses who swore under oath that they saw it.”
“So the Mormons have something to do with the adamants?”
Actually, I knew very little about Mormonism. I’d been born and raised in a Catholic country, so any other Christian faith was foreign to me. But from my work restoring sacred art around Galicia, I’d learned that Mormons had been recording their ancient texts on microfilm for years, from baptismal to death records, and storing them at their headquarters in Utah in preparation for the “end of days.” As far as I’d been told, they believed that only those whose family trees were documented and stored at a special bunker in Salt Lake City would be granted everlasting life.
“Not only was Smith able to use the adamants, Ms. Álvarez,” Dujok said, “he also called them by their ancient name.
“Among the revelations he received while using the adamants was that the Hebrew patriarch Abraham was one of their best-known owners. And that he inherited them from Noah himself. So he named them Urim and Thummim.”
“What do those names mean?”
“It means ‘lights’ and ‘vessels’ in ancient Hebrew. Abraham, the father of Judaism, used them for divination and communication in the town of Ur, near the modern city of Nasiriya, in Iraq, where they found clay tablets with fragments of the epic of Gilgamesh dating back to sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ.”
“So Abraham was a keeper of these stones too?”
“You’d be amazed at the names throughout history who have been linked to the stones before they reappeared in 1827. From Moses to King Solomon, who stored them among the treasures in his Temple and passed them down to Roman emperors, popes, kings, politicians, financiers . . .”
“And what ever happened to Smith?”
“He was obsessed,” Dujok said gravely, now staring intently at the figures on his screen. “He was so serious about his role as redeemer, as the last prophet of Jesus Christ, that he was lynched by his enemies one day in Illinois. Urim and Thummim disappeared in the melee. And the adamants were never spoken of again . . . well, at least not publicly . . .”
Dujok looked up and raised an eyebrow, as if trying to add suspense to the story.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“After being lost for more than four decades, they were rediscovered in the American Southwest during the administration of President Chester Arthur,” Dujok said. “The Hopi Indians had been their keepers until Arthur’s people got their hands on them. That’s when the navy ran tests on them and discovered, conclusively, they were made up of unknown materials. They would change their mass and color, even their temperature, as if they were responding to some unknown force. And now the emission of this adamant will lead us to Martin. It’s already happening. Look!”
56
Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.
Three new messages appeared on Ellen Watson’s BlackBerry. The plane descended toward Lavacolla, about ten miles east of Santiago de Compostela. And the second her phone could receive cell service, the president’s assistant had to decide which message to open first. They were all marked “urgent.”
The first one was from Richard Hale, who’d left such a bad taste in her mouth in Madrid. It included a pair of attachments: a picture of Julia Álvarez—“This is your target. Married five years to ex–NSA agent Martin Faber”—and a recap of Nick Allen’s conversation with Álvarez up until the point she was kidnapped. “Inspector Antonio Figueiras will help you with whatever you need. He’s handling the case for local police,” the note read, and included his cell number.
Watson memorized the information and Álvarez’s picture and closed the document with a press of her thumb. And I’ll have to have a little chat with Colonel Allen, as well, she thought.
The second message was cryptic. It came from her office in Washington, whose last orders were for her to catch the first flight to Galicia. “The stone you’re looking for has been detected in that region,” she’d been told. “Another signal was detected 2,085 miles to the east in Turkish territory.” But now, this new message was instructing her to examine the latest HMBB satellite images taken over the town of Noia regarding the stone closest to her. Watson thumbed a few keys, got on the web, and soon gained access to the NRO’s restricted database. That’s when she realized why the White House’s message was marked “urgent.” “Be careful. Elijah is on the trail,” it read. “These images were sent this morning to the USS Texas. Don’t let your guard down.”
The USS Texas? she thought, startled. How the hell did they get a submarine there so quickly?
The third message was the most specific of all. It came from one of the president’s scientific advisers and contained an analysis of two images, one from the HMBB and another from a seven-year-old private satellite, a relic in terms of space exploration, called GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment). And the analysis drew a strange conclusion: The gravitational field in the area where they were headed had been reduced by 2 percent. And the only anomaly was the electromagnetic emission recorded by HMBB.
“Tom, did you see this?”
Thomas Jenkins was flipping through a newspaper. The man in the striped Saks tie peeked over from behind the sports page to look at Watson’s BlackBerry.
“Looks like we’re going to have to split up,” he said. “When we land, rent a car and get yourself to Noia. That’s where you’ll find Julia Álvarez’s adamant.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“I’ll get together with Colonel Allen and we’ll make our way to Turkey. We’ll find Martin Faber and recover his adamant. I’ll meet you back in Washington in three days. Four, if things get hairy.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the only way.”
Jenkins started to put on his blazer as the plane finished its descent, and he caught Watson with another one of his unexpected questions.
“So, did you know Faber’s a climatologist?” he said, looking at her out of the corner of his eye.
“Yes,” she said. “I studied his file when the president asked us to investigate him.”
“You know, Ellen, a climatologist and a meteorologist are two very different jobs. From a national defense standpoint, it makes sense for the NSA to have a meteorologist on staff, in case they need to decide if the weather’s right to launch a ballistic missile or if they’re testing something in the upper atmosphere. But a climatologist doesn’t serve any kind of short-term function. They study the climate as a whole and if they make projections, it’s usually for something years down the road and sure as hell not with any kind of certainty,” he told her, waiting for the information to sink in before he finished his thought. “So, why do you think they need this kind of person on staff?”
Tom Jenkins never spoke just to hear himself speak. Traveling with him was like playing a game of chess. You had to stay on your toes, listening for the meaning behind everything he said, and carefully think over your answers before he caught you off guard. Ellen Watson knew this.
“Maybe the Elijah project has something to do with climate change,” she said. “It wouldn’t be the first time the NSA studied how to change the climate of a region to destabilize it politically. Remember the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, HAARP, which studied the ionosphere? They wanted to see whether they could control Earth’s and the sun’s natural magnetic forces to change atmospheric conditions at will. Some military intelligence agencies think those are t
he weapons of the future, more so than thermonuclear bombs . . .”
“Sure, that makes sense. But tell me this, Ellen,” he said, rushing to finish his coffee and hand it to the flight attendant. “If the NSA needs atmospheric information, it could just reach out to the National Weather Service and get whatever data it needs. But it’s clear the Elijah project is somehow beyond that. And what, pray tell, does any of it have to do with a couple of old stones? Why do you think they’re so interested in them? Think maybe they could be used to affect the climate?”
“Well, let’s see: So far, we know they’re capable of producing EM radiation strong enough to send a signal into space,” she said. “And now it looks like they can change the Earth’s gravitational force when they’re activated. So, no, I don’t think we’re talking about just any old rocks.”
“Maybe you’re right . . . Maybe they’re not ‘stones’ in the traditional sense at all. Maybe they’re made up of some kind of ancient artificial compound. A crystal from the city of Atlantis. A chunk of kryptonite . . . How the hell should I know?” Watson said, chuckling.
“But what would they have to do with the climate?” Jenkins said, pressing her.
Ellen was getting tired of this game of twenty questions. She knew Jenkins loved to squeeze information out of people and that had earned him a bad reputation in Washington. Others in Castle’s office said he could get into the heads of a whole team, turning one agent against another. Behind his back, they called him “the Serpent.”
“Stones and climate . . .”
Still, despite all that, Ellen tried to take up his challenge. “Maybe . . . maybe the radiation the crystals emit can break up thunderstorms. Or cause them. Or maybe they affect the ozone layer. You know, since the adamants can affect gravitational forces, they might be useful in areas of heavy seismic activity—”
“Wait! I think I got it . . .”
Jenkins’s interruption caught Watson off guard.
“I think the president thinks Elijah is some kind of program to forecast a global catastrophe,” he said, his face lighting up as if something had just dawned on him. “But all of this centering around some stone? It makes no sense. Still . . .”
“Still what?”
“If the program is designed to predict a global catastrophe, they’d need a climatologist.”
“So why would Faber leave such a choice assignment?”
Jenkins was about to respond when he felt the thud of the plane’s landing gear touching down.
He continued when the noise had settled down. “According to the NSA, Faber left his job just after being sent to Armenia, toward the end of 1999.”
“Do we know why?”
“He wrote an obscure resignation letter that said he’d found his true faith there. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Believe it or not, when most intelligence agents resign, it’s over a woman or because they’ve had a religious awakening. In either case, the pressure’s too much to stay with the job. But now that I’ve had a chance to really look into Faber’s file, I think there’s something very different going on. There’s no moral quandary. Actually, quite the opposite. He said the followers of the world’s oldest religion had given him the answers to all of his questions. And that’s why he left the NSA.”
“The world’s . . . oldest religion?”
“They still talk about that resignation letter at the NSA. It was particularly bizarre. He dated it with the year 6748, from the calendar year of his new religion. He said that’s how many years it had been since the Great Flood that ended life on Earth.”
“What . . . ?” Watson just stared at him wide-eyed and instinctively clutched the Star of David hanging from her neck. “A religion older than Judaism?”
“You got it. Ever hear of the Yezidi, Ellen?”
57
A colorful world map flashed across Artemi Dujok’s laptop screen. A multitude of colorful figures scrolled down the right side, while a cursor danced around the screen, spitting out geographical coordinates and acronyms I didn’t understand.
“This program tracks a network of low-orbit satellites that take electromagnetic readings around the world,” Dujok said without looking up. “Any reading above point-seven gausses of magnetic energy sets off an alarm and registers on-screen with this red graphic. See it here?”
I peered around for a look, but none of the cryptic figures made any sense to me.
“If we zoom over the Iberian Peninsula,” he said, quickly tapping commands into the computer, “you can see that the area of Noia will show up in red. See? There you go . . .”
“So, the adamant did that?”
“Not ‘did.’ It’s still doing it,” Dujok said. “The adamant is still sending out a signal.”
“So were you able to find Martin?”
“The program is processing that information as we speak, Ms. Álvarez. A twin signal has shown up just a few miles from the border between Turkey and Iran, near Mount Ararat.”
“Is that where my husband is?” I said, swallowing hard.
“More than likely.”
“And this information . . .” I hesitated to finish my thought. “Can others see it as well? Someone like, say, Colonel Allen?”
“Ms. Álvarez, Colonel Allen is probably dead.”
“Dead?”
“When we rescued you in Santiago, we unleashed a one-tesla geoplasmic blast with a force of more than ten thousand gausses, which is what knocked you unconscious. It’s not the first time in his life he’s been hit with one. And let me tell you, there’s no living thing that can withstand several blasts without being incapacitated—or killed.”
58
The patient in room 616 remained unresponsive even though his vitals—body temperature, pulse, breathing and blood pressure—said he was out of danger. But the shots of adrenaline still hadn’t managed to rouse him. The movement of Nicholas Allen’s eyes indicated he was still in REM sleep, lost in an endless dream. Maybe that’s why the doctors at Our Lady of Hope hospital couldn’t venture a guess at how long he’d be that way.
“He could wake up at any minute,” the chief of the emergency room had said during a meeting with other physicians at six in the morning, “but it’s also possible that his central nervous system could be compromised, and he might never recover.”
“Is there anything we can do for him?” another doctor asked.
“Not much. In my opinion, it’s best to withhold any treatment until we know exactly what happened to him.”
“But he’s been unconscious for hours, Doctor,” a nurse said.
“Look, that’s my medical opinion. As long as he’s stable, we won’t intervene. It’s better that we wait until he wakes up and we can ask him what might have caused this.”
None of them could have imagined that Allen’s brain was working on that very problem as they spoke. His neurons fired rapidly, bringing to mind the last time such an irresistible force felled him.
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN ARMENIA AND TURKEY
AUGUST 11, 1999
Everything seemed to happen in the hours following their foiled robbery in the St. Echmiadzin Cathedral.
Unarmed, beaten into semiconsciousness by Artemi Dujok’s goons and bleeding from the gash in his forehead, Nick Allen had been thrown in the back of an air-conditioned van, which secretly crossed the Turkish border. Next to him, Martin Faber rode with his hands tied behind his back. Allen was sick with the thought of how differently things might have turned out if Faber had been more alert and not been discovered in the van. Well, what was the use of regrets now, anyway? The young bureaucrat sat nearly unharmed next to him. Allen couldn’t see so much as a scrape on him, and even though he was only tied up with duct tape, Faber looked too scared to move. Allen, though, was in much worse shape. He had lost a lot of blood. He was too weak to try to escape and the muscles in his arms and legs seemed drained of all strength. If he was going to survive this, he had to conserve his strength until they got him to a hospital—
if he was lucky.
Over the course of seven interminable hours, they sat next to each other without so much as an attempt to communicate.
If the cathedral’s vigilante group was trying to make it hard for the NSA to find them, they certainly were doing a good job of it. For starters, they had been carted off to the middle of nowhere, to some inhospitable plain. They were no longer in mountainous Armenia but in some expansive plateau where the Armenian peaks cast their shadows in the setting sun.
He and Faber noticed a large, squarish building a couple of hundred yards in the distance. It was on the other side of a chasm, and next to it was a sort of tall, slender tower, wider at the base and tapering to a peak, like a finger pointing to heaven. It had been partially obscured by a tower of adobe blocks, as if someone had tried to camouflage it from prying eyes.
“Where . . . where are we?” Allen stammered. His wound had started to clot.
“This is the free part of Kurdistan, Colonel,” Artemi Dujok said, spreading his arms out toward the abyss that separated them from the buildings. “This is the holy land of Noah’s heirs. And over there, on the edge of the horizon, is Urartu. Or Agri Dagi.
Martin Faber gasped.
Dujok wasn’t lying. They had traveled almost two hundred and fifty miles. He could see the snowy peaks of the Ararat mountain range in the fading light. Faber figured they were somewhere near Mount Ararat’s southern face, probably right in between Armenia, Turkey and Iran.
“Well, what are we doing here?” Allen asked, kicking his legs as if he was trying to get the feeling back in them. “You can’t hold two American citizens hostage.”
Dujok and his men just smiled at each other. “You don’t understand the significance of this place, do you, Colonel?”
The Lost Angel Page 20