The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  “I do,” Martin said. “ ‘Agri Dagi’ means ‘the mountain of pain’ in Turkish. Or ‘Urartu,’ ‘the door to the heavens’ in Armenian.”

  “Very good, Mr. Faber. And today, you’re going to find out why the Turks call it that.”

  “So that’s your plan? You’re going to leave us to die on the mountain?” Faber said. “Or are you going to toss us over the side of a cliff?”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Dujok said with that disquieting grin. “That would be too light a penalty, Mr. Faber. And we do want you to suffer. We Yezidi are very deliberate in our actions.”

  “Yezidi?”

  Nick Allen wondered why Martin Faber looked frozen after hearing that term. The young NSA agent kept staring at Dujok with openmouthed amazement, and Dujok seemed pleased to inspire such respect—or fear. Even though it was the middle of August, a cold northern wind had whipped up once the sun went down.

  “You know who they are?” Allen whispered to Faber when Dujok was distracted by one of his men.

  Martin nodded, answering low and quickly. “Of course,” he whispered. “My father talked a lot about them. He explored this region years ago and he told incredible stories about the Yezidi. Some people think they’re devil worshippers, but in reality, they’re the world’s last known cult dedicated to worshipping angels. They have all kinds of strange rituals: The Yezidi never shave their mustaches. See? They believe in reincarnation. They don’t eat lettuce. They never dress in blue. They believe they are the true descendants of the survivors of several world-ending floods, and, as such, they consider themselves the only loyal protectors of the ancient relics like the ones in St. Echmiadzin.”

  “Great. Religious fanatics . . . ,” Allen said.

  “But not murderers.”

  “Yeah? Well, they almost killed me back at the cathedral!”

  Martin Faber didn’t know how to respond. It would have been useless to try to explain to someone sliced open with a Yezidi blade the fascination his own family had with that tribe. Martin’s parents had spent years studying the Yezidi’s strange theology and they had considered them pacifists. But maybe his parents had been blinded by the Yezidi’s subtle ties to John Dee. Both the Yezidi and Dee’s followers claimed to have established communication with higher beings and to have seen “holy books” and dealt with “celestial tablets” that gave them access to the Creator.

  And that’s exactly why Martin Faber had come to Armenia, driven by his father’s stories and working under the guise of a top-secret project.

  “You know . . . ,” Artemi Dujok said, quickly turning around, interrupting the agents’ whispers and staring directly at Martin. “It shouldn’t surprise me that you inherited your father’s ambition.”

  “My father? You . . . you know my father?”

  “Mr. Faber, your innocence is touching. I know every single thing about every person involved with the Elijah project. As a matter of fact, I myself used to work on Elijah. While you were still in diapers. But I left as soon as I learned the real reason behind your government’s interest in it.”

  “Wait, you used to work for Elijah?”

  Both of the agents’ eyes flashed.

  “That’s right. And from what I can see, they’re still bent on being the ones to control the adamants at all costs.”

  Nicholas Allen was confused, and not just from the blood loss. Did this Yezidi know his partner’s parents? What the hell was the Elijah project? And why the devil had his bosses sent him into this hornets’ nest without telling him any of this?

  “But I don’t understand,” Martin said. “Why have you brought us here, to one of your famous towers?”

  Dujok leaned in close to Martin, his hands clutched behind his back. “I’m impressed you know about this place, Mr. Faber. Then again, I’d expect nothing less from you.”

  “I’ve read about it in William Seabrook’s books. And in Gurdjieff’s.”

  Towers? Gurdjieff? Seabrook? Allen was getting more worried by the minute.

  “So I assume you’ve read what Pushkin and Lovecraft had to say about us,” Dujok said with a malevolent smile. “Maybe you’ve already figured this out for yourself, but I can tell you they’re all lies. Gurdjieff, our country’s so-called famous mystic, never even saw these towers. But that didn’t stop him from publishing his little pamphlets in French and becoming famous in Europe.”

  “But, wait, William Seabrook did discover your secret, didn’t he?”

  “Well, yes, Seabrook did,” Dujok muttered.

  “He was a mystic-slash-reporter who worked for The New York Times in the early twentieth century—”

  “I know who William Seabrook was, Mr. Faber. The first outsider ever to write about these sacred buildings,” Dujok said, pointing toward the stone spire outside the van window. “The idiot called them the ‘towers of evil’ because he thought they radiated energy that Satan used to control the world. But when he wrote about the towers, he couldn’t even prove their existence. Most have been destroyed or hidden beneath other structures.”

  “I read his Adventures in Arabia,” Martin said, nodding, happy to at least be distracting his captor, “and I thought it was odd that he never gave the towers’ exact locations.”

  “That’s because he never knew them. None of the Yezidi sheikhs he spoke to would ever have revealed their locations. He had to settle for assuming that they were hidden throughout the region and that we visited them from time to time.”

  “And this is one of those sacred structures . . .”

  “That’s right,” Dujok said. “My family had to find a way to conceal it after Seabrook published his work. He stigmatized us when he called us devil worshippers and wrote that these buildings were tools of the devil.”

  “Well, aren’t they—tools of the devil? And aren’t you devil worshippers, all of you?” Nick Allen said, interrupting. His legs were growing weaker and his breathing had become even more labored. He was starting to wish that whatever was going to happen to them would just be over.

  “Of course not!”

  “Then why are you going to sacrifice us?” He coughed. The colonel was getting worse by the minute. He was running a high fever. His sliced forehead was pounding. And the cold sweat told him the end was drawing near. “Isn’t that what devil worshippers do—sacrifice people?”

  Dujok leaned in close to the strapping Texan. “That’s where you’re wrong, Colonel,” Dujok murmured. “I’m not the one who is going to execute you. I don’t want the stain of your blood on my hands. But as it turns out, when you stole a sacred object, you opened yourself to ordalia. Do you know what that is, Colonel?”

  Nick Allen had no idea, and Dujok knew this.

  “I’ll tell you what it is: It’s a judgment from God, Colonel,” Dujok hissed. “Justice imparted by the All-Powerful One. An implacable sentence. Instant and exact. He will be the One to decide your fate. Does that sound fair to you?”

  “You’re insane . . .”

  An icy blast of wind from Ararat’s lower peak whipped through the van and suddenly ended their conversation.

  “There’s no time to waste,” Dujok said, ignoring his prisoner’s jeer.

  He gave the signal and two of his men grabbed Faber and Allen and dragged them to the edge of a giant precipice, the lip of an enormous crater. As they moved their feet over the rough terrain, they could feel a heat rising up from the ground, which was parched and cracked. Was Dujok planning to hurl them into that chasm? Was this his idea of an ordalia?

  Faber had heard the term before. It was coined during the Inquisition when they tried accused witches and heretics by tying them to a burning stake or throwing them from a precipice; if they were innocent, they would pass the test. But Martin didn’t think the Yezidi would simply toss them into the void. By its nature, an ordalia gave the accused the opportunity to save himself.

  “What are you going to do to us, Dujok?” Martin asked when his feet had run out of room.

  “We ar
e going to test your faith, gentlemen.”

  Dujok had taken the stone from the cathedral, turned it over in his hands and held it above his head. That kidney-shaped oracle began to glow like a star in the night sky, as if it had its own power source.

  “Now do you understand why they call these ‘sun stones,’ Mr. Faber?” Dujok said, holding the stone aloft. “These heliogabali are made of a specific material that reacts to the sun’s energy. Just a few hours ago, a total eclipse of the sun cast its shadow over this entire area, revealing the sun’s corona. And although probably no one noticed it, that solar energy has powered the remaining seven angelic towers on earth for several hours. If one of these stones comes in contact with that energy it can trigger an . . . interesting reaction.”

  “What kind of reaction?”

  “We call it the Glory of God, Mr. Faber,” Dujok said, smiling. “The Hebrew Torah calls it kabod. It’s the glow of the Eternal Father, the same fire that Moses encountered on Mount Sinai. The flame that engulfed the Burning Bush without consuming it and allowed man to speak to God . . . It is our oldest mode of communicating with the Lord. But for mortal men like you, who do not have the gift to receive God’s light, it will surely kill you.”

  “John Dee stood before that fire and didn’t die,” Martin yelled defiantly.

  “He was an exception. He used the gifts of his seers, who passed on the holy incantations that protected him.”

  “In that case,” Martin Faber said, smiling at the memory of studying Dee’s books of spells, “I am ready to see the Glory of God.”

  Dujok held up the glowing stone. Its light cast hard shadows on Dujok’s face, giving him an ominous visage.

  “Then, gentlemen, let His will be done . . .”

  59

  39° 25’ 34” N.

  44° 24’ 19” E.

  The coordinates flashed on one corner of the screen, illuminating Dujok’s face.

  “We got it!” he yelled, and all of a sudden it didn’t matter how long they’d been sitting on the cold, hard ground at Santa María a Nova.

  Dujok’s mind was too preoccupied with other things, like hiding his true plan from me. How could I have known what lay ahead?

  He quickly punched those coordinates into Google Earth, and we watched as a virtual earth spun on its axis, closing in on the location. Both of us held our breath. We hoped these figures would finally tell us where Martin and the second adamant were.

  The map moved past Europe and continued east, past the Balkans, past Greece, and started to focus on a point between the borders of Armenia, Iran and Turkey. At 39° latitude north, the map started to zoom closer to the ground.

  It finally came to a stop on an image that was bleak in more ways than one.

  “Is that it?” I asked. Dujok nodded.

  The terrain was desolate, ochre yellow, without a single tree anywhere in sight, an endless rocky earth with a handful of dilapidated houses scattered over the hilly terrain.

  “This program won’t give us an exact location,” Dujok said, clicking and dragging the map. “We’ll have to explore the surrounding area.”

  He moved the map around with his cursor, each time revealing bleaker terrain. Only the border post of Gurbulak had a handful of large, all-terrain trucks dotting the only road. He kept moving the image around the barren lands, looking for something distinctive. And that’s when we saw it, less than a mile from the shoddy little town of Hallaç, behind a fenced military zone. It was the only feature that looked out of place: the perfect new roof of a sprawling mansion and a smooth strip of earth that could serve as a landing strip for a small aircraft. A word that could only be read from high above had been scrawled across the terrain. “Turkey.” And at the other end of the airfield, something that resembled the shape of a building had been digitally erased from the satellite image.

  I knew from past experience that those blurred images were common in Google Earth. When I had tried to study several Christian churches in Jerusalem, I found a few had been marked as “classified because of national security.” The same thing happens with military installations over China and Cuba. But what could someone want to conceal in Hallaç?

  When he moved the cursor to the other end of the airfield, we found something else surprising, something even stranger than the censored satellite picture. It was an enormous, perfectly round gap in the earth, a chasm some one hundred thirty feet across.

  Dujok zoomed in on the image.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  But he wasn’t paying attention to me. I saw him jotting down the details of the location: altitude—4,746 feet above sea level; 39°25’14” North; 44°24’06” East. And then he calculated the distance to Ararat’s twin peaks. It was close, less than eighteen miles as the crow flies.

  He spun the image around to get a good look at it from all sides.

  “What? What is it?”

  Dujok wouldn’t take his eyes off that gaping wound in the earth. It looked as if a missile had struck that very spot and left a perfectly symmetrical gaping hole in the ground. He finally turned and smiled.

  “That,” he said, “is where your husband is.”

  60

  For years, Nick Allen had tried to describe exactly what happened to him that summer of 1999 near the Ararat mountains. The best he could do in his report to the agency was to detail what he saw: When the Yezidi held up his glowing stone, some kind of whirlwind, a sphere about the size of a six-story building, rose weightlessly from the bottom of a crater and hovered in midair just several yards from the tower and the group of men.

  The windstorm swirling around that . . . whatever it was was so intense that at first he thought it might be some kind of vertical-takeoff jet. But it wasn’t shaped like anything he had ever seen. He lacked the vocabulary to even describe it, especially when he got an up-close look and realized that it wasn’t made of any kind of metal he had ever seen. That spherical thing looked like some kind of umbilical cord, lights dazzling beneath a transparent membrane. And if that wasn’t enough, it gave off a wide spectrum of sounds and colors that overwhelmed his senses.

  His vision was the first sense to deceive him. He looked over at the Yezidi who held him at gunpoint and saw that their bodies were becoming transfigured, shapeless. He felt the features of his own face losing their form, like melting butter.

  This isn’t real, he said to himself over and over. This isn’t happening. It’s some kind of hallucination. But his mouth suddenly went dry, as if his tongue had fused itself to the roof of his mouth.

  He could hear his captors speaking, but their voices were like a far-off echo.

  “Behold, the Glory of God!” he heard them say over the pulsing chirps coming from the spherical thing.

  “Glory be to God!” he heard others answer in the echo.

  Allen tried to let himself fall to the ground. But his enormous body was now weightless, defying gravity. He knew he was at the edge of the abyss and feared one false step might send him over the precipice. Meanwhile, the spherical thing was floating just a few feet overhead. It had shifted and moved toward him and Martin, spinning at an incredible speed and sucking in nearby rocks and tumbleweed like a luminous twister. If they didn’t do something fast, it would surely devour the two of them.

  That’s when he saw one of Dujok’s men collapse. And Dujok suddenly became just a fine vertical line in his peripheral vision.

  Allen’s world began to evaporate as the spinning mass engulfed him, illuminating the world around him as if night had turned to day.

  But somehow, the Glory of God did not devour him. He was still alive . . .

  It moved past him and now he could hear Martin shouting back at the irresistible light. He spoke in a language Allen couldn’t understand, his words resounding all around them as the glowing, spinning sphere engulfed his companion, casting Allen aside.

  He would not see Martin Faber again.

  And that’s why now, years later, when the US government’s sat
ellites located Martin at the other end of the continent, Nicholas Allen found a powerful reason to live again: He needed to speak to Faber one more time. He needed to know what the hell happened to him when he disappeared inside the belly of that monster.

  61

  “Are you serious? My husband is there . . . right now?”

  Artemi Dujok wasn’t fazed by the despair in my voice. He continued to focus on the barren soil of northeastern Turkey on his computer screen, as if the images could tell him something that no one else on earth could understand.

  “There’s something I should probably tell you, Ms. Álvarez . . .”

  The tone of his voice made me fear the worst; his eyes were fixed on the screen. So I was so relieved to hear him finish his sentence.

  “I know that place,” he said as if deep in thought. “I was there with your husband many years ago.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” he whispered, his lips trembling for just a moment. “That was the day I became his sheikh, his teacher. His captors have taken him to that place because they know more about the adamants than we imagined.”

  “How much more?”

  “Too much,” he said flatly. “Get your things. It’s time to go.”

  62

  Three miles off the coast of Noia, the fifty-six-foot fishing boat Lalín’s Siren bobbed motionlessly in the ocean, trying to get its battered four-hundred-horsepower engine working again. The high seas had overcome its main engine and flooded the auxiliary one, stranding the crew of eleven men and leaving their cargo of cod and eel to spoil within sight of the coastline. Power was completely shut off. The chief engineer, a chubby Galician who liked to polish his bald head to a shine with olive oil, had the crew cut off the power to the engines, and with it went the sonar, the radar, the radio and even the microwave so he could work safely in the bowels of the ship.

  So he was the first one to notice the disturbance in the silence.