The Babylonian Codex

by C. S. Graham

  “Yes, but the seams where they were joined are still visible to trained scholars. Chapters Four through Eleven of Revelation are generally considered the earliest, while Chapters Twelve through Twenty-two were added decades later. Only Chapters One through Three and a few verses of Chapters Twenty and Twenty-two can with any confidence be identified as securely Christian.”

  “So where do the previously unknown verses fall?”

  “Between what we now know as Chapters Four and Five. Essentially, they form an entire lost chapter.”

  Noah felt his pulse begin to quicken with anticipation. By now, they had reached the narrow tip of the plateau, where the town walls fell away and the remains of a ruined castle rose before them at the far edge of a barren field. Only two of the castle’s towers had survived, one round, one square. The wind was stronger here, buffeting his ears and carrying the scent of wood smoke.

  He stared across the rough field in confusion, “Why are we here?”

  Zapatero led the way across the dead grass. “Once, this was an Arab castle; then, the seat of the dukes of Medinaceli. Now . . .” A spasm of what looked like pain crossed his features. “Now, it serves the village as a cemetery.”

  “As a—” Noah broke off as he followed Zapatero through a narrow arched door in the castle wall. Inside, the castle lay open to the cold gray sky. All that remained was a rough field of windblown grass surrounded by crumbling walls and crowded with row after row of weathered tombstones and simple crosses.

  He understood, now, the snowdrops Zapatero clutched in one hand.

  Feeling awkward and out of place, he watched as the Spaniard went to rest his simple bouquet against a black granite tombstone in the newer corner of the cemetery. Zapatero made a quick sign of the cross and bowed his head.

  Noah ducked back outside. Swinging his pack off his shoulders, he rubbed his aching neck and drew in a deep breath.

  There was not another soul in sight, the houses of the sleepy village lying perhaps a quarter mile in the distance, so that he suddenly felt oddly isolated and exposed. As he stared out over what he’d first dismissed as an empty field, his eyes began to pick out the stone foundations of vanished buildings lying buried in the long, windblown grass. Medinaceli had obviously once been a much larger place than it now was. He remembered that it was to the Duke of Medinaceli that Christopher Columbus had come, seeking financing for his voyage to the New World. For some reason, the thought made him shiver.

  Zapatero joined him after a few moments. “My wife,” he said simply.

  They cut across the field in silence, following a rutted lane that led back to the closely packed houses and narrow, winding streets of the village. As the golden sandstone walls of the ancient houses closed in around them, Noah said, “The lost chapter of the Babylonian Codex: what does it say?”

  “The references are predictably obscure. But what is particularly fascinating is that one of the verses matches an inscription found on a mosaic here in Medinaceli.”

  “Here?”

  Zapatero’s eyes crinkled in a smile as he watched a hawk soar high above the red tiled roofs and pointed church spires of the village. “Many mosaics have been found here. One of the largest was discovered in front of the ducal palace when the plaza mayor was repaved a few years ago. It is difficult to do much digging around here without running into one.”

  “But . . . why would an inscription from a lost chapter of Revelation have been used in an isolated outpost of the Roman Empire?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “You’ll show me?”

  Smiling faintly, Zapatero turned down a passage so narrow that Noah had to fall back and follow behind, squeezing between houses so old their walls bulged out, almost touching overhead. At its end, the passage opened onto a small plaza framed on three sides by ancient stone houses. On the fourth side rose a crumbling, shuttered church.

  A blue Citroen stood parked beneath the plaza’s sole scraggly olive tree.

  Following Noah’s glare, Zapatero said, “Ah—my daughter is home,” and pushed open the heavy, worn door of the three-story medieval house that stood at the corner, its lower walls built of massive square-cut stone blocks pierced by small, barred windows. “Please, come in.”

  They entered a soaring, high-ceilinged room, longer than it was wide, with dark beams and quarry-tiled floors and heavy dark wood furniture that looked stark and monastic against the room’s plastered, whitewashed walls. A roaring fire burned on a rugged stone hearth at one end of the room beside wide, shallow steps with tiled risers leading to the floors above. The air was heavy with the scent of beeswax and wood smoke and old stone.

  Noah glanced around the room. “You have a copy of the codex here?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Smiling faintly, Zapatero took off his wool cap and hung it on a peg beside the door. He left on his coat. “Would you like me to take your pack?”

  “That’s okay. I’m good.” All of Noah’s notes and his laptop were in that backpack; he never let it out of his sight. “But—”

  He broke off as a door opened behind him and a woman’s voice said, “There you are, Papa.”

  Noah turned. It was the girl from the Citroen.

  A slender woman with delicate features and long, straight brown hair who reminded him of Julia, she stood in a doorway that led to what looked like a book-lined study. She pulled the door closed behind her and gave Noah a wry smile. “It’s you, is it?”

  Zapatero looked from one to the other. “You’ve met?”

  “Not exactly.” She went to lift a coat from the row of plain pegs and opened the front door. “I’m off to get some bread. I won’t be long.”

  Noah stared after her in bemusement.

  “This way,” said Zapatero.

  Increasingly puzzled, Noah adjusted the weight of his pack and followed the Spaniard through a tall set of French doors that opened onto a broad flagstoned terrace. It was only then that he realized the house lay at the edge of the village, backing right onto the town walls. The terrace looked out over a sloping garden hemmed in on two sides by high, irregularly coursed stone walls. In the summer one might sit here and sip sangria while staring out over the broad Sorian plain. But now, in winter, the rugged tables and chairs were covered, the massive terra-cotta pots empty, the long, sloping garden brown and shriveled by a cold wind.

  They walked down a set of broad, shallow steps, toward a curious low-roofed building that stood at the edge of the garden, its golden stone walls worn and darkened by wind and time. Large, square blocks of worked stone formed its lower courses up to perhaps four or five feet; above that, the stones were more irregular, as if the building had at some point been repaired or rebuilt. There were no windows, only a low, narrow door fashioned of stout, iron-banded planks set into a horseshoe-shaped arch.

  “That’s a curious-looking garden shed,” said Noah.

  Zapatero gave a soft laugh. “That ‘garden shed’ is one of the oldest existing buildings here in Medinaceli. It’s been rebuilt several times over the years, but my daughter has discovered evidence that suggests it was once used as a synagogue. She’s a noted archaeologist in her own right, you know. She says it may have continued in use as late as the twelfth century. Then the Christians conquered this part of Spain, and all those adhering to the Jewish or Muslim faiths were either forcibly converted, driven out, or killed. Their holy places were destroyed or converted to other uses—in this case, first a barn, then a storeroom.”

  “So how old is it?”

  “As far as we can tell, the original structure dates to the time of the emperor Claudius. But there is a mosaic—” Zapatero broke off as the sound of a ringing phone drifted down the slope from the house behind them. “Excuse me,” he said, turning back. “I won’t be but a moment.”

  He took the steps to the terrace at an easy lope that belied his age, while Noah stayed where he was, his gaze going back to the ancient
stone synagogue. Through the open door, the Spaniard’s voice carried on the cold air. “Hello?”

  There was a moment’s pause, then, “Hello? Who is this? Is anyone there?”

  Noah swung around, seized by a sudden, awful certainty. “No! Get off the phone!” he shouted, and began to run, just as the house before him erupted in a roaring explosion of flame and death.

  Chapter 22

  Washington, D.C.: Saturday 3 February 9:22 A.M. local time

  Easing his BMW out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Jax kept one eye on his rearview mirror.

  Davenport had given him a chance to turn October in to the FBI, and Jax hadn’t taken it. He could think of only one reason Davenport had let him walk out a free man: he was planning to let Jax lead him to October.

  Jax wove deliberately in and out of the morning traffic, watching for a tail. He even circled around the block a few times, just to be sure.

  He was not being followed.

  Careless, he thought, heading south toward Alexandria. Davenport should have put someone on his ass, just to make it look good. The absence of an official shadow told Jax his friends at the FBI had used the time he spent in Davenport’s office to mount a tracking device on his car.

  Turning onto his own street, Jax slowed, his gaze scanning the parked cars scattered up and down the block. A white van idling near the corner immediately drew his attention.

  They probably thought they were blending into the neighborhood just fine, with their colorful magnetic sign proudly proclaiming THE MERRY MAIDS: FRIENDLY, FAST, AND EFFICIENT. We clean your house so you don’t have to! But apart from the van’s giveaway tinted windows and improbable bristling of antennae, they’d parked in front of a house Jax knew had a live-in Guatemalan housekeeper.

  Smiling faintly, he pulled into his carport, seemingly oblivious to the FBI agent in coveralls pretending to trim the hedge across the street. Crossing in front of his car, Jax let his keys drop. Cursing loudly for effect, he stooped to retrieve them and felt beneath the front fenders until he located the little black box of the FBI’s tracking device.

  He left it in place.

  Maliciously whistling the endless, maddening refrain of Beethoven’s Ninth, he entered the house through the kitchen. Since his friends in the van couldn’t have been sure how long Jax had planned to be out the previous night, they wouldn’t have taken the time needed to hardwire their snooping equipment. Which meant they’d had to get creative and find ways to hide a bunch of transmitters.

  He strolled slowly through the house. To anyone watching, he would look relaxed, oblivious. In truth, he was anything but. Kitchens were always easy to bug—just stick a microphone and video camera with a wide-angle lens under the refrigerator. He spotted it right away and turned to hide his smile.

  Bookcases were another great spot, as long as the target was the kind of guy who bought his books by the yard and never looked at them again after the room was “done.” Walking into his living room, Jax cast a casual eye over his shelves as if searching for a book to read. He soon spotted the intruder: a hardcover copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead with a tiny lens in its spine. Cute, thought Jax. Selecting a nearby volume at random, he tucked it under his arm and turned toward the entry.

  Still whistling, he stooped to gather the mail that had fallen just inside the front door slot and spotted another small lens, about the diameter of a pencil and connected by a fiber-optic cable to a transmitter fastened beneath the hall console.

  Resisting the urge to give the FBI surveillance team in the van the finger, Jax took the stairs to the second floor two at a time. He retrieved a black leather bag from his closet and tossed in a change of clothes. Then he carried the bag into the bathroom and closed the door.

  Bathrooms weren’t easy places to bug—too many hard, flat surfaces. But Jax went over it carefully, just to be certain. Satisfied, he reached beneath the frame of a wide, full-length mirror that hung opposite the sink and released the catch. Sliding the mirror to one side, he revealed a custom-built compartment stocked with everything from a Heckler and Koch MP7 and a collection of machine pistols to false IDs and various disguises.

  He worked quickly, selecting a driver’s license and credit cards issued in the name of James Anderson. He took a stack of twenty-dollar bills, reconsidered, and added another stack. A lock-pick set and a transmitter detector went in the bag next; a couple of black cylinders a bit larger than a roll of quarters went in his pocket. Conscious of the empty holster at the small of his back, he snapped a loaded cartridge into his backup Beretta. Then he added a Walther PPK and FN Five-Seven to the bag.

  He had a feeling things were about to get ugly.

  Davenport was preparing for a meeting with the secretary of the interior when Kowalski called from the surveillance van.

  “The subject has arrived at the house,” said Kowalski.

  Davenport glanced at his watch. “Alone?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “He’s in the bathroom.” There was a pause. “He’s been in there a long time. I’m not sure what he’s up to.”

  Davenport snorted. “What do you think he’s doing in there?” He tossed a file in his soft leather briefcase and zipped it closed. “I want two teams on the asshole’s tail the instant he leaves the house.”

  “Not a problem,” said Kowalski. Davenport could hear the sound of the van’s passenger door being drawn back and Kowalski’s feet hitting the pavement. “The guy doesn’t have a clue we’re watching him.”

  Clipping his phone back onto his belt, Davenport turned to find Agent Brockman leaning against his door, her arms crossed at her chest, a sardonic smile lifting the edges of her lips. He said, “What the fuck are you smirking about?”

  She pushed away from the door. “Did you know that the National Park Service has a policy of recording the license plate numbers of any cars left overnight in a national park?”

  “No, I didn’t. Is there a reason I should care?”

  “I think you might. You see, the Agency’s computers interface with the Park Service. Which is how we know that last night, Jax Alexander’s car was parked at Daingerfield Island.”

  Davenport swung his briefcase off the desk and frowned. “What the hell?”

  “Daingerfield Island is the site of the Washington Sailing Marina. I crosschecked the names of the marina’s boat owners against Alexander’s file.”

  “And?”

  “Ted Thornton keeps a fifty-foot Hallberg-Rassy at the marina. Now, it just so happens that Thornton was married to Mr. Alexander’s mother when he was a kid. I already contacted the ranger in charge of the area. He says a man and a woman were seen going aboard the Hallberg-Rassy late last night. The man left at dawn, but the woman is still there.” She paused. “I have a two-man team standing by, ready for your order.”

  Davenport clapped her on the shoulder and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Brockman, you’re a genius.” He swung away. “You know what to do.”

  She called after him, “Is now a good time to talk about that promotion?”

  He laughed. “No.”

  Chapter 23

  Medinaceli, Spain: Saturday 3 February 4:10 P.M. local time

  Noah felt a wave of heat and pressure slam into him, knocking him off his feet.

  He rolled onto his stomach, face pressed into the dead grass, arms wrapped protectively around his head. Broken glass and charred bits of wood rained down around him, ripped at his sleeves, thumped against his back. He lay flat, lungs laboring to suck in air, ears ringing. When he finally dared to raise his head, it was to peer at a strange, silent world of billowing smoke and dust.

  He pushed to his feet, trembling badly. From what he could see, the blast had blown out the house’s doors and windows. But the solid eighteen-inch-thick stone walls had contained most of the explosion. He could see flames licking through the gaping windows. Smell the stench of charred flesh.

  He took one shaky step, two
, toward the stairs leading up to the terrace and the house, then staggered to a halt. There was nothing he could do. Anyone who’d been inside that house was dead.

  Noah should have been dead.

  His chest jerking with each breath, he whirled back around, searching the high-walled yard for a way out. Stumbling on the uneven ground, he staggered to the plank door of the old synagogue and tried the handle.

  Locked.

  He rammed his shoulder against the solid panels. Rattled the latch. Slammed his palms so hard they stung.

  Useless.

  Shuddering now with fear and delayed reaction, he spun around. Don’t panic. Don’t panic, he kept telling himself.

  His gaze fell on what looked like a rickety gate set into the nearby stone wall and half hidden by a tangle of vines. Clawing the brown stems aside, he grasped the rusty iron latch with trembling hands and felt it give.

  “Thank God,” he whispered, struggling against the matt of thick stems. He managed to drag the gate inward over the stony ground perhaps a foot and a half. Then it stopped, wedged tight.

  Taking off his pack, he squeezed through the narrow opening to find himself in a dirt lane that curved around toward the village’s old Arab gate. Through the gate’s pointed arch he could see the bleak, open Sorian plain.

  No one was in sight.

  He stood for a moment, his back pressed against the cold, rough stone of the wall. His legs were shaking so badly he could barely stand up.

  Hunching over, he braced his hands on his knees, drew the sweet, cold air into his lungs. It surprised him that he could hear no sirens or alarms, no shouting. Then he realized he couldn’t hear anything, just the constant, maddening ringing in his head.

  Swiping his forearm across his face, he pushed away from the wall, shouldered his pack, and began to run.

  Chapter 24

  Alexandria, Virginia: Saturday 3 February 10:10 A.M. local time

  Seated cross-legged in the sailboat’s main cabin with Jax’s computer balanced in her lap, Tobie skimmed rapidly through the reports on Vice President Bill Hamilton’s death. She discovered Jax was right: a preliminary autopsy had concluded that Hamilton died of a heart attack.