by James Barney
“These,” Eskridge announced proudly, “are from Tell-Fara.”
Kathleen looked around, astonished. One display case contained a stunning collection of gold and silver bracelets, necklaces, and what appeared to be a jeweled ceremonial staff.
Another case contained an impressive collection of ancient Sumerian weaponry—curved sabers, a short dagger with a golden sheath, an ornately embossed shield.
On the walls of the room, mounted on sturdy shelves, were a half dozen carved heads, similar to the one she’d seen on the table at Sargon’s house. Each depicted the same, fierce-looking man, with jewels in his eye sockets and studding his beard.
“Who is that?” Kathleen asked.
“Good question. I wish I knew.”
Kathleen thought about that for a moment and then asked, “Did you get all these things from Dr. Sargon?”
“Well, he was the deliveryman, if you will. But don’t forget, it was your parents’ fieldwork that led to these incredible finds. They did all the work and deserve all the credit.”
“Dr. Sargon told me he gave these things to you in exchange for helping him escape Iraq. Is that true?”
“Yep. And it wasn’t easy getting him out, believe me. I don’t know who he’d pissed off there, but he was in big trouble. I had to call in some big-time favors for that one. But it was a fair trade. Because we got these.” He swept his hand around the room.
“Did Dr. Sargon ever say anything about there being a sarcophagus inside the Tell-Fara temple?”
Eskridge’s eyebrows shot up. “A sarcophagus? No. Why do you ask?”
Kathleen shrugged.
A hint of frustration entered Eskridge’s voice. “Hell, I must have asked him fifty times if he’d seen any sign of a tomb, or a burial pit, or anything like that, and he always said no. But it never made any sense to me. I mean, if it wasn’t a tomb, what the hell was it?”
Kathleen drew a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Well . . . he told me he saw a sarcophagus.”
Eskridge’s eyes widened.
Kathleen continued. “He said he saw a large, rectangular sarcophagus made of alabaster and black marble.”
“That son of a bitch,” Eskridge whispered. “He held out on me.” His voice grew louder. “I’m gonna have to pay him a visit.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”
“Why?”
“Dr. Sargon’s dead. He apparently killed himself two nights ago.”
Eskridge’s expression turned solemn. “Jesus!” he whispered, shaking his head slowly. “I’m . . . I’m really sorry to hear that.”
“But he left me this.” Kathleen pulled the folded paper from her pocket and handed it to Eskridge.
Eskridge unfolded the paper slowly with his fat fingers, glancing at Kathleen as he did. He studied the notation on the page for a long time, rubbing his chin and stroking his moustache absently. Several times, he nodded and grunted quietly. “Mmmm . . . mmm-hmm.”
Kathleen watched nervously.
After a long while, Eskridge spoke. “This was inscribed on the sarcophagus he told you about?”
“Yes, I think so.”
He studied the paper for several more seconds, still shaking his head slowly. Then he mumbled, “Well, I’ll be damned. I’ll be goddamned!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“What does it say?” Kathleen asked breathlessly as she followed Dr. Eskridge up the stairs. He was climbing them two at a time—an impressive feat for a man his age and size.
“Could mean several different things,” Eskridge said over his shoulder. He held the folded sheet of paper Kathleen had given him in his hand.
They reached the landing on the second floor. Eskridge turned right and hurried down the darkened hallway toward the only lighted room on the floor.
A few moments later, they entered a spacious study with dark-stained oak bookshelves on two walls and an antique mahogany library table in the middle. A threadbare Persian rug covered most of the wooden floor, its red-and-blue geometric pattern largely scoured away by decades of foot traffic. Four antique-brass sconces on the walls and a cloisonné lamp on the table bathed the room in soft, incandescent light. The air smelled like old paper.
Eskridge was already busy pulling books from the shelves and stacking them, one by one, on the mahogany table.
“What do you think it means?” Kathleen said anxiously.
Eskridge ignored her. He was now standing on a small stepladder, reaching for more books. “Here grab this,” he said, handing Kathleen a dusty volume from the top shelf.
She added it to the stack on the table.
Several minutes later, Eskridge pulled up a chair, unfolded the paper Kathleen had given him, and laid it flat on the table in front of him. Kathleen stood beside him.
“Now, are you sure this was something Dr. Sargon saw at Tell-Fara?” Eskridge asked.
“Yeah. Pretty sure.”
“These symbols are Sumerian pictographs. Technically, they’re called proto-cuneiform symbols.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they were probably inscribed sometime before twenty-eight hundred BC—about five thousand years ago.”
“Can you tell what they say?”
Eskridge drew a deep breath and inspected the paper. “All right. See this here?” He pointed to the symbol on the upper left of the inscription.
“Yes.”
“That’s the proto-cuneiform symbol for Orion, the Hunter, also associated with Gilgamesh in Sumerian epics. The Orion symbol was used to express many different meanings, depending on the context. It could mean strength, for instance. Or power. Or victory. It could also mean a person of great size, or wealth, or good fortune. And, of course, it could refer to the actual god himself, Orion.”
“Okay . . .”
“See the symbol below it, the one that looks like a rain cloud?”
“Yes.”
“The rain cloud was used to indicate rain, of course.”
“Makes sense.”
“But also the concept of falling, or dropping, or descending.”
Kathleen nodded.
“Now, you see these two symbols?” He pointed to the right-hand side of the inscription.
“Uh-huh.”
Eskridge flipped open a book on Sumerian symbology and thumbed through it quickly, finding the correct page after several seconds. He laid the book flat and scrolled down the page with his index finger, obviously looking up the meaning of the two symbols. “In combination like this, they could mean broken or finished, or the end of something. Something that’s depleted or exhausted. Like the end of a dynasty or the destruction of a city, for instance.”
“Uh-huh.” But Kathleen wasn’t exactly following. There were too many combinations of possible meanings for her to draw any logical conclusions.
Eskridge seemed to agree. “When you put those all together, it doesn’t really make much sense, does it? The end of falling strength? The depletion of descending wealth or good fortune? It could be anything.”
“How about a fallen hero?”
“Sure. Could be. But that would be a fairly vague epitaph to put on someone’s tomb, don’t you think?”
“I guess so,” Kathleen mumbled.
“Actually, I think it’s something entirely different.” Eskridge pulled another book from the stack and flipped through its pages. He eventually found the page he was looking for and began reading quietly to himself, periodically bobbing his head and mumbling indecipherable comments.
Kathleen watched with growing anticipation.
After a long time, Eskridge suddenly sat up straight in his chair. “Yep!” He tapped a particular place in the book with his index finger and exclaimed, “Just what I thought!”
“What is it?” Kathleen asked, unable to contain her excitement any longer.
“This combination of symbols”—he held up the piece of paper and pointed to Orion and the
rain cloud—“had a very peculiar meaning in ancient Sumerian culture.”
“Okay . . .”
Eskridge paused and stroked his moustache lightly, the wrinkles around his eyes revealing a faint smile. “They symbolized . . . the Nephilim.”
“The what?”
Eskridge arched his eyebrows. “You’ve never heard of the Nephilim?”
“No . . . can’t say that I have.”
Eskridge looked astonished but said nothing for a long time, apparently lost in thought. Finally, after nearly a minute, he pushed back abruptly from the table. “Put that on,” he said, pointing to Kathleen’s coat. “We’re going for a walk.”
Part II
It was he who opened the mountain passes,
who dug wells on the flank of the mountain.
It was he who crossed the ocean,
the vast seas, to the rising sun,
who explored the world regions, seeking life.
It was he who reached by his own sheer strength Utanapishtim, the Faraway Land,
who restored the cities that the Flood had destroyed!
. . . for teeming mankind.
Who can compare with him in kingliness?
Who can say like Gilgamesh: “I am King!”?
Whose name, from the day of his birth, was called “Gilgamesh”?
Two-thirds of him is god, one-third of him is human.
The Great Goddess Aruru designed the model for his body,
she prepared his form . . .
. . . beautiful, handsomest of men,
. . . perfect.
—EPIC OF GILGAMESH (TABLET 1 OF TWELVE CUNEIFORM TABLETS FOUND IN THE RUINS OF THE LIBRARY OF ASHURBANIPAL, KING OF ASSYRIA 668–627, AT NINEVEH)
Chapter Twenty-Three
Eilat, Israel.
Elias Rubin took in the stunning view of the Red Sea from the balcony of his hillside mansion. Below him, the resort town of Eilat—Israel’s southernmost city—bustled with activity, as tourists, shoppers, and sun seekers strolled up and down the palm-lined streets of this quaint seaside city of 55,000. A gleaming white cruise ship was moored alongside one of the commercial piers in the harbor.
Rubin was a distinguished-looking man. Late seventies, white hair, with a clean-shaven, wrinkled face and intelligent, dark eyes. He wore a fashionable golf shirt tucked neatly into pressed khaki slacks. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses completed the look of an intelligent, successful man. Which he was.
It was a warm, pleasant day in the biblical city of Elath—now Eilat—home to the oldest copper mines in the world. Yet Elias Rubin was not happy. He stood, arms folded tightly over his chest, brooding over one of the rare goals that, thus far, he’d been unable to achieve in his life—a goal that loomed increasingly more important with each passing day.
Past achievements meant little to Rubin. Twenty years earlier, he’d founded Rial Laboratories, now the largest pharmaceutical company in Israel. Under his inspired management, Rial had gained worldwide notoriety by successfully mapping the complete human genome years ahead of schedule. Rubin, himself, was not a scientist. But his ability to raise massive amounts of cash and overcome countless business and governmental obstacles had been crucial to the success of the gene-mapping project and the emergence of Rial as a pharmaceutical powerhouse. It had also made him incredibly wealthy. Five years ago, he’d risen as high as number fifteen on Forbes magazine’s World’s Richest People list, before settling down to his current position in the low forties.
All of these successes, however, were in the past, and of little interest to Rubin now. Five years ago, he’d stepped down as Rial’s CEO, citing health concerns. He still bristled at that term. “Health concerns,” a generic whitewash that Rial’s communications people came up with in order to calm the market. Rubin was dying, and he knew it.
He could feel it.
Since stepping down from Rial, his sole endeavor and his only real passion—which he shared with just a handful of like-minded individuals—had been something he termed olam, a nuanced Hebrew word meaning something akin to “perpetual” or “forever.” The word had jumped out at him twice as he read the following passage from First Book of Moses in the Torah:
And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man forever [olam], because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old [olam], men of renown.
Rubin called his new endeavor the Olam Foundation, a highly secretive organization with immense financial resources but just seven members. The foundation’s work was carried out by several “facilitators”—mainly ex-intelligence officers—one each in Europe, Japan, China, Russia, Israel, Africa, Australia, and North America. The Olam Foundation paid these facilitators handsomely for their specialized and highly discreet services. In addition, Rubin—the consummate businessman—had established a hefty bonus for whichever facilitator successfully delivered to the foundation the prize that it sought.
Currently, that bonus stood at 100 million dollars. And Luce Venfeld—the North American facilitator—was closest to earning it. But time was running out.
“Elias, come inside,” said his wife, calling from the living room. “It’s time to take your medicine.”
Rubin walked back inside. His wife handed him a glass of water and the first of six pills that had been prescribed for his various ailments. He downed the tablet and grimaced. He despised this process, which he was required to repeat twice a day. “I believe these pills are killing me,” he said with a scowl. He coughed, straightened his posture, then choked down the second pill.
“Please don’t say that,” said his wife. “The doctors say you need these. They know what they’re doing.”
“They know nothing!” Rubin snapped, pushing away the third pill.
His wife of forty-eight years looked at him with a hurt expression. “Elias . . .”
Rubin’s eyes softened. “I’m sorry,” he said, touching his wife’s face. “Give me the pill.” She handed it to him, and he swallowed it quickly with a gulp of water.
His thoughts soon turned back, as they always did, to the Olam Foundation and its goal. Five years of his life had been spent on this project, and tens of millions of dollars. He’d even sent his own ne’er-do-well grand-nephew, Semion, to help out in North America, although he wasn’t sure if that was such a good idea. What was taking so long?
Elias Rubin had never failed at anything in life that he’d sought to achieve. He had no intention of doing so now.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Where are we going?” Kathleen asked, struggling to keep up with Dr. Eskridge. They had already walked six blocks from the Oriental Institute Museum and were now almost halfway across the Harvard campus. It was cold and damp outside, and the campus was not particularly well lit.
“Just a bit farther,” Eskridge replied.
Eventually, they reached a series of intersecting walkways at the center of the Harvard Yard, and Kathleen followed Dr. Eskridge as he strode quickly along one of the dimly lit paths. Two minutes later, they arrived at the steps of the Harvard Memorial Church, a classic New England redbrick structure with four prominent columns supporting a Greek-style pediment, and a tall spire above.
“A church?” asked Kathleen incredulously.
“Yep. Come this way.” Eskridge made his way around the side of the church to an unlit service entrance in the back.
“Is it even open?”
Eskridge smiled and retrieved a large bundle of keys from his pocket. “The rector is a former student of mine.” Moments later, they were inside.
Without turning on any lights, Eskridge made his way along a short corridor and up a narrow flight of stairs to the clergy offices on the second floor. Kathleen followed close behind.
“This way,” Esk
ridge said quietly as he entered a small, windowless room on the left. When they were both inside, he shut the door softly and flicked on the lights.
They stood inside a small, high-ceilinged library with parquet floors and five rows of bookshelves on each wall. Above the bookshelves were twelve dark oil paintings mounted on the yellow walls, each depicting a black-roped clergyman. To varying degrees, the twelve men bore serious, almost angry expressions, some bordering on downright scorn. The library smelled of oil soap and furniture polish. A solitary square table occupied the middle of the room, situated beneath a dull bronze chandelier.
Eskridge was already busy pulling books from the shelves and stacking them on the table in front of Kathleen. “People have written entire books about the Nephilim,” he said as he scanned the shelves for additional volumes. “It’s one of the oldest, most enduring mysteries in all recorded history.”
“Hard to believe I’ve never heard of it,” Kathleen said quietly.
“Well, don’t feel bad. Unless you’re a divinity major or an Assyriologist, the Nephilim aren’t exactly a topic of dinner conversation.” He reached up and pulled another book off the shelf.
Eskridge ran his fingers down the large stack of books he’d just assembled on the table, drawing a deep breath and exhaling loudly as he did. “Okay, let’s start . . . here.” He pulled a large black leatherbound volume from the middle of the stack. The words HOLY BIBLE were embossed in gold letters on the front cover and the spine.