by Alex Archer
Fighting for balance on the canopy, Annja heard a sharp voice behind her calling out for her to stop in Arabic, one of the words she understood in just about any language. And even in parts of the world where the word wasn’t recognizable, the tone always was. She ignored the command and ran toward the building the canopy was attached to.
Shots rang out behind her, ripping through the canopy and knocking splinters from the front of the building.
Annja made herself small, then leaped for the balcony hanging from the second floor. Catching hold of the wrought-iron, she pulled herself up, expecting to be shot, amazed when she wasn’t. Balancing on the balcony, she gazed down and saw Garin struggling with the soldiers. One of them pointed his weapon into Garin’s face and shouted orders.
Garin stopped, then dropped to his knees and laced his hands behind his head. He glared up at Annja and shouted, “Well, don’t just stand there and let them shoot you!”
Grinning, Annja leaped for the rooftop and hauled herself up as a few of the soldiers raced down the alleys on either side of the building and two more started climbing the canopy only to have it collapse beneath them.
On the rooftops, she ran, her heart pumping. She could have the brick in minutes and she would be gone shortly after that.
* * *
Garin lay on one of the bunks in the Syrian jail and thought about Annja’s escape. Maybe the soldier would have shot her, maybe she would have gotten away. It would have been close. Setting her free would probably cost him the brick and the tower and whatever might be lying in wait there, but he knew he couldn’t have stood by and let her be killed.
He was never quite sure what his feelings were toward her. She was an attractive woman—physically and intellectually. Garin hadn’t always appreciated an intelligent woman, and often he didn’t look for that in the women he spent time with, but over the centuries he had come to appreciate intelligence.
And Annja also carried Joan of Arc’s sword, which had changed Garin’s life forever. She was bewitching...and dangerous.
He never knew whether to get closer to her or run. He had never before experienced that and it was infuriating. Indecision could kill a man as surely as making a mistake.
“Yeah, I’ve met Lady Gaga. She’s hotter in person than you’d imagine.” Burris Coronet sat over in the corner and talked to three American guys in their twenties that had gotten busted for drunk and disorderly. None of them had dared take the cots from Garin and his men.
From what Garin had gathered, two of the young men were from Los Angeles and were familiar with Burris Coronet’s radio show. The other man was enamored of Burris’s constant storytelling about celebrities.
“Once you meet Gaga, you are so over Angelina Jolie. I mean, Angelina had her day, but that day is over. Gaga is the new wave.”
The men pestered Burris for more stories and he kept spinning the tales. The way he had for the past few hours.
Friedrich, Garin’s second-in-command for this operation, blew out an angry breath and glared at Burris. Friedrich was short and squat, a powerful warrior capable of taking off an opponent’s head with his bare hands. Garin had seen it done.
“Allow me and I will go over there and close his big mouth,” Friedrich said in Czech. “I grow weary of his constant buzzing. Like a chain saw.”
Several of the other men were in agreement.
“Leave him.” Garin levered an arm over his eyes. “We don’t need any more trouble. We’ll be released soon, once the bribes are in place.”
He hoped his cyberteam watching for Annja had picked up her trail. She would have the brick, but the tower—if that was what she was after—was not in Damascus or anywhere in Syria. All his research indicated that it had been somewhere in Iraq.
Presently, he heard footsteps out in the narrow hallway on the other side of the iron bars. A key rasped in a lock and the door creaked open. “Jean Sirois!” That was the cover name he was currently using.
Garin sat up and looked at the jailers. Neither of them looked happy.
“You and your companions are free to go.”
Garin stood and walked to the door. His men fell in behind him.
“Are we getting out of here?” Burris asked.
Out the corner of his eye, Garin saw the American get to his feet. He ignored him and stepped into the hallway.
“You can’t just leave me here,” Burris protested.
“Of course I can. I saved your life yesterday. I owe you nothing.” Garin peered back at the man through the bars.
“Do you know where Annja is going?”
The jailer started to swing the door shut.
“Because,” Burris said quickly, “if you don’t know, I do.”
Garin caught the door in one big hand and stopped it from closing. He studied Burris. “Where?”
“A place near Babylon.” Burris tried to grin confidently but he couldn’t quite pull it off.
“How do you know this?”
“There was a map on that model tower in the cave. Annja may have a photographic memory, but mine is pretty good, too. I’ve been looking at maps with her for days. I recognized what I was seeing.” Burris licked his lips nervously. “Take me with you and I’ll give you half ownership in the brick.”
“You’re giving your half of the brick to me?”
“No, I’m giving you hers. She left me to rot in jail while she goes off to find the tower. In my book, that negates any deal we had.” Burris sounded a little more confident. “So you’re my new partner. Deal?” He shoved his hand through the bars.
Garin ignored the hand and turned to the jailer. “I’m taking him, too.”
Chapter Eighteen
Eyes stinging from lack of sleep and the dust that cycled endlessly over the valley, Annja drove the secondhand military Jeep south of Baghdad, Iraq. She checked the odometer again. She had come 68.3 miles and was west of Al-Hillah.
She paused the Jeep and took out her binoculars, scanning the nearby landscape. Some of the heaviest fighting in the Iraqi War had taken place in the area. American tanks and soldiers had once flooded the region, and shelling had reconfigured the land’s natural geography.
Only a few miles away, more than three thousand bodies had been found in a mass grave where Saddam Hussein had buried Shiites who had stood up against him and the Baath Party. For a moment, Annja thought about all the peoples who had fought and died in this area. Al-Hillah had been populated for thousands of years, was in the cradle of life where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowed.
She shook those thoughts from her mind and concentrated on her search. On the flight from Damascus to Baghdad, she and Cybele had talked and worked on the brick’s inscription, comparing it to the images of the inscription she had found on the model tower.
Her pictures of the model had revealed the map, just as she’d suspected when she’d seen the crisscrossing of fine cracks, but the brick’s inscription had provided the key to the location of the map. Both had to be consulted to get an accurate assessment of what Annja believed was the location of the Tower of Babel.
Her satphone rang. Seeing Cybele’s name in the caller ID, Annja scooped it from her backpack in the passenger seat and answered. “Hello.”
“Still haven’t found it?”
“I would have called if I had.” Annja uncapped a bottle of water and drank deeply. It was hot enough that the fluid seemed to run right through her, providing a moist layer for dust and dirt to crust on her. She was ready for a bath in the worst way.
But she was more interested in finding the tower.
“You haven’t seen the formation? The one that looks like a perching falcon?”
Annja scanned the rolling horizon again, taking in the strands of barbed wire and metal posts that had once been fences around forward military operating bases. “It’s been thousands of years, and when the United States Army rolled tanks through here, they shelled a lot of landscape.”
“And we are sure the Tower of Babel
was not located in Borsippa?”
Borsippa lay in ruins around a lake north of Annja’s present position, on the east bank of the Euphrates River, closer to Baghdad than to her.
“If the tower was there, archaeologists would have found it by now.”
“I was doing some reading. There is a tower there that the local people believe might have been the Tower of Babel.”
“The Tongue Tower. I know. I’ve seen it and helped with a dig there one summer during grad school. It’s not what we’re looking for.” Annja hated sweltering in the heat, but even more she hated the feeling that she wasn’t going to find what she was looking for.
She reached for the brick, picking it up and studying the inscriptions again. Her damp fingers picked up color from it and she quickly put it down, wondering again at how it had survived over two thousand years. Even when it had been lost, it had been cared for and protected.
Just so it could get to this time and place and leave me stumped. But she was close. She could feel it.
“I’ve been thinking about the inscription. There’s a line, ‘Beneath the tower lies the gift of speaking.’”
“Like I told you, Annja, that translation is the best I can do under the circumstances.” Cybele sounded tired and Annja felt badly for involving the woman in the search. Cybele had an active mind and couldn’t turn away from a good puzzle, either. Just like her.
“You did a fine job, Cybele. According to Bhalla, this prince in the legend took something from the tower and hid it somewhere else. What if the inscription isn’t talking about the Tower of Babel? What if it’s talking about the brick? There was a reason it didn’t end up in the tower.”
“You’re thinking that there’s something inside the brick?”
“Yes.”
Cybele sighed. “I’ve been thinking the same thing, but destroying that brick sounds so...”
“Wrong. I know.” Annja’s stomach clenched at the thought of it. “I wish we had time to get this X-rayed back at one of the big archaeology universities. If I could just get past this Bhalla guy and Garin to make it to London...”
“Garin?”
Annja ignored that question; she wasn’t ready to explain Garin Braden to the linguist. “I haven’t verified it yet, but this brick must be over two thousand years old.”
“But at the end of the day, it’s a brick. Nothing extraordinary.”
“Nothing extraordinary would be an excellent hiding place.”
She carefully took the brick, holding it with a piece of cloth, then climbed out of the Jeep and picked up her canteen. After pouring water on the brick and letting it soak for a moment, she started wiping at one of the edges of the clay, gently scraping it away. For a few minutes, she questioned herself, forcing herself to go on despite her misgivings.
It was a brick.
And it was a riddle.
After sluicing more water over it, Annja spotted something glinting inside. Feeling more certain of herself, she continued wearing away the hard clay, which clearly hadn’t been baked all the way through.
Only a few minutes later, Annja removed a thick, rectangular slab of blue glass with a picture on it. She set the husk of the brick aside to dry.
“I’ve found something.” Annja turned the glass over in her hands, growing more excited as she realized what it was.
“Well, tell me.”
“A piece of blue leaded glass.”
“Leaded glass?” Cybele sounded hesitant. “That means the brick isn’t as old as we thought it was.”
“Mesopotamia was the first area to start making glass, and they were making leaded glass as far back as 1400 BC. A fragment of blue glass was tracked back to Nippur, more commonly known as Enlil City, though only ruins remain now. It isn’t far from here.”
“Why put the glass in the brick?”
“Because it’s the map.” Annja held the glass up to the sky and studied the inscription that suddenly showed so much clearer. “It shows two rivers that have to be the Tigris and Euphrates, and it shows a location marked in a mountain range that is farther south and east of where I am now.” She couldn’t stop grinning as she gently wrapped the leaded glass in a spare shirt. “Wish me luck.”
“Always.”
Annja hung up, repacked the brick in a paper bag so it would safely dry, refilled her Jeep’s gas tank from the jerry cans she carried in the back and dropped into the driver’s seat. She started the engine, got a fresh bottle of water and a couple of energy bars and headed southeast toward the low mountains.
Chapter Nineteen
The glass map was cleverer than Annja had at first thought. It was actually three maps in one, all of them intertwined to the point it took real effort to sort through them. She made sketches of them in her journal to keep from getting confused.
Not more than an hour from where she’d had her epiphany, she recognized the section of the mountain range replicated in glass. She held the glass map up to match against the horizon and, when she got onto the proper approach, she spotted the sweeping wings of the falcon that had been written about in the inscription on the model tower.
She had to look at the mountainside just right to see the falcon, and she knew that if she hadn’t been looking for it, she would have missed it completely. The falcon actually stood out against three different jutting edges that had to be seen from the side to be seen at all. Erosion and time had softened the edges, but it was there.
However, sometime in the past, the falcon had been decapitated. Only a jagged stump remained. The heavy artillery scars on the mountainside were testament that the head had probably been taken off during artillery practice. There was no other reason for the range to have been shot up so many times.
She drove the Jeep up into the mountains until the incline became too dangerous to navigate even with four-wheel drive. Then she hid the Jeep behind a stand of juniper trees, got out, slung her backpack and filled an extra pack with water and energy bars. She started up into the foothills as the sun sank in the west, turning the horizon red and ochre.
Three hundred feet up, where the falcon’s right wingtip faded into the mountainside, a miniature cuneiform symbol for God, which looked like a standing golf tee cross by two other golf tees, stood out on the mountainside. The cuneiform was ancient by the time the Tower of Babel was believed to have been built, but Annja thought the mapmaker had wanted something written that most of his peers couldn’t translate.
That meant he was a scholar, which made her even more hopeful.
Annja wasn’t sure if the marking meant the mapmaker thought God was in this holy place. She just hoped she found a cave that corresponded with the location.
Unfortunately, even locating the wingtip left her with an immense area to explore.
Look with the eye of the falcon.
The line resonated in Annja’s mind. She turned and climbed thirty feet to the ridgeline where the head was missing. Standing there, she looked back down at the right wingtip.
Find the seven steps to the resting place that has been made for that which has been hidden.
At first, Annja missed the “steps.” They were ledges that jutted out from under the wingtip and led farther to the right. Four of them had been blasted away, but she made out the scars where the natural formations had been.
Just as she was about to descend, she saw dust from a Land Rover streaking across the hilly terrain toward her location. Annja dropped down into a prone position, hoping the Jeep was safely hidden.
The Land Rover turned toward her position and rolled up to a dusty stop beside her Jeep. So much for trying to hide it. After a moment, the driver got out and stood there in a khaki shirt and hiking shorts, ankle-high walking shoes and a pith helmet. Dark, round-lensed sunglasses covered his eyes as he stared up the mountainside. He scowled through his white whiskers.
“Have you found it?”
Chapter Twenty
Annja walked down the mountainside, remembering the first time she’d met th
e old man in France. She’d been searching out the secret of the Beast of Gévaudan in the Margeride Mountains. Instead, she’d found Roux and the last piece of Joan’s sword.
The old former soldier had a way of turning up in the strangest places at the most unexpected moments.
“What are you doing here?” Annja called as she descended.
“You call that a greeting?”
“I think it tops ‘Have you found it?’”
“You’re too sensitive. If I didn’t care how you were faring, would I be here?”
“I don’t know.” Annja reached the first ledge at the end of the wingtip and stood there. “Would you?”
“For your information, I left in the middle of a simply amazing run of Texas Hold ’em in Dubai to be here. I was having an absolutely wonderful time, and had captured the attentions of a pair of twins. They were quite enamored of me.”
“Ewww.” Hundreds of years old—Roux had already been a seasoned soldier when he was tasked with protecting Joan of Arc—he had no problem attracting the attentions of a woman. Garin was the same. Annja thought maybe their appeal had something to do with living for hundreds of years. Living that long, especially through the times they’d survived—what little she knew of them—a guy accumulated a lot of confidence and know-how.
“If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.”
“You should have stayed there.”
“If I had, you’d be dead very shortly.”
Annja folded her arms. She had come to love the old man like a daughter would, but he could be the biggest, most enigmatic pain she could ever imagine. The same, she gathered, as a lot of father figures. “I would be dead?”
“Yes. Garin is en route, and then there is some man named Baller.”
“Bhalla.”
Roux considered that and nodded. “African name and the Tower of Babel. Makes a lot more sense.”
“I left Garin in Damascus, in the hands of the Syrian military, and I don’t know if Bhalla survived the last encounter we had. He might be buried in a cave.”