by Glenn Cooper
‘You ready?’ she said loud enough for him to hear.
He gave a thumbs-up and she pulled her sidearm from the molded plastic safety holster clipped to her waistband. She pointed the weapon downrange, ejected the magazine, and cleared the round in the chamber with a smooth pull, finishing the action with the flourish of catching the ejected round before it hit the counter.
The pistol was a small-frame Glock, but he didn’t recognize the model. He asked what it was.
‘Glock 19M,’ she said loud enough. ‘It’s the new FBI standard issue. It’s lightweight, shoots a 9 by 19-millimeter round, uses a fifteen-round mag, has excellent rapid-fire characteristics, low recoil, and just about never jams.’
‘I used the Beretta M9 in the army,’ he said over the racket.
‘I didn’t know you were a vet,’ she said.
‘It was a long time ago.’
She handed him the gun and watched what he did with it. He passed the first test by pointing downrange as she had done, and rechecking, manually and visibly, that the chamber was indeed cleared.
‘Let me see you empty the mag and reload it,’ she said.
He popped the ammo out with his thumb then smoothly filled the double-stack and seated the magazine. Then a pro move: he racked the slide, ejected the magazine, added one more round, then re-seated it. He placed the gun on the counter, barrel pointed downrange, and looked at her.
‘Fifteen plus one,’ he said.
He didn’t expect any praise, so he wasn’t disappointed. Instead she handed him a silhouette target and told him to send it out fifteen feet.
‘How many rounds?’ he asked.
‘Empty the weapon. Take your time.’
There were things you didn’t forget and shooting a pistol was one of them. He’d been drilled like crazy in the army and had achieved an expert marksmanship badge, the highest award. The gun felt good in his hands and the night sights were bright. He extended both arms and acquired the target then began squeezing off rounds, one every second. When the slide locked open, he ejected the empty mag, put the weapon down, and pushed the target-return button. He glanced at it before taking it down and handing it to her.
She was poker-faced at the four-inch grouping around the bullseye.
‘Okay, reload and let’s see how you do at twenty feet.’
They grabbed a table near some vending machines.
‘You want a coffee or something?’ Cal asked.
‘The coffee here is lethal. I’ll have a Diet Pepsi.’
She folded his targets while he got the drinks.
When he sat down he asked if he passed.
‘You shoot better than I do,’ she said, ‘and I’m not bad.’
‘Like riding a bicycle. I like your gun. I might as well get the same model. If I change careers and apply to the FBI I can say on the application I already have the gear.’
She finally smiled. ‘You’re a bit old for a recruit.’
‘That hurts. How long have you been in?’
‘Eleven years.’
‘Always worked in New York?’
‘I started in Columbus then got moved to Charleston, West Virginia. I’ve only been in New York for two years.’
‘Like it?’
‘It’s pretty dynamic. Lots of big cases.’
‘And then there’s my case.’
‘Two dead, one armed-home invasion. It’s big to me.’
‘Thanks for saying that.’
Her jaw rippled before she spat it out. ‘I want to apologize.’
‘For what?’
‘I’ve been kind of a dick today. I’m carrying some domestic problems to work and I shouldn’t do that. You ever been married?’
‘Never.’
‘You said that emphatically.’
‘You noticed.’
‘I’m on my first. We’re having a moment. It’s my third weekend in a row working.’
‘And he’s pissed at you?’
‘She’s pissed at me. Funnily enough her name’s also Jessica. By the way, I thought your Jessica was pretty cool when I interviewed her.’
‘She’s a force of nature.’
‘Mine is too and right now that force is basically volcanic.’
‘Sorry to hear it. I’m afraid I’m the last person in the world to offer relationship advice.’
She changed the subject to his trip to Arizona. ‘How’d it go?’
‘It was interesting.’
‘Yeah? Interesting how?’
‘The woman I told you about, Eve Riley – she’s very knowledgeable about magic and angels.’
‘Name a subject, there’s an expert,’ she said. ‘How did she get to be an expert? Don’t tell me they teach it at some bullshit college.’
‘Well, it’s not taught at the Divinity School.’
‘Yet.’
‘Maybe I’ll work in a course next year,’ he joked. ‘As I understand it, these scryers, which she is, are born with the ability to see angels in reflective surfaces like showstones. I don’t think there are more than a few dozen of them in the United States but by all accounts, she’s at the top of the pyramid.’
‘What did she say about your stone?’
‘She said it was very powerful.’
‘So, it was the real deal, according to Ms Riley.’
‘It was. Her angel told her it was powerful too.’
D’Auria slurped down some Pepsi. ‘Her angel.’
‘Your skepticism abounds,’ Cal said.
‘Does it show? Did her angel have a name?’
‘Pothnir.’
‘After Gabriel, that was the name I would have guessed.’
Cal snorted at that.
‘This Pothnir – male or female?’
‘Male. He’s high up in the angel organizational chart. Apparently, all the important ones are male,’ he said.
‘So what else is new? What did he have to say about the 49th Call your attacker was looking for?’
‘Well, that was the interesting part. He said that it was something for summoning evil. The great evil was how he put it. Marry up the 49th Call with my showstone and a powerful magician and the world’s going to be in deep shit.’
‘Deep shit. That’s the technical term?’
‘My description.’
‘And did this angel of hers tell you where you could find the call?’
‘He didn’t, but he said my father found it. Presumably it was when he worked in Iraq, but I don’t really know that. I do know that I didn’t inherit any Aramaic papyri and I didn’t find any among my mother’s things. I’m going to see if I can find any of his papers and excavation notes floating around the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Anyway, that’s my plan.’
‘You were there, I wasn’t. What’s your opinion? Do you think Ms Riley fed you a bullcrap sandwich?’
Cal, ever the teacher, thought this was a pretty good teachable moment.
‘You know, Special Agent D’Auria, I make a living studying and lecturing on religion. With the exception of miracles, which are tangible manifestations of spirituality that ordinary people might visualize, religion relies on faith. You believe something hard enough and it becomes real to you. I might not hold a particular belief that’s held by another person, but I can appreciate their position. But I’ve got to tell you something about Eve Riley and her angel. He knew something about my father that no one but me could have known.’
‘Oh yeah? What was that?’
‘He knew I had his trowel, the one he used for archeology, with his initials carved into the handle.’
‘You ever been to Las Vegas?’
‘Sure. Why?’
‘They’ve got mentalists who go on stage and do that shit all the time.’
‘I suppose in your line of work it’s good to be a skeptic,’ he said. ‘According to this angel, the same man who killed my mother and tried to kill me also killed my father thirty years ago.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ she said, draining h
er soda and landing a long-distance can-toss into the trash can.
‘Basketball player?’ Cal asked.
‘Point guard in college.’
‘Well, you’ve got my report from angel-land. Anything new on your end?’
‘Unfortunately, not much. We released CCTV photos of the suspect from Cambridge and New York to the media and we’ve been working through tips from the public but nothing’s panning out yet. Hope springs eternal.’
They got up to leave.
‘Yes, it does,’ he said.
On Sunday afternoons, the non-public areas at the Peabody Museum were usually quiet, particularly on a Sunday after the end of the Spring term. As soon as June hit, most of the grad students and faculty members in the Anthropology Department beat a hasty retreat, and if not for his quest, Cal would have been among the evacuees.
Cal touched his museum keycard to the card reader. The door unlocked and he went in. The rooms where non-exhibited artifacts and supporting documentation were stored were not healthy places if you had a respiratory condition. The archives were musty and dusty – the kind of wooden-floored spaces found in nineteenth-century red-brick college buildings. Excavation notes, journals, and photos from archeological digs were generally considered to be the property of the professor, but many retiring faculty members left their papers at the Peabody for research purposes. When Hiram Donovan passed away his department contacted Cal’s mother who willingly signed over her husband’s papers to the museum where they had remained, rarely, if ever, consulted these past decades.
It had been years since Cal looked through his father’s Peabody papers and that had been a cursory review on the occasion of him securing his joint appointment in anthropology. It had been that department’s first dual professorship with the Divinity School, and given his father’s outsize role in Near Eastern archeology, it had been a matter of pride all around. Now, with the memory of Hiram Donovan within the department fading, Cal felt nothing but melancholy standing before the file drawers that held his father’s legacy.
Donovan’s excavations at the Rabban Hurmizd Monastery had spanned four seasons, culminating in the fateful 1989 dig. Cal’s first order of business was finding out whether any of the paperwork from the dig was archived and if so, whether the notes from the 1989 season had been transferred to Cambridge upon his father’s death. He knew for a fact that there had never been comprehensive publications arising from the excavation, only a few cursory reports from the first two seasons. The full excavation report was among the professor’s many unfinished professional tasks. What was clear, however, was that none of the excavated artifacts should have been shipped back to Cambridge – per the joint Harvard/Baghdad University Excavation Agreement, all the finds were required to go to the Baghdad Museum. And that made his pilfering of the obsidian mirror shocking to Cal. What could he have been thinking when he mailed it back to Cambridge? Was Eve right? Had the showstone had literally spoken to him?
When he opened the first file drawer he released more mustiness into the air. Someone had done a good filing job because the folders were in chronological order with clear, typed labels. The very earliest folders were from 1956. They contained research notes and photos from his father’s initial excavation as a Harvard graduate student at a biblical site in Israel. The work had formed the basis for his doctoral dissertation. Cal spent a few minutes perusing the material, purely out of nostalgia. Hiram Donovan had always written with a calligraphy nib on his fountain pen and that gave his writing an Edwardian flair. From the 1950s, Cal motored, opening up one drawer after another until he got to the last cabinet. There he found what he was looking for: Rabban Hurmizd – 1986: 1 of 6. Flipping forward, he quickly counted the six thick file folders from the first season of the excavation. Deeper in the drawer were binders from the 1987 and 1988 seasons but there was nothing from 1989. Had the notes from the last season remained in Iraq?
There was one last file cabinet drawer with his father’s name. Cal opened it and saw several folders marked, H. Donovan – Miscellaneous. One of the them contained a jumble of material that Cal instantly recognized as coming from Iraq and when he pulled it out and had a closer look, it was clear these were the unsorted papers from the 1989 dig.
He took that folder to a reading table and began organizing the papers while looking for anything illuminating. In a bound excavation journal he found a grid map of a trench called Cutting 9 and a notation that immediately grabbed his attention. One square meter, designated Cutting 9/G 18, was marked with a small X at a depth of 3.6 meters. The accompanying note written in his father’s distinctive calligraphy read: ‘Polished obsidian disk.’ The notation was dated a week before the date that Cal always carried with him – the day his father died. He went through every entry in the journal looking for any mention of papyrus scrolls but came up empty. The very last item in the folder, however, was upsetting. It was a photo, apparently taken by someone from the top of the deep trench, clearly marked Cutting 9, showing a police officer crouching over Hiram Donovan’s twisted body.
Phlegm filled his throat. He swallowed hard. His father had died in the same cutting where he had found the showstone. The family had been told that he died of a broken neck. Now Cal wondered that if he had been murdered, whether he had been alive or dead when someone threw him in.
All field archeologists knew that related objects were not always found during the same excavation season. With that in mind he started going through previous seasons, starting with the first in 1986, looking for items that might be temporally related to the obsidian disk. A great many artifacts had been found and logged and it took over an hour to slog through the material, but when he was done he had nothing to show for the time. The same was true for the 1987 season. The afternoon was turning to evening and he had a date with Jessica he didn’t want to cancel. He thought that the 1988 season might have to wait for another day, but decided at least to take a peek to scope out the effort. But in the first folder from 1988, an index card with a name and address caught his eye. It was for someone named Omar Rasouly at the Institute of Archeology in London. He didn’t know him personally, but he recognized the name as someone who’d been working in Middle Eastern archeology for decades. It was Rasouly’s area of specialization that was more than a little interesting – he was an expert in translating and studying Aramaic papyrus manuscripts.
He called Jessica, who answered testily.
‘You’re not canceling on me.’
‘Hell no.’
She sounded like she was on a hair-trigger. ‘What then? You canceled our tennis date this morning to go shooting with your new FBI buddy.’
‘She’s married.’
‘So that’s stopped a determined woman before?’
‘She’s also gay.’
‘Now you’re making me feel better.’
‘I was just hoping we could move the dinner from Boston to Cambridge.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve got a little more work to do and I didn’t want to be late. We can stay the night in my place or we can go back to Boston after dinner.’
She hadn’t done a sleepover at Cal’s house since the break-in.
‘Is your new security system working?’
‘It is.’
‘Is the fucking black mirror there?’
‘Nope.’ It was in the bag by his feet.
‘Then it’s a date.’
The journal entry that would make all the difference was dated July 21, 1988. According to Hiram Donovan’s notes, an Iraqi student had been digging in a relatively new area, Cutting 9, opened toward the end of the 1987 season. The first three meters of more modern deposits had been dug through relatively quickly, but work had slowed when they had reached the era of greatest interest to the dig. At a depth of three meters, they began seeing pottery and other artifacts of an eleventh-century origin – and subsequent radiocarbon data from charred human bones found within the burned and collapsed scriptorium had confirmed the dating. On Ju
ly 21st the student named Mina Almasi found a shallow pit at a depth of 3.2 meters with sixty-two postage-stamp-size fragments of papyrus. The grid reference for the find was Cutting 9/L 14. According to his father, the writing on the papyri was Aramaic. A later journal entry noted that all paleographic material was being sent to Professor Omar Rasouly for analysis.
Cal rapidly leafed through the rest of the journal looking for more information about the papyri and found a second entry of interest, this one from late in the season, toward the end of August. In grid 9/N 13 another twenty-four papyrus fragments were found. And then, a week later, a third and final find of inscribed papyri (nineteen fragments), this one in grid 9/M 14. These too were sent to Rasouly. But that was the extent of it. There was no correspondence between Omar Rasouly and his father concerning the papyri, and no journal entries from any season concerning Rasouly’s work. When he picked up the journal to put it back in the file cabinet, a never-posted air-mail envelope dropped from inside the back cover. Inside was a reminder note Hiram Donovan had written to himself.
One fragment from 9/ M 14 omitted from last Rasouly batch. Need to send on.
A small glassine envelope, the kind used in stamp collecting, was inside the larger envelope. Cal opened it and a piece of papyrus fell onto his palm.
He got very excited very quickly. The lettering was Aramaic. His Aramaic was serviceable – not as good as an internationally known expert like Omar Rasouly, but he could do a reasonable translation of most variants. There were five distinct words on the papyrus but on fast inspection, they made no sense. It was gobbledygook.
A text from Jessica sent him scrambling. She was at the restaurant – where the hell was he?
He put everything back into the file drawer except for the piece of papyrus, which he slid back into its envelopes and into his bag. He had promised Jessica that the ‘fucking black mirror’ wouldn’t be at his home so he took the padded envelope and slipped it among his father’s papers.
‘Here you go, Dad,’ he said.
He turned out the lights and took off after noticing that the archive door hadn’t completely shut on its own. He pushed it closed and made a mental note to let the maintenance people know.