The Genesis Plague (2010)
kept apart, no consorting or information sharing. Really frustrating way to work. The others had higher clearance than me. I was only allowed in the entry passage - the first leg of what was probably a maze of tunnels. There was a guard stationed where the entry tunnel forked, scanning IDs. Like a checkpoint.’
He needed to fish for a connection to the Arabs who were now holed up in the cave. ‘Any chance it had something to do with Islamic militants?’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
Flaherty shook his head sharply.
‘What I saw in that cave had been there over 4,500 years before Muhammad was even born. Terri fying , yes. Terror ism , no.’
A few tables away, Flaherty noticed a man, with a thin face and Dumbo ears, sipping coffee. The guy seemed preoccupied with their discussion, but quickly diverted his attention back to a museum map laid flat on the table. Flaherty lowered his voice. ‘Anything else?’
‘I was only there a few days, taking pictures, making rubbings of the walls. Once I cracked the alphabet, I was asked to give all the materials back. Then they put me back on a plane, no pictures, no records, no copies, nada. The most incredible thing I’ve ever seen and all I’ve got to show for it is up here.’ She tapped her temple. ‘But memories don’t offer a high degree of provenance,’ she said with great sarcasm. She watched him scrawling more chicken scratch, his fingers pinching the Bic way too tightly in a crooked grip. ‘I’m not in any trouble, am I?’
Flaherty’s eyes didn’t move from the notepad. ‘I’ll need to report this all back to my boss, see what she has to say. There’ll be some fact checking, of course.’ He finally looked up. ‘I’ll keep you posted. But we’ll probably need to meet again. So try not to skip town,’ he said with a smile.
‘Not even for some sunshine?’
‘Not unless you bring me.’ He said it too fast to catch himself, and he felt the blood rush into his cheeks. ‘You know, because we may need you to answer more questions …’
‘Of course,’ she said, grinning.
16
LAS VEGAS
Finished with cleaning the carpet, Stokes took a breather next to a metre-high display case shaped like an obelisk. The artifact contained in its pyramidal glass tip captured his attention: a clay tablet, no larger than a hymnal, etched in lines, pictograms and wedge-shaped cuneiform. An amazing work created by the first masters of celestial study - the ancient Mesopotamians.
He’d never divulged to anyone how he’d truly procured this treasure map to the origins of Creation hidden deep within the Zagros Mountains. Even his closest confidants, like Frank Roselli, had clung to the story that he’d recovered the relic from an antiquities smuggler who’d looted it from the vaults beneath the Baghdad Museum after the capital first fell. Amazingly, everyone had accepted the story.
But that explanation - the lie - was far too simple.
This tablet represented Stokes’s pledge to those who’d truly bestowed the artifact, and its secrets, upon him. The pledge that had transformed a warrior into a prophet.
And it all began on a calm day in 2003, when Randall Stokes lost his leg …
*
While US forces bombed Baghdad, Stokes’s Force Recon unit had still been routing out Taliban from the Afghan mountains, just like they’d been doing since October 2001, when Operation Enduring Freedom responded to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. Shortly after Iraq’s capital had been seized, his unit had been redeployed to northern Iraq to pursue Saddam loyalists who were fleeing Mosul and heading north over the mountains for Syria and Turkey.
The Department of Defense had issued a deck of playing cards listing Iraq’s most-wanted men in four suits, plus jokers. In the first two weeks, Stokes and his six-man unit had captured two diamonds, one heart and one club. By the end of the first month, they’d hunted and killed fifty-five insurgents, without one civilian casualty. The worst injury his unit sustained was a non-lethal bite from a Kurdistan mountain viper whose fangs punctured more boot than skin.
Things had gone smoothly.
Perhaps that should have clued Stokes that his luck was sure to turn.
On an uncharacteristically mild Tuesday in late June, Stokes and fellow special operative Corporal Cory Riggins were heading south to Mosul for a weekly briefing with the brigadier general. Their Humvee was forced to a stop in a congested pass where a group of
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