Babylon Rising Read online

  Odd, he thought, how after cutting his son out of his life completely for so many years, now, in death, Arthur kept coming to mind. Not that Barrington was in any danger of suddenly becoming sentimental about family. Other than his ex-wife, who had been paid off more than two decades earlier, Arthur had been his only living relative. And he had no need of nor interest in something as pedestrian as a friend. Associates, staff, servants, yes; friends, no.

  Nor did Barrington have a great attachment to places. There was nowhere he would really call home, though he owned luxurious houses on three continents. The place he came from certainly held no sentimental value for him. It was a place you escaped from if you were lucky, not one you dreamed of going back to. As for the attractions of magnificent architecture or priceless works of art, that was for weaker souls. The truth was, he was happiest when he was on his way somewhere, in a plane or a fast car. Moving, at speed, feeling the world shrink under his feet. And with the state-of-the-art systems Barrington Communications manufactured, he could make things happen wherever he found himself.

  But if he had to choose one place where he felt most at ease, as if he were standing at the very center of the universe, it would be here, in his penthouse, watching the vast, jagged landscape of towering steel and glass come alive in the growing dawn. However, after that horrible moment of seeing Arthur tortured by Talon from his terrace, Barrington had not even looked out his window, let alone used the terrace.

  Now, with four minutes before his guest would arrive, he told himself it was time for the great Barrington willpower to come to the fore. He forced himself to open the draperies and part the sliding glass doors to the terrace. He would not be like every weak creature he had conquered in the past. There was no room for guilt in the Barrington game plan. He strode toward the railing and looked down at the Endicott Arms. For a second, he shuddered, then he wiped his mind clean.

  Immediately, he started to feel the return of total command, as if he were a barbarian king standing on the piled-up corpses of his vanquished foes. Barrington Communications had recently become billions of dollars richer and had never been stronger than it was now. The gaping holes in its financial structure had been shored up, leaving more than enough to bankroll further expansion, further conquests. Any business magnate foolish enough to think he could stand toe-to-toe with Shane Barrington was about to discover the error of his ways.

  He put his hand to the glass and smiled. All this, and how little, really, they had demanded in return. Now to initiate his second assignment from the Seven. As with his first assignment, this task seemed odd, arbitrary, and unconnected to any big master plan, and had been delivered in terse fashion, with no supporting explanation. However, like obtaining the checklist of U.N.-related security information, it was something he could accomplish from his position of power with ease.

  He checked his Rolex. The meeting had been scheduled for seven o’clock. Late enough to have forced her to cancel any plans she might have had for the evening. And he had made her wait a further ten minutes. Long enough for confidence to dram away and be replaced by fear. Cheap tricks, perhaps, and hardly necessary anymore. But the exercise of power, however petty, was what gave him pleasure, and if he could not indulge himself in that, life would surely be very dull indeed.

  He turned away from his shadowy reflection and spoke into a microphone woven into the lining of his jacket. “Send her in.”

  Stephanie Kovacs, Barrington News Network’s up-and-coming star reporter on the national beat, willed herself not to check her hair, her makeup, one more time as the cropped-blond receptionist behind the desk motioned her toward the door with a curt wave of her perfectly manicured hand. Here she was, Stephanie Kovacs, ace TV investigative journalist, fearless exposer of the crooked and corrupt, a woman who’d been shot at, slashed by a knife-wielding maniac, and threatened by slavering attack dogs—who had always stood her ground and kept her head while facing down men twice her size and ten times as aggressive—here she was, nervous as a kitten just because her network’s CEO summoned her to a meeting.

  What was the worst that could happen? Okay, he could fire her. That was the thought that had been racing around her brain for the last five minutes, forcing her to flip urgently through her mental Rolodex. Who would I call first? Who was that executive who said at the awards dinner, “If you ever think of leaving the show …” Which network needs a new face to boost the ratings? Which news program is desperately seeking some credibility?

  But finding a new job in TV wasn’t really the point. She was successful and respected enough in the business not to worry unduly on that score. What was eating away at her and making the butterflies in her stomach do loop-the-loops was the certain knowledge that when Shane Barrington fired you, he didn’t just let you go. He made sure you were finished. Career over. If that was what he had in mind, she’d be lucky to be standing in front of a camera in a month’s time and talking about the unseasonable June rainfall’s effect on the soybean crop.

  She paused at the door, patted a stray hair into place, and walked in, hoping he wouldn’t see beneath her practiced veneer of confidence.

  “You asked to see me, Mr. Barrington?”

  Shane Barrington seemed taller than in photographs and the rare pieces of TV footage, but the harsh features and dark eyes were ominously familiar. Without a word or a change of expression, he gestured toward the dark leather couch against the far wall. He remained standing as she seated herself, forcing her to look up at him from below.

  “Miss Kovacs,” he began. “Stephanie. I’m so pleased you could spare me a few moments of your valuable time. I hope I haven’t kept you away from an important investigation. I’d hate to think some wrongdoer got off the hook because I’d distracted you from your work.”

  She tried to laugh. “Well, there’s always more fish in the sea. That’s the great thing about this job—you never run out of worthwhile targets.”

  Barrington looked at her without smiling. “Sure. I know exactly what you mean.” He turned and sat behind the long, smoked-glass desk in the center of the room. She couldn’t help noticing the absence of a phone or a computer. In fact, there was nothing on the desk to mar its perfect crystalline surface.

  “Sometimes I hear people say I don’t really pay attention to this part of the corporation. That I’m not really interested in TV. Like it’s old technology, a thing of the past. And Shane Barrington is always interested in the future, right?”

  “Right,” she found herself saying.

  “But that’s not true at all, Stephanie. I pay very close attention to what goes out on the news channel. And I’ve been paying particularly close attention to your reports. To your fearless investigations.”

  It seemed to her the word fearless was his way of mocking her. If anyone else had used that sneering tone, she would have gone for their throat instantly. No one trivialized her and got away with it. But to her own surprise she continued to smile meekly, as if she were a dog being stroked, not a lamb being lined up for the slaughter.

  Barrington’s eyes seemed to lighten a little, as if he were enjoying her discomfort. “You really know how to stick it to the bad guys. No mercy. No quarter. I like that.”

  He made her sound like a prizefighter, not a reporter, but if he liked her style, that was fine with her. She still wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but her anxiety level was beginning to drop just a little. Maybe she wasn’t going to get fired after all.

  “People also say I’m a hands-off CEO. I don’t tell the producers at the station what to do. As long as it gets the ratings, what do I care, right? Make a program about anything you like. Killer cockroaches, grandma serial killers. Whatever rings your bell.”

  Better and better. He liked her news judgment. He believed in editorial freedom. What was she worrying about?

  Barrington leaned back in his chair and laid his hands flat on the desk. His eyes darkened again. “But sometimes people just can’t be trusted to do their job.
Sometimes they need a little direction.” He smiled humorlessly. “From above.”

  Okay, not so good. The conversation, if you could call it that, had just taken an ominous turn.

  “I’ve decided that someone ought to do an investigation—a ruthless exposé, no holds barred—on a certain group of people who pose a major threat to this country—to the world. Someone needs to expose them for the dangerous fanatics they are.”

  He paused. Uh-oh, here comes the punch line, she thought.

  “The group is evangelical Christians. And that someone is going to be you.”

  Whew, she had not seen this coming, not where she thought this conversation was heading at all, but Stephanie Kovacs had not risen past the other bright, desperately eager TV talent by being slow on the uptake. She recovered from her puzzlement quickly by flashing a humble smile. “I am honored by your confidence in me, Mr. Barrington. I will try not to let you down.”

  “See that you don’t. I will be watching.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE MAN CALLED Talon paused in his labors, allowing himself a few seconds to take in the part of Manhattan that lay below him. In fact, there was only a narrow railing and some ropes keeping Talon from dropping down to the street.

  He stood ten stories up on the window-washer platform descended from the top of one of the most recognizable structures in the world: the Secretariat Building of the United Nations.

  Talon turned back to one of hundreds of windows that made the outside of the U.N.’s tallest building look like a towering wall of glass. There were thirty-nine floors, but Talon had done his calculations carefully and he was interested only in floors five through twelve. That would make enough of a statement for his purposes.

  Shane Barrington had come through as instructed and managed to get Talon some of the security-defying access he needed to carry out his task. He had told Barrington what he wanted and left it up to Barrington, whose many subsidiaries designed communications, security, and utilities systems for thousands of businesses, to figure out how to get him what he required.

  Talon had not needed too much because the very boring Mr. Farley had given him endless details about his window-washing routine. And Talon had lifted all of Farley’s personal identification before disposing of his body. Which he did only after relieving Farley as well of the necessary body parts for the fingerprint and retinal scanning he would have to pass through to gain access to the U.N.

  Now, in makeup that transformed him into the late Mr. Farley, and having padded his body to fill out his uniform, which said EXECUTIVE BUILDING MAINTENANCE, Talon consulted the paper in his hand. It was a meticulously rendered grid he had drawn for himself of every window of the Secretariat Building. If he could continue to raise and lower himself on the motorized window-cleaning platform at this swift pace, everything would be in place well before zero hour.

  TWENTY-THREE

  MURPHY’S EGO AS a proud male and a proud professional archaeologist was taking quite a pummeling. “Shari, I have to admit, I’m stumped. For the life of me, I don’t know what’s written here on this tail.”

  Shari wished there were something more she could do to help. They had already performed as many dating tests as they were equipped to do in their lab, and she had taken careful digital photos from every angle. They were looking at the enlargements now. “I don’t think I can blow them up any larger, Professor Murphy, or we won’t be able to see anything besides smudges.”

  Murphy rubbed his hand through his hair in distracted frustration. “No, whatever tool Dakkuri used to etch this message into the tail, he made it last pretty much intact for all these years, and seeing it is not my problem. I just can’t make head or your proverbial tail out of this. Because be didn’t have a lot of room, be must have used some kind of ancient shorthand. And I suspect Dakkuri must have been trying to be more than somewhat cryptic beyond that, because he was giving directions for uncovering the next piece of what he believed was his most powerful icon.”

  Shari drew a deep breath before saying what had been on her mind for several minutes now. “Umm… Professor Murphy … have you thought about—”

  “Don’t even finish the sentence. I know when I’m beat. I’ve got to get Isis McDonald back on the phone.”

  “Wow, Professor Murphy, that’s some whopper of a tale … er … story.” Isis McDonald looked back over her hastily scrawled notes and shifted the phone receiver to her other ear just to give her neck a chance to uncramp. “But tempting as it is, I can’t do what you ask.”

  “Why not? Look, I know we haven’t met, but you’ve got to know I’m not a crackpot and I usually know my stuff. You backed me up on the scroll and it seems to have been proven right. This is the next step now. I’m closer than anybody has been in thousands of years, presumably, to finding the entire Brazen Serpent.”

  “Yes, yes, Professor Murphy. That’s all very well and good, but I’m a philologist for the Parchments of Freedom Foundation, not a starry-eyed, glory-seeking archaeologist, and I’ve got a deskful of my own research I’m behind in. Actually”—she craned her neck to look around her—“it’s more like an office full of things I should have finished months ago.”

  “Please, Isis. Believe me, I don’t want to ask for your help, but I can’t wait on this—and I also hate to admit that I’m just not smart enough to figure this out and you are.”

  Isis sighed, but, to her surprise, her lips were forming a smile. “Oh, Professor Murphy, I can see how you bull your way to all these breakthroughs. You are skilled in the ancient art of flattery.”

  “I am a licensed professional. Will you help me, please?”

  “Look, Murphy. Here’s what I’m willing to do. I have to be here for foundation review meetings for the next few days, and you’re a busy man as well. However, the good thing about the foundation is that resources are generally not in short supply. Which is why I need to be here for our review meetings, since you are not the only skilled practitioner of necessary flattery. But I will dispatch my very able, very trustworthy secretary, Fiona, on our foundation jet to pick up your Serpent’s tail and bring it to me.”

  “Whoa! That’s very extravagant, but I can’t let this out of my hands. How can I be sure it would be safe?”

  “Murphy, you’re there in what I’m sure is a quaint, perfect-little-tiny-town school and I’m sitting here in the world’s largest privately funded historical research center with state-of-the-art systems and security. Who are you kidding?”

  Once again, Murphy knew when he was bested. “Point taken, Isis. Before I scurry off with my tail between my legs and lick my wounded small-town pride, let me just say thank you, the Serpent’s tail is yours for as long as you need, and when can Fiona be here?”

  Murphy surprised Laura in her office. He was holding a small box.

  “Murph, what are you doing here? Did that mean old dean send you here for detention again?”

  “Sweetheart, I was sitting and moping in my lab because I had to call Isis McDonald to take the Serpent’s tail because I’m clearly not smart enough to figure it out. Then I realized I was still good for something, so I dug this out and fixed it up. I’ve been meaning to give it to you ever since we got back from Samaria.”

  He handed the box over to Laura. She looked as eager as a five-year-old on Christmas morning as she ripped the lid off. “Oh, Murph, it’s the cross formed by those root branches in the cave. I was wondering where it went.”

  She held up the now-polished wood to admire it. It was approximately an inch and a half long and a half inch wide. Murphy had drilled a tiny hole through the top, then burnished the finish with a few drops of oil, which brought out the grain and enhanced the color of the wood. At the meeting point was a rounded burl from which the four tendrils of root that formed the cross had grown. It shone like a hardwood gemstone.

  “I’ve strung it on my very best leather moccasin lace. No expense has been spared to keep you in jewelry befitting your status, m’lady.” He bowed befo
re her.

  Laura bent down and hugged him hard. “Arise, you noble lad. Your queen has greater things in store for you. Come, take me home, let me show you why it is good to be the king.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  PAUL WALLACH WATCHED as Shari dipped a spoon into the sauce. She took a quick catlike sip, gave a little nod as if to say Not bad, if I do say so myself, and went back to stirring the pasta. In the cramped kitchen, the steam made her look flushed, as if she’d been running and hadn’t had time to change. To him the sheen of perspiration somehow made her look even more beautiful.

  She turned and caught his abstracted gaze. “Hey.” She frowned. “You’re supposed to be watching closely. How long did I say the pasta had to cook?”

  “Five minutes?” he offered. “No—fifteen.”

  Her frown stayed in place and her grip on the spoon tightened.

  “Oh, I know,” he said. “Trick question. Until it’s, you know, whatever the word is—al dente.”

  She brushed a damp strand of dark hair from her forehead and turned back to the steaming pots. “Hmm. I don’t think you’ve been listening to a word I’ve been saying, Paul Wallach. I mean, you’re the one who said he lived on cans of tuna and takeout pizzas and wouldn’t it be great to learn how to cook a meal once in a while that actually tasted of something. I know this isn’t exactly duck à l’orange or anything, but you could show a little more appreciation.”

  He quickly put his glass of Coke down on the counter and adopted a sincere expression. “I do appreciate it, Shari, I really do. And it smells incredible. It’s just that I find it hard to concentrate on things that don’t really interest me—”

  “You’ll be interested enough in eating it, I bet,” she interrupted.