Babylon Rising Read online

  Probably no more than one hundred feet across the shaft from where he stood, high over his head, there was an object tumbling about miraculously in the void. The stream of light brought out a dull shine on what appeared to be a fist-sized lump of metal rolling about in midair. Just the right size, Murphy guessed, to be the head of the Brazen Serpent.

  Murphy didn’t know how long he just stood there, transfixed by the sight of the Serpent’s head, watching it dancing in air as it had been, unobserved, for thousands of years, but it seemed impossible to tear his gaze away. He knew he would never see anything so extraordinary as long as he lived.

  As if his mind were being read, a voice shattered his reverie.

  “A magnificent sight, Murphy. But you must ask yourself: Will it be your last?”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  MURPHY LOOKED PAST the floating Serpent’s head through the surrounding gloom to see where the voice had come from. On the opposite ledge he could barely see the outline of a human figure.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Talon. I told it to your wife, but I guess she never got to share it with you.”

  Finally the evil that struck down Laura had a name and a face. Every fiber of Murphy’s being was screaming for revenge, and if anger alone could have powered him, be would have leaped the void in one bound and gone for this Talon’s throat. Instead, he tried to control his rage to focus on the standoff before him.

  “You monster. So, I was right. You are the same man who is responsible for all of the horrors of the recent weeks.”

  “Yes, who would have thought an archaeologist would see this much action. You cover a lot of ground, Murphy, I’ll give you that, but with enough money and power against you, there are no secrets, yours or the ancients’, that can’t be revealed.”

  “What do you want with the Serpent? How can it be worth murdering for?”

  “I don’t have to reveal my secrets to you, Murphy. All you need to know is that thanks to you, I will have the Serpent’s head and then circle back to the American University, where you’ve locked up the middle piece.”

  “You are an awfully confident monster, Talon, I see that. But it doesn’t look like you’re any closer to grabbing the Serpent’s head than I am over here. All the modern money and power you brag about doesn’t look like it’s any match for a clever ancient mind and a little wind.”

  Talon laughed. “That, Professor, is where you are wrong. It looks like you’re the one who has no way to get out in the middle to grab the head, whereas I have a solution that is almost older than the pyramid itself.”

  Murphy saw a dark flutter of movement, and for a moment it was as if two objects were being tossed in the air in the center of the shaft. One was the head of the Serpent, the other was actually moving on its own, fighting the wind.

  A bird, he thought. Of course. A falcon. Despite himself, Murphy had to concede that Talon had come up with an ingenious method for plucking the Serpent’s head from out of the vortex.

  Even in the uncertain light of the pyramid’s interior, Murphy could see what a magnificent creature the falcon was. He could see the chestnut sheen of its wings, the dappled cream of its breast. A kestrel. Its ancient name, the windhover, came into his mind as he watched it miraculously keeping in place a few feet from the vortex’s grip. She is used to riding updrafts and crosscurrents, Murphy thought, but nothing like this. She must feel as if she’s been caught in a blizzard. But she’s learning fast. A couple of more passes and she’ll have it.

  Without thinking, he slid his bow out of its case and notched an arrow.

  He zeroed in on the falcon, which was now only a few feet from the floating head. Feeling his willpower drain, Murphy shifted his bow toward the target he could not resist. Talon. He drew the string back until every molecule of the bow was begging for release. With just a loosening of his fingers an arrow would streak across the space between them and through Talon’s black heart.

  Vengeance is mine.

  Laura’s killer just stood there. Was it Murphy’s imagination, or was Talon smiling? He knows I’ve got him in my sights, Murphy thought. Does he think I won’t do it? He felt his whole body quiver with the effort of keeping the arrow from loosing itself as if it had a mind of its own.

  Time seemed to stop as he waited to see what his mind would do. The chamber suddenly echoed to the sound of Talon clapping his hands.

  “Come on, Murphy. Do it! What’s holding you back? It’s just the two of us now. Your precious God can’t see you! Do it!”

  Murphy felt his bow finger trembling. He couldn’t hold it much longer.

  He swung the bow up and to his left and fired.

  Despite the winds, the arrow hit its target. The falcon.

  Murphy could not take another man’s life. Even the monster who had killed Laura. He also realized in the final second that Talon had been baiting him to distract his attention from the bird, who had grabbed hold of the Serpent’s head.

  And he could not let the monster Talon get the Serpent’s head.

  The kestrel plunged into the solid stream of air, talons extended. She gripped the head by the thin curve of bronze that would connect it to the middle piece and beat her wings furiously to turn toward Talon.

  Murphy’s arrow caught the falcon on the very edge of its left wing. With a horrible screech that echoed throughout the shaft, the Serpent’s head was knocked out of the bird’s grip. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, as if it had forever renounced the pull of gravity, then plummeted down into the dark. Somehow, having left the particular pull of its centuries-old rotations, the head was now free to plummet into the void. The wounded kestrel was falling almost as quickly.

  Murphy watched it fall. It had almost been close enough for him to reach out and touch it. Now the Serpent could never be made whole again.

  He wheeled back in Talon’s direction, but the shadows had swallowed him.

  Then he felt a sharp pain dig into the back of his neck and heard an even louder bloodcurdling squawk. It was a second bird. Murphy was able to recover in time to knock it away, and then it seemed distracted by the falling of the first falcon and flew off, perhaps to help it.

  Murphy watched it fly away clutching in its claw Laura’s cross, which it had ripped from around his neck.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  THE CLIMB BACK through the air shaft had the quality of a nightmare. Every inch seemed to take forever as Murphy imagined Isis and Jassim being butchered by the killer he had had in his sights. The thought tormented him as he forced his bruised and bleeding body through the shaft: I could have stopped him. I could have stopped him.

  When he finally scrambled out and tumbled onto the sand, he couldn’t see anything—the sunlight had temporarily blinded him. Then he felt arms around him, pulling him to his feet, and he could hear their excited voices. They were okay.

  Back in the Land Rover, in between gulps from a bottle of mineral water, Murphy told them what had happened inside the pyramid.

  “It is a good thing I know you are a man of limited imagination,” said Jassim, rolling his eyes, “or I would be sure you had made it all up. A bird, you say, trained to snatch the head out of the air where it had been spinning for eons! Even now I am not sure I believe it.”

  “Just keep your eye out for another vehicle,” Murphy said. “He must have approached the pyramid from the other side.”

  “How did he know we were here? That’s what I don’t understand,” said Isis.

  Murphy shook his head. “Beats me.” He closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted. “I failed,” he said more to himself than anyone else. “I thought that’s what God wanted me to do. Find the Serpent. That was my task.”

  Isis was smiling her Sphinx smile. “What makes you think you failed?”

  Murphy pounded his fist against the window. “I lost the head of the Serpent. It’s at the bottom of the pyramid by now. No one will ever find it there.”

  “Maybe that’s for the best,” Isis said.
“I think the Serpent—every bit of it—was nothing but evil. If God had a task for you, perhaps it was just to find the inscription. Dakkuri’s final message.”

  “Well, guess what, that’s at the bottom of the pyramid, too, in case you hadn’t figured it out.”

  Isis ignored his sarcastic tone. “Not necessarily.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Crawler’s camera was focused on the head for two or three minutes. The images may not be crystal clear, but the way it was moving in space, we’ll certainly have it from every angle. If Jassim’s lab has half the equipment he claims, we can reconstruct and enhance each frame. Perhaps we’ll be able to put together a composite image—enough to read the cuneiforms anyway.”

  “Of course,” agreed Jassim. “It is quite possible.”

  Murphy spent the trip back to the American University replaying the sequence of events inside the pyramid. He’d been about to kill Talon. He had no recollection of changing his mind. He didn’t even remember aiming at the falcon—it just happened, as if the bow were aiming him, not the other way around.

  That was always how a perfect shot felt. As if it were divinely inspired. Well, maybe it was, he thought.

  Jassim was as impatient as Isis to see what the Crawler’s tapes would reveal and kept the accelerator to the floor, even when the morning rush hour traffic started congealing around them. Isis kept her hands pressed together in her lap and her eyes closed. When they finally arrived in front of the elegant stucco building that housed Jassim’s lab, he insisted on making everything ready while they showered and, in Murphy’s case, changed the dressing on his knife wound as well as applying Band-Aids to his various cuts and scrapes.

  Half an hour later they were hunched over a computer screen as Jassim’s long fingers flew over the keys. After a few moments a grainy image of the Serpent’s head appeared, glinting faintly in the murky light as it revolved on its own axis. “To think it had been there for two and a half thousand years”—he made a clucking sound—“and now—poof—gone.”

  “We got the snapshots to show the folks back home, that’s what counts,” Murphy said.

  “But they don’t show anything. Not yet,” Isis chided. “Move it forward—slowly.”

  Jassim advanced the film frame by digital frame until the underside of the head started to come into view. “Stop it there!” Isis commanded, and Murphy couldn’t help remembering the effect she’d had on the idol worshipers in the sewers. “Give me as much magnification as you can.”

  Slowly the image grew until it filled the screen. Then, as Jassim magnified it still further, the outline was lost and all they could see was a scarred and pitted landscape of bronze, like the surface of a distant yellow moon.

  Jassim shook his head. “That’s about as much as—”

  “There!” Isis shrieked.

  Murphy leaned closer. She was right. What had seemed moments before like the random scratches and fissures of any weather-beaten piece of metal suddenly took on the orderly form of written characters: the distinctive cuneiform etchings of Dakkuri.

  Jassim prepared to print the image. “I expect it is something else I will find impossible to believe,” he said, “but perhaps now is the time to tell me what this is all about.”

  Murphy put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Wait until Isis has figured out what it means. Then I promise I’ll tell you everything.”

  Jassim nodded as Isis practically tore the printout from the machine. None of them moved. However long it took, they weren’t going anywhere.

  “At least it’s short,” she said after a while. “I suppose he thought if the reader had made it this far, there was no point playing games anymore.”

  Her eyes darted back and forth across the piece of paper, and Murphy felt he could almost hear her brain working. Her lips moved silently, mouthing the words over and over until they made sense. Then she placed the sheet carefully down on the desk.

  “Well?” Jassim seemed even more agitated than Murphy, who had stopped breathing.

  She took a moment to compose herself, and began. “It starts with a ritual exhortation, as usual: The servants of the snake have kept this secret. Honor to them and power hereafter.”

  She coughed. “Then comes the important bit.

  “Babylon’s great towers are dust, the wind blows them where it pleases.

  “But find the head and the body shall rise after, casting its shadow again over all the earth.

  “It is of gold and marks a king, the most powerful.

  “In Marduk’s dwelling shall you find it.

  “O faithful servant of the dark, be commanded to raise it up.

  “From the dust Babylon shall be raised up also to rule again.”

  The silence dragged on, and Isis said, “That’s it.”

  “It’s enough,” said Murphy quietly.

  “But what does it mean?” asked Jassim.

  “It means Babylon will rise again. At least, it will if the wrong people get hold of the Golden Head.”

  Isis looked at him thoughtfully, but Jassim was out of his chair, wringing his hands in frustration. “You’re talking in riddles, Murphy. How can Babylon rise again? What is this Golden Head? I thought you were looking for—and just lost—the head of the bronze Serpent.”

  “I’m sorry, Jassim. Let me try to explain. According to Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the Babylonian empire was the most powerful the world would ever know. That power was symbolized by the Golden Head of the statue in the dream—the one he then had built. When Nebuchadnezzar saw the error of his ways, he had the statue destroyed. But I’m betting that the head was buried somewhere by the people who worshiped the Brazen Serpent.”

  “But why? If they didn’t want to destroy it, why not melt it down? The gold must have been worth an unbelievable fortune.”

  “I’m pretty sure because they believed that if they preserved the head, then one day the right person would find it, and Babylon would rise up again.”

  Jassim rubbed his eyes as if he were checking he wasn’t dreaming. “And what does this mean: Babylon will rise up? The old city will be rebuilt?”

  “Not just that,” Murphy said. “It means the power of Babylon will be rebuilt too. This time, as an evil power dominating the world.”

  Jassim turned to Isis. “I would like to know what you think of all this, Dr. McDonald. You are a sensible person, like myself, I think. Do you really believe that an evil cult hid Nebuchadnezzar’s Golden Head for two and a half thousand years, waiting for their chance to take over the world?”

  Isis took her time to answer. “I’m not sure. My view of what’s possible, what’s real and what isn’t, has changed recently. You see, I think I’ve seen evil at work now—genuine pure evil. Innocent people killed for a piece of brass.” Her eyes caught Murphy’s for a second. “I don’t know what to believe about the Golden Head, the return of Babylon, all that. All I know is I’m afraid. More afraid than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  Jassim nodded solemnly, then turned to Murphy. “I am like Dr. McDonald. I do not know what to believe. But just to be on the safe side, I think it might be a good idea to find this Golden Head before anyone else does.”

  “I’ll second that,” Murphy said.

  “So, where do you suppose Marduk’s dwelling is?”

  “That’s an easy one,” Isis said. “The temple of Marduk was in Babylon.”

  “So you’re saying…”

  Murphy nodded. “Exactly. For this one, I’m going to have to call in everybody: the Parchments of Freedom Foundation, the American University, and my friend Levi, to pull every string in the region. We’ve got to get into Iraq.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  “THE HANGING GARDENS of Babylon,” Isis said dreamily, stirring her iced tea. “I can’t think of five more mysterious and seductive words. They sound so familiar—but nobody actually knows what they looked like.”

  Murphy watched her catlike sips. “Are
you sure about that? You don’t have a memory of walking through them two and a half thousand years ago?”

  Isis took out a piece of ice and threw it at him. “Stop that.”

  Jassim frowned. He had chosen the restaurant because it was quiet and it was possible to find a table in an alcove where you could talk without being overheard. He was in no mood for games. “So that is where the temple of Marduk is located? In the Hanging Gardens?”

  “Or above them. We won’t really know until we get there,” Murphy said.

  “You make it sound so simple. Surely it is not possible to turn up at the site and just start digging. So many of Iraq’s antiquities have already been looted.”

  “That’s the point, Jassim. The best place for Iraq’s ancient treasures right now is a museum someplace far away. When law and order have been restored, and Iraq’s own museums are up and running again, then everything can be returned and the Iraqi people will be able to appreciate their ancient heritage without worrying that some hoodlum is going to take it and put it on the open market.”

  Jassim looked skeptical. “It is hard to believe that something so big—What did you tell me? Fifteen feet tall, six or seven in diameter?—could have evaded the looters. Either the ones who came after the war or the ones who were running the country for thirty years. I think perhaps it was melted down and turned into gold faucets for Saddam’s bathrooms a long time ago.”

  “That’s a lot of faucets,” Murphy said.

  “He had a lot of bathrooms.”

  Murphy sipped his water thoughtfully. “Dakkuri has proved to be pretty smart so far. He managed to hide a Biblical artifact so no one would find it until… the time was right. I’m betting he hid the head pretty well too.”

  “And now the time is right to find it?”

  “I’m not sure there will ever be a right time to find a thing like that. But anytime is the right time to stop the wrong people from getting their hands on it.”