Babylon Rising Read online

  Isis checked her watch and picked her backpack up from the floor. “Then, let’s get a move on. Our plane leaves in two hours.”

  Jassim put a hand on her arm. “Wait just a minute, please, Dr. McDonald.”

  “Isis. Please.” It was odd, but now that her goddesses no longer seemed so real to her, she felt more comfortable with her name. “What is it, Jassim?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “You, Murphy, are a brave man. Or perhaps just foolhardy—but no matter. Perhaps it is all the same. And you, Isis, you have endured some truly terrifying experiences with an extraordinary fortitude. I, on the other hand, am no kind of hero. The people who want to get hold of the Golden Head are clearly very powerful and utterly ruthless. It is not a combination I like.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, Jassim,” Murphy said. “And if you don’t feel comfortable coming with us to Iraq, I wouldn’t blame you. I’ll admit it would make our job harder not having you around to help with the logistics. But we could manage. However, two things make me think we won’t be coming up against the likes of our birdman again. First, he never got to see the inscription on the Serpent’s head, and you destroyed the film and deleted everything on the computer. We’re the only three people who know where the Golden Head is.”

  “I wish I shared your confidence.” Jassim looked nervously around the restaurant. “This terrible man, this Talon, seems to have been a step behind you every inch of the way, if you don’t mind my saying so. How can we be sure he isn’t somehow listening in to our conversation at this very moment?”

  “Maybe he is,” Murphy admitted. “But here’s the second thing. We’re not going to be on our own when we get to the temple of Marduk. Right now, a unit of U.S. Marines is securing the site.”

  Jassim stroked his chin. “Well, I hope they have orders to shoot on sight any suspicious characters—and any suspicious birds of prey, for that matter.”

  “I’m sure they do, Jassim. So, are you in?”

  “I believe I am making a very foolish decision,” he sighed. “But I think if you did find the head and I was not there to share the greatest archaeological discovery of modern times, I would have to kill myself anyway. So, yes, I am in.”

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  AS THE LAND CRUISER bumped its way slowly through the scattered ruins of the ancient city, Isis had to pinch herself to check that she wasn’t dreaming. Since the loving presence of her father had departed, she’d lived her life in hiding. Her academic studies had been a way of avoiding all the things in life that scared her, and her little office buried at the Foundation was really a kind of bunker from which she had successfully kept the outside world at bay.

  Until Michael Murphy had turned up in her life, that is.

  Now, in the space of a few short days, she’d been exposed to danger, to fear, and to death. She’d ventured quite literally into the unknown. She’d journeyed through the dark underground heart of a medieval city She’d seen the inside of a pyramid. And now she was about to walk on the ground of Babylon itself.

  On the walls flanking the famed Ishtar Gate, fierce dragons met her wide-eyed gaze, survivors of three thousand years of ram, wind, and sandstorms. But her heart didn’t quite leap the way she’d expected. Perhaps after a lifetime of studying the multifarious gods and goddesses that men had worshiped through the ages, she had finally caught a glimpse of something greater.

  “There they are.” Murphy was pointing to a nearby hillside, where crumbling walls still rose from the stepped terraces of Queen Amytis’s original design. At the top, the temple of Marduk was marked by a lonely pinnacle of sandstone.

  As Jassim had predicted, the site looked as if the jackals had long ago picked it clean. Whole sections of the hillside had collapsed, covering what had once been the remains of ancient doorways and staircases with earth and rubble. Any remaining segments of stone with any sort of engraving or design had been taken, from hand-sized fragments to actual pillars.

  Murphy was surveying the devastation when a tanned marine officer in aviator shades trotted up the hillside to introduce himself. “Colonel Davis, U.S. Marines. You must be Professor Murphy.”

  Murphy submitted to a bone-crunching handshake. “It’s good to see you, Colonel.” For the first time, he noticed the handful of soldiers in desert camouflage forming a loose perimeter around the hillside. “And your men.”

  “Our pleasure. Anything we can do, just holler.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” Murphy admitted. “We need to see what’s under the rubble. We’re looking for some sort of underground chamber.”

  The colonel grinned. “Figured you might be. So I did a little digging around when we got here. Seems the fellas who cleaned this place out left a couple of items they couldn’t find a use for on the black market.”

  Murphy brightened. “Such as?”

  “How would a sonar sled suit you?”

  Murphy broke out laughing. “That would suit me just fine, Colonel.”

  Half an hour later Murphy and Jassim were dragging the sled—a lightweight plastic oblong the size of a child’s mattress—slowly across the rockslide while Isis watched the images forming on Murphy’s laptop computer screen a few yards away.

  So far all she’d seen were the shadowy outlines of collapsed chambers and empty vaults. Then her attention was taken by the remarkable symmetry of a pair of dark parallel lines on the screen. “Hold on! Can you back it up a little?”

  Murphy and Jassim steered the sled in a crisscross pattern over the rocks. There was no mistaking them now. Some sort of man-made object was down there, perhaps a dozen feet beneath the surface. And it wasn’t small.

  Murphy and Jassim walked over and looked at the screen. Jassim nodded. “A set of doors, perhaps? An entrance of some kind, anyway.”

  “But how are we going to get to it?” Isis asked.

  Colonel Davis had been standing to one side, observing her at work. “Pardon me, ma’am, but would a bulldozer help?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he marched off, and a few minutes later they heard the groaning of the bulldozer’s engine as it crested the hill. It pulled up a few feet from where Murphy and Jassim had been working the sled. Murphy gave the thumbs-up and the bulldozer started to heave the rubble aside. Its first pass just seemed to skim the surface, but the fresh-faced marine perched in the bulldozer’s cab soon warmed to his work and after twenty minutes Murphy gave the signal to stop.

  He walked over to the area of newly excavated earth, then turned to Colonel Davis. “Now all we need is a few shovels.”

  Davis saluted smartly. “Coming right up. And I’ve got twenty men with plenty of experience digging holes, if you need ’em.”

  By the time they’d dug down to a depth of about ten feet, Murphy and Jassim were getting dizzy with the effort, but the half-dozen marines alongside them hadn’t even broken a sweat. “Whoa, that sounded like metal,” one of them said as his shovel bounced off something hard. On their hands and knees they brushed the last of the loose earth away and then stood aside.

  Joined by Isis, Murphy and Jassim looked down on a huge set of bronze doors. Encrusted with mineral deposits and a patina of discoloring sediment, the sculpted panels still had the power to astonish, as images of Nebuchadnezzar’s many conquests came into focus after an interval of three thousand years. And there, towering above even the great Nebuchadnezzar, was the image of Marduk, the warrior-god.

  For moments, nobody spoke. Then Jassim said, “I’d say we were in the place where Marduk dwells, all right. Shall we go in?”

  The nearly horizontal doors looked as if they had been sealed for all time, and even if the combined manpower of all present could pry them apart, they had no way of knowing whether there was anything more than earth behind them. The whole structure had long ago shifted from the vertical, perhaps in one of the frequent earthquakes the region was subject to, and it was possible the doors opened onto nothing.

  Under Murphy’s direction, three marines stood
on one of the doors and attempted to lever the other one open with their shovels. Soon even they were sweating, and Murphy began to suspect the doors had been cunningly designed to suggest a chamber beyond that didn’t in fact exist.

  Then suddenly there was a wrenching sound and a shovel flew out of one of the soldier’s hands as a crack appeared and a rush of stale air escaped from below. Grabbing hold of the door’s edge, they heaved, and it slowly swung upward with a groaning of ancient hinges.

  Holding on to one of the doors, Murphy eased himself down into the blackness, his legs hanging free in the empty space. So, the doors did open onto something. The fetid air was almost unbearable now, an acrid stench of decay more powerful than anything he’d ever experienced. He felt a wave of nausea and then his chest started heaving as his lungs convulsed. He heard Isis scream as his fingers slipped off the edge of the door, and then he was tumbling downward.

  The moment seemed to stretch out, and Murphy thought of drowning men whose whole lives flash past them in a split second. Then a jarring impact sent a lightning pulse of pain shuddering through his legs. Before he could cry out, his head smashed against something hard and unyielding, and a black cloud ballooned inside his head, blotting everything out.

  When he came to, he could hear voices from above. For a moment it was just noise, then the sounds turned back into words again and he understood it was Isis and Jassim asking if he was all right. He heard the second door being hauled back.

  “I’m okay,” he managed to say, hauling himself onto his hands and knees. Another wave of coughing seized him as more of the black air forced itself into his heaving lungs and he felt his eyes stinging with tears. He waited until the fit had passed, then wiped his face with the back of his hand. His head was ringing, but the pain in his legs had subsided to a steady throbbing. He opened his eyes.

  Then closed them again as his head filled with an agonizing brightness. The blow on the head, he thought. I’ve blinded myself. Fighting down a wave of panic, he steadied his breathing and squinted through half-open lids. The golden light was still overwhelming, but he forced himself to keep his eyes open and gradually the fierce haze that filled his field of vision resolved itself into a solid object.

  He was looking into the iris of a huge golden eye.

  Still on his hands and knees, he shuffled backward in the dirt until the rest of the object came into focus. At first the powerful ridges and curving lines of sculpted metal didn’t make any sense—like the jumbled features of a giant Picasso. Then his perspective adjusted to its horizontal position and the face of Nebuchadnezzar glared at him across a chasm of two and a half thousand years.

  Murphy shuffled back farther until he leaned against the wall of earth and looked into the face of the king. How faithfully the sculptor had managed to capture the king’s features he had no way of knowing, but the sculpture definitely had an unnerving realism. The great eyes seemed to bore straight through Murphy like lasers, and the sneer of command etched into the huge mouth seemed to be saying, Raise me up, you dog! I have lain in the dust long enough!

  He didn’t know how long he had been crouching there, mesmerized by the imperious stare of the long-dead king, before he heard the thud of boots alongside him and the sound of excited voices raised in wonder and awe. Then strong hands hauled him upright and he closed his eyes again, grateful not to have to look anymore into the face of evil.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  SHARI TUGGED AT Paul’s hand. It was still weak from his long hospital stay.

  “Hey,” he protested, “the plaster came off only yesterday. You’re going to pull it out of its socket.”

  “Stop fussing,” she said. “Dr. Keller said too much sympathy wouldn’t be good for you. It would impede the healing process. Look—there he is!”

  He had let her drag him all the way to Washington, D.C., to wait at the airstrip where the Parchments of Freedom Foundation had arranged for the cargo plane to land. They had not arranged for the vast array of cameras and reporters, but it was hard to keep the arrival of such a spectacular artifact from the press.

  When the plane touched down, started waving frantically before Michael Murphy came bounding down the steps. “Professor Murphy!”

  He turned with a quizzical expression, then walked over, beaming. “It’s okay, Officer. You can let these two through. They’ve earned it.”

  The guard grudgingly stepped aside and Murphy and hugged. Paul could feel the wordless communication passing between them.

  They pulled apart and said, “I can’t believe you did it. I can’t believe it’s really here. In the States!”

  Murphy grinned. “It wasn’t easy. We had to persuade a lot of people it was the right thing to do. I couldn’t have done it without my friends here”—he indicated a petite redhead with elfin features and an elegant, dark-complexioned man in a cream suit who were talking animatedly to the trucking crew—“putting the weight of the Parchments of Freedom Foundation and the American University of Cairo behind it. You know me, I’m not very good at playing nice with bureaucrats.”

  “But you did it!” said again.

  “I even got some behind-the-scenes help from a very special place, from someone who had already helped us tremendously.” Murphy pulled a copy of a letter from the pocket of his jacket. “Wait till you read this, guys. As momentous as the arrival of the Golden Head is today, this is even greater reason for celebration. This letter was waiting for me when I got to the plane. Listen.

  “My dear Professor Murphy—

  “Thank you for honoring my home with your visit, and for allowing me to help you with your search for what I now know was the Brazen Serpent, which has in turn led you to the Golden Head of Nebuchadnezzar. I am doubly honored to have played some small part in arranging for the exit for its temporary home in your charge.

  “But most of all, thank you for taking the time to explain to me so clearly the real reason why Christianity is the one true path to God.

  “After you went to bed that night, I sat alone in my room contemplating what you had told me about the nature of God. For the first time, I understood that Jesus Christ had died for my sins and for the sins of the world. He then rose from the dead.

  “That night, I received Him by faith, as you had urged, and I invited Him into my life.

  “If I do not see you again in this life, I certainly will see you in the next, in heaven.

  “Sincerely,

  “Sheikh Umar al-Khaliq”

  Shari broke out into a wide smile. “Oh, Professor Murphy, that has got to be such a great feeling, to know that you helped this sheikh in his search.”

  Murphy hugged her and noticed Paul again. He gripped his hand. “Hey, it’s good to see you, Paul. You’re looking well. And I understand you have a new scholarship from the Barrington folks. I trust that will allow you to really bear down and find some course of study that excites you more than business.”

  “Yes, sir. Shari here would not have let me agree to it otherwise. She’s been a great help.” He blushed, and poked him hard in the ribs.

  “Go easy on him, Shari,” Murphy said. “He’s still a young man. It will take a while before he realizes he’s got to turn most of his life decisions over to God and a good woman, in that order.”

  She wagged a finger. “Professor Murphy!”

  The lanky figure of Dean Fallworth sidled out of the hangar and blocked Murphy’s path. Before he could react, Dean Fallworth grabbed his hand and started pumping it enthusiastically.

  “Murphy—great to have you back. The faculty board and I, we’re all tremendously proud of what you’ve achieved for the university. This is a proud day indeed for Preston, with one of our finest in the news.” A sheepish look briefly supplanted his huckster’s grin, and he lowered his voice so only Murphy could hear. “I hope we can put our little misunderstanding behind us. My comments on that TV interview were taken totally out of context, you know. In fact, I’m considering a formal complaint against BNN and that awful r
eporter. She practically put the words into my mouth.”

  Murphy really couldn’t think of anything to say. He would settle his account with Fallworth when the time came. Right now he was simply relieved that his position at the university was secure. When all the fuss and publicity died down, he’d be able to get back to his real job of inspiring his students. He knew that was what Laura would have wanted him to do.

  He gave Fallworth a look to let him know he wasn’t going to pick a fight now, but he wasn’t necessarily letting him off the hook either. “Later, Dean.” He brushed past him, leaving Fallworth standing, his fixed smile holding him in place.

  “Isis, Jassim. I want you to meet some good friends and students of mine, Nelson and Paul Wallach.”

  Jassim held his hand out while Isis delivered some last-minute instructions to one of the crew preparing to open the crate. “The pleasure is all mine,” he said. “I have heard many good things about you both. Preston University is truly fortunate to have such outstanding students of archaeology—especially considering the, shall we say, unconventional habits of your professor.” He indicated Murphy with a wink.

  Isis joined them. “Take no notice of Jassim. He’s just making the most of being in the limelight. He thinks maybe some bigwig from the Discovery Channel is going to give him a series on the secrets of the pyramids.”

  “And why not?” said Jassim, doing his best to look offended. “I am an excellent communicator, I think, and I have the sort of face the camera likes. Miss Nelson, what do you say?”

  “I’d tune in,” she said, laughing. “After everything you two have done to help Murphy find the Golden Head, it’s the least I could do.”

  Murphy coughed. “Speaking of which, let’s start unloading.”

  It took the best part of an hour to unload the crate from the cargo bay and set it on a huge flatbed truck. Now the crate stood alone in the center of the truck like an enormous piece of modern art.