Babylon Rising Page 8

  “But I’m beginning to think this Serpent is rather hard to get rid of. Nobody who possessed it ever wanted to just melt it down and recast it.”

  Murphy bolted out of his chair. “Yes! That’s it! The reason for the scroll. Dakkuri isn’t taking the trouble to write all this down just to let people know he’s been a naughty Serpent-worshiper. No. He made it look as if he broke it again and got rid of it, as ordered by Nebuchadnezzar. He wasn’t stupid. But he hid the three pieces, and that’s what he’s telling us in this scroll, isn’t it, Dr. McDonald?”

  “Better than that, Mr. Murphy. I believe what Dakkuri has written here is not just that he hid the pieces, but the beginnings of how to find them.”

  Murphy sank back in his chair as if he had been deflated by her last comment. “What do you mean, ‘the beginnings of how to find them’?”

  “The last part of the scroll is really in two parts. Part one continues Dakkuri’s report of events. It looks like he picked three of his acolytes to scatter the Serpent pieces far and wide within the Babylonian empire.”

  “But does he tell us where they went to hide the pieces?”

  Isis was getting good at talking past Murphy’s interruptions. “That’s the second part of the end of the scroll. It looks like Dakkuri was setting up a kind of high priest’s scavenger hunt for the Serpent pieces, and the last lines are a key for where to find the first piece. Then it looks like he’s indicating that once you find the first piece, that will lead to the rest of the Serpent.”

  Murphy stared at the blow-up of the scroll in front of him. “And based on this pattern here, the curve with the ridges at the bottom, this first piece must be the tail, right?”

  “The tail of the Serpent gets my vote.”

  “Dakkuri sure went to a lot of effort to save this Serpent, yet made certain that it would be awfully hard for somebody to find the pieces.”

  Isis found talking to Murphy brought into full play her twin drives of scholarship and competitiveness with smart men. “Not hard for somebody smart enough to work out his clues.”

  Murphy felt every archaeologist’s bone in his body starting to quiver with excitement. “This means that we can find the Brazen Serpent made by Moses! Better still, if we do find the Serpent based on this scroll, it proves that it was still in existence during Daniel’s time!”

  A particularly unladylike laugh escaped Isis’s mouth before she could stop herself. “Forget this ‘we’ business, Mr. Murphy. I can barely find things in my own office. I don’t go on expeditions. However, you are free to charge off in search of the first Serpent piece. Nothing could be simpler. So long as you know the location of the Horns of the Ox.”

  TWELVE

  HORNS OF THE OX.

  Horns of the Ox.

  Murphy kept replaying the phrase in his mind and marveled at the seeming ease with which Isis McDonald had come up with that site from the symbols at the very end of the scroll. As hard as he had stared at those same symbols, he had not come close to making that connection.

  Of course, now that she had given him her interpretation, it seemed crystal clear. With more than a bit of both his professional and male pride rebounding, Murphy did note that here was where his field experience could put Dr. McDonald’s bookish linguistic skills into operation.

  The Horns of the Ox would have to refer to a fairly prominent landmark reasonably close to the old Babylon. Dakkuri probably would have chosen a natural landmark as opposed to a man-made one, because he could not have known how long it would be before this Serpent piece would be dug up.

  For a few hours he pored over his map texts, but he realized that nobody knew the ancient landscapes better than his own wife. Her studies of ancient cities gave her an encyclopedic knowledge that he now needed.

  Desperately.

  Murphy finally tracked Laura down in the faculty lounge. “Honey, you’ve got to get out all your books and maps. I think I’ve found the location of the Serpent.”

  “Murphy, really, you figured out where the Serpent is?” Instantly, Laura shed her counselor’s cloak and was one hundred percent archaeologist.

  “Well, it was really Dr. McDonald. And it’s only the clue to where the first piece of the Serpent is hiding. According to her, the scroll is a kind of Chaldean treasure map, with the Serpent piece as the treasure.”

  “How exciting!” Laura said. “But where is it?”

  Murphy knelt down and showed Laura where he had written The Horns of the Ox and sketched out several rough pencil drawings of landscapes that could have inspired that nickname. They all had two high vertical points curved like horns, straddling a mound of land that could be seen as the ox’s skull. “This is about as far as I got. The truth is, I need your ancient-map-reading skills. It’s been a while since Dakkuri wrote down the directions, and I think the neighborhood’s changed a little in the meantime.”

  Laura laughed. She took Murphy by the hand and they started off down the hall.

  “I don’t know, Murphy,” she said, shaking her head. “Why is it men just can’t read maps?”

  As soon as he’d shown Laura the partial translation of the scroll, she had gone into overdrive. Within minutes their already cluttered living room had become a stormy sea of paper, as maps, reference books, and computer printouts had been laid out on the floor. Laura sat in the middle of the chaos, grabbing maps, throwing them aside, scribbling furious notes while she hummed a tuneless ditty to herself.

  As she put it, it wasn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack. It was like trying to reconstruct a two-thousand-year-old haystack, figuring out where each individual piece of hay had originally fit before being bumped around by a couple of millennia of winds, floods, and earthquakes—and then trying to find the needle.

  Dakkuri’s directions—assuming Murphy and Isis had correctly deciphered the scroll—to the final hiding place of the Serpent’s tail had been pretty specific. Laura gave a more refined interpretation to Horns of the Ox than Murphy’s crude sketches, saying it most likely referred to a particular geographical feature—probably a curved ridge ending in two sharp promontories. Maybe with a big hump of rock or a prominent hill lying behind it—the “body” of the ox. And the whole thing was likely to be visible from some distance, so the surrounding area might well have been relatively flat.

  But the landscape Dakkuri had had in his mind’s eye was ever-changing. Sea levels advanced and retreated, erosion moved hills around like pieces on a chessboard, the courses of rivers and waterways could be diverted, turning desert into pasture and vice versa. And on top of that, earthquakes could shake things up like a kaleidoscope, totally changing the picture from one year to the next.

  To see things the way Dakkuri had, it was necessary to reverse the process. To somehow look at the modern landscape and see the ancient one beneath.

  Such a task required an uncanny ability to read relief maps in three dimensions, a detailed knowledge of ancient geography, and an intuitive sense of geological transformation through time—not to mention a kind of sixth sense that you couldn’t put a name to.

  Luckily Laura was one of only a handful of people on the planet who had the full skill-set. As Murphy watched her pore over her papers, he marveled at these unique and powerful skills. Finding the tail of the Serpent at the Horns of the Ox was going to test those skills to the limit.

  THIRTEEN

  IT WAS THE second punch that Murphy regretted. No one was fighting him; he was hitting a heavy bag in the Preston University gym. The first punch, a sharp right jab, felt good to him, so good that be quickly snapped his left hand with a pop against the bag that sent a jolt from the boxing glove straight up his shoulder. The shoulder he had momentarily forgotten was still throbbing from the clawing by the lion.

  When Murphy dropped both arms to let the pain ricochet around his upper body, the burly figure next to him let out a gruff snarl. “Come on, Murphy, no coffee breaks. This isn’t government work, it’s supposed to be a workout.” Levi Abrams pushed
Murphy’s shoulder to get him started again. His left shoulder.

  Now Murphy had to double over to keep the pain from shooting around his torso. “Levi! Didn’t you hear me say I had to take it easy today with that shoulder?”

  “Suck it up, Murphy. Intensity. Focus. Do you remember nothing of your army time? Tram, tram, tram some more. That’s the only way to keep yourself from decaying like one of your desert mummies.”

  Murphy had to laugh as he looked over at the six-foot-five Israeli who was always so serious about their training sessions. Actually, Levi Abrams was serious about everything he did, as far as Murphy could tell. He had been recruited to the United States by the high-tech companies in the Raleigh-Durham area as a very highly paid security expert. So highly paid that he could afford to take an early retirement from the Mossad and relocate his family to Raleigh.

  However, Murphy was certain that Levi had not completely retired. He would never ask Levi directly, and Levi was far too serious and closemouthed to say anything, but he remained extremely well connected in the Mideast, in the Arab countries as well as in Israel. So much so that Levi had been able to help Murphy on a number of occasions with expediting papers to get himself and, more important, some objects out of the Mideast.

  For his part, though you would never guess it from his always stern expressions and no-nonsense conversations, Levi seemed to respect Murphy. Like Murphy, in his way Levi was a natural instructor, though if Murphy worked his students the way Levi worked him, the university would have him brought up on abuse charges.

  They had first met by eyeing each other before sunup on the running track two years earlier, when Levi was overseeing the security needs for a high-powered computer system being donated to the university by his current tech firm. Eventually, Levi offered to expand Murphy’s martial arts skills, which led to high-intensity training sessions whenever they could fit them in. With Levi, Murphy always pushed himself way beyond the effort he put in on his own, and he normally pushed himself hard. Right now, getting so carried away had brought on the pain that kept him doubled over.

  This morning Murphy would have skipped working out altogether to let his shoulder heal, but he had an urgent reason to get together with Levi. He decided to get to it while he was waiting for the pain to subside.

  “Levi, my friend, I have a major favor to ask. I’ve gotten a lead on something really huge, an archaeological find that I need to jump on.”

  “Another of your dusty knickknacks?” Levi’s respect for Murphy as a fighter did not exactly extend to Murphy’s choice of profession. “Let me guess, you need, as my son has taken to saying, ‘wheels’? Transportation to somewhere dicey in the Mideast?”

  “You know me all too well, my friend. Levi, all I need is to get Laura and me into Samaria ASAP, try to find the hiding place for this piece we’re looking for, and bring it back to Preston and have no hassles with officials or customs. Oh, and have it cost me no money.”

  Levi gave a long, low whistle. “What, you’re not going to make time for a round of peace talks as long as you’re in the neighborhood? Let me see what I can do. How soon can you get away?”

  “We have most of next week off for independent study, and I’ve just about got all my students covered, so I can leave immediately. Laura’s getting her office hours covered as well. I really owe you, Levi.”

  “Let’s see if I can deliver first. In the meantime”—Levi punched Murphy’s shoulder—“your coffee break is over. Get back to the bag.”

  FOURTEEN

  “WE ARE TWO men, but we make an interesting couple, Professor Murphy, do we not?” Murphy nodded deferentially to his host, Sheikh Umar al-Khaliq, but he wondered where he was going with this conversational opening. They sat drinking strong Arabic coffee in al-Khaliq’s beautiful home in Samaria, after a day of traveling, all arranged by Levi Abrams with amazing rapidity.

  Laura had gone to their guest bedroom, saying that she was exhausted from her flight, but privately she pointed out to Murphy that she was sensing the sheikh was no believer in women as being worthy of inclusion in any serious discussion. “Typical,” she said, “of so many Arab men of his generation. In fact”—she jabbed Murphy with her finger—“typical of so many men of every country.”

  “Hey, don’t point that finger at me. It’s loaded,” Murphy said. “I’m clean.”

  “But you could help bring the sheikh into at least the nineteen hundreds.”

  Murphy sighed. “I agree, dear, but could we not offend the generous hand that has made this trip possible? At least until the trip is over. Then, I promise, I will leave you behind to enlighten him. You will be my very special gift for the Samarian host who seems to have everything else.”

  “Murphy, it’s a good thing I have my maps to study. Because tomorrow, when we set out exploring, I’m going to pick out a really great place to leave you behind. Don’t stay up too late with your manly man talk.”

  Actually, Murphy was pretty certain what the sheikh might want to talk about, thanks to Levi Abrams, who had connected him with the sheikh. After working his cell phone for fifteen minutes while Murphy finished his workout, Levi said, “I think I’ve made a perfect match for you, my friend. Sheikh Umar al-Khaliq.”

  “And he’s perfect because …?”

  Levi sat Murphy down. “This may sound like the last thing you would expect me to know about the Mideast, Murphy, but did you know that there are more and more Arabs who are seeking out your God?”

  “I had read a little bit about the Christianity movement among Muslims, but I honestly believed it had to be about as likely as their coming to your God. No offense.”

  “None taken. At any rate, al-Khaliq is wealthy beyond belief, still enjoys diplomatic status for his fleet of private airplanes, and somehow, I guess, it was not enough. I had heard that he was putting out some discreet feelers to some of the Christian missionary groups in the region. As you can imagine, such seeking is not a popular extracurricular habit in the Mideast, no matter how powerful you are. So I told him that you would be happy to counsel him in return for round-trip passage and supplies for a little digging.”

  “Levi, you are a genius. Can I trust him?”

  “I helped the sheikh out years ago with a messy situation with some trigger-happy Bedouins who were making it a little awkward for him to fight back against them on his home turf. I would trust him.”

  “Thank you, Levi. I owe you big-time.”

  “You owe me nothing. Take care of that wonderful wife of yours. You, I would miss not so much. Her, I would miss. And, Murphy, trust the sheikh, don’t necessarily trust anyone else who’s working with him. But you know the drill, so to speak, about digging in strange lands.”

  Now, two days later, Murphy sat across from the sheikh, waiting for him to explain in his sometimes tortured English why the two of them made such an “interesting couple.” The trip could not have gone more smoothly. The sheikh’s main adviser, Saif Nahavi, had made all of the travel arrangements, and al-Khaliq’s wealth and diplomatic status had eased all bureaucratic hurdles.

  Of course, as Laura had pointed out, “Murphy, your trips are always a lot like prison, a whole lot easier getting in than getting yourself out.”

  Certainly, Murphy had a lot to be thankful for due to the sheikh’s generosity, and he wanted to live up to his part of Levi’s bargain by counseling al-Khaliq about any and all aspects of his apparent interest in Christianity However, his many trips to the Mideast had taught him that he must wait for the sheikh to bring up the discussion of such a sensitive topic in his own way. If he broached it at all.

  “Professor Murphy, you are a Christian man who comes to my Muslim land in search of something that has been lost for centuries, something you feel is still vital today. I am a man who has every modern possession tenfold, but I feel I am seeking something even more ancient, more simple than you seek in your journey here.”

  “Sheikh, I respect your courage in your search. Are there questions you have?
”

  “So many questions, Murphy, but it is enough for me to meet you and help a man of your faith. In my position, as long as I stay here in the land of my ancestors, and despite all I can afford to do, I do not have the freedom that you enjoy, you who come here with your hat in hand.”

  Murphy had to suppress a laugh once again at the sheikh’s unintentional knack for the embarrassing phrase.

  “Let me just say, Sheikh, that I am at your service at any time of the night or day. I am indebted to you for your generosity toward my work and on such short notice. But after tonight, I realize that I am doubly blessed, because you have reminded me of how lucky I am to be an American and to be free to pursue any religion I wish.”

  “It is I who must be thanking you, Murphy. Someday perhaps we will be able to discuss many things in your land.”

  “Are you sure we must wait for that time, Sheikh? I’m sure we do not have time tonight for all of your questions, but how about giving me the two that are of greatest concern at this time?”

  The sheikh smiled. “I see, Professor, that you are good at your digging. All right. Tell me, what do you see as the main difference between Allah and your God? Many people think they are the same.”

  Murphy sat forward. “There are several similarities. We believe our God is the creator of all things, and you agree. But we also believe in a triune God, one God made up of three divine personalities who have individual works. He is a merciful heavenly Father and sovereign sustainer of the universe who loved mankind so much, He gave His only Son to die on the cross for our sins so that we can have eternal life. He sends His Holy Spirit into our hearts to create a new spirit in us and lead us through life.”

  The sheikh sighed. “There is so much to try to understand. My second big question is, what would I have to do if I wanted to become a Christian?”