“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.”
“
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.”
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.”
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.