The Sanctuary Read online

  Evelyn’s expression clouded as she struggled for words. “What happened to him?”

  A sharper fear flickered in his eyes. “What is this book about, Sitt Evelyn? Who else is after it?”

  Consternation flooded her voice. “I don’t know.”

  “What about Mr. Tom? He was working on it with you. Maybe he knows. You need to ask him, Sitt Evelyn. Something very bad is happening. You can’t send me back there.”

  The mention pricked Evelyn’s heart. Before she could answer him, Ramez’s voice echoed through the mounds of rubble around them.

  “Evelyn?”

  Farouk shot her an anxious glare. She craned her neck to see Ramez appear, making his way over from the mosque. She glanced back at Farouk, who was looking down through the alleyways, towards the main street. When he turned back to face her, the blood seemed to have drained from his face. He shot her a look of such terror that she felt her heart constrict. He pushed the small stack of photos and the envelope into her hands and just said, “Nine o’clock, downtown, by the clock tower. Please come.”

  Ramez reached them, clearly wondering what was going on.

  Evelyn fumbled for words, unsure about what to say. “Farouk’s an old colleague of mine. From the old days, in Iraq.” Ramez seemed clearly aware of the unease hovering over them. Evelyn sensed Farouk was making a move and reached out to him reassuringly. “It’s okay. Ramez and I work together. At the university.”

  She was doing her best to telegraph to him that her colleague wasn’t a threat, but something had visibly spooked Farouk, who just nodded furtively at Ramez before telling her with an insistent, pleading voice, “Please be there.” And before she could object, he was already scrambling up the path, away from the town center, heading towards the mosque.

  “Wait, Farouk!” Evelyn sidestepped away from Ramez and called out after him, but to no avail. He was already gone.

  She turned back to Ramez, who seemed mystified. She suddenly remembered that the Polaroids were still in her hand, in plain sight for him, and he’d noticed them. He looked a question at her. She stuffed them in the envelope and pocketed it quickly while conjuring up a disarming smile.

  “Sorry about that. He’s just…It’s a long story. Shall we get back to the chamber?”

  Ramez nodded politely and led her back up the path.

  She followed him, her eyes distant, the pit of her stomach garroted by Farouk’s unsettling words, her mind too overwhelmed to register a fleeting image from the town below: two men, standing by the edge of the road, a hard, stone-dead look in their eyes—not uncommon given the setting or the context, an expression she’d gotten used to seeing since the war—and yet, somehow disconnected to the activity around them, looking up in her direction, before one of them got into a car that drove off rather abruptly, the other catching her eye momentarily before moving off and disappearing behind a collapsed house.

  Chapter 2

  “D o you have him yet?”

  He’d left Baghdad over four years ago, and yet, despite his natural talent for foreign languages and his best efforts, his Arabic vocabulary and accent were still influenced by his years in Iraq. Which is why the men who were assigned to work for him—led by Omar, the man who had just called—all came from the east of his new adopted homeland, close to its border with Iraq, where they’d been facilitating the smuggling of weapons and fighters in both directions. The two languages were broadly similar—think of California Valley–speak vs. East London cockney—but the variance between them was enough to spawn inaccuracies and generate misunderstandings.

  Which wouldn’t do.

  He prided himself on accuracy. He didn’t tolerate imprecision, nor did he have much patience for unreliability. And he could tell from the man’s discomfited tone, from the very moment he’d been interrupted and picked up the call, that his patience was about to be sorely tested.

  There was a hesitant pause before the cold answer came back over his cell phone. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?” the hakeem rasped as he angrily flicked off his surgical gloves. “Why not? Where is he?”

  Omar wasn’t easily cowed, but his tone was now tinged with some added deference. “He was being careful, mu’allimna.”

  On either side of the border, the men assigned to him always called him that. Our teacher. A lowly servant’s self-effacing moniker of respect. Not that he’d taught them much. Only to make sure they did what they were asked and did it without asking any questions. It wasn’t so much teaching as it was training, with fear as the prime motivator.

  “We didn’t really have the right opportunity,” Omar continued. “We followed him to the American University. He visited the Archaeology Department. We waited for him outside the building, but he must have used another exit. One of my men was watching the sea gate and saw him sneaking out and getting into a taxi.”

  The hakeem frowned. “So he knows he’s being followed,” he said gruffly.

  “Yes,” Omar confirmed reluctantly, before adding, “But it’s not a problem. We’ll have him for you by tomorrow night.”

  “I hope so,” the hakeem countered acidly. “For your sake.” He was trying hard to keep his rage in check. Omar hadn’t failed him yet. The man knew what the stakes were, and he was ruthlessly good at his job. He’d been seconded to the hakeem with clear orders to look after him and make sure he got everything he needed. And Omar knew failure wasn’t tolerated in the service. The hakeem took some solace from that. “Where is he now?”

  “We followed him to Zabqine, a small town in the south, close to the border. He went there to meet someone.”

  This instantly piqued the hakeem’s interest. “Who?”

  “A woman. An American. Her name’s Evelyn Bishop. She’s a professor of archaeology at the university. An older woman. She must be in her sixties. He showed her some documents. We couldn’t get close enough to see what they were, but they must have been pictures of the collection.”

  Interesting, the hakeem mused. The Iraqi dealer’s hardly in town for a few hours and the first thing he does is head straight out to see a woman who happens to be an archaeologist? He archived the information for further consideration. “And…?”

  Another hesitant pause, then Omar’s tone dropped lower. “We lost him. He spotted us and ran. We looked for him all over the town, but he disappeared. But we’re watching the woman. I’m outside her apartment right now. They were interrupted, there’s unfinished business between them.”

  “Which means she’ll lead you to him.” The hakeem nodded quietly to himself. He raised his hand and rubbed his face with it, massaging his furrowed brow and his dry mouth. Failure would certainly not be tolerated here. He’d waited too long for this. “Stay on her,” he insisted coldly, “and when they meet up, bring them both to me. I want her too. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, mu’allimna.” The reply was crisp. No hesitance there.

  Which was just how the hakeem liked it.

  He clicked off and replayed the conversation in his mind for a beat before stowing the phone in his pocket and getting back to the business at hand.

  He washed his hands and slipped on a new pair of surgical gloves, then walked over to the bed where the young boy lay, strapped in, hovering at the edge of consciousness, his eyes narrow, ceramiclike white crescents peeking out from under heavy eyelids, tubes emerging from various spots on his body drawing out minute amounts of liquids and sucking the very life out of him.

  Chapter 3

  I t was past six in the evening by the time Evelyn made it back to the city and to her third-floor apartment on Rue Commodore.

  She felt exhausted after a day that had marked her on many levels. After Farouk had slipped away, Ramez—who, in what Evelyn took for a remarkable display of self-restraint, hadn’t asked her about him or even tried to casually slip it into conversation—had been able to get them a face-to-face with the mayor of Zabqine, who understandably had more pressing matters on his mind than discussin
g the excavation of a possible early-Christian temple. Still, Evelyn and her young protégé had charmed him, and the door was left open for a further exploratory visit.

  Which was quite a feat, given that her mind was totally elsewhere the whole time they were with him.

  From the moment Farouk had shown her his tattered envelope of Polaroids, the memories they’d awakened inside her had consumed her every thought. Once at home, she’d taken a long, hot shower and was presently sitting at her desk, staring at a thick file that had followed her like a shadow with each relocation. With a heavy heart, she pulled its cloth straps open and started to flick through its contents. The old photographs and faded, yellowed notebook sheets and photocopies lit up a part of her that had been smothered in darkness for a long time. The pages flew by, one after the other, conjuring up a jumble of emotions that swamped her, taking her back to a time and a place she’d never been able to forget.

  Al-Hillah, Iraq. Fall, 1977.

  She’d been in the Middle East for just over seven years, most of that time spent on digs in Petra, Jordan, and in Upper Egypt. She’d learned a lot on those digs—it was where she’d first fallen in love with the region—but they weren’t hers. Before long, she was yearning to sink her teeth into something she could call her own. And after a lot of hard research and some relentless lobbying for funding, she’d managed to swing it. The dig in question would concern the city that had fascinated her for as long as she could remember and yet had been underserved by archaeology of late: Babylon.

  The history of the fabled city went back more than four thousand years, but as it was built of sun-dried mudbrick, not stone, not much of it had survived the ravages of time. The little that had was eventually carted away by the various colonial powers who had ruled over the troubled area over the last half century. With Mother Nature, the Ottomans, the French, and the Germans picking away at it like vultures, the ancient cradle of civilization didn’t stand a chance.

  Evelyn had hoped, in however small a measure, to try to rectify that injustice.

  The digs had started in earnest. The working conditions weren’t too harsh, and she’d gotten used to the heat and the insects by then. She’d been surprised at how helpful the authorities had been. The Ba’athists had taken control of the country five years earlier after a decade of coups d’état, and she’d found them pragmatic and courteous—The Exorcist had been filming nearby when she first got there, and Saddam’s bloody takeover was years away. The area around the dig itself was poor, but the people were kind and welcoming. Baghdad was only a couple of hours’ drive away, which was handy for good food, a decent bath, and some sorely missed social interaction.

  The find itself had come about by fluke. A local goatherd who was digging for water had discovered a small trove of cuneiform tablets, among the oldest examples of writing, in an underground chamber near an old mosque in Al-Hillah. Being close by, Evelyn had been the first on the scene and decided the area merited further exploration.

  A few weeks later, while doing soundings inside an old garage adjacent to the mosque, she found something else. This find wasn’t nearly as ancient or valuable. It wasn’t a spectacular find, by any means: a series of small, barrel-vaulted, underground chambers, tucked away for centuries. The first few rooms were bare, aside from some austere wooden furniture and some urns, jars, and cooking utensils. Interesting, but not exceptional. Something in the deepest chamber, however, grabbed her attention far more viscerally: A large, circular carving of a snake eating its own tail had been tooled into the main wall of the chamber.

  The Ouroboros.

  It was one of the oldest mystical symbols in the world. Its roots could be traced back thousands of years to the pig dragons of the Hongshan culture in China and to ancient Egypt and, from there, on to the Phoenicians and the Greeks, who gave it its name, Ouroboros, which meant the “tail-devourer.” From there, the image was found in Norse mythology, Hindu tradition, and Aztec symbolism, to name but a few. It also held a firm place in the arcane symbolism of alchemists over the centuries. The self-devouring serpent was a powerful archetype that represented different things to different peoples—a positive symbol for some, a portent of evil for others.

  Further exploration of the chambers yielded more curious discoveries. What had been thought to be cooking utensils in one of the chambers turned out to be something rather more esoteric: primitive laboratory equipment. The shards of broken glass, upon closer examination, were actually pieces of flasks and beakers. Remnants of cork stoppers and pipes were also found, along with more jars, and pouches made of animal skins.

  Something ominous about the chambers captivated Evelyn’s curiosity. She felt as if she had stumbled into the locale of an unknown clandestine group, an unknown cabal who wished to meet away from curious eyes, watched over by the sinister tail-devourer. She spent the next few weeks exploring the tunneled rooms more carefully and was rewarded by a further discovery: a large, earthenware jar, sealed with animal skin, buried in a corner of one of the dark rooms. The Ouroboros, similar to the one on the wall, was tooled into it. In it, Evelyn found paper folios—the material had supplanted parchment and vellum in the area since the eighth century, long before reaching Europe—that were richly covered with texts and elaborately decorated with mesmerizing geometric patterns, scientific renderings of nature, and colorful, if bizarre, anatomical studies.

  As Evelyn flicked through the various images of the symbol in her file—etchings, woodcuts, and other prints—she came across a bunch of old, faded photographs. She put the file aside and perused the pictures. There were several shots of the chambers, and others of her with the team at the dig, one of whom was Farouk. How he’s changed, she thought. How we’ve all changed. She stiffened as her fingers fell upon a shot that sent a little tremor though her. It showed her much younger self, a bright-eyed and ambitious thirty-year-old woman, standing with a man of roughly her age. They were side by side at the site of a desert dig, two adventurers from a bygone age. The shots weren’t exactly high-resolution clear—they were small prints she’d had developed at the time and were weathered after sitting in her folder for almost thirty years. The sun had been beating down savagely that day, and both their faces were obscured by sunglasses and safely tucked away under the protective shadows of their safari hats. Regardless, her eyes quickly filled in the details of his features. And even after all these years, the sight of him still made her heart turn over.

  Tom.

  She gazed deeper into the picture, and the noise of the chaotic city outside receded into silence. The image brought a bittersweet smile to her face as conflicting emotions swirled inside her.

  She’d never understood what had really happened all those years ago.

  Tom Webster had appeared unannounced at Al-Hillah, a few weeks into her find. He’d introduced himself as an archaeologist-historian with the Haldane Institute, a research center that was affiliated with Brown University. He told her he’d been in Jordan when a colleague had mentioned Evelyn’s inquiries about the Ouroboros. Research in the dark ages, before the Internet, involved the use of libraries and picking the brains of experts by actually talking to them—and often, shockingly, face-to-face. He said he’d driven overland to see her and find out more about her discovery.

  They’d spent four weeks together.

  She’d never felt as strongly about any man since.

  Their days were spent examining the chamber, studying the writings and the illustrated folios from the chamber, and following leads to libraries and museums in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, seeking out scholars and historians.

  The calligraphy of the texts placed their origin firmly in the Abbasid era, sometime around the tenth century. Carbon dating one of the folios’ leather straps had supported their assumption on that front. The texts were beautifully written and illustrated and dealt with a variety of subjects: philosophy, logic, mathematics, chemistry, astrology, astronomy, music, and spirituality. But nothing explained who had written t
hem, nor was there any mention of the tail-devourer symbol’s significance.

  Evelyn and Webster worked together with a shared passion, and their inquiries showed a brief spark of promise when they uncovered information about an obscure group of the same era, the Brethren of Purity. The Brethren’s precise identity was a matter of conjecture. Little was known about them beyond that they were Neoplatonic philosophers who met in secret every twelve days, and whose shrouded legacy included a remarkable compendium of scientific, spiritual, and esoteric teachings garnered from different traditions that was considered to be one of the oldest encyclopedias on record.

  Certain aspects of the writings found in the chamber, however, matched the writings left behind by the Brethren, both in style and in content. None of the writings from the chamber, however, dealt with the spirituality of its occupants. Although rooted in Islam, the Brethren’s writings also included teachings from the Gospels and from the Torah. The Brethren were seen as freethinkers who didn’t ascribe to any specific creed, seeking instead to find truth in all religions and valuing knowledge as the true nourishment of the soul. They strove for a reconciliation, a fusion of the sectarian divisions that plagued the region, in the hope of creating a broad, spiritual sanctuary for all.

  Evelyn and Webster had speculated about whether the cabal from the underground chamber could have been an offshoot of the Brethren, but there was nothing to prove or disprove that theory. One aspect of that theory, though, fit rather nicely: The Brethren were thought to have been based in Basra and in Baghdad. Al-Hillah sat between them.

  Throughout their time together, Evelyn had been surprised by Webster’s unflagging interest, and she’d been taken aback by his unbounded energy and drive in elucidating the little mystery she’d unearthed. Also, for someone she’d never heard of, he seemed to know an awful lot about the Ouroboros and about the history of the region.

  She was also pretty sure that he’d fallen in love with her, just as she had with him. Which made his sudden departure all the harder to stomach. Especially given what he’d left her with. And the lie she’d had to live with ever since.