The Crypts of Eden

CHAPTER FORTY

Upon his immediate arrival at the hospital, while he was being was treated for dehydration, Hall had his two gorillas stand sentinel at the hospital door. Not because of his personal welfare, but to guard the content in his backpack.

When he returned to the Seafarer, which was waiting for him three miles from the Turkey shoreline and somewhere in the Aegean Sea, he had placed his treasure inside a glass case and had it hermitically sealed, which meant that oxygen had to be pumped out and argon gas pumped into the container to preserve the material.

For almost two hours, he sat across the glass casing admiring his priceless trove with a crystal tumbler of expensive cognac in his hand. It was, without a doubt, his greatest treasure.

“Leave it to you to do something as heinous as that,” said a familiar voice.

Hall bolted from the expensive couch. John Savage was standing at the doorway wearing a neoprene suit. His face held the outlines of a diver’s mask that had been fitted tightly. In his hand was a firearm and attached suppressor.

“Savage,” was all he said. “So, you survived after all. And here I am thinking that it was only Ms. Moore who made it out since the news media never made mention of you, just her.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Not so,” he said. “I’ll enjoy watching you being killed, as much as I will her. A man such as I can never leave loose ends, you know.”

“I concur, which is why I’m here — to tie up loose ends.”

Hall sniggered. “You’re aboard the Seafarer,” he told him. “Trust me. No matter how you got on board, you were seen.”

“I know that.”

“Then you also know that my men most likely have a weapon trained on you as we speak. But I will say this: I’m surprised you got this far.”

It was Savage’s moment to smile. “You mean those two apes of yours that are probably touching down at the bottom of the ocean right about now?”

Hall’s smile vanished. “What?”

“Your two goons. You know — the big guys. They’re lying at the bottom of the Aegean Sea.”

“You killed them?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to let them kill me. That wouldn’t have been right.”

Hall was stunned, frightened. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“What should have been done a long time ago,” he answered. “Sit down.”

Hall did as he was told. Savage moved into the room with his firearm pointed at Hall’s chest. “Don’t worry about the rest of your crew,” he added, “They’re fine. They’ve taken the smaller boats to safety.”

“You know I have lots of money. I can pay you. And I won’t harm Ms. Moore. You have my word on that.”

“Your word? Hall, I wouldn’t believe anything that came out of your mouth even if your tongue was notarized.”

“So you’re here to kill me, then?”

“Actually, I’m not. I’m here because I want you to live long enough to watch something,” he said. “And then I’ll let nature take its course.”

“Nature?”

Savage looked at the glass case and to what was inside it. With a fluid motion, he leaned over the top of the glass and smashed it with the butt of his pistol. Hall shot to his feet. Savage quickly pressed the mouth of the barrel against Hall’s forehead. “Sit!” he said.

Hall did so, slowly and begrudgingly. “And what will you do with that?”

“Share it,” he said. “Unlike you. I assume you have something for me to carry this in?” Hall didn’t answer. “No matter. I’ll find something.” Savage placed the firearm in his shoulder holster, and withdrew his knife. “Give me your arm.”

“What?”

Savage took a step forward, grabbed Hall’s wrist, displayed the openness of his forearm, and drew the blade across the flesh, paring it. Hall screamed as he pulled his arm away, cradling it.

“Nature,” commented Savage. “It’s what you deserve.”

“What are you talking about?”

Savage kept his smile of malicious amusement. “Some men can never be forgiven for what they have done,” he said, pulling out a small, burnished metallic box from a side pocket. “And you’re one of them.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What am I going to do? I’m going to destroy your world, Hall. Everything in here, your lifetime achievement of stealing, your private little niche, your comfort zone, came at the cost of how many lives?” He held the metallic box up, his thumb on a switch.

“That’s not what I think it is, is it?”

“Probably.” When he flipped the switch a series of muffled pops went off in succession.

…One, two, three…

…Whump… Whump… Whump…

Hall cocked his head. “What was that?”

“The sound of your life going down like a sinking ship.”

Halls eyes started. “No!” He stood and threw himself into frenzy as he bled out onto the Berber carpet, not caring. He ran from item to item, from treasure to treasure as the ship began to list toward the starboard side.

When he turned to confront Savage, the man was gone, and so was the item Hall most cherished. “SAVAGE!”

Items fell from their displays and plinths and mounts as the yacht canted to the right. Obsidian Hall stood by and watched his life slip away. As he stood there, his arm bled, the blood dripping in a steady beat against the floor.

After rationalizing that nothing could be saved, he ran for the decks. The yacht was empty as Savage had stated. The safety boats adrift. The moment the boat listed dangerously far to the right, he dived into the water and swam as far away as he could from the suction as the ship was being drawn down.

From a distance, he began to thread water, watching his yacht settle on its starboard side a moment before its stern sank, the shift causing the bow to rise above the surface, and then it was gone, leaving nothing in its wake but a vortex of frothing bubbles.

“You’re a dead man, Savage,” he said to himself. “And then more loudly and at the top of his lungs. “You’re a dead man!”

And that’s when he saw them, the two dorsal fins of the bull sharks heading right at him. He raised his injured arm; saw the blood coursing from the wound. A shark could smell a drop of blood from hundreds of yards away and hone in to the very spot. The fins were cutting a quick swath across the surface of the water, closing in.

Nature, he thought. Savage said he would allow Nature to take its course. And just as that thought occurred to him, the bull sharks converged and tore Hall apart until he was nothing more than bits and pieces of chum.

Alyssa was back at the Göbekli Tepe site wearing a boot cast on her ankle. Mobility was tough along the rises and falls of the terrain, but she managed.

Inside her tent she was documenting her latest finds at the dig, correlating the bas-relief carvings against the temple pillars to the constellations of the sky, with Heaven and Earth having a symbiotic relationship with one another — the creatures upon the land, the stars overhead.

“They said you were hard at study.”

Alyssa turned to see Savage enter the tent. In his hand was a backpack. When she got to her feet, she nearly tripped in the attempt.

“Careful,” he said, letting the flap fall behind him. He could tell by the way her eyes lit up, by the way she smiled, that she was glad to see him at a level that was much higher than platonic.

“You came back,” she said.

“I told you I would.”

She drew closer. Their eyes met. And then she fell into his embrace. He never felt warmer or so uplifted. He knew he was free. As he allowed her to pull away he showed her the backpack. “I got this from Hall’s yacht,” he said.

“I heard about the Seafarer sinking. It appears that Hall’s missing. I don’t suppose you know anything about that, do you?”

“No.” And then: “Maybe.” And then: “Yes. But we can discuss this later. Right now I want to show you something.”

He walked to her table, lay the backpack down, and unzipped it. “Hall had this in his collection,” he said. “I couldn’t allow him to have it, at least not with so many questions that need to be answered.” When he opened the pack Alyssa brought her hands to her chest and gasped.

Staring back at her was the head of Adam.

“Apparently he had enough presence of mind to take the head as I was jumping into the hole to escape,” he said.

She reached in and grabbed the head with such care; Savage thought she was paying homage to it. And perhaps she was, he considered, and rightfully so as she placed the head down onto the sparse area of the desktop.

The skin was brown and waxy, the orbital area of the eyes were malformed with its lids having sunk into the orbital sockets, covering them like a blanket. The area where the head had been lifted from the body by Hall was a clean cut. “Hall should have let it be,” she said softly.

“I agree. But it would have been far worse if he was allowed to keep it under display.”

She traced her fingers gently across the skull with an adoring touch. And then: “Alyssa, don’t you at least want to know the truth?”

“I already know the truth,” she said.

“One DNA test,” he said. “That’s all it will take to find his true origin. Our true origin.”

“I already know the truth,” she repeated.

“Alyssa, come on — so many questions. The truth is literally at your fingertips.” She remained quiet, her fingers running along the malformed curvatures of the skull. “How do you explain the creation of a temple created entirely of black silica, a substance found halfway around the planet?”

“Eden was at the head of four major waterways,” she said. “It was the first true hub of an advanced civilization where the waterways became the center of a shipping trade. The silica was a mineral of trade for cultural goods that eventually spanned the globe from the ports of Egypt to Mesoamerica, where some of these cultures share similar aspects of architecture and text.”

“Even you have doubts, Alyssa. I know you do, which is why I brought this to you. Just one test.” He could tell that she was warring with herself. “What would your father have done?”

She turned on him fiercely. “I’m not my father!”

He held his hands up in surrender and backed away. “That wasn’t fair, I know. But still,” he pointed to the skull, “the truth lies in front of us.”

She reached out, grabbed him by the shirt, and pulled him close. “I’m sorry,” she told him contritely. “I’ll never be like my father. He was a special man.”

He stroked her hair gently. “And you’re a special woman, Alyssa, so don’t sell yourself short. If you want to seek the truth, then the opportunity lies before you. I won’t pressure you to do anything you don’t want to. This is your call.”

Yeah, she thought. This is my call.

She sighed.

Alyssa Moore had driven to an area that was abysmally barren and about four miles away from the Göbekli Tepe site. She was alone, having taken the Jeep.

As she parked and exited the driver’s side, the wind jumpstarted dust devils, little funnel clouds, to gyrate across the landscape, kicking up dust. She hobbled to the Jeep’s rear, grabbed a shovel and backpack, and made her way to a spot where she stabbed the spade of the shovel into the desert sand. From there she dug a deep hole, about four feet down, such labor coming easy to her from years of working diligently at sites.

When she was finished, she looked skyward and wiped a hand across her brow. The sun was behind a series of scudding clouds, the temperature not as hot as it could be — a blessing. She then got her GPS unit, found her exact location, and logged it into the unit’s memory banks. Some things were never meant to be understood, she thought. And then she carefully laid the backpack into the hole with reverence along with the Photostat pages taken from her father’s journal.

After filling in the hole, after tapping the earth hard against the surface with the flat of the blade, she tossed the shovel in the Jeep, started it up, and made her way back to Göbekli Tepe; the only person who knew the whereabouts of Adam’s remains.