The Eden Prophecy

PROLOGUE

The desert wind cried like a beast in pain. Ahmad Bashir listened to it as he crouched in the shelter of a hastily erected tent. As the wind howled outside, the tent’s thin walls flapped and strained against the poles and stakes that held them in place. The storm was getting worse, not better.

He tried to ignore it, turning his attention to the excavated grave in front of him. There, illuminated by a lantern and the daylight filtering through the canvas of the tent, a partially excavated skeleton rested at the bottom of a five-foot-deep trench.

A stone tablet had been unearthed near the skeleton’s feet and a tube of some metal remained clutched in its hand. Bashir examined the metallic tube. It appeared to be made of copper, frayed strands of leather still clinging to it in places. Bashir guessed it had once been wrapped in an animal skin of some kind, a fabric that had been devoured by the desert over the last seven thousand years.

Behind Bashir, a sunburned young man with curly blond hair and long sideburns fiddled with a transistor radio, trying to listen to the BBC news over the noise of the storm. Each time he managed to improve the reception slightly, the thrashing wind seemed to rise up a notch and drown it out once again.

“Come on,” the young man said, twisting the dial in tiny increments.

Bashir glanced at him. “Put it down, Peter.” He waved the young man over. “Come look at this instead.”

Peter McKenzie was an American anthropologist just out of graduate school. He and several others had come to southern Iran to work on Bashir’s excavation. The main effort was taking place twenty miles to the east, where Bashir believed they had found one of the oldest settlements in Iran — older even than the city of Ur, across the border in Iraq. They’d also found directions to a trade route, which had led them to the grave they now stood over.

After discovering it, Bashir and McKenzie had erected the tent to protect the site from the elements, but Bashir had never expected to end up sheltered beneath it himself. A raging sandstorm had seen to that, trapping them for the past two days. With nothing else to do, they’d continued the excavation, at least until events in Tehran had distracted McKenzie.

“It’s getting bad,” the young man said.

“How can you tell?”

“I can make out some of what’s going on,” McKenzie insisted. “They’ve shut down the airport. Flights are being diverted to other countries.”

As demonstrations against the shah and American interests grew, most of Bashir’s Americans had left, but McKenzie was one of two who had stayed on. A decision he now seemed to be regretting.

“They want the shah returned to stand trial,” McKenzie announced. “They’re taking hostages.”

There had been unrest for months. After decades of persecution, the tables were turning. And while Bashir thought change was overdue, he had grave concerns about the men who were leading that change.

Some expected them to institute democracy, but most believed they would return Iran to the Middle Ages if they won. Bashir prayed to Allah that it would not be so, but the pendulum had swung so far in one direction under the shah that it was bound to overshoot in the other once he was gone.

“Tehran is a long way from here,” he said. “Do you really think they’re going to drive through a hundred miles of desert in the middle of a storm just to look for a couple of Americans?”

McKenzie looked around, listening as the wind sandblasted the tent. He seemed to find that logic sensible.

“Anyway,” Bashir said. “You’re very tan now. I’ll put a burqa on you, cover your face, they’ll think you’re my woman.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” McKenzie said.

Bashir smiled. “How do you think it sounds to me?”

The young American looked no less distraught, but eventually a smile crept over his face. He shook his head, began to laugh, and put the radio down, careful to leave it on.

He crawled over to the trench. “What are you so excited about anyway?”

“Look closely,” Bashir said, pointing to the metal tube. Markings could be seen on it. Not drawn or painted, but pounded into the surface as if they had been stamped by some great hammer.

McKenzie’s eyes grew wide. “Like the copper scroll from the Dead Sea.”

“Exactly,” Bashir said. “If our theory is right, this could be as old as the dwellings we found. Seven thousand years. It could tell us priceless things.”

Climbing around in the trench, careful not to disturb anything, Bashir moved to the stone tablet. He swept away the sand with a horsehair brush and studied the symbols. Only then did he realize the tablet was not made of stone but was some type of clay or adobe, fired or dried in the sun. It seemed extremely dense but it would still be a far softer surface than stone.

He moved carefully, blowing air into the crevices and using delicate strokes to reveal the carved markings beneath.

McKenzie aimed a flashlight at the surface.

With the added illumination Bashir could make out the style of writing.

“What do you see?” McKenzie asked.

A wave of elation rose through Bashir, mixed with melancholy disappointment.

“Proto-Elamite,” he said, referencing the writing on the stone. Proto-Elamite: one of the most ancient forms of writing known to man. Unfortunately, it was also unreadable. It had never been translated.

Bashir ground his teeth. Whatever secrets were contained on the clay tablet would remain just that. He glanced back at the copper scroll, guessing the information clutched in the skeletal hand would be written in the same style.

“Bad luck,” McKenzie said, obviously realizing the same thing. “But it’s still an incredible find.”

Bashir nodded, but he wasn’t really listening. His eyes had been drawn to a mark in the center of the tablet. A circle with four notches on it, like a compass rose. Within the circle was a square and within that square was a vertical rectangle.

The symbol was different from the Proto-Elamite script, in both the way it was drafted and the depth of its carving. Certainly it matched nothing else on the tablet. And yet he’d seen it somewhere before.

The sound of a zipper racing upward and the sudden blast of wind distracted him. He turned to see Jan Davis, the other American, standing in the entryway, holding the flap open. He looked panic-stricken.

“Close the tent,” Bashir said as sand and dust came blasting in.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Davis said, ignoring Bashir and talking straight at McKenzie.

“Jan!” Bashir shouted.

“They’re coming,” Davis replied. “They came to the other dig looking for the Americans.”

McKenzie looked at Bashir.

“They’re coming here next,” Davis insisted. “Men with guns, riding in trucks. We have to leave.”

“Are you sure?” McKenzie asked.

“They shot Ebi and Fahrid, accused them of being traitors. The rest of us ran.”

“Are they okay?” he asked.

Davis looked haunted by what he’d seen. “I don’t think so.”

Bashir turned back toward the tablet, his mind spinning. He felt instantly sick. Ebi and Fahrid were Iranian like him, from his own university. Two of his best students, now dead at the hands of the revolutionaries.

“Ahmad, we have to leave,” McKenzie pleaded.

Bashir knew Peter was correct. Knew he had misjudged the extent to which his country had gone mad.

“Listen,” Davis said, turning the radio to full.

Through the static they heard the reporter intermittently.

“… they’ve taken the American embassy now, they’re parading around in the streets, burning flags, shouting death to America …”

“We have to go.”

Bashir nodded, slowly coming to terms with it. But as McKenzie stood and gathered a few things, Bashir found his mind drifting inexplicably back to the tablet. Where had he seen that symbol before?

Jan Davis disappeared from view. McKenzie was halfway out of the tent. “Ahmad, you have to come.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said.

“You won’t,” he said. “They know you work with Americans. They’ll take it out on you when they can’t find us.”

Bashir couldn’t fight the logic, but he did not want to leave. He felt they were close to something important, something that mattered more than revolutions and guns and the ugly transfer of power.

“This symbol,” he said, pointing to the tablet. “I’ve seen it.”

The wind howled and the tent shook and Bashir’s mind whirled.

“It doesn’t matter,” McKenzie said.

“It does!”

“Not if you’re dead.”

McKenzie looked away and then stuck his head back inside. “The truck’s leaving.”

There was no choice. Bashir knew he had to go. He looked at the symbol one last time, burning it into his brain, and then he went to leave. At the last moment he turned back and grabbed the copper scroll from the skeleton’s grasp.

Stepping out of the tent, Bashir was determined not to let the revolutionaries destroy what he’d found. He ripped one stake from the ground and the wind did the rest, filling the tent like a balloon and carrying it across the desert like a kite.

Forty yards away, a big diesel truck waited. McKenzie and Davis were already running toward it.

“Come on!” McKenzie shouted.

Fighting the wind and shielding his eyes, Bashir made his way to the truck. He climbed into the back along with the two Americans and three others. The cab up front was already full.

In the distance behind them, he could see sunlight reflecting off several vehicles. There was no time to spare.

The truck lurched forward and Bashir lost his balance. He stumbled, put a hand out to brace himself, and dropped the scroll. It hit the back edge of the truck bed and tumbled out onto the sand as the truck accelerated away.

Bashir cringed. He stepped to the edge, ready to jump, but the truck was moving too fast. He grabbed McKenzie. “Tell the driver to stop. Tell him to stop.”

Between the roaring of the diesel engine and the howling of the wind, his words were barely audible.

“It’s too late!” McKenzie shouted.

“No!” Bashir said.

Desperate beyond reason, he tried to climb out but McKenzie held him back.

“Let me go!”

“No, Ahmad. It’s too late.”

By now the truck was rolling away at thirty miles per hour. The revolutionaries were approaching from the east. There would be no jumping free, no stopping or turning back.

As this reality seeped into Bashir, he stopped straining. McKenzie relaxed his grasp and then cautiously released him. Bashir squinted through the storm at the scroll, and his heart sank.

It might take hours or even days for the grave to fill with sand, but the scroll would be buried in minutes. And without any marker to lead the way, it would disappear from the world as if it had never existed.