The Sanctuary

Chapter 31

Mia watched Corben click his cell phone shut. He turned to her and shook his head. He checked his watch and frowned thoughtfully.

“I don’t like leaving this till morning,” he said, “but I don’t think we have much choice. If they’re onto him, then we’re already too late. If they’re not, then I’d rather not alert them to him at this hour. I’ll call the guys at Hobeish first thing in the morning,” he added, referring to the police station where Mia had been held, “and take it from there.”

“We could go to the university, early,” Mia suggested, “and get to him first thing.”

Corben did a double take. “‘We’?”

“You don’t know what he looks like. I can point him out to you,” she protested.

“I can just ask for him at the department.”

“I’ve met him. He’ll feel more at ease if he sees a familiar face,” she insisted, her voice alive with nervous energy. “Besides, I don’t want to stay here alone. I’ll feel like a sitting duck.” She paused, catching her breath. “I want to help, okay?”

Corben looked away, clearly weighing his options and seemingly not liking any. After a moment, he turned to her cheerlessly. “Okay,” he relented. “Let’s see what he has to say and take it from there.” He went to the fridge and pulled out two more beers and offered Mia a bottle.

She took it and crossed over to the balcony. She stood there and sipped at it, staring pensively into the night. The lights from the densely packed buildings were burning brightly, crowning the city with a pale, whitish aura. She wondered where Evelyn was at that very moment and thought about Farouk and Ramez. Where had they bunkered down for the night? Beirut was a crowded city, and it knew how to keep its secrets. No one really knew what went on behind closed doors, but in this city, Mia suspected, the lurking malevolence was in a class of its own.

“I don’t get it.” She turned to Corben. “This symbol, the coiled snake. What’s he looking for, exactly? If it’s really this book that he’s after, why does he want it? He can’t just be some maniacal collector.”

“Why not?”

“He seems willing to go to some pretty extreme measures to get hold of it,” Mia noted. “It’s got to have some serious significance to him, don’t you think?”

“He’s a bioweapons scientist. These guys are into viruses, not relics that are hundreds of years old,” Corben reminded her. “I can’t imagine its relevance to his work.”

“Unless he’s looking for clues to some ancient plague,” she half-joked.

Corben didn’t dismiss it out of hand. Instead, his face clouded, then the faintest of smiles flitted across his lips. “Now there’s a merry thought to sleep on.”

She felt a ripple of concern. An outright dismissal would have been better.

They left it at that, finished their beers, and put the food away in a leaden silence. She watched Corben as he went about the nighttime routine of spinning the dead bolt on the front door and switching off the lights. She found herself wondering about what made someone take on a life like that: solitary, dangerous, mired in secrets, trained to manipulate and predisposed to mistrust. From what she could gather, he seemed like a pragmatic, clearheaded guy who wasn’t suffering from a righteous, save-the-world delusion. She couldn’t deny that his action-adventure hero side was alluring — she hadn’t exactly met men like him in the sedate academic waters she usually navigated. But there was also something dark, unknowable, and guarded about him that, while also somewhat attractive, was also a bit scary.

“Can I ask you something?”

He turned, curious. “Sure.”

She smiled, slightly uncomfortable with the moment. “Is Jim your real name? I mean, I read somewhere that you guys always seem to use Mike or Jim or Joe as cover.”

He breathed out a small chuckle and winced. “It’s actually Humphrey, but…it doesn’t exactly go with the job profile.”

She wasn’t sure for a second — then he smiled. “It’s Jim. You want to see my passport?”

“Yeah, right,” she mocked. “All of them.” She paused for a breath, then her face grew serious. “Thanks. For everything today.”

He winced uncomfortably. “I’m sorry I took you there. To your mom’s apartment.”

Mia shrugged. “We got to her stuff before they did. Maybe that’ll count for something.”

It was close to eleven by the time her head finally hit the pillow in the guest bedroom. She found it hard to fall asleep and just lay there, staring at the unfamiliar, impersonal surroundings, wondering how it had all gotten so complicated so quickly. She’d been warned about coming to Beirut when the offer had first come up, mostly by people who only remembered the city from the endless news reports about the civil war, the bombings, and the kidnappings, people who weren’t familiar with the country’s phoenixlike, if tenuous, return from the ashes — at least, the one that had been cut short a couple of months earlier. She could have pulled out from taking up her posting — she didn’t need an excuse, war being a pretty convincing reason for anyone to give a country a wide berth — but she’d felt drawn to exploring new directions and experiencing a more exciting life than the one most of her peers seemed more than happy to settle for.

She tried to subdue her churning mind, tossing and turning and fluffing her pillow and moving it around, but it was a losing battle. She was too awake.

She sat up and listened. She couldn’t hear anything coming from outside her bedroom. Corben had to be asleep. She considered taking another shot at taming the beast of insomnia, then decided against it and climbed out of bed.

She went into the living room. A pale glare from a streetlamp cast long shadows across the walls. She took quiet steps into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. As she headed back into the living room, her eyes fell on Evelyn’s file, lying there on Corben’s desk.

Beckoning her.

She flashed back to the quick peek into it that she’d stolen back in her mom’s kitchen and decided it merited more than that.

She walked over to the desk and opened it.

The images of the Ouroboros immediately snared her attention.

She sat down on the sofa and worked her way through the photographs from the digs and the photocopies of images taken from books, taking a good look at them this time while putting the handwritten notes aside.

As she went through them, she pulled out the different incarnations of the beast that her mom had compiled and laid them out on the coffee table. They were markedly different: Some were rudimentary, which Mia presumed were the oldest ones. One looked Aztec; a couple of them had a distinctly Far Eastern look about them, with the snake looking much more like a dragon; others were more elaborate and figurative, married to the imagery of the Garden of Eden or of Greek gods.

She settled on the version that was of most interest, the one that had been tooled into the book from the Polaroids and carved into the wall of the underground chamber. The image disturbed her, as it had done before. She put it aside and started going through Evelyn’s notes.

Evelyn had evidently spent many hours researching this, but at some point, she’d obviously given up. Confirming this, Mia noticed that many of the sheets were dated, the earliest in 1977, the last of them in 1980. She quickly gathered that the underground chamber Evelyn had discovered was in a town called Al-Hillah, in Iraq. Curious, Mia pushed herself to her feet, retrieved her laptop from her bag, and fired it up. She found an unprotected Wi-Fi connection within range, camped onto it, and opened her browser. She did a quick search, easily finding the town’s location, south of Baghdad, on a map. She committed it to memory and moved on.

She read about the manuscripts that Evelyn had found hidden in the chamber. According to her notes, the style of the writings were reminiscent of those of a secret society of the same era, a group of highly sophisticated gnostics called the Brethren of Purity, who were also based in southern Iraq. There were several pages of notes that dealt with this line of research, with afterthoughts and additional markings and arrows linking sentences scribbled across them. Mia jotted the name of the society down, making a mental note to look into it. Some words were circled or underlined. Her eyes picked out the mention Offshoot of Brethren? with a prominent question mark.

Turning the page, a circled blurb drew her attention. It said, Other writings match, but no mention of rituals or liturgy here. Why? In the margin of the opposite page, next to more scribbled notes and dates, Evelyn had written Beliefs? and Heretics? Is that why they were hiding? with more big, emphatic, multiple question marks.

Mia read the page more closely. Evelyn had found common ground between the writings of the Brethren and the writings from the chamber. One glaring difference, however, was that nothing left behind in the chamber covered its occupants’ spiritual beliefs.

The next pages laid out Evelyn’s research into the Ouroboros. Mia went back to some of the photocopies of the various images, which also had notes scribbled across them.

There seemed to be as many interpretations of what the symbol stood for as there were cultures that had adopted it. Some saw it as a representation of evil, while others — far more, Mia noted — saw it as a benign, hopeful symbol. Mia found this somewhat disconcerting, at odds with the twinge of unease she felt when she saw the snake.

Evelyn had collected dozens of references to it throughout history, from ancient Egypt and Plato all the way to the nineteenth-century German chemist Friedrich Kekulé, who discovered the ring-shaped molecular structure of benzene after, so he claimed, dreaming of a snake who had seized its own tail, and, most recently, to Carl Jung, who had studied its archetypal grip on the human psyche and its particular significance to alchemists. There was even, Mia noted with a bittersweet knot in her throat, a Phoenician version of it, a tail-eating dragon carved into one of their temples.

Throughout, Mia picked up on a recurring theme, one that was at odds with her instincts. It was a theme of continuity: It spoke to the cyclicality of nature, the endless circle of life, death and rebirth, the primordial unity of all things. She went back to a sheet that showed an almost pastoral rendition of a winged Ouroboros in a garden with a cherub in its center.

Mia stared at it, processing what she’d read. Something didn’t sit well. She thought back to her chat with Corben, about the hakeem’s possible motives. The symbol didn’t tally with anything worrying, but then, it didn’t need to, did it? The swastika was, after all, a symbol of good luck in the Far East ever since the Stone Age. Hitler saw it otherwise and turned it into something monstrously different. Could this be the same thing? Corben kept saying the man was insane. But what if he was really searching for a lost virus, a poison, a plague. Somehow, the pieces’ relevance seemed portentous, their importance malevolent. And yet, most of what she’d read about the tail-devourer symbol seemed to have an opposite feel. She couldn’t see anything fearful in what was mostly regarded as a symbol of continuity. She questioned whether her initial reaction was more primal, whether it had to do with the instinctive apprehension that the archetype inspired in most people, regardless of its intended symbolism. Perhaps that, coupled with the context in which she had experienced it — on the run, hiding out from killers with bullets whizzing around her — helped explain it. But it left some unanswered questions. Was the tail-devourer something to be feared? What was its significance to the hakeem, if not something sinister? Did the members of the cabal who met in the underground chamber have something that the hakeem was so desperately after?

She thought back to the date, tenth century, and went back to her laptop. She ran a search on the scientists of the era. Some of the big names she remembered — Avicenna, Jabir ibn Hayyan — popped up immediately. She surfed from one site to another, gathering tidbits of interest and logging into her account at the Britannica online edition along the way.

Mia’s mind was nestled in a comfort zone she was well used to as she worked her way through the research material on the screen before her. The more she read, though, the more that comfort eroded. Nothing in what she found seemed to shed any light on what the hakeem was after.

It wasn’t for a lack of great minds working in the area at the time of the Brethren. She trawled through a couple of biographies of Al-Farabi, who was widely considered second only to Aristotle in his grasp of science and philosophy, earning him the moniker of Second Teacher. She read about Al-Razi, who would be known to the Europeans, much later, as Rhazes, the father of what we now refer to as plaster of paris, who was already using it to set broken bones in the tenth century; and Al-Biruni, who traveled extensively in the Far East and wrote extensive treatises about conjoined twins. More relevant to Mia’s thinking, though, was Ibn Sina, or Avicenna, as he became known in the West. The most influencial physician of his time, Avicenna had become an accomplished philosopher and poet by the age of eighteen. By twenty-one, he’d written long, expert tracts about all the sciences known at the time. He differed from his predecessors in that he was more interested in the potential of chemicals to treat disease. In that vein, he’d studied illnesses such as tuberculosis and diabetes in great detail, and his masterwork, the fourteen-volume Canon of Medicine, was so authoritative and advanced that it remained the standard medical reference text in Europe until the 1600s — well over five hundred years after he wrote it.

All these men had achieved great advances in many disciplines. They studied the human body, identified diseases, and proposed cures. But nothing linked any of them to the Ouroboros, nor did she find anything in their work that had a nefarious aspect to it. They were simply interested in mastering the forces of nature.

If anything, these scientist-philosophers were interested in bettering mankind, not destroying it.

She picked up the photographs of the underground chamber and studied them again. She tried to imagine what went on there and considered it with new eyes. There was actually nothing sinister about it. She followed that line of thought and picked up a sheet from the file on which Evelyn had sketched out a plan of the chambers and marked it with what they’d found. They’d found no bones there, no traces of dried blood, no cutting tools or sacrificial altars. Evelyn seemed to have reached the same conclusion. At the bottom of the sketch, scribbled in her distinctive script, she’d written and underlined the word Sanctuary, followed by another question mark.

A sanctuary from what? Whom, or what, were they hiding from?

The battery in Mia’s laptop died out, and as it did, a deep-seated tiredness swamped her. She put the file away and found her bed again.

This time, it didn’t take her long to drift off into sleep, but as she did, one lingering, confused thought seemed determined to ride roughshod over any hopes of a peaceful rest: the idea of an ancient terror being resuscitated to unleash havoc on this world, presaged by the haunting image of the tail-devouring snake, which had inexorably wormed its way into the deepest recesses of her mind.