Hadassah Covenant, The (44 page)

“Don’t say that.”

“How about no air conditioning? It’s hotter than Hades over there.”

“Okay. Let’s run with that. How about I jack up the brightness and we all stare at this thing really hard.”

“For what?”

“Fluctuations, shadows, patterns. Anything. If I knew exactly, I wouldn’t be asking for help.”

Onscreen, the blanket bearing Arabic script shifted from black to an unnatural gray as the sensitivity of the signal’s color palette was multiplied three hundred times. While the little girl’s mouth moved in slow motion beneath it, the cotton surface seemed to shimmer with a million tiny luminous fluctuations. Digits galloped across time-counters at the bottom of the screen.

At minute four-point-sixteen, a discernible shadow roughly the shape of a cigar traveled across the fabric from left to right.

A shout arose so loud that four other NSA leaders in opposite corners of the room jumped to their feet, and an outside door clanged open against the foot of a pistol-brandishing NSA security officer on full alert.

The technicians at the screen hardly noticed—they were too busy grabbing for the rewind button. Voices called out speculations of the flying object that might have caused it.
Military chopper. Large bird. Commercial airliner. No way, you idiot—that thing’s traveling below stall speed! Blackhawk. Apache. Huey . .
.

Then the young woman returned with her results. At 11:21 A.M. local Baghdad time, the Corps of Engineers reported that a car bomb had exploded only twenty yards away from a major electrical substation in the Khudra neighborhood. CIA estimates put the power spike
at a six-kilowatt surge within an initial quarter-mile radius around the source.

“All right, who can tell me how bad six kilowatts looks to an ordinary household power plug?”

“There’re too many variables. I could tell you in an American house, but see, Baghdad has four completely different, totally incompatible power supplies—depending on the neighborhood—originating from one of four European countries that have contracted with Iraq over the years. So your answer depends completely on whether we’re dealing with the French grid, the German grid, the old British one, or the complete joke of a Russian excuse for a power plant. We don’t even know whether they use sixty-nine-or one-thirty-eight-kilovolt lines.”

The man in the chair slammed a large fast-food drink cup on the console. “I don’t want to hear that! I know it’s not exact—but give me a rough estimate. Your best educated guess.”

“I’d rather work backward from what we saw onscreen,” murmured a man leaning over his shoulder. “I’d say, if you’re starting with a six-kilowatt spike, then that should be between two and five miles away.”

Fingers punched on keys. A map of Baghdad splashed onscreen. “Okay. So that likely puts us within Khudra, which is one of the city’s biggest neighborhoods.” The map blew up by two levels of magnification, until individual buildings were visible. “Okay. We caught a break. Streets in Khudra run perfect north to south, so our angles are simple.”

“Were any aircraft dispatched to the site of the car bombing? That would give us an easy ID on the blanket shape. . . . ”

In fifteen minutes the site of the kidnappers’ lair had been narrowed down to within a two-block area of central Baghdad.

Encrypted satcom messages flew out of Room 3E099 to military commanders in the Green Zone, less than two miles away from the site in question.

In the middle of an Iraqi night, thickly muscled men bolted from their cots and started pulling on black camouflage, then checking their weapons.

And not far from them, a frightened little girl with hauntingly beautiful eyes cried herself to sleep on a blanket crudely lettered with threatening Arabic words.

She was alone . . . in every sense of the word.

Chapter Forty-eight

The Independent Online Edition
, 17 April 2005

Thousands of previously illegible manuscripts containing work by some of the greats of classical literature are being read for the first time using technology which experts believe will unlock the secrets of the ancient world
.

Among treasures already discovered by a team from Oxford University are previously unseen writings by classical giants including Sophocles, Euripides and Hesiod. Invisible under ordinary light, the faded ink comes clearly into view when placed under infrared light, using techniques developed from satellite imaging
.

The Oxford documents form part of the great papyrus hoard salvaged from an ancient rubbish dump in the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus more than a century ago. The thousands of remaining documents, which will be analyzed over the next decade, are expected to include works by Ovid and Aeschylus, plus a series of Christian gospels which have been lost for up to 2,000 years
.

—D
AVID
K
EYS AND
N
ICHOLAS
P
YKE
, “E
UREKA
! E
XTRAORDINARY
D
ISCOVERY
U
NLOCKS
S
ECRETS OF THE
A
NCIENTS
”

M
ASADA, SOUTHERN
I
SRAEL—THE FOLLOWING MORNING

W
hy do I have to
go through with this?” exclaimed Prime Minister ben Yuda, repeating his wife’s inane question. “You should know better than anyone why I have to do this. Because I have to keep up business as usual. Because I can’t afford to have anyone think these charges are tying me to my office. Because Masada is one of Israel’s most symbolically important places, and to cancel now
would offend every voter who has ever lost a loved one in wartime. And maybe, above all, because I simply refuse to let the jackals take me down!”

“You’re right,” Hadassah answered in her most placating tone. “I do know those things. But in a national crisis, I’m just saying the people expect you to be in the capital, directing things.”

“I will be directing things. I
am
directing things right now,” he said, the veins bulging on his neck. “Now, admit it, Hadassah. You’re just breaking my knuckles because you know the media is going to descend on you like vultures. And, my dear, I can’t help that. I didn’t exactly cause this, you know.”

“You act as though I did,” she said mournfully.

“It
feels
like you did, that’s all,” he answered, his voice softening. “I know you’ve done your best. I just feel so powerless. It’s like some hoary old figure out of the distant past sat up out of his grave and grabbed me around the neck. I mean, think of it—my cabinet, my whole government, maybe the future of the Middle East, is now depending on whether Mordecai, a man who lived twenty-three hundred years ago, managed to produce offspring.”

“You don’t have to oversimplify it for my sake, Jacob. There are more logical steps than I can count between you and Mordecai.”

“Well, count them if you want to. But the fact remains that if Mordecai did not marry Leah, then neither you or Ari have any claim to being the new Exilarch, and only a new Exilarch can negotiate with Iraq for the claims of the exiled Jews or persuade the hidden Jews to come out of hiding to save themselves.
Ergo
—my troubles have only just begun.”

“I know. I love that a story so old and historical has such a hold on the present.”

“Oh, Hadassah, please spare me the Oprah Book Club blather.” But the bite was taken out of the words by his look of both pride in her and frustration with the current juxtaposition of events.

“Look, I just feel that her story spoke to me,” she tried to explain. “That’s all. I feel like we’re sisters, almost.”

Her cell phone rang with her personalized tones: the opening fanfare of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” She had the unit to her ear before her shoulders had even registered the motion.

“Hadassah?” It was Ari, with the buzz-saw noise of distance in the background.

“Where are you?”

“Paris, my dear cousin. I have honeycombed the world in my unceasing efforts to get you and your husband off the hook.”

she raised her eyebrows—hopefully the banter meant there was good news. “Right. As if you had no self-interest in the matter.”

“Listen. I’m at the Louvre. I know that sounds a little obvious, but that’s where all the Persian antiquities are stored. I can’t tell you more until it happens. But make sure you’re reachable. Where are you?”

“We’re leaving shortly for Masada. The three-thousandth anniversary or something.”

“That sounds like a security nightmare. Be careful.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll stay away from the edges.”

“Well, just make sure you stay in cell range—either that or let Mossad know how to contact you. Because I think I’m on to something.”

T
HE
L
OUVRE
M
USEUM
, P
ARIS—LATER THAT DAY

Ari Meyer descended the endless marble steps two at a time, mentally marking off the decades with each step. Mathematically, he estimated that it would take nearly sixty years per step to account for the journey back in time—from the twenty-first-century main floor, to the sheer ancientness of not only the museum’s catacomb displays, but the very antiquity of the Louvre’s bowels themselves.

Only a decade or so earlier, in the midst of renovations that had added the famous crystal pyramid and underground turnstiles, the French government had discovered battlements and buried structures that dated back to the time of Christ. To Ari, it only added to the Louvre’s mystique—the difficulty of telling which represented the most stunning work of art: the pieces on display or the building itself.

Another fact Ari would pretend not to know: that the world’s largest museum did not contain the world’s most extensive collection
of Persian artifacts merely because it was the biggest or best museum, or because it had become the famous setting for the fictional decoding of an ancient mystery. Rather, it contained nearly a whole floor of hidden Persian objects and archives deep within its foundations, somewhere between the floors tourists knew best and its prehistoric foundation layers, because the French had been for decades the colonial patrons of modern Iran. As a result, French archaeologists had an easy time negotiating unfettered access to the world’s greatest ruins in exchange for coveted modern luxuries like running water and paid-off royal debts.

Indeed, what Alexander the Great did not cart off in those early years of the overthrown empire, the French had managed to ship away on large steamboats, all for the filling of the Louvre’s nearly inexhaustible stacks.

Ari Meyer lost count of his decades somewhere around the last ten steps. Upon reaching the subterranean landing, he simply rounded off and gave himself an even thirty-five hundred. Then he turned into a barrel-vaulted, unlit doorway with the confidence of someone with an idea.

“The Marduk Love Letters,” he said to the half-shadowed face of the after-hours Chief Archivist. “I would like to see them.”

The archivist did not move but cocked his head with an air of suspicious curiosity. “We are most pleased, of course, to address the needs of a valued diplomatic friend. I only wonder why there is such a hurry that we need do this at such a late hour.”

“Actually,
mon ami
, it is a matter of the gravest urgency,” Ari responded. “And you will have the eternal gratitude of the government of Israel if you would please guide me hurriedly—no, swiftly—to the room where they are contained.”

“All right, sir. Please come with me. . . . ”

Ari could hardly contain his excitement. The sense of advancing history intensified with their descent through the rows of ancient racks. The idea had struck him like a long-delayed revelation.
The Letters
, one of the most cryptic and speculated-about cuneiform documents of all time, outlined an odd, unexplained love between a high palace official in the time of Artaxerxes and some kind of lowbrow woman within the palace. Over the decades, even centuries, these
letters had acquired a dedicated following of scholars enamored with their secrecy, their eloquent, florid language, their oddly phrased and incomplete dialogue, and their abundance of references to palace staff, hidden beneath layers of encryption and misdirecting clues.

Today Ari had a secret weapon. The Mossad had acquired, through the most secretive of intelligence circles, the working prototype for a device developed for the CIA by scientists at Johns Hopkins and the Rochester Institute of Technology. It was a device roughly the size of a hand-held scanner that emitted a rare form of infrared light through a classified ultraviolet filter, all finely calibrated according to the parameters of the latest satellite imaging technology. Back in Jerusalem, the Mossad had already developed a full-scale laboratory model. But for his work, Ari had laid his hands on one of the few miniature-sized originals in existence.

They had arrived at the room in question: a vast square space fringed by wall-hung displays.