Book of Stolen Tales (48 page)

Ali, the older contractor Shaheen had brought with us, and I went back to the tunnel entrance and kicked the chunks of hardened earth we'd removed into the hole to hide the entrance. We raced back to the Jeep. The remaining soldiers commandeered the Humvee, as well as the car and driver Mancini came with, and drove off.

Ali took me back to Baghdad in the Jeep. It was all I could do to make it to my hotel. I felt as if I had nearly lost my life, not Shaheen. I got a carafe of strong coffee from the bar and struggled up to my room. Downing some painkillers, I collapsed onto the bed.

What happened in the pit of that seven-gated hell had to be a hallucination. I'd never experienced a hallucination before, let alone a
collective
one. Yet I knew extreme fear could do strange things to the mind. All kinds of dangerous gases built up in sealed underground spaces. I'd heard of hydrogen sulfide and other chemicals being released. Had Mancini and Ben succumbed to something like that? No doubt I was suffering their delayed effects too.

The mild symptoms I'd first noticed in Rome had worsened. My throat felt like someone had scraped a razor over it. I couldn't clear my lungs. My skin was red and felt tight all over my body, as if it were somehow in the process of shrinking. Red welts now covered my neck and there was no feeling in my arm.

Those spores must have infected me. They were microscopic and would have been no more noticeable than grains of dust or lint. Had they been contained within the book? Did that explain why it had been kept untouched in that cedar box over all those centuries—because its originators knew it carried a contamination? Or had some toxic agent from the journey into the underworld condemned me? It was impossible to tell.

Fifty

December 8, 2003

Baghdad, Iraq

B
y the time Ali returned to pick me up at the hotel I couldn't walk a straight line.

Shaheen, remarkably recovered, met us outside the Green Zone and ushered me in. We pulled up in front of the Ibn Sina hospital, a prestigious treatment facility for the wealthy in Hussein's day, now a trauma center for U.S. personnel and the occasional Iraqi civilian. The gray-veined white marble floors and teak reception desk at the emerg entrance told of its luxurious history. On a back wall hung a huge American flag, bulletin boards, and army banners. Shaheen indicated a set of doors. We pushed through them to a corridor and passed a room where medics furiously worked on a soldier whose uniform had turned to bloody shreds. His bloated skin was black with severe burns. I turned my eyes away and kept them focused on the corridor after that. Shaheen helped me into the exam room.

The doctor showed up not long after. He gave me a careful going-over before sending me for X-rays and blood work. Shaheen told me he couldn't stay and Ali would drive me back to the hotel afterward. An hour or so later the doctor returned. His first words weren't exactly encouraging.

“Do you have medical insurance? You won't be charged for any limited treatment I give you now but you need to get home immediately. To start with, how did you get that bruising on your back?”

I wasn't about to tell him about the shooting in Ghent. “I had a fall.”

He frowned and looked up at the ceiling lights then walked over to the wall and flicked the switch on and off.

“That's funny,” he said. “It seems dim in here. Our generators are supposed to be working full tilt.” He shook his head. “You've given me quite a bit to work with. A scar on your thigh that appears to have been professionally stitched. Broken ribs, although they've healed nicely.”

“Those were from before; I'm not worried about them. I had a car accident.”

“How long ago?”

“Last summer.”

“I see. Are you a drinker, sir? You've got a lot of injuries for a man your age.”

“Not the way you mean.”

He touched my jaw and gently turned my head. “How did you get the cut on your scalp?”

“A bar fight. I intervened to help someone.”

Disbelief was written all over his face. He smirked. “I've treated combat soldiers with less damage. Whatever your lifestyle is I suggest you switch and take up something safer like skydiving or free solo rock climbing.”

“What's that?”

“Skittering up the side of a mountain without a rope.”

“Doesn't sound too enticing.”

“The good news is you're not quite ready for the grave. The bruising on your back may look nasty. You'll see it heal soon enough. I'm more concerned about long-term damage to your arm. You've hurt it recently, causing a hairline fracture in the ulna—that's your arm bone—and ligament injuries. It's been left unattended and now the bone's infected. There's nerve damage. It could turn out to be permanent.”

I remembered the crack Alessio gave me with his cane when we wrestled in the Thames.

“You've also acquired a severe respiratory infection. It's bacterial so we can treat it with antibiotics.” He hesitated as if searching for the right words. “There's something else we
can't
explain. An anomaly in your blood work.”
Anomaly
was one of those words medical people used to cloak the ones that really got you scared.

“You mean a problem with my blood cells—like leukemia or something?”

“No. Your white blood cell count is a little elevated yet consistent with a respiratory infection. It may be genetic. I don't know what to make of it.” He checked the medical history sheet I'd filled out. “You left the section about your parents blank. Are they both still alive?”

“No. They died in a mining accident in Turkey. I was cared for by my older brother. Don't know much about my birth parents and nothing about their medical history.”

“Is your brother still alive?”

“Half brother—and no. He died in an accident. Was very healthy before that.”

“That's unfortunate. Quite frankly I've never seen anything like it before. Has your doctor in New York told you about this previously? Mentioned any kind of inherited disorder?”

“Not that I'm aware of. Could it affect me in the future?”

“There's a good chance it will. Is it ultimately life-threatening? It might be but I couldn't tell you that. I'm a trauma specialist. You need a hematologist. It requires a much more thorough investigation. And you must get that arm taken care of. I can patch you up for now. As soon as you get home you need to seek out medical attention.”

He shot me full of antibiotics, gave me Prednisone for my skin, and fitted my arm with a temporary sling. I walked out the hospital door at ten that evening with two new reasons for alarm: the dimming lights that seemed to follow me around and my blood problem.

I explained the shadow away by thinking that likely it
was
just a poor electric connection. And New York had the best specialists in the world; they could treat my blood problem. Still, the doctor's remarks stirred up my fears about having been contaminated and I couldn't get it out of my mind.

Ali took me back to the hotel, where the heavy-duty sedative the doctor gave me knocked me out for the next twelve hours. The next morning I took a hot shower and downed a jug of coffee. The drugs sat uncomfortably on my stomach. I managed to swallow some bread anyway and felt well enough to think about the immediate future. It became a lot clearer when my phone rang and a familiar voice came on the line.

“Congratulations, you're not dead yet. I hear the doctor said you'd live to see another day.”

“Where are you, Shaheen?”

“Decided to revisit hell. A very quaint place when all's said and done.”

“Get off it.”

His laugh came through loud and clear. “You need have no fears about anyone else getting in there.”

“You have it protected? Good.”

“The marines signed it as a contaminated site. They stationed a permanent guard. No more looting; they won't even let the antiquities people in. A lot of their work was accomplished before they even got there. You won't believe what happened.”

“Try me.”

“The whole thing, the tunnel, everything, ended up completely submerged in water. Water ran out the entrance hole as if a spring or something suddenly popped up. The flow is slowing now but it washed all the way down to that depression we parked in and turned everything into a river of mud. Thanks to the powers that be it held off until we got outta there.” His voice dropped. “That meant we couldn't retrieve the bodies.”

The old canal, still in use, was a couple of miles away from the site. I couldn't imagine how there would be any connection to it. Was it groundwater then? I thought about the ancient myth how disturbing the balance of the world by entering the god's domain would release Apsu, the great sea Mesopotamians believed lay underneath the earth's thin crust. The effect of that much water suddenly flowing through a centuries-old dry environment would cause numerous cave-ins. The mud filling the tunnel would eventually harden like concrete, a next-to-impossible task to excavate.

Mancini had ended up buried in hell beside the image of the Babylonian white horse, just as Alessio predicted. And the stone weights along with him. A strange ending to the tale.

“Leonard Best is none too happy about my failure to retrieve the stone spindle whorls. Lots of black marks all over my record now.”

“What ever happened to the one Loretti and Hill found?” I asked.

“Loretti's wife told the doctor before she died. Once her husband opened it, he had enough presence of mind to put it in a secure container. After he got sick, his wife went through his things and found it. She didn't tell the authorities. She'd read news stories about people being charged for stealing relics from Iraq and was afraid Loretti would be accused of theft. They have an old oil furnace in their house, so she threw the spindle whorl into the firebox. That destroyed all the spores and reduced the soft stone to ash.”

I was tempted to ask whether Shaheen really would have shot Mancini, but I knew in my heart he would have.

“Why did Mancini want the weights so badly?” I asked instead. “A joint project he planned with a South African biochemical firm. Those fungal spores were highly virulent and, as opposed to other toxins like anthrax, there's no effective treatment. Their real value is simplicity. The main challenge with current biological weapons is effective disbursement. In contrast, the fungus easily seeds itself. It would spread like crazy in moist areas, just like it did in Babylon's wet flax fields.”

“Then people would flee to drier regions where the fungus couldn't survive.”

“You're right, a desert would be safe. Anywhere that supported agriculture and livestock would be affected by it. There'd be huge food shortages.”

Mancini was a harsh customer. Still, I found it hard to imagine how someone even as amoral as he could contemplate a scheme that monstrous. He'd actually become a demon of the human variety. “Didn't you tell me the fungus can be found on the West Coast? Why not just use that?”

“Extremely difficult to collect. You'd have to destroy forests and sift through thousands of acres of soil to get enough. On top of that the spores hidden in the stone weights are way more lethal.”

“Why wait so long to … confront Mancini? You'd have been able to throw away the key on him after everything he admitted to you.”

“I tried and got stopped. A man like that, he had super-powerful connections. You don't funnel money out of the country without the right people turning a blind eye. I was told to back off in no uncertain terms.”

“What about Dina?”

“We put her in a safe house. Not in Italy. After a couple of days she left. Vanished into thin air. We haven't heard from her since.” Shaheen asked me to hold for a minute. I could hear him talking to someone in the background. He came back on the line. “Looks like I hafta run.”

“Do you get leave? Maybe we could hook up in NYC.”

“They owe me time off, ten times over. So soon, God willing. Keep a Coors cold for me for when I'm back in the motherland.”

I promised to do just that. We clicked off.

Was the idea of enclosing the spores within spindle whorls where they'd be kept perfectly dry and preserved an early attempt to fashion a crude biological weapon? Had the Babylonians actually used them against their enemies? That will never be known. How ironic that our military, hunting for modern weapons of mass destruction, ended up finding ones some 2500 years old.

I never did hear back from Shaheen. A few months after I returned home I got a terse email from Ali to say Shaheen had been declared missing in action near Najaf. The news hit me hard. He'd seemed to me to be indestructible, to have the kind of spirit that burned too brightly to be quenched. Another good man the war chewed up and swallowed whole.