01 Babylon Rising (29 page)

If he had noticed the falcons, he would have seen the slim, dark shapes powering their way skyward in a classic spiral ascent, using the warm updrafts from the sun-beaten asphalt below to augment the regular beats of their muscular wings. Had he been a birder, their elegant silhouettes would have been
instantly recognizable and he might well have smiled to himself as he watched, his spirits lifted by the unlooked-for sight.

Peregrines were in some way the epitome of wild, untamed beauty, and it was no surprise that the greed and rapacity of man had driven them from many of their natural habitats. And yet, they were surprisingly well adapted to living in the heart of the most modern and densely populated cities. In the wild, they were happiest nesting on tall cliffs and preying on other birds; in cities, skyscrapers and pigeons provided for their needs in almost supernatural abundance.

Perhaps, had he been of a spiritual turn of mind, the guard might have reflected that a time would come when many cities were abandoned as the world was plunged into conflict and chaos, and the falcons would inherit the empty skyscrapers as if they had belonged to them all along.

What he would not have imagined was that in a matter of minutes, one of the birds was going to kill him.

His colleague, stationed in front of the door from which Murphy and Isis had exited the building, was equally unaware. At the moment the two birds reached their pitch, approximately a thousand feet above the ground, his mind was chewing over a familiar puzzle. His meager salary was not enough to cover his gambling debts, let alone support a wife who seemed to blame him for the way time was ravaging her face and figure and took her revenge out on his credit cards.

And yet here was the guard, literally sitting on a gold mine. A gold mine to which he had the key—or at least some of the many keys—in his hand. Deep down he knew that it would take someone far smarter and more inventive than he would ever be to parlay his security access into hard cash, but in the
same way that some people chew tobacco or whittle away at sticks, he found the seemingly pointless process relaxing.

He was very relaxed when the larger of the birds, the female, steadied herself in the air with a flick of her wings and turned her piercing tunnel vision on the tall figure standing in the parking lot a thousand feet below. He was dressed from head to toe in black, and to anyone looking across the lot, he might easily have merged into the lengthening shadows. But to the falcon, he stood out like a beacon. Partly because of her extraordinarily acute vision—and partly because she knew him so well.

She also knew what he expected of her.

The man was holding a falconry glove high over his head. To anyone passing, he would have looked like a man hailing a cab. A strange thing for someone to be doing in the middle of a parking lot, no doubt. But he was in fact doing something much stranger.

He was calling death down from the air.

Talon looked up and saw the speck of black against the delicate pink of the early-evening sky. She seemed to be perched weightlessly in the upper air, and he could almost feel her impatience. She wanted him to cut the invisible thread that held her fast and set her free.

Bringing the glove down sharply to his side, he did just that. Seeing his gesture, she swiveled once to set herself, fixed her eyes on her target, and tucked her wings under her. Gravity did the rest.

A falcon descending from such a height can accelerate to speeds of almost two hundred miles an hour. Too fast for the human eye to follow, the best guide to her progress is the
sound of the air being sliced apart by this speeding bullet of muscle, feather, and bone. Talon preferred to watch her target and simply wait for the inevitable.

As his mind wandered through familiar get-rich-quick fantasies, the security guard noticed that a dark-clad man standing between two rows of cars was looking directly at him. Was it his imagination or a trick of the fading light, or was there a look of amused expectation on the man’s face? A look that seemed to say
I know something you don’t
.

He instinctively turned to his right as a blur of movement registered at the edge of his vision, and then the razors attached to the peregrine’s talons tore through his throat with blinding speed. Carotid arteries draining, he staggered a couple of steps, a hand clutched to his shattered larynx, then collapsed in a heap of twitching limbs.

Talon waited until it was over, then walked over and examined the corpse, careful to avoid the spreading pool of blood. Sliding his hand inside the jacket, he removed a set of keys and started feeling for the shape he wanted. Behind him he could hear footsteps coming from the direction of the security booth, slow and deliberate at first, then accelarating into a trot as they came closer. He put the keys in a pocket and waited.

“Okay, buddy. Stand up slowly and turn around. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Talon raised his hands and gave him his best
Who, me?
smile. The guard held him at the end of his revolver and sneaked a look at the body on the ground. Realizing he couldn’t help his colleague and keep watch on Talon, he reached for the radio at his belt. Talon let one of his arms drop sharply to his side.

“I said keep your hands—” But the words died in his throat as the second peregrine slammed into the back of his neck, severing his spinal cord with a single punch of its talons. Talon stepped aside as the guard dropped heavily onto the tarmac. Opening a plastic Ziploc bag, he took out a couple of dead mourning doves and held them at arm’s length. After a few seconds, both peregrines swooped out of the shadows and settled on his wrists, chewing happily on the unexpected treat as their talons dug into the leather armbands he wore under his jacket.

He walked back to the van and settled the female onto her perch. She hissed angrily as he slipped the hood over her head, then instantly quieted, soothed by the cocoon of darkness that suddenly enveloped her. He held the smaller male by his jesses and turned toward the booth, clucking softly. “You still have work to do, little one.” Inside, he quickly found what he was looking for.

The door to the museum at the Parchments of Freedom Foundation opened with a satisfying click, and Talon slipped inside.

It was Saturday, but Fiona Carter had decided to take advantage of Dr. McDonald’s absence to try to organize the office. She did treat herself to lunch out at an actual restaurant, something she rarely got to do when she was keeping tabs on Dr. McDonald. Fiona wondered how her boss and Professor Murphy were faring out in the field and wondered which of them was in for the greater shock.

Her mouth dropped open at her own discovery. The bodies
of the two security guards were horribly mutilated and tangled together as if they’d been doing a gruesome tango when the killer had struck. Fiona bent down and tried to make sense of their wounds, but could not, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming and fleeing. Instead, she forced herself to enter the building to call 911.

Inside, the corridors were eerily quiet. There was no reason to expect anyone else to be working at this hour on a weekend, but the silence was somehow too thick, as if the whole building had stopped breathing.

Instinct made Fiona head for the secure storage area. Turning the corner, she could see the wire mesh door was open. When she got to the vault, the heavy door was open. Fiona looked inside, knowing what she would find. Or, more accurately, not find.

The tail of the Serpent was gone.

In its place, cut with deep, fresh slashes into the metal shelf of the storage room, was a quickly carved rendering of a snake. The snake was cut into thirds—head, middle, and tail. Next to it was an even more disturbing symbol. She was going to have to page PFF chairman Compton. And then she was going to have to try to track down Professor Murphy and Dr. McDonald. She hoped it was not too late for them to turn back.

THE FIRST LEG
of the flight had taken them from Washington to London Heathrow, where the plane was refueled and the crew was changed. Murphy and Isis quickened their pace toward their departure gate. Her slim frame weighed down by a voluminous leather briefcase stuffed with books—rare editions she simply couldn’t bear to check—she was struggling to keep up. But repeated offers to carry it for her had met with stiff resistance. “I can manage quite well, thank you. And anyway, you have your own precious cargo to contend with.” It was true, the competition bow in its impact-resistant case wasn’t exactly heavy, but it was awkward to carry, and she was determined she wasn’t going to add to Murphy’s burdens.

At least he had stopped arguing about her coming with him. While she thought of herself as a professional equal of
Murphy’s, and while she could not match his most recent personal loss, when she thought back to the death of her father, she felt she could empathize with him personally as well.

Murphy and Isis didn’t talk much during the long journey to Tar-Qasir. Murphy slept for most of the flight to London, unconsciousness unexpectedly settling on him like a blessing almost as soon as he was buckled in. While they waited for their plane to refuel, he paced Heathrow’s cavernous corridors and malls in silence, like a man trying out a new pair of shoes. He wasn’t thinking about anything. He was just getting used to his new life, his new existence: the one without Laura.

Isis had a sense that she should leave him be, that he needed time to gather his strength for what was to come, and was happy enough to bury herself in her books. Although she wouldn’t admit it, she was worried that she was going to slow Murphy down and consequently was determined that at least her linguistic skills would be honed to razor sharpness. If they did manage to find the second piece of the Serpent, she wanted to make sure she could unlock its secrets.

In particular, she was revisiting an old volume that had belonged to her father. Bishop Henry Merton’s
Lesser Chaldean Apocrypha
. She had read it before, of course, but not, she was beginning to realize, with quite her full attention. Or perhaps it was simply that Merton’s study of some of the more obscure corners of ancient Mesopotamian religious belief had never seemed terribly relevant. Now, however, his exhaustive
analyses of Babylonian idol worship seemed tailor-made to her needs.

Of course, he hadn’t been “Bishop” Merton when he’d written the book. Just a young country vicar in a half-forgotten parish in Dorset, England’s sleepy southwest. That was where her father had first come across him. As he told the story, they had both been reaching for the same first edition of Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
in a secondhand bookstore in Dorchester. After a protracted argument, during which they each insisted the other had first claim on the book, her father had finally prevailed (steely Scots self-denial winning out over English politeness), practically herding the young cleric to the counter with his prize.

After that, of course, Merton could do no other than invite his benefactor to tea and scones at the little shop around the corner. It was there, amid the chintz and china, that his interest in the dark rituals of the world’s forgotten religions was revealed. An interest, her father recalled, bordering on obsession. Not that there was necessarily anything wrong or even strange about that, given her father’s own proclivities—except that Merton was wearing the black shirt and collar of an ordained Church of England vicar. “It just seemed rather odd,” he’d recalled, “to listen to this young man, who by rights ought to be spending his time harvesting souls for Jesus, speak with such passionate intensity about the demons inhabiting the gloomier reaches of the Sumerian underworld.”

Despite the elder archaeologist’s instinctive qualms, a lively correspondence had ensued after they parted. The lure of Merton’s vast erudition was simply too much to resist. But
after a few months, her father had stopped replying to Merton’s letters, and it was clear to the adolescent Isis that something had deeply disturbed him.

She never discovered what it was. But now, as she slowly turned the pages of
Lesser Chaldean Apocrypha
, she remembered that this was the very volume her father had been clutching when they found him.

She shuddered, and her fingers went instinctively to the amulet around her neck. It was the head of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, a gift from her father, and it was a constant comfort in times of stress.

With a little shake of her head, she returned to the book. Whatever the truth about Bishop Merton, he knew his Chaldean rituals. If anyone was going to provide an insight into the mind of Dakkuri, it was him.

On the flight from London to Riyadh, Murphy hadn’t interrupted her reading. It seemed to have the effect of recharging her batteries—something she surely needed after the trauma of the last few days. Certainly by the time they’d made the long taxi ride through the desert to Tar-Qasir itself and settled into a large modern hotel called, appropriately enough, the Oasis, she seemed positively bursting with energy. Murphy had passed out again as soon as he lay down on the cool white sheets before he’d had time to wonder what their next step would be. And now, some hours later, the crisp rat-tat-tat on his door that jolted him out of a dreamless sleep seemed to have all the hallmarks of her restless spirit.

Showered, changed, and newly focused, Murphy met her in the spacious lobby. “I think they should rename this hotel
the Empty Quarter,” he joked. “Are we the only guests, do you think?”

“Tar-Qasir isn’t exactly a tourist destination,” she admitted. “But that’s not to say it doesn’t have its points of interest.”

“Such as?”

“I’ve been doing a little research while you were catching up on your sleep,” she said with a twinkle. It sounded as if sleep was something she indulged in only rarely, like the occasional drink. “As we know, it began as an oasis. A convenient crossing point of various trade routes through the desert. Gradually it grew into a proper market town as merchants began to settle here instead of just using it as a watering hole. And by the Middle Ages, it had become a genuine city Actually, rather a unique and unusual one.”