The Eden Factor (Kathlyn Trent/Marcus Burton Romance Adventure Series Book 2) (2 page)

The old man apparently understood
her without benefit of translation. He stood up, followed by his two comrades,
the translator, and Kathlyn and Marcus. When they emerged into the scorch of
the mid-day sun, it looked like the entire village had turned out to watch
them. Marcus hovered over his wife protectively as they followed the men
through the whitewashed village and out into the alluvial plain beyond.  It was
incredibly dry and bleak, like being out in the middle of nowhere.  There was a
primordial sense about the landscape that conveyed an incredible impression of
timelessness and despair.

 The village was following like a
herd of hungry cattle. Kids and dogs ran alongside them a safe distance away. 
The six of them walked several dozen yards, across flat areas and down small
dales carved out by flash floods when the seasonal rains came. The more Kathlyn
walked, the more excited she became.

  A vast fossil river soon became
apparent. The depression was probably a quarter of a mile wide, perhaps four or
five feet in depth.  Several feet away, down in the fissure, stood a few men
with guns in their hands. While the rest of the villagers came to a halt a
respectful distance away, the old man and the translator led Kathlyn and Marcus
down into the rocky depression.

Sweat dripped down Kathlyn's
forehead and she quickly wiped it away. As they drew near the area where the
gun-toting men stood, she began to see the outline of a hole, perhaps seven feet
long by four or five feet wide. It was evident that it had been picked at and
dug out by hands and crude instruments. Inside the hole, embedded in ancient
mud, were the remains of a large human skeleton.

The men with guns stood back as
the elder approached. The old man pointed at the skeleton in the hole, clearly
so she would not be mistaken, and walked away. Kathlyn didn't wait to be
prodded; she walked right up to the bones with Marcus behind her.

Her fingers began to tingle as
she gazed at the well-formed skeleton, the bones so old that they were
beginning to petrify. But this wasn't just any skeleton. She had been told that
two very unique attributes made it different from any human who ever populated
this earth. It was those two attributes that came into focus, so much so that
Kathlyn let out an audible gasp. Marcus was already straddling the skeleton,
extremely carefully, to examine the characteristics. He had more experience
with field anthropology than she did.

"Oh, my God," Kathlyn
whispered. "Are those what I think they are?"

Marcus didn't reply. He was
consummately cool and clinical. Blowing on the fragile bones, he dug into his
rear pocked and came up with a very small horsehair brush, the kind used by
makeup artists for very delicate shading and brushing. He ran the brush over
the bones, blowing away any excess dirt the brush failed to remove. He was very
methodical, very careful in his work. Perspiration poured off his brow and
soaked his shirt.

Kathlyn stood over him, watching
his work, amazed by what she was witnessing. In her line of work, or
myth-chasing as her husband called it, it wasn't often that she was surprised
by anything she saw. But she was today.

Marcus was working up around the
shoulder area, brushing and blowing, pausing to study, and then brushing and
blowing again. It was seven hundred degrees down on the ancient riverbed, but
he didn't notice the heat.  He, like his wife, was consumed with the find at
his feet. Kathlyn finally knelt down beside him.

"Our translator said that
some kids found this while playing down here," she said. "Apparently
only the skull was visible. The villagers dug around it."

Marcus cocked an eyebrow.
"And damaged some of these bones. There are nick marks all over it."

Kathlyn tried to be cool about
delivering the obvious question, but she couldn't contain herself. "So
what do you think?"

He brushed and blew one more
time. "I really don't know," he said. He paused, sweat dripping off
his face, staring at the bones. "There could be a hundred explanations for
this."

"Name one."

"Fraud."

"Are you kidding? It's
obvious how old this is, Marcus."

"We can't rule out any
possibility. I'm not just going to jump in and endorse this without knowing
more about it."

"So we carbon date the mud.
We analyze the bones and reconstruct the skeleton. If it's fraud, we'll find
out quickly enough via those tests." She looked down at the bleached
bones. "I just can't imagine that it would be a fake. I mean, look where
we are. Look at the fossilization of these bones, the proportion and the
structure. If this is a five thousand year old fraud, then the ancient
Ubaidians or Sumarians or whomever concocted this are a hell of a lot more
advanced than we've given them credit for."

Marcus was a logical man, blatantly
so. His wife, on the other hand, took a lot more things on faith. Staring down
at the pile at his feet, he could only shake his head in wonder.

"Christ," he hissed.
"Do you realize what this means if this is found to be legitimate?"

She nodded her head even before
he finished his sentence. "Yes, I do. I've been in the Biblical Archaeology
business a long time, remember? I go where angels fear to tread."

It had been a stupid statement on
his part. Kathlyn was aware of the significance more than he was. Only he had
never seen anything this incredible before. Although his initial reaction was
that the skeleton was fraudulent, he couldn't refute the evidence before him.
Out here in the cradle of civilization, where Man began his walk into civility,
too many factors pointed to the probable, not the improbable.

But he wasn't ready to go on
faith yet. He was far too rational. He brushed and picked, trying to gain a
better picture of what lay in the dried mud. Somewhere in the process, he
passed a few samples to Kathlyn, who discreetly sealed them into plastic
baggies hidden beneath her chador.  Although the elder hadn't said anything
about samples, they didn't want to take a chance. And they badly needed to date
this find if it was going to be of any scientific value.

 The more Marcus worked on the
bones, the more addicted he became to them. It was like a disease that spread
from his eyes to his brains to his limbs, consuming him.  He was determined to
uncover as much as he could, as quickly as he could, because he knew the elders
would end their little observation soon enough. He was just thankful that they
had the presence of mind to smuggle a few samples out. He couldn't wait to get
them to the lab.  If they couldn't take pictures or sketch drawings, it was
tangible proof at its best to collaborate their observations.

"Revelation 12:7 through
12:9;" Kathlyn's soft voice floated upon the heated drafts, interrupting
his thoughts. "’And there was a war in heaven. Michael and his angels
fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. The great
dragon was hurled down, that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who
leads the whole world astray.  He was hurled to earth, and his angels with him’."

Marcus looked up at her, noticing
that she was almost in a trance-like state. He had seen her that way before,
many times. Her archaeological team called it exactly what it looked like;
The
State
. It was the gift of Intuition that conventional science scoffed at.
She froze up, mentally, and things seemed to come to her. Whereas most
archaeologists used their education and wits to gain their finds, Kathlyn went
a step further. Those who had worked with her swore she had a sixth sense for
archaeological sites; Marcus had scoffed, too, until he saw her in action.  He
couldn't even begin to comprehend how she sensed things; all he knew was that
she did. And she had a career full of auspicious results to confirm it.

"Are you sensing
anything?" he asked quietly so the nosy translator wouldn't over hear him.

She was staring off into the
distance, her pupils huge to the point that her irises had vanished. "I'm
not sure," she murmured. "It's very murky here. It's hard to get any
sense of Flow."

Flow
. Another Kathlyn term used to
describe the sensation of movement she felt when her mind was still and she
allowed her senses to expand. Marcus looked back down at the bones.

"Flow or not, I know what
you're thinking," he said. "It looks pretty obvious, but we can't be
so sure yet."

She stared, her pupils dilated, a
moment longer before seeming to shake herself back to reality. She looked at
him, the pupils in her big eyes shrinking down to pinpoints as he watched.

"It's really
fantastic," she murmured. "Think about it, Marcus; we're in the area
that spawned civilization as we know it. The Garden of Eden was around here,
somewhere, if you follow the Biblical accounts.  Remember your Bible and the
battle for heaven? Legions of angels were lost."

"Don't say it."

"Maybe this is one of those
lost."

Marcus sighed heavily, gazing
down at the skeleton at his feet. She was so willing to go on belief of her
convictions, whereas he simply couldn't at this point. But it was difficult not
to feel the excitement. Beneath is massive boots, bones forming a large-scaled
human lay partially on its back, limbs slightly twisted and a half-revealed
skull open in a silent scream. But the most unique features, the ones that had
everyone in an uproar, were the two protrusions that seemed to come directly
out of the shoulder blade, at least on the left side that he could see, looking
like what his trained eye was telling him to be folded and bent wings.

He could see the tiny metacarpus,
looking more like rocks than bones. But Marcus' trained eye knew better. The
more he brushed, the more the pattern of the wings was revealed. It was the
most incredibly bizarre sight he had ever seen and it was a struggle not to
feel particularly overwhelmed by it. Kathlyn could give in to her faith. He
just couldn't at the moment.

They had what looked to be, for
lack of a better explanation, like a fallen angel.

CHAPTER
TWO

Los
Angeles, California

The offices of World Geography
Magazine, Inc. were located at the very top of what was formerly known as the
First State Bank building in downtown Los Angeles.  It was a soaring pillar of
glass and steel, towering above the other structures in the heart of the busy
city. The fifty-sixth floor was where the chairman's suite of offices was
located, taking up one fourth of the thirty thousand square foot commercial
space. A massive conference room adjoined a sumptuous office, complete with its
own bathroom, shower, and sitting room with a hide-a-bed leather couch imported
from Italy. One entire wall of the office was a two-story window, offering a
magnificent view of Hollywood to the west and the San Gabriel Valley to the
east.

Dr. Donald Davis Ballard sat
behind a massive black granite desk that dwarfed him. He was a tall, thin man,
looking rather ill at ease in the midst of such opulence. A field archaeologist
with a stellar reputation for over thirty years, he was trying very hard to fit
into the chairman-of-a-major-corporation-lifestyle. He'd only been the chairman
for sixth months, replacing a man by the name of Walter Dougray after he was
implicated in a plot that involved, among other things, killing one of their
most popular correspondents, Dr. Kathlyn Trent. It was a bizarre story that
even now wasn't fully understandable; the courts were still sorting the entire
mess out. Nonetheless, Ballard was in as CEO and attempting, somewhat
successfully, to adapt to the lifestyle. He wore an expensive Armani shirt,
matching dark pants, and old New Balance tennis shoes. So much for image.

Today, none other than Dr. Trent
herself was in Dr. Ballard’s office. She sat across the desk from the man who
represented the company that had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into
sponsoring her. Although her official affiliation was with Southern California
University, World Geography Magazine and The World of Exploration Channel
funneled money into the university to sponsor Dr. Trent's popular cable
programs. Dr. Trent’s husband, world-renown Egyptologist Dr. Marcus Burton, sat
next to his wife with a beer in his hand. It had been so long since he had
savored one that even at eleven in the morning, he was drinking.

"That's exactly what it was,
Don," Kathlyn was saying as she took a sip of her diet cola. "I'd
stake my reputation on it."

Ballard was cautious. Dr. Trent's
reputation for finding and identifying ancient and/or Biblical relics was well
founded. She had built a strong standing on it. Although he respected her a
great deal, he just couldn't take her word for it at the moment because this
claim was the most outrageous thing he had ever heard. Had it come from anyone
other than her, he would have kicked them right out of his office.

"But you have no real proof,
no pictures or anything," he said. "What about the lab samples you
brought back?"

Marcus spoke. "They're at
the lab. We won't know anything for another couple of days."

"And you say the bones were
petrified?"