On the floor in front of him lay an enormous object that Adam at first took to be some kind of obelisk made of that same gleaming black pitch, perhaps some sort of altar. But then Feyiz broke off a piece of the pitch and Adam took a step nearer, zooming the camera in for a close-up.
“What is it?” Hakan said. “A crate?”
Adam slipped over behind Feyiz. Now that it had been illuminated, he could see that the entire black casing on the far side of the obelisk had been broken away, revealing a different texture beneath. A large, rectangular wooden box, timber heavy and blackened. Its lid had been sealed with that same bitumen, but Feyiz had begun to run his fingers over the seam and Adam zoomed in to see that the seal had been shattered, broken bits of pitch all over the floor.
Zoomed in, the camera picked up strange markings carved in the black surface, both on the outside of the box and on the shattered seal.
“It’s some kind of sarcophagus,” Meryam said.
“It’s Egyptian?” Adam asked.
She gave him a sharp look. “How should I know?”
“Sarcophagi are Egyptian.”
“We’ve established there are no archaeologists among us,” Meryam said. “I’m only saying I think it’s some sort of coffin.”
“A tomb,” Hakan said quietly.
“So, not Egyptian, then?” Adam teased, the joy of discovery buzzing inside him. He could feel that everything had changed for them. The future would begin with this moment.
But Meryam had stopped smiling. Her features paled and fresh beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. Her pallor went an ugly yellow.
Still crouched by the tomb, Feyiz muttered something in his own language and then slumped onto his side in a sprawl, unmoving. Hakan shouted his nephew’s name and shoved past Meryam. Adam reached for her too late. Meryam twisted to one side, dropped to her knees, and retched again. A moment later she clasped her hands to both sides of her head and began to scream in pain, crying out that her skull had split open.
The camera saw it all.
Outside the ark, the cold wind went on howling. A cloud passed across the moon and, atop Mount Ararat, all lay in darkness.
THREE WEEKS LATER
FIVE
Ben Walker turned up the collar on his coat and zipped it all the way, nestling his mouth and nose down inside its warmth. The military helicopter tilted leftward as the pilot banked toward the mountain. Thousands of feet of gray daylight separated the chopper from the ground, but it wasn’t the height that troubled Walker, it was the wind. Commercial helicopters were not even allowed to fly this close to the mountain. The only way to get on top of Ararat without climbing it was to hitch a ride with the Turkish military.
An updraft buffeted the chopper and then they hit a moment of dead air—so thin at this elevation that when the wind died, the rotors whined and it felt like they were falling. The rotors thumped so loudly that the sound felt like a physical assault. Walker gritted his teeth and looked out the window as they came in view of the shadowy scar on the face of the mountain. His son, Charlie, a nine-year-old daredevil, always talked about his desire to ride in a helicopter one day. Walker thought he ought to take the boy up eventually, but when he did it would be in less perilous conditions.
Don’t be an idiot, he thought. Amanda would never go for it.
His ex-wife, Amanda. Charlie’s mother. The longer they’d been together, the more frequently Walker had been away, and the situations in which he’d found himself had only grown more dangerous and more frightening. His scars unsettled Amanda, but not as much as his unwillingness to talk about how he’d acquired them. She’d told him his secrecy meant that he did not trust her, and though he’d denied it, Walker knew it was the truth. Amanda had a beautiful smile and a carefree laugh that made her eyes gleam with genuine joy. She tried to see the best in people, which made her the worst sort of person with whom to share things that must be kept secret. Keeping secrets would have eaten away at her. Just knowing the world contained some of the horrors Walker had encountered would have tainted her, and he refused to be responsible for that.
Charlie couldn’t have asked for a better mother. Amanda would raise him to greet the world with openness and optimism. So when she’d told him that his sullenness and privacy was poisoning their marriage, Walker had agreed. The stunned look in Amanda’s eyes—the painful epiphany as she realized he would not change for her—still haunted him. But she had found a path away from him, started to build a life without him, surrounding herself with friends. Last time he’d seen Charlie, his son had told him that Amanda had started dating an artist named George, who would draw the boy cartoons full of ghosts and wizards and funny animals. It hurt him to hear the fondness in his son’s voice, but it made him happy as well.
An elbow nudged him and he glanced to his left, realizing belatedly that Kim Seong had been speaking to him. With his collar up and the thrum of the helicopter, he’d missed the words.
“Sorry, what’s that?” He leaned toward her.
“I said ‘if this is weather they feel safe to fly in, I’m very happy you didn’t persuade them to come up when it was snowing!’”
“So am I.”
He smiled as he spoke, but he had not yet decided what to make of Ms. Kim. The Korean woman made a strange and possibly unwelcome addition to this excursion. Meryam Karga and Adam Holzer had reportedly promised the Turkish government excellent coverage in the documentary and book they were working on as well as a share of earnings from those ventures, but Walker thought the adventurers must have made other promises as well, having to do with media coverage, tourism, and their willingness to accept any rules the Turks wanted to lay down.
When Karga and Holzer were pulling their initial team together they brought in people from various nations and disciplines, and the Turks only insisted on having a pair of government underlings on site. But the moment the United States had asked to send a representative from their National Science Foundation—Walker himself—the Turkish government had decided they needed an independent observer and had appealed to the United Nations to provide one. Kim Seong was that observer. An expert on global policy, trained in international negotiation, Kim seemed a strange choice for the job, but from the moment they had met in Istanbul she had struck Walker as professional, intelligent, and most importantly, intrigued by whatever the adventurers had actually found on Ararat.
Still, he didn’t like the idea of a babysitter, no matter how well he might get along with her.
Walker strained at his seat belt so he could glance over his shoulder. Father Cornelius Hughes had gone as pale as the snowy crest of the mountain but gave a quick nod to indicate his general well-being. The aging priest had a deeply lined face and an air of wisdom that seemed to come from another era entirely. He was an expert on ancient civilizations and languages, but despite the priest’s academic background, Walker had been pleasantly surprised to learn that Father Cornelius had an open mind regarding the biblical story of the flood.
Not much of a team, but if Walker had tried to bring a security officer, it might have led to the revelation that the National Science Foundation was nothing more than a decades-long facade, a placeholder name for use when the U.S. Department of Defense didn’t want anyone to know that DARPA was on the scene. Even the priest didn’t know who he worked for, and Walker sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Ms. Kim. The UN rarely approved of DARPA sniffing around without authorization, and they’d have informed the Turks, who’d have withdrawn permission for Walker to be on site.
The mission would have been scrubbed and Walker’s superiors would not like that at all. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had a fancy name but a relatively simple job—look into emerging science and unexplained phenomena and make absolutely certain that if it was possible someone could make a weapon out of it, the United States would be first to do so. Walker had never really liked working for DARPA—he didn’t appreciate weaponized science—but he had a lifelong fascination with mysteries both natural and unnatural, a thirst for explanation that would not be quenched. And when those things turned out to be potentially dangerous, he did prefer they be in his own government’s hands.