‘I was on a mission for the CIA in Iraq, before the invasion. There’s a lake between the Euphrates and the Tigris called Umm al Binni — we had a rendezvous with a group of Marsh Arabs there. Saddam had drained the marshes to drive them out, and because of that, the water level had dropped enough to reveal something in the lake. A temple. I went inside, and found the angel. The unbroken angel.’ He held one hand about twelve inches above the other. ‘It was this tall, and looked exactly as John described in Revelation — the body of a man but with the head of a lion, wrapped in six wings full of eyes.’
‘If you say so,’ said Nina warily.
He rounded on her. ‘I don’t need to say so!’ he barked. ‘I can show you!’ He flipped up the laptop’s lid. ‘Here!’
The screen came to life, displaying a photograph of the interior of the temple. The resolution was relatively low, but still clear enough for her to realise that whatever else she thought of her captor, he had made an impressive discovery.
He had also accurately described the angel, which rested inside a gold-lined nook. It did indeed have a lion’s head on a man’s body, metal wing-like shapes tightly encircling it. But she found herself more intrigued by the surroundings than the centrepiece. The walls were covered in inscribed text — she recognised it as Akkadian, a long-extinct language of ancient Mesopotamia. It wasn’t one she could translate, though, those words visible through the dirt and shadows remaining indecipherable.
She also recognised another language: ancient Hebrew, carved into stone tablets propped against the wall. Their lower halves were lost beneath the flooded temple’s murky waters, leaving only a few lines visible. Again she couldn’t read the language; Latin and Greek had been her specialities.
‘This was under the lake?’ she asked, intrigued. She knew she was falling prey to her own weakness, her obsession with learning more about lost treasures of the past, but couldn’t help wanting to know more.
Cross nodded. ‘It had been under twenty feet of water until Saddam drained the region. The Marsh Arabs avoided the area even before then; they thought it was a place of death.’
‘And was it?’
‘I was the only person who got out alive after the Iraqis attacked, so yes. The temple was blown up by a helicopter gunship.’ He gestured at the sliver inside the cabinet. ‘That was the only piece of the angel I recovered.’
Nina was still examining the photograph. ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do with this. I can’t translate Akkadian, and I only know a small amount of ancient Hebrew. I don’t have a clue what this says.’
‘You don’t need to. This was taken twelve years ago. I’ve had it translated since then. In pieces, so that no outsider would know what it all meant.’ Cross brought up another picture.
Words had been overlaid upon a copy of the original image. But they were positioned almost randomly across the wall, a scattershot translation. Nina frowned. ‘These are only fragments. Is there even a complete sentence there?’
‘Only a few,’ he replied, with clear frustration at the fact. He pointed them out. She read them: The guidance of God led His chosen through the desert and showed them water when they thirsted; Three times shall it be said, seven is the number of God, and man is always lesser; And the Elders sent their people into the lands around. ‘They were all we could find, even after the picture was enhanced. But it told me enough.’
‘Which was?’
‘That this place was used by the twenty-four Elders — the ancient Hebrew leaders who sit around God’s throne in His temple, just as Revelation says.’ Cross indicated some of the translated text. ‘You see? The Akkadian symbols for the number twenty-four — and here in the Hebrew text,’ he added, pointing out one of the half-submerged slabs, ‘it actually uses the word “Elders”.’
Nina shook her head. ‘So it was an important religious site. That doesn’t prove that God personally stockpiled his angels there. The ancient Hebrews spread out over a wide area, including into Mesopotamia.’
‘There’s more.’ Cross’s finger moved to other snatches of translation. ‘These Hebrew sections say that the Elders sent the other three angels away for safety, dispersing them as more tribes came into the region. And the older text, the Akkadian, describes how the angels were bound in the first place — or rather, what was bound inside them.’
‘And what would that be?’ said Nina, her cynicism muted by the fact that she now genuinely wanted to know. She had no intention of taking Cross’s deductions at face value, but at the same time she couldn’t deny that his find deserved proper archaeological study.
‘Do you know what the Umm al Binni lake is, Dr Wilde?’ Before she could speak, he provided the answer. ‘It’s a meteorite crater. A meteorite hit Mesopotamia around 2200 BC. The destruction it caused led to the downfall of the Sumerian civilisation — the Sumerians being replaced by the Akkadians.’
‘That’s conjecture,’ Nina corrected. ‘It’s a possible cause for the fall of Sumeria, but there are others. And yeah, I have heard of Umm al Binni. It might be a meteorite crater, but considering the state of things in Iraq since the war, nobody’s been in a big hurry to check it out.’
‘I believe it was a meteorite. And you will too.’ Cross went back to the cabinet, gazing down at the chunk of stone within. ‘Let me quote from Revelation again.’
‘Oh, I doubt I’m gonna be able to stop you,’ she sneered.
Anna strode right up to her. ‘Don’t talk back to the Prophet again. Understand? I can hurt you without hurting your baby.’
‘Anna, that’s enough. For now,’ said Cross. ‘Revelation chapter eight, verse ten: “And there fell a great star from heaven, burning as if it were a lamp.” Now, what does that describe, in modern terms?’
‘A meteorite,’ Nina had to admit — then her mind made a connection to another ancient story. ‘Wait… there’s a section in the Epic of Gilgamesh, I think the eleventh tablet, that could be interpreted the same way. It describes the Anunakki — a group of Sumerian sky gods — “setting the land ablaze with their torch” and “shattering the land like a pot”. That’s followed by a great flood, maybe the same one from Genesis, but the timing of the Gilgamesh legend roughly coincides with a date of around 2200 BC.’
Cross exchanged glances with Anna and Simeon. ‘You know your subject, Dr Wilde,’ he told Nina. ‘That proves you’re the right person to find what I’m looking for. But I’m curious. You’re willing to accept Gilgamesh as a source of truth. So why not the Book of Revelation?’
‘Because some of the events in Gilgamesh can be corroborated by other sources. Revelation can’t. It’s a completely stand-alone piece of work, and to be frank, it reads like some sort of drug trip.’
She expected an angry response. Cross’s reply, however, surprised her. ‘Have you ever taken hallucinogenic drugs, Dr Wilde?’
‘What? Of course not.’
‘I have.’ Her surprise grew at the admission. ‘Part of my training with the CIA’s Special Activities Division. It lets them judge if an operative’s likely to give up information under truth agents. I passed the test, by the way.’
Nina gave him a thin smile. ‘Congratulations.’
‘But I discovered something about hallucinations, which I’ve since corroborated from other sources.’ A glance at Simeon; had he been another CIA agent who’d undergone the same training? ‘Anything you see while under the influence is taken from your own subconscious mind — it’s something you’ve already encountered, but reflected back at you in a distorted way, like a funhouse mirror. You can’t hallucinate something you’ve never encountered before, because there’s nothing for your mind to work with. So if you’ve never heard of an elephant, say, it would be impossible for you to hallucinate an elephant.’