“Nothing?”
“Bones,” Marie intoned. “Nothing but bones.”
“The vault has been turned into a mass grave,” explained Kismet. “There are hundreds of skeletons down there. Maybe thousands.”
“Babylonian slaves?” wondered Chiron.
Kismet felt profoundly uncomfortable with the older man’s eagerness for all the gruesome details. “Not Babylonian and not ancient, but slaves nonetheless: Saddam’s workforce. After they excavated this tunnel, he had them all slaughtered to keep its existence secret.”
Marie shuddered involuntarily, but offered nothing more. Despite his suffering, Hussein was also keenly attentive, his expression revealing that he was all too familiar with atrocities of the sort Kismet was describing.
“Perhaps we have been looking for the wrong treasure chamber,” Chiron mused.
“It makes no difference now. We have to get Hussein back to the surface.”
“He can go back alone. Or with Marie. We need to find out where this tunnel leads.”
Kismet stared in disbelief at his old mentor, but before he could begin to formulate a contrary argument, Hussein interjected. “I am able to continue. The sting of this creature — it is not fatal.”
“If Hussein can go on,” voiced Marie, “I vote to continue our search as well. I also would like to know where this tunnel leads.”
As the lone dissenting voice, Kismet fought back an urge to rage at his associates. “It doesn’t matter. There’s no reason to continue. Whatever we hoped to find is long gone. If Saddam’s engineers found some kind of treasure trove, they would have moved it—” he fixed a stern gaze on Chiron, “—or destroyed anything of religious significance.”
“Nick.” Chiron’s tone was passionate and pleading. “We’re here. We’ve come so far… you have brought us this far. Don’t you want to see where this path leads?”
Kismet sensed his friend was talking about more than just the tunnel. He stared back silently for a moment, then glanced once more at the wounded Iraqi. “Hussein, are you sure you can make it?”
In spite of the cool air in the tunnel, the young man’s forehead was beaded with droplets of perspiration and his face showed a distressing pallor, but he nevertheless nodded eagerly. Kismet drew in a breath and exhaled with a defeated sigh. “Well, I suppose it has to lead somewhere. I just hope we don’t run into any of the former tenants.”
After a few moments spent gathering and inventorying the remaining supplies, the small party began advancing once more along the tunnel route. Although they progressed in much the same manner as before, Kismet was now more keenly aware of the separation of each member of the party. The space that divided them as they moved was more than simply a physical interval. Alone with his or her thoughts, each person walked silently more than a meter from the next, and Kismet found himself wondering what occupied the minds of his companions.
Chiron’s obsession with finding the trove, and specifically the Staff of Moses, was most troubling, but at least it was something he could understand. In his own way, Kismet was also searching for the answer to a question that was much bigger than anything he could put into words. He didn’t for a moment believe that the old man would find something definitive — the fingerprint of God, written large in the desert sand — but in a quest for faith, sometimes the search itself was the goal.
Marie’s motivations were less easy to read. Initially, it had been easy to dismiss her attendance as peripheral, a titillating presence in the right environment, but a deadly distraction in the midst of life and death hardships. Yet, there had been a few moments when her behavior seemed out of character with that impression, not the least example of which was her eagerness to push ahead into the treasure vault. And her simple declaration of interest in discovering what lay at the end of the tunnel bespoke a deeper personal investment in their quest than a simple wish to support her employer.
Under the pretense of checking his physical condition, Kismet diverted the lantern’s broad cone of light away from the tunnel to briefly illuminate Hussein’s face. The young man’s movements were labored, as was his breathing, and his countenance betrayed the ongoing war his body was fighting against the toxins in his bloodstream, but he flashed a determined smile and managed to straighten his posture.
Kismet had no reason to doubt that Hussein’s intentions were anything beyond the obvious. The young scholar, like most people his age, was interested in adventure and discovery. In that, they were not so different, though Kismet could remember a time in his own life when subterranean passageways and ancient ruins held no significance for him. In fact, it had not been until that fateful night in the desert that he had begun looking into the mysteries of the past, and even then only as means to solving a more immediate enigma. The depth of his knowledge of history was incidental to a quest rooted solely in the present.
As he continued to tread the trail of his thoughts, he found Marie at his side. “Nick, a question if you please. You said that anything of religious significance would be destroyed. Is that the goal of the Prometheus group? To destroy that which might reinforce religious faith?”
He tried in vain to read her expression; she floated like a wraith in the darkness beside him. He resisted the urge to play the light on her face as he had Hussein’s. “I don’t know for sure. In any case, that’s not what I meant. There’s reason to believe that Saddam Hussein would have ordered the destruction of certain relics — artifacts from the Temple of Solomon and perhaps even the Staff Pierre is seeking — out of fear that the Israeli government might risk war in order to recover them.”
“How can you know this?”
Kismet gave a vague shrug. “It’s not so farfetched. The Taliban government of Afghanistan destroyed several stone carvings of Buddha because they believed it to be the will of God.”
“But Saddam Hussein has never been devoutly religious. He would view such relics merely as antiquities to be prized or sold.” She took a step forward so that her face was partially bathed in light, her expression stern. “And you did not answer my question. Is this something that Samir Al-Azir told you?”
He made no attempt to hide his dismay, but lowered his voice in an unspoken plea for her to use discretion. “So you really were eavesdropping. But the answer is yes. That’s what he told me.”
“And had he been so ordered? I am wondering what he found that could have been so inflammatory.”
“Marie.” Kismet’s voice took on a forceful edge. “Drop it.”
“I think I have as much right to know as Pierre,” she continued defiantly, but dropped her tone to a whisper. “And you may be sure that I will demand an explanation when this is finished.”
Kismet breathed a relieved sigh at her temporary retreat from the subject. Between Chiron’s probing and Marie’s spying, he had inadvertently revealed more about his encounter with Samir Al-Azir than at any other time in his life. He had kept the details of what had happened that night secret with a passion that bordered on mania for the simple reason that he wasn’t really sure who he could trust. His attempts to regulate how much of the tale he would reveal were proving futile. Each revelation led to more questions and to deductions that were startlingly accurate.
Nothing more was said on the subject and a few minutes later the discussion was forgotten as the group reached the terminus of the tunnel. There was an abrupt transition from the smooth, symmetrical tube through which they had walked into a vast cavern hewn by nature but reinforced by human engineers. The discovery of the cave must have been a serendipitous event for the excavators of the tunnel, who had evidently chosen it as the place to begin the next phase of the project. As Kismet played the light into the recesses of the grotto, he saw what the tunnel had been leading up to.