The Illumination (3 page)

“Excuse me, Miss Landau . . .” Duoaud, the young Iraqi, leaned in to set a small cup of thick black coffee before her. “Is there anything else you need this evening?”

“I'm set for tonight, Duoaud.” She glanced up at the thin young man with the movie-star eyelashes who hovered at her elbow. “I'm turning in for the night, too.”

She angled the pendant back into its pouch as Duoaud gathered up the plates and napkins. As he worked, his gaze followed the glint of the chain as it slid into the hollow of waiting leather.

“A most beautiful amulet, Miss Landau. Almost as beautiful as you,” he added with a flashing grin. “My girlfriend, she would enjoy wearing one like that. Did you buy it here in Baghdad?”

She scraped back her chair and turned toward the stairs. “Actually, it found me. G'night, Duoaud. Please tell Wasim the lamb was amazing this evening. The best I've ever tasted.”

But Duoaud didn't tell Wasim a thing. As soon as Dana left the dining room, Duoaud raced through the kitchen and out the back door, tearing down back alleys stinking of garbage and dog piss, past tall and vacant hotels, past gas stations and trinket shops, until he stood at a stately home near the far outskirts of the Green Zone. At the door of Aslam Hameed, who was paying him to keep an eye on the Americans and to keep an ear out for whispers about the Eye of Dawn, he pummeled the thick wood with the side of his fist.

“It's true. It exists—it's here.
The Eye of Dawn.
I saw it with my own eyes. Tonight—at the villa.”

The words poured out of him faster than the sweat sliding down his dark, razor-sharp cheekbones. The obsidian eyes of Aslam Hameed pinned him.

“Inside.” The heavier man jerked Duoaud into the stone entryway of his comfortable home, quickly scanning the street in both directions before he stepped back inside his residence and slammed the door.

“Tell me everything. But first, tell me who has it.”

Duoaud was still panting, yet exhilarated by the full attention of Aslam Hameed.

And when Hameed reports my discovery to Hasan Sabouri himself,
insha'allah,
I, too, might be in line for an important position with the Guardians of the Khalifah.

“A woman has it. She is a reporter. For an American television network—MSNBC. Her name is Dana Landau.”

 

 

The cab lurched down the Avenue of the Americas like a fitful donkey and Natalie swayed against the backseat as if she were riding one. She was already late for her 4
P.M
. meeting with Oscar Charles, chair of the Treasures of the Tombs fund-raising gala. And they only had an hour to finalize a wish list of major donors to underwrite the event.
Someday, when I'm on staff at a bigger museum, like the Met,
she thought wistfully,
fund-raising will be handled by its own department.
But the Devereaux was only a tenth the size of the Met, and its curators had to wear many hats.

She was frazzled and fatigued, despite the fact that she was doing exactly what she'd dreamed of doing ever since her grade-school field trip to the King Tut exhibit. That day, in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—built to house the Temple of Dendur exhibit—she'd fallen in love with the mystery of the ancient world, its grandeur and glamour. It wasn't until years later, while in the field for hours on end digging beneath the broiling Jordanian sun, that she finally appreciated the amount of grit and grunt it had taken to unearth those ancient treasures from the bowels of the desert and get them into their neat, temperature-controlled glass-and-velvet display cases.

As the cab finally jolted against the curb at Seventy-fifth and
Third, she scrounged in her shoulder bag for a twenty-dollar bill, past her penlight, her cosmetics bag, her cell phone. She stopped short at the sight of her passport, still there amid the crumpled boarding pass and the tin of Altoids.

What is my problem? Tonight this is getting put away,
she chided herself, tossing the twenty at the driver. With a cacophony of horns blaring behind her and the intense pulse of the city pounding in her blood, it seemed like forever, not merely a week, since she'd departed Florence, still heady with the thrill of opening her first exhibit abroad.

Her exhilaration when Dr. Geoffrey Ashton, president of the Pan-European Association of Antiquities Scholars, called her to the podium was only a memory now. After having conferred with so renowned an expert for more than a year while she planned and coordinated her first international traveling exhibition, it had been an incomparable adrenaline rush to hear him introduce her. Now those heady moments were behind her. The exhibit of ancient Greek Orthodox
tamata
crafted of clay, wood, and metal was on the road now. The little
tamata
are still used as church offerings, only today they are made of tin, silver, or gold, and embossed with specific body parts representing an ailment. As in days past, the faithful hang them near an icon as they light a candle and pray for healing for themselves or others, even for a sick animal.

Her exhibit of rare artifacts dating back to the Bronze Age was headed next to Sydney. And she was home, swamped to her shoulders in new work—cataloging several new acquisitions, catching up on a mountain of correspondence, planning this gala—all while racing against a looming deadline for her first article in
International Antiquities Journal.

Someday she'd use that passport to get back to Florence on her own dime and explore the museums and architecture like a proper tourist, but right now she couldn't even think beyond the projects screaming for her attention, let alone remember to put away her passport.

Pushing through the door of Crush, Natalie spotted Oscar at once and waved. His mop of curly silver hair made him hard to miss in any crowd. An off-Broadway producer, Oscar Charles
personified enthusiasm, and he had the connections to guarantee that they'd fill the gala venue to capacity. He was an ebullient man, a people magnet, and a stickler for perfection—and by now she knew he liked his Grey Goose dirty, with extra olives on the side.

She plunged through the jammed, dimly lit restaurant, then stopped short, her attention diverted by the sound of her sister's voice flowing from the television perched high in the corner of the bar.

Dana was reporting from the site of a roadside bomb attack in Iraq. It was a repeat of the broadcast Natalie had seen on this morning's news. Still, her head swiveled up to her younger sister's image, and she felt the same pang in her gut she'd felt on learning that Dana had snagged the Iraq assignment.

Get the hell out of there, baby,
she thought, staring hard at Dana's small, serious face, trying to reconcile the whiny kid sister who wouldn't step outside in the rain without an umbrella to the petite, poised woman speaking calmly in the godforsaken desert without a flak jacket.
God, I miss you.

“. . . and in other Mid-East developments, Israeli police today fired tear gas to break up a demonstration by the right-wing Jewish extremist group Shomrei Kotel, which is protesting next week's historic summit in Jerusalem. Security is already tightening in preparation for the arrival of UN Secretary-General Gunther Ullmann, who brokered the deal between Hamas and—”

Suddenly, static filled the screen and the audio turned into an irritating rasp.

“This is the third time today it's gone out,” the bartender griped.

“Someone forget to pay the cable bill?” a woman at the bar drawled, eliciting laughter.

By then the transmission had been restored, but Dana was gone. Her report was over.

Still, an eerie chill swept along Natalie's nape. Her shoulder-length dark hair, caught loosely in a barrette, seemed to crackle with an odd electricity. She knew what her childhood friend Kara's grandmother would have said. She'd have clucked that someone had just walked over Natalie's grave.

Natalie shook off the thought, and the chill with it. Dana was fine, no doubt sound asleep by now. And Oscar was standing there waiting, offering her the chair opposite his.

She relaxed her shoulders and leaned in to greet him with a two-cheeked European kiss, reminding herself that by the night of the gala, two months from now, she wouldn't have to worry about Dana being stationed in Iraq anymore.

Two months from now Dana would be done with this assignment and home, safe and sound.

 

 

Rusty Sutherland struggled to keep his eyes open. Waiting for his boarding call, he slouched against the airport wall with a copy of Greenspan's
The Age of Turbulence
tucked under one arm and his duffel at his feet. All around him U.S. military personnel waded with authority through the stream of journalists, diplomats, and wary travelers eager to exit the war zone.

Flights here were few and far between, and often canceled at a moment's notice. He felt too fuzzy-headed this morning to read, but he wouldn't be able to close his eyes and relax until he was on that plane and the boarding door had been bolted shut.

He could almost smell Elaine's hair as he stood half a world away from her. She had the softest brown hair, and it smelled like ginger. He was sure the kids had made a homecoming sign for him, as big as the one they'd drawn for his fortieth birthday, and he found himself grinning at the memory.

When his flight was announced he stooped down quickly to grab up his duffel, and the book tumbled to the floor. Grabbing it up, he tried to jam it inside the canvas bag already bulging with his cameras, lenses, journal, and an assortment of honeyed Arabic pastries to tide him over on the long flight. As he searched for a free corner to shove the book into, his watch caught the drawstring of the pouch Dana had given him, dragging it out and spilling its contents at his feet.

Rusty swore in exasperation. Clumsily, he extricated the pouch from his wrist. People were surging past him toward the boarding gate. Impatient just to get on the damned plane, he snatched up Dana's note and pendant, cramming them back into his carry-on. With loping strides, he hurried toward the gate.

Behind him the gray eyes of a tall fair-haired man narrowed like a falcon's on Rusty's retreating back, watching until he disappeared through the door. Then Elliott Warrick, U.S. Assistant Undersecretary of Defense, lifted his cell phone and punched in a series of numbers known only to a select few in the world.

 

Dana dozed fitfully in the armored car shuttling her and the new cameraman back from Kirkuk. The sun boring through the windshield all but negated the fan she'd positioned to blast chilled air straight at her face. The long dangerous drive out to the north and back—coupled with abandoning her bed at an ungodly hour to see Rusty off—had depleted the last of her energy.

She wouldn't have the stamina to shower, or even to think about dinner, let alone to sit upright long enough to eat it. Dana's thoughts were no longer centered on the Kurdish families she'd interviewed at length today, exploring the contrast between their present shaky circumstances and the horrors suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein. All she could think about were cool cotton sheets and a long undisturbed sleep.

Her new cameraman, Linc Sanchez, made a beeline for the liquor cabinet the instant they got back to the villa, but she trudged toward the stairway in a stupor. Cresting the landing, she fairly staggered down the hall. As she opened her door, she heard a soft clink on the wood floor and glanced down to see that her
hamsa
necklace had fallen from around her neck.
The clasp must have come loose while I dozed in the car,
she thought, stooping wearily to retrieve it.

Clenching it in her hand, she stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind her—and only then did her dazed eyes focus on the chaos around her.

Drawers out of the dresser. Her clothes and underwear and
toiletries dumped across the floor. The bed stripped, cotton sheets lying like deflated white parachutes alongside the mattress. Pillowcases in shreds, feather stuffing layered everywhere.

Ohmygod,
Dana whispered, fumbling for her cell phone. She heard a small creak—the sound of the bathroom cupboard closing.

Someone's still here. In the bathroom. Run!

She spun toward the door, adrenaline surging, her exhaustion evaporating. But as she seized the doorknob she felt strong hands grab her from behind and lift her into the air. In a split second, an unseen attacker had flung her across the room.

 

 

“The plan is progressing according to schedule. By the time our enemies realize what is happening, the final battle will be upon their heads.”

Iranian businessman Farshid Sabouri's eyes glittered as he surveyed the three men in expensive suits gathered in the flat on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais overlooking the Eiffel Tower. On the streets below no one suspected that six stories above them four of the wealthiest, most powerful terrorists in the world were finalizing an unprecedented conflagration.

“
Insha'allah,
from the river to the sea, Islam will again prevail,” Farshid added, as the other key leaders of the Guardians of the Khalifah listened raptly. “The invader in our midst will fall before the sword of Allah.”

Siddiq Aziz, a clean-shaven man with manicured hands and diamond cuff links, leaned forward upon the low suede sofa. He was handsome enough to grace the pages of
GQ,
and his financial cunning exceeded his looks. “And Palestine will glory in the obliteration of the infidels,” the Saudi banker murmured.

Stretched across the wall behind him, the golden-hued painting of Al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, caught the sunlight splashing through the window. Each of the men glanced involuntarily at the image of the sacred site.

The ancient stones of Jerusalem seemed to glisten with a
holy radiance that spilled from the golden sphere dominating the hilltop. The infidels called it the Dome of the Rock, but these men knew it as Qubbat as-Sakhrah. Each man in the apartment was acutely aware at that moment that with the sweetness of impending victory there would come a price.