“Later, in an orphanage, the boy would meet a very generous woman. In fact, she was a Saudi princess, a woman with no children of her own. A woman with a huge heart. Touring the ravaged countryside, she would take pity on the homeless, family-less boy. He would return with her to Saudi Arabia. There, he would live a fairytale life of wealth and privilege. Although never formally adopted, as this is prohibited in Islam, or even a real prince, his new mother loved him with all her heart. But her love was not enough to erase his pain.”

  Omar’s eyes glistened in the artificial light.

  “Yes, Sam. I’m here for revenge.”

  ***

  “Ballistic missiles are visible to intelligence agencies,” I said. “Their flight paths can be predicted, and warnings can be provided to their intended targets. You will lose the element of surprise, emir. Not to mention defensive systems that can come on line for missile interception.”

  “All true, Mr. Ward. But I will take my chances. Even with proper warning, it is difficult to evacuate three million people.”

  Faye stepped forward, fists clenched, breath steaming before her in a bullish sort of way. “Then why keep my father prisoner? Why use him and his student to search for the ark?”

  Omar flicked his dark gaze to Faye. “I would have disposed of the old fool and his student long ago but Al Sayid found a use for them.”

  “Who the hell is Al Sayid?”

  The portly little man I had first seen outside ambled forward. He pushed his glasses up with a stubby middle finger and blinked rapidly behind them. “That would be me, my dear.” He spoke in flawless English.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Professor Al Sayid from the university in Riyadh.”

  Omar said, “The professor is an avid ark researcher like your father. In fact, Al Sayid added the necessary validity to convince the Turks to close the mountain.”

  Al Sayid’s metal framed glasses slipped to the end of his nose. He promptly pushed them back up. “Your father is onto something. That cave of his is most unusual, and may prove invaluable. But I’m afraid we are down to our final days. Time is short.”

  “Frankly,” said the emir, lip curling with disdain, “I couldn’t care less about this blasted ark. Once the missile is launched, I will be happy to go and leave this wretched mountain behind.” He paused a beat. “Then I can die happy.”

  “You and three million people,” I said.

  He stared at me for a long moment. “For now, Mr. Ward, you will help the others clear the tunnel, which will give me some time to decide your fate.”

  I sucked in air. “And what of Miss Roberts?”

  “She will stay here, with me, of course. The cave is no place for a lady. Farid, take her away.” He paused. “And this time do not let this one escape.”

  The words should have been meaningless, and perhaps they were. But I stopped breathing, and even my heart seemed to pause. But it was Farid’s expression, the look of pained regret that showed in the deep furrows of his brow that made me realize my reaction was valid. Farid inhaled deeply, let it out in a steady stream that fogged before him.

  I turned to Omar. “Who escaped, emir?”

  Omar flipped his hand casually. “It is of no concern to you.”

  I heard the blood pounding in my ears, felt the throb of it behind my temples. “Who?”

  “Guards,” said Omar, raising his voice and looking down at his fingernails. “Take him away. He has much work to do.”

  A hand reached for me and I knocked it away. Rifles swung in my direction. I ignored them. I took a step toward the emir, and this time a much bigger hand held me back. Farid’s hand.

  He looked at me with a pained expression, and for the first time I saw real emotion behind those lifeless eyes. “I am sorry, Sam. It was an accident.”

  “What do you mean, Farid?” I asked, but I knew what he meant. I had intuitively known all along, I suppose.

  Omar looked up, alarm on his face. “Farid, I command you to be silent.”

  The big Arab ignored his master, perhaps for the first time in his career. “It happened three years ago during our first visit to the mountain. The girl had wandered too close to camp, and so our guards picked her up for routine questioning.”

  “Silence, Farid!”

  “She was questioned repeatedly. Had she overheard our plans? She said she had not, but we could not know for sure. I, for one, was certain that she had harmlessly blundered near our camp.”

  “Farid!”

  “But then she escaped from her tent, and I was ordered to track her down and bring her back.”

  My throat constricted, as if seized by a hand.

  Farid’s gaze was penetrating and unwavering. His voice was surprisingly gentle. “But when I found her hours later at the bottom of a ravine, she was already dead. A rockslide, I believe. Sam, I’m sorry.” The big man looked mortified. But I didn’t fault him. He was only doing the emir’s bidding.

  I collapsed to my knees, tried unsuccessfully to breathe. The cold of Ararat seeped up through the fabric of the tent, up through the material of my pants, numbing my kneecap. Finally, I looked up at Omar, and when I spoke my voice shook and did not sound like my own. “You are responsible for her death.”

  Omar shrugged and looked away. “She should not have been on her own. As far as I see it, Mr. Ward, she was the cause of her own death. And perhaps you, too.”

  I shot to my feet in one explosive movement and pounced on the emir, hands going straight to his throat. Behind me came the bolt actions of automatic rifles, armed and leveled at me. Faye screamed. The emir gurgled. I forced him up against the steel frame of the launcher, eyes bulging pleasantly from his wicked face. I concentrated all my strength into my hands and fingers in an effort to snap his neck.

  Until I sensed a shadow rise behind me. And from the corner of my eyes, Farid raised his fist high and struck down like the Hammer of God.

  Lights out.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  I awoke slowly from the land of the dead, head pounding. Professor Caesar Roberts was holding a wet rag to my head, a bemused grin on his face. I was beginning to think he always had a bemused grin on his face.

  “How long,” I said, struggling to regain use of my tongue. “How long have I been out?”

  “Two or three hours,” said Caesar, a sparkle in his eyes. “At least since they dragged you in here and deposited you like a sack of potatoes.”

  When I finally stood, a wave of nausea swept over me, and I almost disgorged what little food I had eaten during the past few days. Wally sat cross-legged next to the fire, rocking gently, staring down into the lapping flames as if they held the secret to his escape. He didn’t look at me, and seemed lost in his own fear. I could see that his Mickey Mantle baseball card, once sheathed in plastic, was now melted and blackened in the fire pit. I pointed to the remains of the card and asked Caesar what had happened.

  “A soldier threw it in the fire,” said the professor. “He said it was punishment for the beating you gave him in the tunnel.”

  “Dammit.”

  A cold draft worked its way over my skin. Faint morning light issued from the tunnel behind, pushing my shadow before me. In the muted half-light, Caesar and Wally looked ghoulish and pale, like two creatures from a Jules Verne novel. I wondered how long it had been since they had seen the light of the sun.

  “Pardon me if I seem insensitive to your pain,” said Caesar, the smile on his face wavering, “but where the hell is my daughter?”

  My head pounded from the inside out. There seemed to be a faint ringing in my skull. It had been a hell of a punch by Farid. “She’s with Omar.” I thought of Liz Cayman, inadvertently dead at the hands of Omar. I did not blame Farid. But I would hold the emir responsible. He would pay for stealing my fiancé’s life. My life. Our life together.

  Caesar said, “You okay, Sam?”

  “No.”

  The professor exhaled, looking miserable. “Join the club. I should have known she would try something like this. With her, nothing surprises me. She’s quite capable of anything. So what do we do now?”

  “I’m still working on that one, professor. First, I need to stop the ringing in my head. Either that, or someone get the damn phone.”

  While I sat there with my head in my hands, Caesar caught me up to date. “We used a map I had created from the journal of Jans Struys. By coming up from the north, we had inadvertently skirted Omar’s camp.” The map had indicated that this was the legendary cave, but there was no marker, as proclaimed by Struys in his memoir. Frustrated but undaunted, Caesar began hacking away at the ice until he’d uncovered the fabled finger of rock. The marker. Elated, they had found their cave, only to discover that a massive cave-in had blocked further access into the tunnel. Omar and his men appeared shortly thereafter. In summary, Caesar said, “I can see clearly now what I failed to see for the past month. By offering ourselves as workers, I had managed to spare our lives. That was my one good decision in a long series of very bad ones. Now the bastard has my daughter.”

  “Your daughter is safe for now,” said a voice behind us.

  We turned. Omar stood in the cave opening, out-of-breath, hanging by the arm of his bodyguard. The light from the fire cast the emir’s eyes into twin pools of bottomless pits. “But it is your own well-being that should concern you. Mr. Ward, will you please accompany me?”

  ***

  We stood together in the passageway, with Farid off to the side.

  As always, the bodyguard stared blankly into the near distance, managing somehow to see everything and nothing at once. The stock of his pistol jutted from the inside of his robe. Either that or he was happy to see me. He stood between me and the emir, and it was obvious that I would not get another chance at the emir’s neck.

  I waited silently as Omar studied his perfectly manicured fingernails. He looked ghastly in the muted light: deep shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and temples. Finally, he said, “I’m prepared to make you an offer, Mr. Ward.”

  It took all my effort to keep my voice steady. “What offer?”

  “You were a photojournalist, Sam. A very good one, from what I hear. I want you to write my story before I die, which I imagine will be soon.” He paused, and his dark eyes stared into my own. “I want the world to know why I have done what I am about to do. I do not want the world to think I’m an animal.”

  “But you are an animal, emir. The worst kind: you kill the innocent.”

  Anger flared briefly on his face. His mustache twitched. Farid glanced his way, then back to staring at the wall. “I kill for a higher purpose, Sam. I kill to end the war on Kurds. Much like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War Two. Yet the genocide on the Kurds continues. The world refuses to see that. Now they will. I will force them to take notice, to wake up. To acknowledge the problem.”

  I snorted. “You’re doing this out of revenge, plain and simple. An eye for an eye.”

  The emir’s eyes blazed. “You trivialize at your own peril, Sam. My hunger for personal justice, for the brutal murder of my family, takes nothing away from the fact that heinous crimes are enacted on my people on a daily basis.”

  Omar leaned against the tunnel wall. If Farid was interested in our conversation, he showed it by appearing completely uninterested. Omar folded his arms over his chest and stared at me with tired eyes.

  “And what’s in it for me?” I asked.

  “I will leave you a fortune, Mr. Ward. I will give you a portion now, and the rest when the article is published to my satisfaction.”

  “And what of Faye and the others?” I asked.

  Omar shook his head sadly.

  I looked him directly in the eye. “I would rather deal with the devil, emir.”

  He sighed and nodded. “I was afraid you’d say something like that. You give me no choice, Mr. Ward.”

  I stepped forward. Out of the corner of my eye, Farid shook his head. Stepping forward was not a good idea. I stopped and clenched my fists. “What have you done with Faye Roberts?”

  “She is safe.”

  “From your brother?”

  “He has been kept at bay. For now.”

  I glanced at Farid and he nodded reassuringly. Yes, she was safe.

  I narrowed my eyes. “I will kill you, emir, if any harm comes to her.”

  “When you are dead, Mr. Ward,” said Omar, turning his back on me, “you will hardly be in a position to carry out your threat.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  We spent the remainder of the day removing rocks and digging with shovels.

  Most of the rocks were huge, and seemed to be cemented together. We used wheelbarrows to deposit the debris on the south side of the cave. I never mentioned the significance of the small mound on the north side of the cave. And much later, as the long day turned into evening and the evening turned into night, a guard tossed in a leather satchel.

  “Dinner,” said Caesar.

  It was our only meal of the day, scraps of fatty meat and bones and chunks of hard bread. A canteen was included. We ate and drank in silence, although I noticed Wally simply poking at his food, his face long and drawn. He seemed to be retreating into himself, having given up hope for escape. The three of us were filthy enough to make a bar of soap nervous.

  While we ate, I pointed to the excavated opening in the cave wall. “Soon, we’ll need to support the walls and ceiling with timbers, or risk a cave-in within the cave-in.”

  The professor was nodding. “True, but we haven’t gone deep enough yet.”

  The food was quite good, then again, my standards had dropped considerably over the past few days. A guard came in later, saw that we were done, and ordered us to continue working.

  “I don’t speak Arabic,” said Wally, “but I’ve come to know what that means.” It was the most he had spoken all day.

  We continued to remove dirt and rocks far into the night, although I was unable to detect much difference in the wall, which was disheartening. And when it got considerably late, Wally tossed aside his shovel and said, “I’m going to bed.”

  ***

  While the boy slept, I sat with Caesar off to the side. We spoke in low voices, out of respect to the sleeping Wally. Eventually, the conversation turned to Struys’s memoirs.

  “I’m unaware that Struys left behind a map,” I said. “Only a memoir.”

  Caesar looked like a politician with a secret. “True, there is no physical map, per se. The map, however, is hidden within the pages of the memoir.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The map exists, Sam. You must read between the lines.”

  I shook my head. “Other researchers have scoured his memoir from top to bottom, gleaning from it all the known facts of Ararat, applying that book as a guide to find the cave with the marker shaped like a finger. How is it that you were successful where others have failed?”

  “I am one of those researchers, Sam. I am one of those who scoured Struys’s book from top to bottom. I felt that his account had the ring of authenticity as opposed to other, less credible eyewitness accounts. Call it a hunch, but I was convinced that Struys’s accurate descriptions of the mountain and its inhabitants proved that not only had he climbed the mountain, but that he had observed it with a journalistic eye for detail. His description of the ark itself is nothing short of breath-taking. The truth, Sam, is in the details.”

  “Fine,” I said, “the guy had an eye for detail. Aside from that, how were you able to discern from his writing an accurate map to this particular cave?”

  “Ah, well, even magicians nowadays are telling their secrets. I suppose I can tell mine, too.” He paused dramatically. “I began by obtaining the most current satellite photograph of Mount Ararat as provided by the Turkish Department of Interior. Next, I carefully went through Struys’s memoir word for word, creating in perfect chronological order each step of Struys’s journey over the mountain.”

  “But that has been done,” I noted.

  “Yes,” said Caesar. “But perhaps not with as much intensity. Next, aided by a friend from Boeing’s research and development team, we entered the satellite photograph into their advanced-imaging computer, which brought the mountain to life, in wonderful 3-D.” Caesar grinned. “With the touch of a button, I could view the mountain from every angle, panning out wide, or in as close as possible. Like a starship in Star Wars, we sailed through canyons and over rivers.”

  Faint voices came from down the tunnel, loud and obtrusive. The guards were probably drunk, or halfway there. Wally, however, continued to sleep as if dreaming of sawing logs.

  Caesar continued, “The computer assigned coordinates to the mountain, in a sort of grid-like pattern, roughly every square acre. Coordinate AA-123, for instance might be near the southern base of the mountain. Coordinate AA-124, might be the square acre just above it, etc., etc. Next, I entered each step of Struys’s journey over the mountain: each trail, each outcropping of rock, each river or stream, each canyon or gully or ravine. When I entered a description of, say, a stream that flowed over a grassy plateau, the computer gave me 52 coordinates that matched that description. Next I entered into the computer the description of a fifty foot granite canyon. The computer gave me seventeen possibilities. I entered every natural landmark as described by Struys along his journey. Each time, the computer gave a list of possible matching coordinates that could likely be found on the mountain.

  “And in the end, Sam, the computer provided me one long list of coordinates. Starting from the base of the mountain, it followed a likely trail matching the coordinates for all the landmarks. You cannot begin to know the excitement I felt on that day, Sam, as I stared at that 3-dimensional map of Ararat, as the Dutchman’s route came to life before me.”

  “But surely the emir, or Al Sayid, would have confiscated your map by now, perhaps ensuring that you would not attempt to escape through the rock wall once you broke through the cave in.”