Altar Of Eden
Makeen risked a peek through the bars of the cage door. The fat man carried a large metal briefcase in his hand.
“Are they secure?” the military man asked. He also spoke in Arabic, but his accent was not Iraqi.
The fat man dropped to one knee, balanced the case on his thick thigh, and thumbed open the lock. Makeen expected gold and diamonds, but instead the case held nothing but white eggs packed in molded black foam. They appeared no different from the chicken eggs his mother bought at the market.
Despite his terror, the sight of the eggs stirred Makeen’s hunger.
The fat man counted them, inspecting them. “They’re all intact,” he said and let out a long rattling sigh of relief. “God willing, the embryos inside are still viable.”
“And the rest of the lab?”
The fat man closed the case and stood up. “I’ll leave it to your team to incinerate what lies below. No one must ever suspect what we’ve discovered. There can be no trace.”
“I know my orders.”
As the fat man stood, the military man raised his pistol and shot his companion in the face. The blast was a thunderclap. The back of the man’s skull blew away in a cloud of bone and blood. The dead man stood for a moment longer, then flopped to the ground.
Makeen covered his mouth to stifle any sound.
“No trace,” the murderer repeated and collected the case from the ground. He touched a radio on his shoulder. He switched to English.
“Bring in the trucks and prime the incendiary charges. Time to get out of this sandbox before any locals turn up.”
Makeen had learned to speak a smattering of the American language. He couldn’t pick out every word the man spoke, but he understood the message well enough.
More men were coming. More guns.
Makeen sought some means of escape, but they were trapped in the lion’s cage. Perhaps his younger brother also recognized the growing danger. Bari ’s shaking had grown worse since the gunshot. Finally, his little brother’s terror could no longer be held inside, and a quiet sob rattled out of his thin form.
Makeen squeezed his brother and prayed that the cry had not been heard.
Footsteps again approached. A sharp call barked toward them in Arabic. “Who’s there? Show yourself! Ta’aal hnaa!”
Makeen pressed his lips to his brother’s ear. “Stay hidden. Don’t come out.”
Makeen shoved Bari tighter into the corner, then stood up with his hands in the air. He backed a step. “I was just looking for food!” Makeen said, stuttering, speaking fast.
The pistol stayed leveled at him. “Get out here, walad!”
Makeen obeyed. He moved to the cage door and slipped out. He kept his hands in the air. “Please, ahki. Laa termi!” He tried switching to English, to show he was on the man’s side. “No shoot. I not see… I not know…”
He fought to find some argument, some words to save him. He read the expression on the other man’s face-a mixture of sorrow and regret.
The pistol lifted higher with merciless intent.
Makeen felt hot tears flow down his cheeks.
Through the blur of his vision, he noted a shift of shadows. Behind the man, the secret door cracked open wider, pushed from inside. A large, dark shape slipped out and flowed toward the man’s back. It ran low and stuck to the deeper shadows, as if fearing the light.
Makeen caught the barest glimpse of its oily form: muscular, lean, hairless, with eyes glinting with fury. His mind struggled to comprehend what he was seeing-but failed.
A scream of horror built inside his chest.
Though the beast made no noise, the man must have felt a prickling of warning. He swung around as the creature leaped with a sharp cry. Gunshots blasted, eclipsed by a savage wail that raised the hairs on Makeen’s body.
Makeen swung away and rushed back to the cage. “ Bari!”
He grabbed his brother’s arm and dragged him out of the lion’s cage. He pushed Bari ahead of him. “Yalla! Run!”
Off to the side, man and beast fought on the ground.
More pistol shots fired.
Makeen heard the heavy tread of boots on pavement behind him. More men came running from the other side of the park. Shouts were punctuated by rifle blasts.
Ignoring them all, Makeen fled in raw terror across the bombed-out gardens, careless of who might see him. He kept running and running, chased by screams that would forever haunt his nightmares.
He understood nothing about what had happened. He knew only one thing for certain. He remembered the beast’s ravenous eyes, shining with a cunning intelligence, aglow with a smokeless fire.
Makeen knew what he had seen.
The beast known as Shaitan in the Koran-he who was born of God’s fire and cursed for not bowing down to Adam.
Makeen knew the truth.
At long last, the devil had come to Baghdad.
ACT ONE. FIRST BLOOD
Chapter 1
MAY 23, 7:32 A.M.
NEW ORLEANS
The Bronco crushed through the debris left by the hurricane and bounced off yet another hole. Lorna nearly hit the roof of the cabin. The car slid to the left on the wet road. She eased off the accelerator as she fought for control.
The storm had stripped vegetation, sent creeks overflowing their banks, and even floated an alligator into someone’s swimming pool. Luckily the worst of the dying hurricane had struck farther west. Still, with such downpours, Mother Nature seemed determined to turn Orleans Parish back into swamplands.
As Lorna sped along the river road, all she could think about was the phone call. It had come in twenty minutes ago. They’d lost power at ACRES. The generators hadn’t kicked in, and a hundred research projects were threatened.
As she rounded a final oxbow in the Mississippi River, the compound appeared ahead. The Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species occupied more than a thousand acres downriver from New Orleans. Though associated with the city’s zoo, ACRES was not open to the public. Sheltered within a hardwood forest, the grounds included a few outdoor pens, but the main facility was a thirty-six-thousand square-foot research building that housed a half-dozen laboratories and a veterinary hospital.
The latter was where Dr. Lorna Polk had worked since completing her postgraduate residency in zoo-and-wildlife medicine. She oversaw the facility’s frozen zoo, twelve tanks of liquid nitrogen that preserved sperm, eggs, and embryos from hundreds of endangered species: mountain gorillas, Sumatran tigers, Thomson’s gazelles, colobus monkeys, cape buffalo.
It was a big position to fill, especially for someone only twenty-eight and just out of her residency. Her responsibility-the frozen genetic bank-held the promise of pulling endangered species back from the brink of extinction through artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and cloning. Yet, despite the weight of her responsibility, she loved her work and knew she was good at it.