Ark of Fire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  CHAPTER 89

  CHAPTER 90

  CHAPTER 91

  CHAPTER 92

  CHAPTER 93

  CHAPTER 94

  CHAPTER 95

  Teaser chapter

  ON THE FIFTH DAY

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ARK OF FIRE

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / December 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Chloe Palov.

  Internal artwork by Jeanne Chitty.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15177-8

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Ria Palov for keeping the faith.

  And Steve Kasdin for taking a chance.

  The author would like to express thanks to Jeanne Chitty for the exquisitely rendered artwork.

  CHAPTER 1

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  DECEMBER 1

  His movements slow and deliberate, the curator ran his fingertips over the small bronze coffer, lightly grazing the incised Hebrew letters. A lover’s caress.

  Holding his breath, he opened the box.

  “Claves regni caelorum,” he whispered, entranced by the relic nestled within the box. Like Eve gazing upon the forbidden fruit, he stared at the twelve polished gemstones anchored in an ancient gold setting.

  The keys to the kingdom of heaven.

  Dr. Jonathan Padgham, chief curator at the Hopkins Museum of Near Eastern Art, reached into the coffer, carefully removing what had once been a gem-encrusted breastplate. Once. Long ago. More than three thousand years ago, by his reckoning.

  Although bits and pieces of the gold scapular still precariously clung to the setting, the relic was scarcely recognizable as a breastplate, the chains that originally secured the gem-studded shield to the wearer’s body having long since vanished. Only the stones, set in four rows of three, gave any indication as to the relic’s original rectangular shape, the breastplate measuring some five inches by four.

  “That’s some real bling-bling, huh?”

  Annoyed by the disruption, Padgham glanced at the curly-haired woman engaged in placing a digital camera on a tripod. Not for the first time, he wondered what possessed her to pair black leather motorcycle boots with a long tartan skirt.

  A cheeky grin on her face, Edie Miller stepped over to his desk, bending her head to peer at the relic. Since immigrating to “the land of the free,” he’d come to realize that American females were far more brazen than their English cousins. Ignoring her, Padgham arranged the breastplate on a square piece of black velvet, readying it to be photographed.

  “Wow. There’s a diamond, an amethyst, and a sapphire.” As she spoke, the Miller woman pointed to each stone she named. Padgham was tempted to snatch her hand, afraid she might actually touch the precious relic. A freelance photographer hired by the Hopkins to digitally archive the collection, she was not trained to handle rare artifacts.

  “And there’s an emerald! Which, by the by, happens to be my birthstone,” she continued. “What do you think that is, about five carats?”

  “I have no idea,” he said dismissively; gemology was not his strong suit. Hers eit
her, he suspected.

  “How old a relic do you think it is?”

  Barely glancing at the plaid-garbed magpie, he again replied, “I have no idea.”

  “I’m guessing really old.”

  To be certain, the age of the breastplate was punctuated by a very large question mark. So, too, its provenance. Although he had an inkling.

  Again, Padgham ran the tip of a manicured finger over the engraved symbols that adorned the bronze coffer in which the breastplate had been housed. He recognized only one word—

  —the Hebrew tetragrammaton. The unspeakable four-letter name of God. It had been placed on the coffer as a talisman to ward off the curious, the covetous, the carnivores who gobbled up ancient relics like candy-coated Sweeties.

  How in God’s name did an ancient Hebrew relic end up in Iraq, of all places?

  Although the museum director, Eliot Hopkins, had been very hush-hush, he did let slip that the relic originated in Iraq. Padgham, an expert in Babylonian art, had been entrusted by the old man with the initial evaluation of the bejeweled breastplate. He’d also been cautioned to keep mum. Padgham was no fool. Far from it. He knew the relic had been bought on the black market.

  Risky business, the purchase of stolen relics. In recent years a curator at the renowned Getty had been brought to trial by Italian prosecutors for having knowingly purchased stolen artifacts. The black-market antiquities trade was a billion-dollar business, particularly with the unabated pilfering of Iraqi relics and Babylonian art popping up all over the place these days. Many in the museum world turned a blind eye, jaded enough to believe that they were preserving, not stealing, ancient culture. Padgham concurred. After all, had it not been for European art thieves, the world would have been deprived of such treasures as the Rosetta stone and the Elgin Marbles.

  “There’s too much backlight falling on the relic. Do you mind if I adjust the window shades?”

  Padgham drew his gaze away from the relic. “Hmm . . . no, no, of course not. This is your arena, as it were.” He pasted a smile on his face, needing the woman’s cooperation. He’d been ordered not to show the relic to anyone on the museum staff. It was the reason why he was conducting his preliminary evaluation on a Monday, when the museum was closed to the public and no staff were on the premises. Of course, the photographer didn’t count; the woman was a freelance contractor who didn’t know a breastplate from a bas-relief. Who would she tell? As far as he knew, aside from the two guards in the museum lobby, they were the only two bodies afoot.

  A flash of light momentarily illuminated the dimmed office.

  “Looks good,” the photographer remarked, reviewing the image on the camera display. She deftly popped a blue plastic card out of the camera. “I’ll just snap a backup copy. No sense having four gigabytes of internal memory if I don’t use it.” No sooner did a second flash go off than she gestured to the bronze coffer. “Do you want a shot of the metal box as well?”

  “Is Queen Anne dead?” Then, catching himself, he added in a more congenial tone, “If you would be so kind.”

  Padgham stood aside as the photographer repositioned the tripod. Contemplating the beautiful relic, he worriedly bit his lower lip. As curator of Babylonian antiquities, he’d been given custody of the breastplate because it’d been found in the deserts of Iraq. The museum director assumed he’d be able to put flesh to bone, to derive the four Ws of provenance: who, where, when, and why. To Padgham’s consternation, those answers eluded him. The breastplate was most definitely of Hebrew derivation, and his knowledge of the ancient Israelites was sketchy at best. Thus, the reason for the digital photograph.

  As fate would have it, an old Oxford chum, Caedmon Aisquith, was currently in Washington on a publicity junket for his newly released book, Isis Revealed—one of those faux histories that purported to expose the arcane secrets of the long-buried past. That sort of esoteric conspiracy theory was all the rage. Never one to gawk at the proverbial gift horse, upon reading the newspaper review he immediately rang up Aisquith, renewing their acquaintanceship. Surprising, really. Last he’d heard, old Aisquith had absconded to the continent, taken his inheritance, and opened an antiquarian bookshop on the Left Bank. Drinking Beaujolais and banging French tarts; the man should have his head examined.

  Although they hadn’t set eyes on one another in nearly twenty years, Aisquith had agreed to meet him later that evening for drinks. Hoping to pique his interest—and in the process glean some kernel of information about the mysterious Hebrew relic—he intended to e-mail Aisquith the digital photographs. A true Renaissance man with an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient history, Caedmon Aisquith would, hopefully, be able to shed some much-needed light.

  As with the freelance photographer, Padgham did not deem the secrecy clause set down by the museum director applicable to his Oxford chum.

  “All finished,” the photographer announced. Popping open the digital camera, she removed the memory card and handed it to him.

  He stared at the minuscule piece of stored data. “And what I am supposed to do with this? I asked you to take a photograph.”

  “And I did just that. There’s your photograph. On the memory card.” She stuffed the digital camera into her pocket, her outlandish garb topped by a khaki-colored waistcoat.

  Cheeky cow, Padgham thought, frustrated. Although he was only forty-two, he often felt as though the modern world and all its technical sleights of hand were passing him by at a dizzying speed.

  As she dismantled the tripod, Padgham repeated his question. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “You’re supposed to download it to your computer. Once you do that, you can print it, e-mail it, doctor it up, whatever.”

  There being no staff available to assist him, Padgham was forced to grovel. “I would be most appreciative if—”

  Just as he hoped, she snatched the memory card out of his hand. Bending at the waist, she inserted it into the computer tower under his desk.

  Biting back a pleased smile, he pointed to a notepad inscribed with the museum logo. “I would like to send the photographs, via e-mail, to that address.”

  “Yes, sire. I live to serve.”

  Padgham turned a deaf ear on her disgruntled mumblings. “You’re most kind, Miss Miller.”

  “You say that only because you don’t know me.” She seated herself at his carved mahogany desk. “All right, let me get this straight, you want me to send the pics to one C Aisquith at lycos dot com?” When he nodded, she said, “Probably best if we send the photos as jpegs.”

  “Yes, well, I’ll leave it up to you.”

  She quickly and deftly tapped away on the keyboard. Then, getting up from his executive-style chair, she said, “Okay, I want you to pull up your e-mail account.”

  “I would be only too happy to oblige.” Padgham seated himself at the desk. “What the bloody hell!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Are you blind, woman? The screen has gone blank.” He pointed an accusing finger at the blackened monitor.

  “Calm down. No need to have a conniption. It’s probably just a loose cable.”

  “Hmm . . .” He glanced at the floor-bound computer, then at his Gieves & Hawkes hand-tailored trousers. The problem had but one solution. “Since you so easily diagnosed the problem, would you be a dear and . . . ?”

  “You do know that this is not in my job description,” Edie Miller griped as she scrambled to her knees. There being no room to pull the computer tower forward, she was forced to wedge herself under the desk in order to check the cables. Padgham glanced at the Waterford candy dish on the nearby console, thinking he might offer her a cellophane-wrapped sweet. Recompense for a job well done.

  As the woman under the desk silently went about her business, Padgham picked up the ancient breastplate, returning it to the incised bronze coffer.

  “Ah, let there be light,” he murmured a moment later, pleased that a spark of life now emanated from his computer, the monitor flickering t
he familiar Dell logo.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Padgham saw a third person enter the office.

  Surprised to see a man attired in gray coveralls with a black balaclava pulled over his head, he imperiously demanded, “Who the devil are you?”

  The man made no reply. Instead, he raised a gun and pointed it at Padgham’s head, his finger poised on the trigger.

  Death was almost instantaneous. Padgham experienced a sharp, piercing pain in his right eye socket. Then, like the flickering lights on his computer monitor, he saw an explosion of color before the world around him turned a deep, impenetrable shade of black.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Who the devil are you?”

  Pop.

  Crash!

  Thud.

  Those sounds registered on Edie Miller’s brain in such quick succession that it wasn’t until she saw Dr. Padgham’s lifeless body sprawled on the Persian carpet, three feet from her huddled position under the desk, that she realized what had happened.

  She stifled a shriek of terror. Like a freight train that had jumped the tracks, her heart slammed against her chest. Hearing a clang above her, she froze, the murderer having picked up her folded tripod from the top of the desk.

  In a state of shock, her brain sent a series of urgent messages. Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t twitch so much as a finger.

  Terrified, Edie heeded the commands.

  And then her fear turned to joy.

  Several seconds had passed since Dr. Padgham had hit the floor, and she was still alive. It was her lucky day. The killer didn’t know she was crouched in the knee well under the desk. Covered on three sides by antique mahogany, she was hidden from view. In order to find her, the killer would have to bend at the waist and peer under the desk.

  From her low vantage point, Edie saw a pair of gray-clad legs suddenly come into view. At the end of those legs was a pair of tan military-style lug boots. Next to those legs she saw a large masculine hand wrapped around a pistol that had a silencer attached to the end of it. As though she were looking through the lens of a camera, she focused on that ham-fisted hand, noticing the hairy knuckles and the unusual silver ring made up of interconnected crosses. The notion that she and the killer might actually pray to the same God caused her to bite down on her lip, hard, a hysterical burst of laughter threatening to escape.