The Babylonian Codex Read online

  The Babylonian Codex

  C. S. Graham

  Dedication

  For Grady

  Epigraph

  Many will say to me in that day, “Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name done many wonderful works?”

  And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

  MATTHEW 7:22–23

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  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

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  By C. S. Graham

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Davos, Switzerland: Friday 2 February 4:05 P.M. local time

  Noah Bosch waited in the lee of a small Alpine shop, its steep roof draped with snow, its cold-frosted windowpanes giving glimpses of exquisite crystal figurines that cost more than he earned in a month. A light snow had begun to fall, the temperature plummeting rapidly as the surrounding steep slopes cast the valley into shadow. But despite the cold, Noah was sweating, his throat dry with fear and anticipation as he studied the tanned, supremely confident faces of the men filling the icy streets of the exclusive ski resort.

  A convocation of fat cats in the snow. That’s what the irreverent called this annual gathering of the obscenely rich and powerful here at the World Economic Forum in Davos. These were the kinds of guys who owned not one but two yachts worth $100 million each, who could drop a couple hundred thousand at a blackjack table in Monte Carlo as if it were so much loose change.

  Because to them, it was.

  They ruled the world, these men, although no one had elected them. They were the richest of the rich, a superclass of hedge fund managers and international bankers, corporate CEOs and venture capitalists. They came here every year to network and schmooze and set the agendas that would determine the lives—or deaths—of the other six billion inhabitants of the planet.

  The official pass dangling around Noah’s neck identified him as an outsider, a journalist admitted only to observe and report. But no one needed to read his name tag to know that he wasn’t one of these captains of the universe. He was marked by his ratty tan parka; by the clumsily cut brown hair worn a little too long; by the lanky, narrow-chested body of a twenty-something geek without a private gym or the leisure to schedule regular workouts with a personal trainer. A tall, long-legged woman in a cropped mink jacket, her gloved hand tucked into the elbow of a man three times her age, glanced over at Noah, her lips twitching with amused contempt.

  Noah ignored her.

  The sessions at the Congress Center had finally ended. Narrowing his eyes against the thickening snow, Noah anxiously scanned the growing crowd on the ice-covered Promenade. He was looking for one man: the newly inaugurated vice president of the United States, Bill Hamilton.

  Where was he?

  He spotted the tall, silver-haired Southerner an instant later. Flanked by two Secret Service men, Hamilton was pausing to read the blackboard easel set up on the sidewalk in front of a fondue restaurant when Noah pushed his way through the crowd toward him.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Vice President?”

  One of the Vice President’s Secret Service agents moved to block him. But Hamilton turned with a politician’s ready smile and waved the bodyguards back. He was a handsome man, his face tanned and open, his eyes a brilliant blue. “I know you,” said Hamilton with the affable charm that had helped win him the number-two slot on his party’s ticket. “You’re that journalist—Bosch, isn’t it? The one who thinks someone is planning to kill me.”

  One of the Secret Service agents—a musclebound tank with small dark eyes and a neck as thick as his head—laughed.

  Noah set his jaw. “Please, Mr. Hamilton; you’ve got to listen to me. I don’t know how they’ll do it, but they plan to make their move here, at Davos. And I tell you, this is meant to be just the beginning.”

  Hamilton’s smile was still in place, but the vivid blue eyes had hardened. “Look, Noah— You don’t mind if I call you Noah, do you? I appreciate your concern. I really do. But take a look around, son. No place is more secure than Davos. You can’t walk half a block without running into a Swiss police check. No one could touch me here.”

  “Mr. Vice President—”

  Hamilton reached out to pat Noah’s shoulder. “Son, I don’t know who’s been jerking your chain, but you can’t believe ninety percent of what you hear in this business.” He nodded to the restaurant beside them. “Why don’t you go sit down, have a nice cup of hot chocolate, and relax?”

  “But—”

  “Good day, Mr. Bosch.”

  The Vice President moved on up the snow-filled street, his deep, drawling voice raised in cheerful greeting to a man Noah recognized as a defense contractor from Texas. Noah chewed his lower lip in frustration. Maybe what he needed was to—

  Even though he was watching, Noah couldn’t understand what happened next. One minute, the Vice President was striding energetically up the street. Then he went down, and Noah heard the thump of Hamilton’s long, solid body hitting the ice. A woman let out a soft gasp. Someone shouted, “Is there a doctor? Get an ambulance. Quickly! Oh, God. I think he’s dead!”

  A shocked, jabbering crowd of expensively dressed men and women converged on the fallen man. Over their heads, the Secret Service agent’s dark gaze met Noah’s.

  Noah felt a chill run up his spine. He took a step back, then another and another. When he reached the snowy alley beside the restaurant, Noah turned and ran.

  Chapter 2

  Washington, D.C.: Friday 2 February 11:20 A.M. local time

  Two men walked along the C&O Canal towpath in Georgetown, their shoulders hunched against the brisk wind. The sky was a clear, cold blue reflected in the placid waters of the canal beside them. Neither man was here for the view.

  “We’re concerned abou
t the appearance of this journalist in Davos,” said the younger of the two men, adjusting the sleeves of his soft gray Italian suit so that they lay just so against the cuffs of his crisp, hand-tailored white shirt. “I assume this Mr. Bosch is being taken care of?”

  The second man—taller, darker, more heavily muscled than his companion—kept his gaze on the bare branches of the trees before them. His name was Duane Davenport, and as head of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division he was one of the most powerful men in the Bureau. “We’re on it,” he said simply.

  “You know where he obtained his information?”

  “Not yet, but we’re working on it.”

  A tight smile flattened the other man’s lips. He had bland, forgettable features and straight, corn-silk-fine hair that had a tendency to fall forward from a receding hairline so that he was always smoothing it back. He swept it away from his face now in a quick, fastidious gesture. “Work faster.”

  Davenport swallowed a spurt of annoyance and kept his voice even. “You can tell Mr. Carlyle he doesn’t need to worry.”

  “Mr. Carlyle decides what he does and doesn’t need to worry about.”

  The younger man’s name was Casper Nordstrom, and for the past ten years he’d served as personal assistant to Leo Carlyle, an international financier who’d taken advantage of the deregulations pushed through back in the eighties to amass billions. Being a personal assistant might not sound very powerful, until you realized that Carlyle made all of his moves through Nordstrom. One whispered suggestion from Nordstrom was enough to send everyone—from senators and congressmen to judges and generals—scrambling to do his bidding. To cross Nordstrom was to cross the powerful, shadowy figure who stood behind him, and that was something few men dared to do.

  Duane Davenport cleared his throat. “Everything is under control.”

  Unlike Nordstrom, who’d been bred in the rarified atmosphere of Andover and Princeton, Davenport had grown up on the streets of Trenton, New Jersey, the son of an out-of-work longshoreman and an alcoholic mother. He’d started out as a cop walking a beat in Trenton, then joined the Bureau as a Special Agent assigned to organized crime while he was still finishing up his law degree at night school. In the twenty-two years since then, he’d risen rapidly through the ranks, and he owed much of that advancement to Leo Carlyle’s influence. Carlyle was very good at identifying bold, willing men in everything from politics and the judiciary to law enforcement and the military, and then shepherding them through to positions of power.

  “Frankly,” said Davenport, pausing to let a slim, auburn-haired woman on a red bicycle zip past them, “I’m more concerned about this Ensign Guinness the Art Crimes Team is bringing in this weekend to work on the antiquities stolen from Iraq.”

  “You mean the remote viewer?” Nordstrom gave a sharp laugh. “Don’t tell me you believe in that hocus-pocus nonsense?”

  Davenport watched the bicyclist disappear around the bend. “There is much in God’s world we don’t understand.”

  Nordstrom shrugged. “Then eliminate her.”

  “If I have to, I will. I’ve detailed one of my men to work with the special agent involved in the project. If Guinness comes up with information that could be dangerous to us, he has orders to take them all out.”

  Nordstrom glanced at his watch. “The second phase is set to begin in just five days. It’s critical that you not let yourself get distracted.”

  Davenport huffed a soft laugh. “By Ensign October Guinness? Are you kidding? I checked her record. The woman’s a real whack job. The Navy gave her a psycho discharge just months into her tour in Iraq. The only reason they brought her back to active duty was because T. J. Beckham insisted on it.”

  Nordstrom frowned. Until last month’s inauguration, T. J. Beckham had been the vice president. Now he was back in Kentucky raising coon dogs. “So she no longer has a sponsor. Why not simply have her called off the case?”

  Davenport shook his head. “This isn’t an assignment. It’s a personal favor to an old friend, through unofficial channels. I might have been able to shut the whole thing down with strong-arm tactics from my end, but now is not a good time to stir up some of the old questions about what happened in Baghdad.”

  “You think taking out a couple of Navy personnel and an FBI agent isn’t going to stir things up?”

  Davenport smiled. “I told you, Guinness is a certified whack job. If my man has to eliminate them, he’ll fix it so it looks like a classic murder-suicide. Nothing could be simpler.”

  Chapter 3

  Louis Armstrong Airport, New Orleans, Louisiana: Friday 2 February 10:25 A.M. local time

  October Guinness was scanning the arrival and departure monitors in the New Orleans airport when she felt a strange sensation steal her breath, leaving her shaky and hot.

  She didn’t realize her reaction showed on her face until Colonel F. Scott McClintock, who’d driven her to the airport, said, “What is it, Tobie? What’s wrong?”

  She gave an unsteady laugh and turned away from the bank of monitors, toward the security line. “I don’t know. Maybe somebody walked on my grave.” Remembering where she was, she cast a quick glance around and lowered her voice. The airport was thick with tourists flying in for the last weekend before Mardi Gras—and locals fleeing the crowds and traffic congestion that meant Carnival in New Orleans. “Can I say that here without getting arrested?”

  McClintock smiled. “Last I checked.” Standing well over six feet tall, with a thick shock of white hair and a weathered face, the Colonel had spent more than thirty years as a psychologist in Army intelligence. Although officially retired, he still saw VA patients on a volunteer basis. But his main focus was the work he did with Tobie: setting up a small, hush-hush remote viewing program at the Algiers Naval Base, across the river from the French Quarter.

  Now, his smile faded slowly as he continued studying her face. “Are you worried about flying?”

  “In a jet? No. As long as it’s not a helicopter, no problem.” Tobie had had a really bad experience with a Kiowa helicopter in Iraq.

  He laughed. “I can promise, no helicopters on this assignment.”

  She was on her way to Washington, D.C., to work on a project for an old friend of the Colonel’s at the FBI’s Art Crimes Team. The ACT was still trying to track down the thousands of artifacts looted from Iraq’s National Museum during the 2003 fall of Baghdad. The expert in charge of the project, Special Agent Elaine Cox, had asked for Tobie’s help in locating a dozen or so of the rarest items.

  Unfortunately, the Colonel himself had had to back out of the trip at the last minute, thanks to a torn rotator cuff that required immediate surgery. He paused beside Tobie at the end of the security line and said, “I wish I was going with you.”

  “You focus on getting better. Peter and I work together just fine and you know it.”

  McClintock’s eyes crinkled in a smile. Peter Abrams, McClintock’s assistant, had flown up to D.C. the night before and would be taking McClintock’s place in the project for the Art Crimes Team. “Yeah, I know it. But I’d still like to be there.”

  From a TV in the bar beside them came a reporter’s lightly accented voice. “The world is in shock today following the sudden death of United States Vice President Bill Hamilton. Preliminary reports suggest Hamilton may have hit his head after slipping on the ice, although it is also possible the sixty-two-year-old Vice President may have suffered a heart attack. We’re still waiting for an official comment from President Daniel Pizarro, inaugurated just two weeks ago tomorrow. We expect to have that in the next half hour.”

  McClintock nodded toward the TV set. “That might be what has you unsettled.”

  Tobie followed his gaze to the screen, where a reporter in a heavy, hooded coat could be seen against a backdrop of steep, snow-covered slopes. And she felt it again, that swift sensation of what she now recognized as disembodied fear. “Maybe,” she said softly.

  “Listen, Tobie . . . if you t
hink this might be a bad idea, you can still back out. I’ll just tell Elaine—”

  She jerked her gaze away from the snowy scene. “Are you kidding? We couldn’t ask for a better chance to show all the skeptics in D.C. just what remote viewing can accomplish. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”

  She was almost at the front of the line. McClintock said, “Just . . . be careful, you hear?”

  “I’ll be fine. I’m going to be sitting in a soundproof room remote viewing a bunch of dusty old artifacts.” She pulled her boarding pass out of her carry-on bag and fumbled for her ID. “How dangerous can that be?”

  Chapter 4

  Davos, Switzerland: Friday 2 February 8:15 P.M. local time

  “This is the most excitement I’ve seen at Davos in years. If ever.” The United States secretary of state, Forest Quincy, stretched his short legs toward the fire that crackled sedately on the hearth. He held a glass of French Colombard brandy from the Tishbi family cradled in his left hand and one of Leo Carlyle’s famous hand-rolled Cuban cigars in the other. As he settled deeper into the tapestry-covered wingback chair, the gray vest of his three-piece Armani suit pulled gently across the soft swell of his stomach. Quincy had a well-deserved reputation for overindulgence in the sins of the flesh.

  Leo Carlyle splashed a measure of brandy into his own glass and smiled at his guest. “And to think you almost decided to give the World Economic Forum a pass this year.”

  Unlike the Secretary, Leo was the kind of man who valued discipline and took pride in his self-control. At just above medium height, he kept his naturally powerful body strong and hard with a carefully honed weight-training regimen. He might be fifty-six years old, but his hair was still thick and dark, as were the heavy brows set straight above his smoky hazel eyes. For some years now he had worn a full beard, as dark as his hair and meticulously trimmed. According to Forbes, he was one of the ten richest men in the world.

  Leo was proud of that, too.

  Quincy glanced up. A balding man in his early sixties with a ruddy complexion and an unusually small nose, he had served as secretary of state for the last eight years. The inauguration of the recently elected president, Daniel Pizarro, just two weeks ago should have changed that. But the new president—a half-Jewish, Latino ob-gyn, for Christ’s sake—was a bleeding-heart liberal with all kinds of outdated, sixties-era feel-good bonhomie. Thanks to the idiot’s misplaced belief in the virtues of bipartisanship, Quincy was still secretary of state.