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Archaeologist Molly O'Dwyer leads an expedition into war-torm Iraq to search forthe remains of Jesus.
On the evening of the American invasion
of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, Imran
Fawzi, director of the National Museum
of Baghdad, makes a discovery in the basement of a murdered colleague: the bones of a child dead two thousand years. Several thousand miles away in the mountainous Firezkhoi Highlands just across the border in Afghanistan,
Molly O'dwyer stumbles upon the remains of another two-thousand year old body. Strange markings adorn both the urn found in Baghdad and the cave located in Afghanistan, markings that will lead Molly and an international team of archaeologists into the heart of Iraq. Nina Cavalcante has a reputation as an archaeologist who hunts the arcane. Teodor Kwiatkowski is an officer in the Polish army. Frenchman Andre Leveille-Gaus represents the Vatican but secretly works for another master. Andrew Milstein, working for American intelligence, is having intense dreams of a life lived long ago and of a red-haired girl he must possess. Molly has her own issues. A loyal Catholic, she can not resist the hunt. Ultimately, she must choose between her drive for knowledge and her fear that her discovery could destroy the faith of millions. She must elude Iraqi fighters led by Hussein's former security chief, the Eight of Diamonds, Ghazi Al-Tikriti, and Abdul Azim Nur, the Muslim cleric who controls the lands in which Molly must conclude her search. She must outmaneuvre members of her own expedition, each with their own agendas. And she must finally decide which is more important to her, science or faith. It has been 4000 years since Abraham abandoned Ur of the Chaldees for a new land promised him by the one God, two thousand years since Jesus returned with his illegitimate daughter and their family. Now it is Molly's turn.For her and the others, the descent into ancient Babylon goes far deeper than a few feet into the rocky soil of Iraq. In dream, each recognizes their journey into the past is far more personal and real than they could ever have imagined. Something more powerful than archaeological gold is drawing them together agin. After two thousand years, Molly, Cavalcante, Nur, Milstein, Leveille-Gaus are reuniting, not as they are but as they once had been.
Excerpt
So determined was Fawzi to discover what it was his old colleague had buried that he plied the shovel while Habib scraped away at the hole with the pickaxe. It took them more than an hour to expose them more than an hour to expose the hidden relic. An hour of careful digging around what appeared to be a clay vase, so heavy it took the two of them and a pulley they rigged from ropes to drag it out of the hole and onto the dirt floor.
"My God!" Fawzi whisperedwhen the ancient clay urn lay at his feet. The pot was lidless and fat, as round as it was tall. This was no decanter for wine. Around its equator, running along a band that may once have been painted red or brown, Fawzi detected letters. Excited, he knelt in the dirt.
"Help me roll it into the light," he told Habib.
The two had to shove bodies aside to push the heavy artifact into the center of the room, then heft it onto a table directly under the light.
"Can you read it?" Habib asked.
"It's in Hebrew," Fawzi said, his fingers trembling as they caressed the letters. Around the entire circumference of the urn, Fawzi translated the letters carved itno clay at least two thousand years before. Habib watched his uncle struggle with the wording and saw the older man's eyes widen with disbelief as the reason for Jama's concern became obvious.
For a moment Fawzi couldn't speak, couldn't utter a sound. When he did, he broke down in tears. Leaning his heavy frame on the table,he ignored the dizziness and nausea that threatened to topple him.
"Open it!" he managed to spit out.
"Here?"
"Yes!"
"It's sealed," Habib said, noting a plug of hardened wax and clay that filled the opening.
"Break it!" Fawzi said, uncaring. "Hurry! Hurry!"
Habib picked up a hammer. "Are you sure?" he asked.
"Break it, I don't care. It's not the outside that matters. It's what's inside."
Shrugging his shoulders, Habib hefted the mallet and, with one strong blow, struck at the rim of the ancient vase. The tool bounced on impact but tore a hole into the plug. Two hits, three, four. Habib pounded away, chipping at clay, and wax, and mud, dislodging material to spray into the air, forging cracks in the vasethat had held together for twenty centuries until at last it gave way. Like a river freed from a constraining dam the mouth of the jar and all its contents gave way falling out of the darkness into Imran Fawzi's waiting palms. But even he was unprepared for what he held in his hands. The skull of a two thousand year old infant.
"This, my dear nephew," Fawzi said, when at last he could calm his hammering heart, "could be the salvation of Iraq."
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