Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Mia watched Corben click his cell phone shut. He turned to her and shook his head. He checked his watch and frowned thoughtfully.

“I don’t like leaving this till morning,” he said, “but I don’t think we have much choice. If they’re onto him, then we’re already too late. If they’re not, then I’d rather not alert them to him at this hour. I’ll call the guys at Hobeish first thing in the morning,” he added, referring to the police station where Mia had been held, “and take it from there.”

“We could go to the university, early,” Mia suggested, “and get to him first thing.”

Corben did a double take. “‘We’?”

“You don’t know what he looks like. I can point him out to you,” she protested.

“I can just ask for him at the department.”

“I’ve met him. He’ll feel more at ease if he sees a familiar face,” she insisted, her voice alive with nervous energy. “Besides, I don’t want to stay here alone. I’ll feel like a sitting duck.” She paused, catching her breath. “I want to help, okay?”

Corben looked away, clearly weighing his options and seemingly not liking any. After a moment, he turned to her cheerlessly. “Okay,” he relented. “Let’s see what he has to say and take it from there.” He went to the fridge and pulled out two more beers and offered Mia a bottle.

She took it and crossed over to the balcony. She stood there and sipped at it, staring pensively into the night. The lights from the densely packed buildings were burning brightly, crowning the city with a pale, whitish aura. She wondered where Evelyn was at that very moment and thought about Farouk and Ramez. Where had they bunkered down for the night? Beirut was a crowded city, and it knew how to keep its secrets. No one really knew what went on behind closed doors, but in this city, Mia suspected, the lurking malevolence was in a class of its own.

“I don’t get it.” She turned to Corben. “This symbol, the coiled snake. What’s he looking for, exactly? If it’s really this book that he’s after, why does he want it? He can’t just be some maniacal collector.”

“Why not?”

“He seems willing to go to some pretty extreme measures to get hold of it,” Mia noted. “It’s got to have some serious significance to him, don’t you think?”

“He’s a bioweapons scientist. These guys are into viruses, not relics that are hundreds of years old,” Corben reminded her. “I can’t imagine its relevance to his work.”

“Unless he’s looking for clues to some ancient plague,” she half-joked.

Corben didn’t dismiss it out of hand. Instead, his face clouded, then the faintest of smiles flitted across his lips. “Now there’s a merry thought to sleep on.”

She felt a ripple of concern. An outright dismissal would have been better.

They left it at that, finished their beers, and put the food away in a leaden silence. She watched Corben as he went about the nighttime routine of spinning the dead bolt on the front door and switching off the lights. She found herself wondering about what made someone take on a life like that: solitary, dangerous, mired in secrets, trained to manipulate and predisposed to mistrust. From what she could gather, he seemed like a pragmatic, clearheaded guy who wasn’t suffering from a righteous, save-the-world delusion. She couldn’t deny that his action-adventure hero side was alluring — she hadn’t exactly met men like him in the sedate academic waters she usually navigated. But there was also something dark, unknowable, and guarded about him that, while also somewhat attractive, was also a bit scary.

“Can I ask you something?”

He turned, curious. “Sure.”

She smiled, slightly uncomfortable with the moment. “Is Jim your real name? I mean, I read somewhere that you guys always seem to use Mike or Jim or Joe as cover.”

He breathed out a small chuckle and winced. “It’s actually Humphrey, but…it doesn’t exactly go with the job profile.”

She wasn’t sure for a second — then he smiled. “It’s Jim. You want to see my passport?”

“Yeah, right,” she mocked. “All of them.” She paused for a breath, then her face grew serious. “Thanks. For everything today.”

He winced uncomfortably. “I’m sorry I took you there. To your mom’s apartment.”

Mia shrugged. “We got to her stuff before they did. Maybe that’ll count for something.”

It was close to eleven by the time her head finally hit the pillow in the guest bedroom. She found it hard to fall asleep and just lay there, staring at the unfamiliar, impersonal surroundings, wondering how it had all gotten so complicated so quickly. She’d been warned about coming to Beirut when the offer had first come up, mostly by people who only remembered the city from the endless news reports about the civil war, the bombings, and the kidnappings, people who weren’t familiar with the country’s phoenixlike, if tenuous, return from the ashes — at least, the one that had been cut short a couple of months earlier. She could have pulled out from taking up her posting — she didn’t need an excuse, war being a pretty convincing reason for anyone to give a country a wide berth — but she’d felt drawn to exploring new directions and experiencing a more exciting life than the one most of her peers seemed more than happy to settle for.

She tried to subdue her churning mind, tossing and turning and fluffing her pillow and moving it around, but it was a losing battle. She was too awake.

She sat up and listened. She couldn’t hear anything coming from outside her bedroom. Corben had to be asleep. She considered taking another shot at taming the beast of insomnia, then decided against it and climbed out of bed.

She went into the living room. A pale glare from a streetlamp cast long shadows across the walls. She took quiet steps into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. As she headed back into the living room, her eyes fell on Evelyn’s file, lying there on Corben’s desk.

Beckoning her.

She flashed back to the quick peek into it that she’d stolen back in her mom’s kitchen and decided it merited more than that.

She walked over to the desk and opened it.

The images of the Ouroboros immediately snared her attention.

She sat down on the sofa and worked her way through the photographs from the digs and the photocopies of images taken from books, taking a good look at them this time while putting the handwritten notes aside.

As she went through them, she pulled out the different incarnations of the beast that her mom had compiled and laid them out on the coffee table. They were markedly different: Some were rudimentary, which Mia presumed were the oldest ones. One looked Aztec; a couple of them had a distinctly Far Eastern look about them, with the snake looking much more like a dragon; others were more elaborate and figurative, married to the imagery of the Garden of Eden or of Greek gods.

She settled on the version that was of most interest, the one that had been tooled into the book from the Polaroids and carved into the wall of the underground chamber. The image disturbed her, as it had done before. She put it aside and started going through Evelyn’s notes.

Evelyn had evidently spent many hours researching this, but at some point, she’d obviously given up. Confirming this, Mia noticed that many of the sheets were dated, the earliest in 1977, the last of them in 1980. She quickly gathered that the underground chamber Evelyn had discovered was in a town called Al-Hillah, in Iraq. Curious, Mia pushed herself to her feet, retrieved her laptop from her bag, and fired it up. She found an unprotected Wi-Fi connection within range, camped onto it, and opened her browser. She did a quick search, easily finding the town’s location, south of Baghdad, on a map. She committed it to memory and moved on.