Tom Knox: The Genesis Secret

Radevan threw his cigarette butt out of the window. They were back in open countryside, the battered Toyota rattling over a blurry dirt road. In the far distance blue mountains shimmered in the heat-haze.

'Gobekli Tepe could be like pyramids or like…Stonehenge. But they keep it quiet. It could be many many tourists here, pay money Kurdish people, but no. Turkish government say no. They not even put up signs or build road here. Like secret.' He coughed and spat out of the window, then wound it up to keep out the rising dust. 'Gobekli Tepe bad place,' he said again, then fell silent.

Rob didn't know what to say. Ahead of him the low, yellow-brown hills rolled endlessly towards Syria. He could see another tiny Kurdish village with a slender brown minaret rising above the corrugated iron roofs, like a watchtower in a prison camp. Rob wanted to say that if anything was holding the Kurds back it was possibly their traditions, their insularity, and their religion. But he didn't think Radevan was in the mood to listen.

They drove on in silence. The road got worse, and the semi desert more hostile. Finally Radevan scraped the car round another corner, and Rob looked up to see a solitary mulberry tree, stark against the cloudless sky. Radevan nodded and said Gobekli and then parked abruptly. He turned around in his seat, and smiled, his good mood apparently back. Then he got out of the car and opened the door for Rob like a chauffeur and Rob felt slightly embarrassed. He didn't want a chauffeur.

Radevan got back in the car and picked up a newspaper showing a big picture of a football player. He was evidently going to wait. Rob said goodbye and said three hours? Radevan smiled.

Turning, Rob walked up the hill and crested the rise. Behind him stretched thirty kilometres of dusty villages, empty desert and scorched cotton fields. In front of him was an astonishing scene. In the middle of the arid desolation there were seven sudden hillocks. And dozens of workers and archaeologists were scattered right across the biggest hillside. The diggers and workers were hefting buckets of rock, and tilling seriously at the soil. There were tents and bulldozers and theodolites.

Rob walked on, feeling like an intruder. Some of the diggers had stopped working and had turned to look at him. Just as he was getting really embarrassed, a genial, fifty-something European approached. Rob recognized Franz Breitner.

'Wilkommen,' said the German breezily, as if he knew Rob already. 'You are the journalist from England?'

'Yes.'

'You are a very lucky man.'

The lobby of St Thomas' Hospital was as busy as ever. Detective Chief Inspector Mark Forrester pushed through the bustling nurses and gossiping relatives and the wheelchaired old women with drips hanging from steel frames, and wondered, for the third time that morning, if he could hack what he was obliged to do.

He had to go and see a mutilated man. This was tough. He'd seen plenty of nasty sights-he was forty-two and he'd been a detective ten years-but something about this case was especially unsettling.

Seeing the sign for the ICU, Forrester briskly climbed a flight of stairs, went to ward reception, snapped his Met credentials at a sweet-faced girl-and was told to wait.

A few second later a Chinese-looking doctor came out, peeling rubber gloves from his hands.

'Dr Sing?'

'Inspector Forrester?'

Forrester nodded and reached out to shake the doctor's ungloved hand. The returning handshake was tentative, as if the doctor was about to impart bad news. Forrester felt a slight panic. 'He is still alive?'

'Yes. Just.'

'So what happened?'

The doctor looked somewhere over Forrester's shoulder. 'Total glossectomy.'

'Sorry?'

A doctorly sigh. 'They cut out all of his tongue. With some kind of shears…'

Forrester looked through the plastic doors to the wardroom proper. 'Jesus, I heard it was bad, but…' Somewhere in there, beyond the doors, was his only witness. Still alive. But without a tongue.

The doctor was shaking his head. 'The blood loss was tremendous. And not just from his…tongue. They also carved lines into his chest. And shaved his head.'

'So you think-?'

'I think if they hadn't been interrupted, it would have been worse.' The doctor eyed Forrester. 'What I mean is if that car alarm hadn't gone off, they would probably have killed him.'

Forrester exhaled. 'Attempted murder.'

'You're the policeman.' The doctor had adopted an impatient expression.

Forester nodded. 'Can I see him?'

'Room 37. But briefly, please.'

Forrester shook the doctor's hand again, though he wasn't sure why. Then he walked through the plastic doors, avoided a gurney stacked with urine gourds and knocked at the door to room 37. All he could hear was a groan inside. What should he do? Then he remembered: the man's tongue had been cut out. Sighing, the detective pushed open the door. It was a small, simple NHS room with a TV suspended on a steel armature at one end. The TV was switched off. The room smelled of flowers and something worse. In the bed was a fairly old man staring wildly at Forrester. His head had been entirely shaved leaving a mess of cuts and scars on the nude scalp. Forrester was reminded of a map of railway lines. The man's mouth was shut but blood was caked at the corners of his lips like dried brown sauce at the top of an old sauce bottle; bandages covered the patient's torso.

'David Lorimer?'

The man nodded. And stared. And stared.

It was this wild stare that gave Forrester pause. In his career he had seen plenty of frightened faces, but the sheer terror welling in this man's eyes was something else.

David Lorimer mumbled something. Then he started coughing and small flecks of blood spat from his mouth and Forrester felt an arching guilt. 'Please.' He held up a hand. 'I don't want to trouble you. I just…wanted to check something…'

The man's eyes were full of tears, like those of a troubled child.

'You have had a terrible ordeal, Mr Lorimer. We just…I just…want to say that we fully intend to catch these people.'

The words were pathetically inadequate. This man had been brutalized and terrorized. He'd had his tongue sliced out with shears. He'd had lines carved into his living skin. Forrester felt like an idiot. What he wanted to say was 'we're gonna nail these bastards', but this room didn't seem the right place for such absurd posturing, either. In the end he sat down on a plastic chair at the end of the bed and smiled warmly at the victim, trying to relax him.

It seemed to work. A minute or two passed and then the old man's eyes no longer looked quite so terrified. Instead Lorimer waved a shaking hand at some papers lying on his bedside table. Forrester got up and walked to the table and picked up the documents. It was a sheaf of handwritten notes.

'Yours?'

Lorimer nodded. Keeping his lips firmly shut.

'Descriptions of the attackers?

He nodded again.

'Thank you very much, Mr Lorimer.' Forrester reached out and patted him on the shoulder, feeling self-conscious as he did so. The man really looked as if he was about to cry.

Pocketing the papers, Forrester left the room as quickly as he could. Out and down the steps and through the swing doors. When he reached the rainy late spring air of the leafy Embankment he breathed deeply, and in relief. The atmosphere of terror in the room, in the man's staring eyes, had been all too intense.

Walking briskly down and across the River Thames, with the Houses of Parliament yellow and Gothic on his left, Forrester read the scrawled notes.

David Lorimer was a caretaker. At the Benjamin Franklin Museum. He was sixty-four. Nearing retirement. He lived alone in a flat at the top of the museum. The previous night he had woken at about 4 a.m. to the muffled crash of broken glass downstairs. His flat was in a converted attic and he'd had to descend all the way to the cellar. There he'd found five or six unknown men, apparently young, and wearing ski-masks or balaclavas. The men had broken in, quite expertly, and they were digging up the basement floor. One of them had a 'posh voice'.