When Martin Klein stepped off the plane, Morgan couldn’t help but give a fond smile. His shock of blonde hair spiked up all over the place, his jacket was done up with the wrong buttons and he jerked away from people around him to maintain his need for personal space. He carried a small backpack with everything he needed for this short trip to help them with the mission. Most would consider him unusual, many might even use the word ‘special’ in a way that wasn’t a compliment. But few understood how special Martin really was, and Morgan was grateful that she was one of them.
They had grown close over the missions they had experienced together with Jake. Although Martin wasn’t a natural field agent, his knowledge and ability to think differently had often proved to be the missing link that the team needed to discover the next step. His rational and unemotional approach had helped in the past, but this time, Morgan knew the journey was personal. Martin had shaken off the effects of the poison but Sebastian was still in hospital, Professor Camara Mbaye remained missing, and he blamed himself for involving them.
Martin looked up and Morgan lifted a hand to wave a greeting as he hurried over.
“You have all the pieces?” he asked, his eagerness hard to contain. He bounced up and down on the balls of his feet with no need to rest after the long flight from London to Rio de Janeiro.
Morgan nodded as she led him toward the taxi rank. “Yes, we’ve got an office suite at the Fidalgo mining headquarters reserved for our investigation.” She shrugged as they jumped in a cab. “Strange times make for strange bedfellows, indeed. I’m glad you’re here to help.”
During the journey into the city, Martin tapped his long fingers on his knees, as if limbering up for the code he would soon generate, and the taxi soon pulled up outside the towering skyscraper.
Morgan flashed her temporary identification, and the guard let them through and into the bank of shining chrome elevators. They sped up to the penthouse suite that Aurelia had commandeered for their preparation to travel east, leveraging her remaining authority to get them the resources they needed.
Jake stood with the heiress in a glass-fronted meeting room before an oversized whiteboard covered in scrawled handwriting. He waved as they passed, indicating that he would be out soon. Aurelia glanced over with barely concealed disdain. The woman clearly had a penchant for strong South African men, and Morgan was happy for Jake to take the lead in managing her — at least for now.
She led Martin into a smaller room kept with blinds closed down over the full-length glass walls and overhead lights dimmed low enough to protect the pieces of ancient manuscript laid out on the table. There was an extensive amount of other equipment in the room, everything they might need to investigate the map further.
Martin whistled a little under his breath. “Finally together again.”
Morgan nodded. “It’s likely that they haven’t been this way since 1496, when the Jews were expelled from Portugal and scattered across the empire.” As she said the words, a sense of foreboding rose within. Whoever made this map went to a lot of trouble to make sure the pieces were separated when it was a lifetime’s journey to travel across the globe.
But why not destroy the map altogether?
She tried to imagine the person who created it. Perhaps some old Rabbi, desperate to save the rare knowledge but afraid for its future potential. Did he rip it apart with tears in his eyes at the thought of what might be lost? There was no way to know how it had come into being, or what the map might lead to in reality. Perhaps there was nothing there at all. But at least now they could find out.
Martin opened his backpack and pulled out a slim laptop through which he could access the ARKANE servers. But first, they needed to know what to search for, and that’s where Morgan appreciated Martin’s different way of looking at things.
The map was now complete — but it was not a simple, modern geographical layout with a clear path. A verdant garden lay at the center of four rivers with phrases written around its heart, interwoven with faded images of many kinds of trees, plants and flowers.
But there was something wrong about it. Morgan didn’t know what it could be, but the map looked unfinished in some inexplicable way.
Martin stared down at the fragments, his brow furrowed in concentration, clearly feeling the same way. They had both seen enough ancient maps and manuscripts in their time and researched a lot more. Both found this one unusual.
“There must be something more…” Martin whispered.
A moment later, he brightened. “Of course! Bring it over here.”
He turned on a light box with a glass top, back-lit with bulbs that enabled different layers to be seen within whatever lay above. “Many of the Kabbalist manuscripts in particular use different kinds of ink visible in certain lights. This should give us a new perspective.”
Morgan carefully placed the pieces on top and as light flooded through, the pigments deepened in color. Greens split into shades of dark moss and emerald, and the bark of the tree shifted into shiny chestnut with walnut hues. The vines seemed to shimmer as spines of silver emerged with razor-sharp, wicked blades. More text appeared, the writing almost frenzied, and there were droplets of something darker on the page. Rust perhaps… or blood.
This wasn’t a map to a gentle Eden. This was a warning to stay away.
“Can you decipher the text?” Morgan said, bending closer. “It looks a bit like Hebrew, but not something I can understand.”
“Let’s see what we can do.” Martin picked up a handheld scanner and ran it over the map, holding it just an inch or so above. Once the scan was complete, a digital image appeared on his computer screen.
He sat down and typed so rapidly that Morgan could barely see his fingers as they flashed over the keys. It was a pleasure to watch Martin at work, and she felt privileged that he allowed her to see him like this.
The world fell away as he worked with the tools he had developed for ARKANE, delving into databases linked by strange coincidences using ancient keywords in dead languages. He accessed the machine learning algorithms he had trained to discover new information, hidden to even the most knowledgeable human brain.
Occasionally, Martin stopped and pushed his glasses up or ran his fingers through his shock of blonde hair, pulling it into spikes. He narrowed his eyes and stared at the lines of code on the screen, some programmed by his own hand, still more generated by the extension of his genius, the computer itself.
While Morgan was confident of her place in the physical world, sure of her ability to find the objects they sought, her brain could only fathom so much, while Martin’s world stretched into places far beyond human knowing.
She thought of her father, a Kabbalist scholar, murdered as one of the Remnant and avenged at the Gates of Hell. Leon Sierra had worn this same concentrated expression as he studied the words of the Torah, as the letters spun themselves into meaning that gave him an insight into his impenetrable God. Did Martin feel the same way as understanding clicked into place and new perceptions surfaced? Perhaps one day she would ask him, but for now, Morgan sat in silence as her friend conducted a symphony of code.
The clicking of keys marked the passing of time until Martin finally stopped. His screen changed to show a map of the Middle East with the dominant lines of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and next to it, the scan of the fragments with the translated text.
He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The hidden text was the key to understanding where the rivers intersect.” He zoomed into the map. “A document chronicling the Islamic invasion of the Caucasus in the eighth century mentions a River Gaihun, later renamed Araxes and then Aras. Some early Victorian biblical commentaries have it as Gihon-Aras.”
Martin pointed to the screen. “It rises in the mountains to the north of Lake Van in south-eastern Turkey and runs to the Caspian Sea across northern Iran.”
“So where is the Pishon?” Morgan asked.
He zoomed the display closer. “The database pulled from various linguistic models and determined that the Hebrew was likely conflated with ancient Iranian. The Pishon is actually the Qizil Üzan, a tributary which also runs into the Caspian Sea.”
Martin superimposed the proposed rivers over the map, and Morgan took a step back in surprise. The four lines clearly outlined a region that crossed from eastern Turkey through Armenia and Azerbaijan, circling down through northern Iran.
“So if that region is Eden, then where’s the Garden?”
Martin zoomed in to Lake Urmia and followed a line of blue east through Tabriz, the fourth largest city in Iran, in the north-western corner of the country near the borders of Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. “This is the Ari Chay River, once known as the Meidan, Persian for walled garden.”
Morgan nodded. “OK, but that’s still a vast area.”
Martin zoomed in once more to the peak of Sahand Mountain, a dormant volcano to the south of Tabriz.
“Ezekiel, chapter 28. ‘You were in Eden, the garden of God… You were on the holy mount of God; you walked among the fiery stones.’”
“Fiery stones,” repeated Morgan in wonder. “It could be the place. God is often found on a mountain-top.”
“It’s known as the bride of Iran’s mountains because of its abundant and beautiful landscape.” Martin pointed to the eastern slopes. “There’s a ski resort on one flank, but there’s a Protected Area on the opposite side. There are no maps I can find of it, which is unusual, even for that part of the world, and Professor Mbaye had a dig site in the area before it was abruptly shut down.”
Morgan gazed at the contours of the mountain. “Then that’s where we’ll go next.”