The Genesis Secret Read online

  TOM KNOX

  The Genesis Secret

  Author’s Note

  The Genesis Secret is a work of fiction. However, most of the religious, historical, and archaeological references are entirely factual and accurate.

  In particular:

  Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Go-beckly Tepp-ay) is an archaeological site maybe twelve thousand years old presently being unearthed in south-east Turkey, near the city of Sanliurfa. The entire complex of stones, pillars and carvings was deliberately buried in 8000 BC. NO one knows why.

  In the region surrounding Gobekli Tepe, amongst the Kurds of southern Turkey and northern Iraq, there exists a group of ancient religions known as the Cult of Angels. Some of these cultists worship a god called Melek Taus.

  And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son

  Genesis, 22

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  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

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Alan Greening was drunk. He’d been boozing all night in Covent Garden: starting at the Punch, where he had three or four pints with his old friends from college. Then they’d gone to the Lamb and Flag, the pub down that dank alleyway near the Garrick Club.

  How long had they lingered there, sinking beers? He couldn’t remember. Because after that they’d gone to the Roundhouse, and they’d met a couple more guys from his office. And at some point the lads had moved from pints of lager to shorts: vodka shots, gin and tonics, whisky chasers.

  And then they had made the fatal error. Tony had said, let’s go and look at some girls. So they’d laughed and agreed and ambled halfway up St Martin’s Lane and bribed their way into Stringfellows. The bouncer hadn’t been keen on letting them in, not at first: he was wary of six young guys, obviously out on the lash, swearing and laughing, and way too boisterous.

  Trouble.

  But Tony had flashed some of his ample City bonus, a hundred quid or more, and the bouncer had smiled and said, Of course, sir…and then…

  What had happened then?

  It was all a blur. A blur of thongs and thighs and drinks. And smiling naked Latvian girls and ribald jokes about Russian furs and a Polish girl with unbelievable breasts and endless amounts of money spent on this and that and the other.

  Alan groaned. His friends had departed at various times: collapsing out of the club and into taxis. In the end it was just him, the last punter in the joint, tucking multitudes of tenners into the G-string of the Latvian girl who gyrated her tiny little body as he stared at her helplessly, worshipfully, dumbly, idiotically.

  And then at 4 a.m. the Latvian girl had stopped smiling and suddenly the lights were up and then the bouncers had him by the shoulders and they were firmly escorting him to the door. He wasn’t quite thrown into the street like a bum in a saloon, in an old-fashioned western-but it was pretty close.

  And now it was 5 a.m., and the first throb of the hangover was needling him behind the eyes; he had to get home. He was on the Strand and he needed to be in bed.

  Did he have enough cash left for a taxi? He’d left his cards at home but, yes-Alan sorted groggily through his pockets-yes, he still had thirty quid left in his wallet; enough for a cab to Clapham.

  Or rather, it should have been enough. But there were no taxis. It was the deadest hour of the night: 5 a.m. on the Strand. Too late for clubbers. Too early for office cleaners.

  Alan scanned the streets. A mild April drizzle was falling on the shiny wide pavements of central London. A big red night bus was trundling the wrong way-towards St Paul’s. Where could he go? He fought through the boozy fog in his head. There was one place you could always get a cab. He could try Embankment. Yes. There were always taxis there.

  Collecting himself, he turned left: down a side road. The sign said Craven Street, and he’d never heard of it. But that didn’t matter. The road headed downhill towards the river: it must take him directly onto Embankment.

  Alan walked on. The street was old: lots of serene Georgian buildings. The drizzle was still falling. The first hint of a spring morning was bluing the sky above the ancient chimney tops. There wasn’t a soul around.

  And then he heard it.

  A noise.

  But not just a noise. It sounded like: a groan. A human groan: but somehow clogged, or distorted. Weird.

  Had he imagined it? Alan checked the pavements, the doorways, the windows. The little side street was still deserted. All the buildings around here were offices. Or very old houses converted into offices. Who could be here at this time of night? A junkie? A homeless guy? Was it some old drunk, lying in a gutter, down there in the shadows?

  Alan opted to ignore it. That’s what you did if you were a Londoner. You ignored. Your life was hassled enough in this huge, frenetic, and bewildering city without adding to your daily stress by investigating odd groans at night. And besides, Alan was drunk: he was imagining it.

  And then he heard it again: distinct. A terrible chilling moan of someone in pain. It almost sounded like someone saying ‘help’. Except the word came out as ‘eeeeelllbbbb’.

  What the fuck was that? Alan sweated. He was scared now. He didn’t want to know what kind of person-what kind of thing-could make a sound like that. And yet he had to find out. All his moral reflexes were telling him to help.

  As he stood in the gentle rain he thought of his mum. What she would say. She would tell him he had no choice. It was the moral imperative: Someone Is In Pain: Therefore You Help.

  He looked left. The voice seemed to come from a row of old Georgian houses with dark purple bricks and elegant old windows. One of the houses had a sign up at the front, a wooden placard shining with rain in the lamplight. The Benjamin Franklin Museum. He had no proper idea who Benjamin Franklin was. Some Yank; a writer or something. But that didn’t really matter. He was fairly sure the moan was coming from this house: because the door was open. At 5am, on a Saturday morning.

  Alan could see a dim light beyond the halfopen door. He clenched his fists once, then twice. Then he went to the door, and pushed.

  It swung wholly open. The hall beyond was quiet. There was a till in the corner, a table stacked with leaflets; and a sign that read: Video Presentation This Way. The ha
ll was illuminated, barely, by some nightlights.

  The museum seemed undisturbed. The door was open but the interior was perfectly still. It didn’t look like the scene of a robbery.

  ‘Errrrlmmng…’

  There it was again. The curdling groan. And this time it was plainly apparent where it came from: the basement.

  Alan felt the talons of fear grasp his heart. But he stifled his nerves, and walked determinedly to the end of the hall, where a side door led to some descending wooden stairs. Alan creaked his way down them, and stepped into a low cellar room.

  A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The light was soft, but bright enough. He gazed about. The room was unexceptional-apart from one thing. A corner of the floor had been recently and comprehensively dug up, the earth was turned over-to leave a big black hole going down a metre or more into the dark London soil.

  It was then that Alan saw the blood.

  He couldn’t not notice it: the big sticky stain was vivid and scarlet, and spattered over something very white. A pile of whiteness.

  What was this whiteness? Feathers? Swan feathers? What?

  Alan walked over and prodded the whiteness with the toe of his shoe. It was hair: human hair maybe. A pile of shaved white human hair. And the blood was spattered luridly across the top, like cherry sauce on lemon sorbet. Like a sheep’s miscarriage in the snow.

  ‘Errrllllbbbbb!’

  The groan was very close now. It was coming from the room next door. Alan fought back his fears one last time and went through the small, low-slung door that led to the next room.

  Inside, it was very black, apart from the narrow slant of light thrown by the bulb behind him. The ominous moan reverberated around the room. Fumbling to the side of the door, Alan slapped at the switch and flooded the room with brightness.

  In the centre of the room, on the floor, lay a naked old man. His head had been completely shaved. Brutally shaved-judging by the grazes and cuts. Alan realized that that was where the hair must have come from. They had shaved his hair. Whoever they were.

  Then the old man moved. His face had been averted from the door, but when the lights came on he turned and looked at Alan. The sight was unnerving. Alan flinched. The terror in the old man’s eyes was unspeakable. Wide and red, his eyes stared out, frenzied with pain.

  The earlier drunken-ness had gone: Alan now felt queasily sober. He could see why the man was in agony. His chest was cut with marks, slashed with a knife. A design had been carved into his soft, old, wrinkled white skin.

  And why was he groaning so weirdly? So incoherently? The man moaned again. And Alan wobbled with faintness.

  The man’s mouth was abrim with blood. Blood oozed from his mouth, as if he had gorged himself on strawberries. Red blood was oiling down from his elderly lips, dripping onto the floor. When he moaned, more blood bubbled and gurgled, splattering his chin with gore.

  And there was one final horror.

  The man was holding something in his hand. Slowly, he opened the hand, and mutely extended it: as if he was kindly offering something. A gift.

  Alan looked down at the extended fingers.

  Clutched limply in the hand was a severed human tongue.

  2

  Carmel Market was busy. Full of Yemenite spice merchants arguing with Canadian Zionists, Israeli housewives examining lamb ribs, and Syrian Jews setting up racks of CDs by Lebanese torch-singers. The crowds were thronging between the tables of pungent red spices, stacked metal tins of green olive oil and the big liquor stall selling good Golan Heights wine.

  Amongst them was Rob Luttrell, making his way to the far end of the market. He wanted a beer at the Bik Bik beer and sausage shop, his favourite spot in Tel Aviv. Rob liked to watch the Israeli celebrities in their paparazzi-fooling sunglasses. A few days back, one particularly cute starlet had actually smiled at him. Maybe she’d guessed he was a journalist.

  Rob also liked the Czech beer at the Bik Bik sausage bar: served in plastic steins it went down a treat with those chunks of home-made salami and tiny pitas of spicy kebab.

  ‘Shalom,’ said Samson, the Turkish sausage man at the Bik Bik. Rob briskly ordered a beer. Then he remembered his manners and said Please and Thanks. He wondered if boredom was getting to him. He’d been back here for six weeks, kicking his heels after six months in Iraq. Was it too long?

  Yes, he’d needed the break. Yes, he liked being back in Tel Aviv-he loved the city’s vivacity and drama. And it was generous of his editor in London to give him the time off, to ‘recover’. But now he was ready for action again. Another posting in Baghdad maybe. Or Gaza-things were kicking off there. Things were always kicking off in Gaza.

  Rob drank from the plastic pint glass of beer, and then stepped to the front of the open air bar to look out across the corniche at the grey-blue Mediterranean beyond. The beer was cold, golden and good. Rob watched a surfer breasting the waves out to sea.

  Would his editor ever call? Rob checked his mobile phone. The digital image of his little daughter stared back. Rob felt a serious pang of guilt. He hadn’t seen her since…when? January, or February? When he was last in London. But what could he do? His ex-wife kept changing her plans, as if she wanted to deny Rob all access. Rob’s yearning to see Lizzie was like a hunger, or a thirst. There was a constant sensation that something-someone-was missing from his life. Sometimes he’d find himself turning to smile at his daughter, and of course she wasn’t there.

  Rob returned his empty beercup to the bar. ‘See you tomorrow, Sam. Don’t eat all the kebabs!’

  Samson laughed. Rob paid his shekels then headed for the seafront. He ran across the busy lanes of Thursday traffic, hoping not to get killed by the punchy Jewish drivers trying to run each other into the ocean.

  The Tel Aviv beach was his favourite place to think. With the skyscrapers behind him and the waves and the warm, bracing wind in front. And now he wanted to think about his wife and child. His ex-wife and five-year-old child.

  He had wanted to fly back to London immediately after the newspaper ordered him out of Baghdad. But Sally had suddenly got a new boyfriend and told him she needed ‘space’, so Rob had decided to stay put in Tel Aviv. He didn’t want to be in England if he couldn’t see Lizzie. It was too agonizing.

  But whose fault was all this, really? Rob wondered how much of the divorce was his own doing. Yes, she’d had the affairs…but he had been away all that time. But this was his job! He was a foreign correspondent: it was what he’d spent ten years striving for back in London. This was how he earned his money. And now he’d made it in his mid-thirties and he was covering the whole Middle East-and there were more stories than he knew what to do with.

  Rob wondered if he should go back to the Bik Bik for another beer. He looked left. The Dan Panorama hotel loomed against the blue sky-a great concrete lump of a hotel with a flashy glass atrium. Behind was the parking area, acres of car lots oddly situated in the middle of town. He remembered the story behind these car parks: when the Arab-Israeli war had broken out in 1948 this had been the main front in the urban conflict between Jewish Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa. Then the Israelis had won and they’d levelled the shell-shocked slums that remained. And now it was just a big car park.

  He made a decision. If he couldn’t see Lizzie he could at least earn some money, to keep her fed and secure. So he decided to go straight back to his little flat in Jaffa and do some research. Find some more angles on that Lebanese story. Or trace those Hamas kids that hid out in that church.

  Ideas fizzed in Rob’s head as he headed to the curve of the beach, and the ancient harbourfront houses beyond: the port of old Jaffa.

  His mobile rang. Rob checked the screen hopefully. It was a British number, but it wasn’t Sally, or Lizzie, or his friends.

  It was his editor, in London.

  Rob felt the surge of adrenalin. This was it! This was the moment in his job he most loved: the unexpected call from his editor. Go to Baghdad, Go to Cairo, Go to Gaza, Go Risk Your Life.
Rob adored this moment. The never knowing where he was going to be. The frightening sense of improvised theatre: as if he existed on live TV. No wonder he couldn’t pin down a relationship. He clicked the phone.

  ‘Robbie!’

  ‘Steve?’

  ‘Wotcher.’

  The ultra-Cockney accent of his editor fazed Rob for a second, as it always did. He still had enough of the middle-American in him to presume that editors at The Times always spoke in pukka Oxford English. But his foreign editor spoke like a Tilbury docker-and swore even more. Sometimes Rob wondered if Steve put it on a bit-the Cockney accent-to mark himself out from his plummier Oxbridge peers. Everyone in journalism was so competitive.

  ‘Robbie, mate. Whatya doing right now?’

  ‘Standing on a beach, talking to you.’

  ‘Fuck. Wish I had your job.’

  ‘You did. But you got promoted.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Steve laughed. ‘Anyway what I mean is, what you doing next? We got you on assignment?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘That’s right, that’s right. You’re recovering from that fucking…bomb shit.’

  ‘I’m OK now.’

  Steve whistled. ‘That was messy. Baghdad.’

  Rob didn’t want to think about the bombing. ’So…Steve…where…’

  ‘Kurdistan.’

  ‘What? Wow!’

  He immediately felt excited, and a little scared. Iraqi Kurdistan. Mosul! He’d never been there and it was surely chock-full of stories. Iraqi Kurdistan!

  But then Steve broke in: ‘Cool your jets…’

  Rob felt his excitement ebb. There was something in Steve’s voice. This wasn’t a war story. ‘Steve?’

  ‘Rob, mate. What do you know about archaeology?’

  Rob looked out to sea. A paraglider was soaring over the waves. ‘Archaeology? Nothing. Why?’

  ‘Well there’s this…dig…in south-east Turkey. Kurdish Turkey.’

  ‘A dig?’

  ‘Yep. Pretty interesting. These German archaeologists have…’

  ‘Cave paintings? Old bones? Shit.’ Rob felt a piercing disappointment: