The Genesis Secret Read online

  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.’

  4

  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’.

  And that was pretty much all Lorimer’s notes said. During the attack a car alarm had gone off, for some reason, probably sheer and miraculous coincidence-just as the men were carving Lorimer’s neck and chest, and so the men had fled. The caretaker was lucky to be alive. If the young lad, Alan Greening, hadn’t wandered in and found him he would have bled to death.

  Forrester’s mind was full of speculation. Turning right on the Strand, he headed down the quiet Georgian side street to the museum, the Benjamin Franklin House. The house was roped off with blue and white plastic tape. Two police cars were parked outside, a uniformed constable stood by the door, and a couple of obvious journalists with recorders were sheltering under a nearby office block awning, with cups of takeaway coffee.

  One of them stepped forward as Forrester approached. ‘Detective, is it true the victim had his tongue cut out?’

  Forrester turned and smiled blandly and said nothing.

  The journalist, young, female and pretty, tried again. ‘Was it some kind of neo-Nazi thing?’

  This made Forrester pause. He turned and looked at the girl. ‘Press conference is tomorrow.’ This was a lie, but it would do. Turning back to the house, he ducked under the tape and flashed his badge. The uniformed constable opened the door and Forrester immediately caught the piercing, chemical smell of Forensics at work. Fuming for fingerprints. Quasaring the place. Silicon gel and superglue. Stepping to the end of the noble Georgian hall with its portraits of Benjamin Franklin, Forrester took the narrow stairway to the basement.

  The cellar was a scene of activity. Two Forensics girls in green paper nonce suits and masks were working at one end. The bloodstains on the floor were vivid, sticky and dark. Detective Sergeant Boijer waved from the other side of the room. Forrester smiled back.

  ‘They were digging in here,’ said DS Boijer. Forrester noted that Boijer’s blond hair was newly cut, and expe
nsively so.

  ‘What were they digging for?’

  DS Boijer shrugged. ‘Search me, sir.’ He waved a hand across the ripped-up flagstones. ‘But they had a good old hunt. Must have taken them a couple of hours to shift all that shit, and get that deep.’

  Forrester bent to assess the disturbed soil, the deep, damp hole in the earth.

  Boijer chatted away behind him: ‘Did you see the caretaker?’

  ‘Yep. Poor bastard.’

  ‘The doctor told me they were trying to kill him. Slowly.’

  Forrester replied without looking around. ‘I think they were bleeding him to death. If the car alarm hadn’t gone off, and if he hadn’t lucked out with that lad arriving he would have died of blood loss.’

  Boijer nodded.

  Forrester stood up. ‘So it’s attempted murder. Better speak to Aldridge. He’ll want an SIO, and the rest. Set up an incident room.’

  ‘And the scars on his chest?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Forrester turned. Boijer was wincing, and holding a photo. ‘You haven’t seen this?’ He handed the photo over. ‘The doctor took a photo of the scars on the guy’s chest. He emailed it to the station this morning, didn’t get a chance to show you.’

  Forrester looked. The caretaker’s white chest was exposed to the camera, soft and vulnerable. Bloodily carved in the skin was a Star of David. Unmistakable. The flesh was crudely ripped, but the sign was clearly legible. Two juxtaposed triangles. A Jewish Star of David. Carved into living flesh and blood.

  5

  ‘So these are the carvings, the new ones they mentioned in the article?’

  ‘Ja.’

  Rob was in the middle of the dig, next to Breitner. The two of them were standing at the side of a pit, looking down at a circle of tall, T-shaped stones within the sunken enclosure. These were the megaliths. All around them the dig was proceeding with alacrity: Turkish workers were brushing and shovelling earth, shinning down ladders, trundling barrows of rubble along duckboards. The sun was hot.

  The carvings were strange-and yet familiar, because Rob had seen them in the newspaper photos. There was a stone carved with lions, and a few weathered birds; maybe ducks. On the next stone was something that looked like a scorpion. About half the megaliths had similar carvings, many of them seriously eroded, others not. Rob took some shots with his cameraphone then scribbled a few impressions in his notebook, drawing the strange T-shape of the megaliths as best he could.

  ‘But,’ said Breitner, ‘that of course is not everything. Komm.’

  They walked along the side of the pit to another sunken area. Three more ochre pillars stood in this enclosure, surrounded by a mudbrick wall. Traces of what looked like tiling glinted on the floor between the pillars. A blonde German girl said Guten Tag to Rob as she pushed past carrying a small clear plastic bag full of tiny flints.

  ‘We have many students here from Heidelberg.’

  ‘And the other workers?’

  ‘All Kurdish.’ Breitner’s twinkling eyes clouded for a moment behind his spectacles. ‘I also have other experts here of course, paleobotanists and two or three other specialists.’ He took out a handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his bald head. ‘And this is Christine…’

  Rob turned. Approaching him from the direction of the tented headquarters was a petite but determined figure in khaki trousers and a remarkably clean white shirt. Everybody else in the dig was smothered with the ubiquitous beige dust of Gobekli Tepe’s exhausted-looking hillocks. But not this archaeologist. Rob felt himself go tense-as he always did when he was introduced to an attractive young woman.

  ‘Christine Meyer. My skeleton woman!’

  The small, dark-haired woman extended a hand: ‘Osteoarchaeologist. I do the biological anthropology. The human remains and so forth. Not that we have found anything of that nature yet.’

  Rob detected a French accent. As if he guessed Rob’s thoughts, Breitner interrupted. ‘Christine was at Cambridge under Isobel Previn, however she is from Paris so we are very international here…’

  ‘I’m French, yes. But I lived in England for many years.’

  Rob smiled: ‘I’m Rob Luttrell-we share a back-ground! I mean I’m American. But I’ve been living in London since I was ten.’

  ‘He’s here to write about Gobekli!’ Breitner was chortling. ‘So I am going to show him the wolf!’

  ‘The crocodile,’ said Christine.

  Breitner laughed, then turned and walked on. Rob glanced between the two scientists, confused. Breitner waved a hand, beckoning him to follow. ‘Komm. I will show you.’

  They took another circuitous walk around the various pits and spoilheaps. Rob gazed about. There were megaliths everywhere. Some still half-buried. Others were tilted over at dangerous angles. He murmured: ‘It’s much bigger than I expected…’

  The narrow path forced them to walk in single file. Behind Rob, Christine replied, ‘GPR and magnetivity imply there may be two hundred and fifty more stones buried under the hills. Maybe more.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘It is an incredible place.’

  ‘And of course incredibly old, right?’

  ‘Right…’

  Breitner was now racing ahead of them. To Rob he looked like a boy eager to show his parents his new den. Christine went on, ‘In truth it has been very hard to date the site: there aren’t any organic remains.’

  They reached a steel ladder and Christine moved beside Rob. ‘Here, like this.’ She skimmed down it-vigorously. Evidently she didn’t mind getting dirty, despite the shirt.

  Rob followed rather less swiftly. They were now down at floor level in one of the pits. The megaliths loomed around them, like sombre guards. Rob wondered what it would be like here at night, and dismissed the fleeting notion. He took out his notebook. ‘So you were saying, about the dating?’

  ‘Yes,’ Christine frowned. ‘Until recently we couldn’t be sure how old the place was. I mean, we knew it was very old…but whether it was late PP Neolithic A, or PPNB…’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Last week we finally managed to carbon date some charcoal that we found on a megalith.’

  Rob wrote this down. ‘And it’s ten or eleven thousand years old, right? That’s what the Trib article said?’

  ‘Actually that report was inaccurate. Even carbon dating is only an estimate. To get a truer date we compared the radiocarbon analysis with some of the flints we found, Nemrik points and Byblos points-types of arrowheads and so forth. Taking these together with other data we think that Gobekli is actually closer to twelve thousand years old.’

  ‘Hence the excitement?’

  Christine glanced at him, pushing dark hair back from her clear eyes. Then she laughed. ‘I think Franz wants you to look at his lizard.’

  ‘Wolf,’ corrected Breitner, standing by another half buried T-shaped pillar. At the foot of this pillar, attached to the upright of a stone, was a sculpture of an animal about two foot long. It was delicately chiselled and looked strangely new. Its stone jaw was growling at the floor. Rob looked at Breitner and at the Turkish worker just beyond him. The Turkish man was glaring at Breitner with what appeared to be anger, or even hatred. It was a shocking expression. When the man saw Rob looking at him, he turned and abruptly climbed a ladder. Rob glanced back at Breitner, who was stoutly unaware of this little exchange.

  ‘We only found this yesterday.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I think it’s a wolf, judging by the paws,’

  ‘And I think it’s a crocodile,’ said Christine.

  Breitner laughed. ‘Do you see?’ He put his spectacles back on and they glinted in the bright sun, and for a moment Rob felt a sudden admiration for this man: so delighted and enthused by his work.

  Breitner went on, ‘You and me and these workers, we are the first people to see this since…the end of the Ice Age.’

  Rob blinked. That was a truly impressive thought.

  ‘This carving is so
new to us,’ Christine added. ’No one knows what it is. You are seeing something very important for the first time. There’s no one to interpret it for you. Your guess as to what this might be is as good as anyone’s.’

  Rob stared at the jaw of the stone creature. ‘It looks like a cat to me. Or a mad rabbit.’

  Rubbing his chin, Breitner replied: ‘A feline? You know I hadn’t thought of that. Some kind of wildcat…’

  ‘Can I put all this in my article?’

  ‘Ja, natürlich.’ Breitner said. But he wasn’t smiling as he said it. ‘And now I think-some tea.’

  Rob nodded: he was thirsty. Breitner led the way back through the maze of covered pits, open pits, tarpaulined enclosures and bucket-carrying workers. Over the last rise was a flatter area of open-sided tents laid with red carpets. A samovar in one corner produced three tulip-shaped glasses of sweet Turkish cay. The open tents afforded a spectacular view: beyond them were the endless yellow plains and shallow dusty hills undulating towards Syria and Iraq.

  For several minutes they sat and chatted. Breitner was explaining how the area surrounding Gobekli used to be much more fertile-not the desert it had since become. ‘Ten or twelve thousand years ago this area was much less arid. In fact it was beautiful-a pastoral landscape. Herds of game, orchards of wild fruit trees, rivers full of fish…That’s why you see carvings on the stones of animals-creatures that don’t live here now.’

  Rob noted this down. He wanted to know more-but then a couple of Turkish workers approached and asked Breitner a question in German. Rob knew just enough of the language to glean the meaning: they wanted to dig a much deeper trench to access a new megalith. Breitner was evidently worried about the safety of such a serious excavation. Eventually Breitner sighed, shrugged at Rob, and went off to sort things out. As he went Rob saw that one of the workers was scowling: a strange, dark expression. There was definitely a tension here. Why? He wondered if he should mention his suspicions now that he and Christine were alone. The noise of the dig was muffled at this distance-all Rob could hear were little tinklings of trowels and spades, small noises occasionally carried over, on the hot desert wind. He was about to ask his question when Christine said, ‘So what do you think of Gobekli?’