God's Lions - The Dark Ruin Read online

  CHAPTER 1

  ISTANBUL — PRESENT DAY

  Enveloped by the sights and smells of the bustling Bazaar Quarter, the two dark-clothed men watched the maritime parade of boats flow from the Golden Horn into the Bosporus as they sat drinking strong Turkish coffee next to the steamy entrance of a sidewalk café. Technically it was springtime, but a slight chill blanketed the old section of the city with the last vestiges of a long winter that clung to the land in a feeble attempt to keep the warming rays of the sun from reaching down into narrow streets still cloaked in dewy, early morning shadows.

  Cardinal Leopold Amodeo tapped his watch and held it to his ear. “What time do you have?”

  “Seven-thirty,” Bishop Anthony Morelli replied.

  “He should have been here by now. Maybe you should call him again.”

  Morelli’s brown eyes peered from beneath his black baseball cap. “He’ll be here. I’ve worked with this man for years on other archaeological digs here in Turkey. He’s never on time, but he always shows up ... and he’s very discreet about my activities. We can’t afford to bring anyone new onboard at this late stage.”

  The cardinal turned the collar up on his jacket and stared past his friend at the turbulent blue water lapping at a distant promontory point facing the Sea of Marmara. He was actually looking at another continent, for they were on the European side of a city that straddled the two continents of Europe and Asia, a geographical position that had made Istanbul a strategic focal point throughout history.

  “Too bad Lev couldn’t bring the Carmela into port here,” Morelli huffed, watching cigarette smoke from a nearby table drift over their heads. “This is practically the yacht’s second home, but her presence here now would have announced our arrival. I’ve been onboard twice when she was anchored off the coast of Turkey. The scenery was beautiful ... and the archaeology! There’s no other place on Earth where the ancient world is so evident. It’s all around us. We’re sitting in the cradle of civilization. The Assyrians, the Hittites, the Greeks ... the Romans. They were all here.”

  “I know,” Leo said, picking at his small breakfast baklava with a silver fork before downing the last of his coffee. “It wouldn’t have surprised me if Lev had decided to build his villa here in Turkey instead of in Israel.”

  “He’ll never leave the Holy Land, Leo, but he does love it here. There are more Roman ruins here than there are in Italy, and more Greek ruins here than in Greece. Even though Lev is surrounded by antiquity in Israel, this is where he discovered his love of archaeology. He brought Ariella here for her first dig when she was only ten years old. We all camped near the site of the ancient city of Troy, and that little girl wore everyone out tromping around looking for artifacts. We had to keep a constant eye on her because of snakes.” Morelli shook his head as he gazed out over the jostling flow of humanity walking past their table. “People who don’t enjoy learning about history ... I just don’t get it.”

  By now Leo’s gaze had shifted to nearby tables, looking for eyes that lingered just a little too long in their direction. Like everywhere else in the world, crime was also on the rise here in Turkey, but there was another, more tangible reason for Leo’s growing caution.

  Satisfied at last that they were not being watched, Leo looked at his watch again just as the loud screech of brakes on the street jerked his attention to a mud-splattered Chevy Suburban that had just pulled to the curb after cutting off a slower-moving car. Behind the wheel, peering from beneath a head of curly dark hair, the Chevy’s grinning driver pulled his sunglasses down over his nose and winked in their direction.

  “That’s him,” Morelli said, rising from his chair. “Let’s go.”

  Hefting their backpacks over their shoulders, the two men quickly made their way through the jostling crowd before piling into the large four-wheel-drive vehicle. Glancing in his side-view mirror, the driver lurched the big Chevy out into thick traffic, joining the flow that crossed the famed Galata Bridge—a bridge that was named after the 6th century tower that overlooked the Golden Horn from the top of one of the seven hills that rose above the European section of the city.

  Sitting in the front passenger seat, Morelli smoothed his thinning red hair under his cap before turning his heavy-set frame sideways so that he could peer into the back seat. “Leo, I’d like to introduce you to a close friend of mine. This is Abbas Sadik. Abbas is an archaeologist attached to the Turkish Ministry of Antiquities, and for the past twenty years he and I have made several important archaeological discoveries, both here and in other areas around the Mediterranean. Without his help here in Turkey I would have been totally lost on more than one occasion.”

  With his tanned forearms gripping the steering wheel, Abbas threw his head back in laughter. “Actually, Cardinal, your friend the bishop here is the one who keeps me from getting lost. He sent me a GPS for Christmas a few years ago after we accidently crossed over the border into Iraq. Luckily for us a group of U.S. Marines pointed out our mistake before we ran into any bad guys. Even though he knows I’m not a Christian, he keeps sending me Christmas presents every year just in case I suddenly convert without his knowledge.”

  Leo’s stark green eyes narrowed as he smiled at the back of the man’s head. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Abbas. Bishop Morelli tells me that you’re a Muslim.”

  “That I am, Cardinal. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Sunni Muslim.” Abbas grinned into the rear-view mirror. “Pay no attention to the bulges under my jacket ... they’re just sandwiches.”

  It was quickly becoming obvious why Morelli had chosen this man to be their guide into the remote hinterlands of the Turkish countryside. Morelli enjoyed being around happy people with a good sense of humor, and this guy certainly fit the bill.

  “Your people have a proud heritage, Abbas. Have you always lived in Turkey?”

  “Yes, except for the time I spent at Cambridge. I was born in Meryemana. That’s about 8 kilometers from the ruins of Ephesus, one of the greatest ancient cities in the western world. The proximity of my birth to such places is probably one of the main reasons I took up the study of ancient cultures. My friends and I used to play in the ruins when we were kids, and my parents still live in the area—a few blocks from the house where the Blessed Virgin Mary spent her last days.”

  “That’s some neighborhood you grew up in,” Leo said, impressed.

  “It was the best. My father told me that, after Jesus asked Saint John the Evangelist to look after his mother, John brought Mary with him to Ephesus after the crucifixion. She lived there until the day she died, and her house still stands. It’s a revered shrine to both Christians and Muslims alike.”

  “I’d love to visit there someday.”

  “You will, Cardinal,” Abbas winked up into the mirror at Leo’s blurred silhouette in the back seat. “I will see to it personally.”

  Speeding from the crowded Bazaar Quarter along the Ciragan Caddesi, the wide boulevard that parallels the Bosporus on the European side of the city, Leo watched the sprawling metropolis pass outside their windows in a blur of vibrant color and muted sound that reminded him of Rome. He was instantly struck by the similarity of the two ancient cities. Not only were they both dominated by seven hills, but Rome and Istanbul had once been major centers of the Roman Empire. In fact, after the Roman Emperor Constantine had made the city the new eastern capital of the Empire in 330 AD, it became widely known as the “City of Constantine” or Constantinople. Constantine himself wanted the city to be called Nea Roma, Latin for New Rome, but due to the confusion of having two cities with the same name, it never caught on. For almost 1600 years the city was called Constantinople, until the 1930’s, when Turkish authorities formally announced that the city would be called by its Turkish name—Istanbul.

  Curving up a wide ramp on the European side of the Bosporus Bridge, the big Chevy joined an endless parade of traffic moving from one continent to another across one of the busiest bridges in the world, and within minutes, they found th
emselves headed east through a warren of narrow streets in the Asian part of the city.

  Digging through his backpack, Morelli retrieved a map and glanced over at Abbas. “Has there been any activity at the site since Eduardo left?”

  “Nothing obvious, Bishop. I was out there last week, and except for a few graduate students and their professor, the place was practically deserted.”

  “You say, practically?” Leo asked, leaning forward.

  “Yes, Cardinal. The usual sheep herders and farmers still wander by, but as far as I know nothing out of the ordinary has occurred since Eduardo and his team left. Their departure was just as sudden as their arrival the month before. A childhood friend of mine from a nearby village was hired to do some digging at the excavation site, and he said it sounded to him like they didn’t find what they were looking for. He said Eduardo was becoming increasingly upset and threatened to fire everyone and hire another team of archaeologists. The next day, when my friend went to work, he and the other men were surprised to find that Eduardo and his people had packed up and left. They actually left the workmen’s paychecks lying in envelopes under a rock.”

  “And the men doing the digging ... they weren’t told what they were looking for?”

  “Apparently not. Every time they uncovered anything that looked important, Eduardo would show it to his wife, but she would always just shake her head and walk away.”

  “What about the boy?”

  “He stayed mostly to himself. Didn’t speak much to anyone, but when he did speak he was very polite. I can tell you one thing though. According to my friend, his mother never let him out of her sight.”

  “Did your friend ever have a chance to speak with him?”

  “Only once, Cardinal. The kid was sitting in the sun all alone on a hillside looking out at the horizon. My friend went over and offered him some bottled water. He said the boy looked up toward the top of the hill where his mother was standing before taking the water, and ...

  “Please, Abbas ... any detail could be important.”

  “He said the boy seemed distant. There was something about him that made my friend feel uneasy whenever he was around.”

  “In what way?”

  “Nothing he could pinpoint. I asked him the same question, and he said it was just a vague feeling of uneasiness ... like when a big dog is walking toward you and staring you down ... not growling but not wagging its tail either. A dog like that ... you never know what it’s going to do.”

  “Interesting. I wish we could have come here sooner.”

  Abbas cleared his throat. “I don’t think that would have been a good idea, Cardinal.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The priest.”

  “The priest?”

  “Sorry, Cardinal, I thought you knew. A Coptic priest arrived the day before they left and offered to bless the site. The security men hustled him away and ...

  “And what?”

  Abbas glanced up at the rear-view mirror and swallowed. “After his visit, the priest’s body erupted in black boils. He died two days later.”

  CHAPTER 2

  BABYLON, IRAQ

  Squinting in the sun’s reflective glare, Eduardo Acerbi wrapped a frail hand around a glass of orange juice and looked out over the sand-covered ruins of the ancient city of Babylon from the rooftop garden of his new home. Actually, the word palace would be a better term to describe the immense structure that stretched out beneath him, for it was much more than just a home.

  Originally built for an Iraqi dictator who had wisely decided to flee for his life ahead of an advancing American army, it was surrounded on all sides by high walls that enclosed manicured gardens and an artificial lake that mirrored the sky, and on the inside, the cavernous interior was dominated by immense crystal chandeliers that hung over patterned marble floors laid by some of the finest craftsmen in the world. Even the bathrooms, with their ridiculously high ceilings and gold-plated fixtures, seemed out of proportion. To Eduardo, it looked like the building had been constructed for a race of giants; a fitting architectural accommodation made in the name of ego rather than the actual size of the people who had once inhabited it.

  The colossal palace was quite a change from the simple stone house in the idyllic French village of Foix, where the old man had lived for the past forty years after abandoning a life of privilege as one of the wealthiest men on the planet. He had left it all—simply turned his back and walked away in order to lead a life of virtual isolation with his wife Colette so that they could be true to the central tenets of their Cathar faith—a faith that had given Eduardo Acerbi the peace he had always desired.

  After he had disappeared from his French chateau in the 1970’s, the search had lasted for months, until finally all hope had been abandoned. The newspapers and magazines of the day had called it one of the strangest disappearance cases on record. It was a total mystery. One of the world’s wealthiest men—a handsome husband and loving father who doted on his family—suddenly and inexplicably gone. He had vanished into thin air without a trace.

  Eduardo’s first wife had remarried shortly after his disappearance, but within a year she and her new husband were dead; killed in a freak automobile accident. In her will she had bequeathed everything to the son she and Eduardo had adopted before he disappeared. They had named the boy Rene, and it was he who eventually inherited the entire sum of the Acerbi fortune on the day of his twenty-first birthday.

  For years, as Eduardo and his new wife Colette lived in their quiet Cathar enclave, they had heard rumors of how Rene had been using the immense wealth and power of the Acerbi fortune in ways Eduardo never could have imagined. Some said his son had gone mad; that he was even indulging in criminal enterprises, but despite the rumors, Eduardo had remained steadfast. He had made his decision, and as painful as it was to hear these things about his adopted son, he had no desire to return to the brutal and corrupt corporate world he had fled from years before. He had become a Cathar. He was free—free from the materialistic world he had left behind to live a happy life with Colette.

  But then, twenty-four years after he had disappeared, something had happened that had altered the course of his life forever. Eduardo and Colette were gifted with a child. Like the proverbial thief in the night, the child had been left on their doorstep; an infant swaddled in fine linens. At first they thought he must have been the product of some unfortunate young girl in the village who had secretly given birth out of wedlock, but Eduardo quickly realized something didn’t quite fit. As a man who had once enjoyed the finer things in life, he immediately recognized the label on the swaddling cloth. It had come from a company that manufactured the finest linen in the world—cloth so fine that it was affordable only to the very rich. Therefore the question remained as to why someone who could afford such expensive cloth would leave their baby on his doorstep in the middle of the night without so much as a note of explanation.

  At first, Eduardo had been hesitant. He and his wife were getting on in age, and his first instinct had been to take the child and drive into the village where he could deliver the infant into the hands of a couple that was young enough to raise the boy into adulthood. But as he gathered the child up to drive him to town and looked into the infant’s eyes, he stopped. Maybe it was the fact that he had already left behind one adopted son in his haste to escape his past life. Maybe it was guilt. But whatever the reason, as soon as the infant’s golden-brown eyes had met with his, he somehow knew that the child in his arms was his destiny.

  Together, Eduardo and Colette decided to name the boy Adrian, and after only a few short months, thoughts of ever giving him up had long since been forgotten. They were now hopelessly in love with their new son, and together they had become a family. They did all the family things together; joyful mealtimes full of laughter, planting vegetables together in the garden, walks through the woods and bedtime stories at night. Eduardo was recapturing the youthful life of a new father; a life he had abandoned once
before and now vowed never to abandon again. Life had begun to take on the idyllic quality of renewed meaning—until fate once again intervened when the world was suddenly struck by an unimaginable horror.

  While Eduardo’s attention had been fixated on his new family, his first adopted son’s madness had escalated to a whole new level. Fifteen years later, after Adrian had become a teenager, Rene had begun using the immense resources of the Acerbi fortune to go on a murderous rampage. He and a core group of power-hungry individuals had killed tens of thousands of innocent people with a deadly pathogen in a mad plot to eliminate half the planet’s population so that they could sweep in and take over the world.

  As Eduardo watched and listened to events unfold, he felt helpless. As far as the world knew, he was dead. He had unknowingly handed over the keys to the vast Acerbi fortune to a madman, and now there was nothing he could do to stop him. Or was there? Clearly something had to be done to stop Rene. Eduardo’s conscience and mankind’s future demanded it.

  After discussing the situation with a fellow Cathar, he had been put into contact with a secretive group in Israel known as the Bible Code Team, and it was during his first meeting with them that Eduardo had reluctantly divulged information that would eventually lead an armed force to his son.

  After waiting in his little stone house to hear if their mission to eliminate Rene had been a success, Eduardo had finally learned that their plan to stop his mad son had failed. Rene had outsmarted some of the best tacticians in the world, and now millions would die a horrible death unless someone stopped him.