The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [14]
‘Haven’t you heard?’ he said. ‘The alarm in the cave? For God’s sake. They’ll find -‘
Stokes raised a hand to stop him. ‘I’ve heard,’ he replied levelly.
‘And you’re still here?’ He spread his hands. ‘Have you gone mad? What if they -‘
‘Calm down. Don’t you see? This is better than we could ever have hoped for.’
‘What? Are you insane?’
‘Now, now, Frank …’ he warned. But Roselli was inconsolable.
‘I told you this might happen!’ he overrode indignantly. Pointing a pudgy index finger at Stokes, he said, ‘We should’ve permanently sealed the opening.’ He shook his head with dismay. ‘Christ, we knew that hatch might draw attention.’
‘And how do you suppose what’s in the cave could be released without a doorway?’
Rolling his eyes, Roselli didn’t have an answer.
‘Let me remind you that it was a missile, Frank. A missile that accidentally veered off course. Sorry, but we didn’t plan for that.’ Stokes got up again. ‘Let’s not have someone overhearing this conversation,’ he said conspiratorially. He waved for Roselli to follow, led the way to the open door in the rear of the office.
Huffing, Roselli got up and went over to him, hesitated at the entry threshold to assess the keypad on the doorframe. His head tilted to calibrate the thickness of the door - five, maybe six, inches. Then he peeked inside. ‘What is this place?’
‘My private gallery. We can talk more freely in here.’ Stokes offered a composed smile, placed a gentle hand on the man’s shoulder and urged him inside.
The spacious, windowless gallery housed an impressive collection of ancient artifacts in sturdy display cases - mostly Middle Eastern, as far as Roselli could tell. No surprise since Stokes was obsessed with anything remotely linked to Mesopotamia or Persia, both past and present. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls; dozens of compact clay tablets were neatly laid out behind thick glass doors. He could also make out jewellery, pottery and Bronze Age tools and weapons stored there too.
But the room’s centre featured the relics Roselli knew intimately.
Mounted atop a wide granite plinth was an enormous limestone slab; maybe six feet high, four feet wide, he guessed. On the monolith’s face were intricate relief etchings of two winged beasts, spirits facing one another in profile, as if courting for a dance - each half human, half lion. The stone seal they’d removed from the cave entrance and replaced with a heavy-duty metal door.
In the display cases beside the seal, Roselli spotted some of the cursed artifacts they’d recovered from deep within the labyrinth: an assortment of clay tablets stamped with ancient wedge-shaped symbols and pictograms; a beautiful necklace of glossy shells; a clay jar painted in symbols and whose bizarre contents remained locked within rock-hard resin. But the most prominent display case was covered with a veil. The thought of what might be inside it made him shudder. ‘You must be insane … keeping all these things here.’
‘Do you really think anyone would know where these treasures came from? I’m a mere collector, Frank. Stop being paranoid,’ Stokes suggested delicately.
‘Paranoid? Do you know what will happen if anyone finds what we left behind in that cave?’ Then he turned pale when he thought of the most serious consequences. ‘My God … what if those American contractors go inside … what if they all die?’
With hands behind his back, Stokes paced over to the stone slab and admired it for a long moment. ‘When God expelled Adam and Eve from Eden, the cherubim were posted outside the entrance so that the humans could never return to paradise. The sacred guardians …’
‘Now is not the time for Bible-thumping,’ Roselli fumed. ‘We need to focus on the cave. What are we going to do?