Free The Revelation Code (Wilde/Chase 11) by Andy McDermott

cabinet. A laptop on the countertop was the only loose item.
    Nina felt a new unease. She had been in a similar lab before, part of a Russian biological warfare centre. Whatever Cross kept in here, he considered dangerous.
    He went to the cabinet. ‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked, pointing at its contents.
    She peered through the toughened glass. On top of a small pedestal sat a fragment of pottery or ceramic. It seemed to have been burned, a dark charcoal smear on the surface. ‘It looks like . . . a piece of a statue?’
    ‘It is,’ said Cross, nodding. ‘But it’s also something else. I told you I’d seen an angel, Dr Wilde. There it is.’
    ‘You mean you saw a statue of an angel?’
    ‘Yes. But I believe – as firmly as I believe in the word of God and Jesus – that they’re the same thing.’ On her questioning look, he went on: ‘The Book of Revelation talks of four angels, bound by God. Chapter nine, verse thirteen: “And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, ‘Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.’” And I’ve seen one of them with my own eyes. This was it!’
    Nina held back the more scathing of her immediate thoughts. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I was on a mission for the CIA in Iraq, before the invasion. There’s a lake between the Euphrates and the Tigris called Umm al Binni – we had a rendezvous with a group of Marsh Arabs there. Saddam had drained the marshes to drive them out, and because of that, the water level had dropped enough to reveal something in the lake. A temple. I went inside, and found the angel. The unbroken angel.’ He held one hand about twelve inches above the other. ‘It was this tall, and looked exactly as John described in Revelation – the body of a man but with the head of a lion, wrapped in six wings full of eyes.’
    ‘If you say so,’ said Nina warily.
    He rounded on her. ‘I don’t need to say so!’ he barked. ‘I can show you!’ He flipped up the laptop’s lid. ‘Here!’
    The screen came to life, displaying a photograph of the interior of the temple. The resolution was relatively low, but still clear enough for her to realise that whatever else she thought of her captor, he had made an impressive discovery.
    He had also accurately described the angel, which rested inside a gold-lined nook. It did indeed have a lion’s head on a man’s body, metal wing-like shapes tightly encircling it. But she found herself more intrigued by the surroundings than the centrepiece. The walls were covered in inscribed text – she recognised it as Akkadian, a long-extinct language of ancient Mesopotamia. It wasn’t one she could translate, though, those words visible through the dirt and shadows remaining indecipherable.
    She also recognised another language: ancient Hebrew, carved into stone tablets propped against the wall. Their lower halves were lost beneath the flooded temple’s murky waters, leaving only a few lines visible. Again she couldn’t read the language; Latin and Greek had been her specialities.
    ‘This was under the lake?’ she asked, intrigued. She knew she was falling prey to her own weakness, her obsession with learning more about lost treasures of the past, but couldn’t help wanting to know more.
    Cross nodded. ‘It had been under twenty feet of water until Saddam drained the region. The Marsh Arabs avoided the area even before then; they thought it was a place of death.’
    ‘And was it?’
    ‘I was the only person who got out alive after the Iraqis attacked, so yes. The temple was blown up by a helicopter gunship.’ He gestured at the sliver inside the cabinet. ‘That was the only piece of the angel I recovered.’
    Nina was still examining the photograph. ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do with this. I can’t translate Akkadian, and I only know a small amount of ancient