The Pandora Room: A Novel Read online

  Then there were days like this, when the novelty of being halfway around the world from his home made him jittery, even without the potentially real threat the day had brought them.

  It would’ve been so much easier if it had just been Sophie and Lamar.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She kept her hands on the wheel and ignored it, though both men looked at her expectantly. Sophie steered around potholes on the road that wound down off the mountain and through the trees. The air conditioner had been cranked up full blast, but now she rolled down both her window and Lamar’s. Hot air blasted in, but at least the air moved. The heat had been baking inside the Jeep the entire time they had been up in Amadiya. Now the shadows of the trees provided a bit of relief, though it would be short-lived.

  Again, her phone buzzed, and again, she ignored it.

  The Jeep emerged from the trees, and she turned west along a narrow road whose pavement was so dusty and faded that it seemed to merge with the land around it, as if one day the road might be erased altogether and the way out into the valley would be forgotten. The mountains loomed all around them, but down here in the hot, rocky basin, they seemed more ominous than beautiful.

  “You really not going to look to see who’s texting you?” Lamar asked.

  “I know who it is.”

  In the backseat, Martin sniffed in disapproval. “It’s Steven.”

  Sophie glanced in the rearview mirror, catching his eye. “Of course it’s Steven. Mind your own business.”

  Martin threw up his hands as if to say he’d never intended to chime in, which of course was an unspoken lie. If anyone had opinions about the relationship she’d abandoned when she’d left her teaching post at New York University, it was Martin.

  Her brows knitted. What if this time it wasn’t Steven at all? For the first time, it occurred to her that it might be her mother calling … that it might be the call she had been dreading but expecting for the past two years. Sophie’s parents had divorced a month after her high school graduation, and her father, French by birth and inclination, had moved back to Rennes. They’d made a strange couple, to be sure—he an Afro-French composer of motion picture soundtracks and she an American corporate lawyer. For years after their divorce, their only contact was through their daughter, but then Philip Durand had begun to slip, and that slippage became rapid early-onset Alzheimer’s, and before Sophie even realized her parents had been in touch with each other, her mother, Imani, had announced plans to close her practice and move to France to care for her ex-husband.

  The sweetest fucking story Sophie had ever heard, she had said at the time. And the saddest. There were other factors, of course, and Sophie focused on them, especially when talking to Steven … but really, once her mother had left New York for France, it had been only a matter of time before Sophie left, too.

  Her pocket buzzed again. “Damn it,” she muttered. What if it wasn’t Steven?

  Sophie glanced at Lamar, but he shook his head.

  “We have more important things to worry about,” he said as if she needed that reminder.

  “So,” Martin said, leaning forward between the two front seats. “You going to tell us what we were running from back there? I saw those two guys who were watching us when we got back to the Jeep.”

  “They followed me for at least twenty minutes. Probably longer. I overheard one of them speaking Turkish. Maybe they’re government, maybe something else.”

  “Shit,” Martin hissed.

  Lamar shook his head. “Don’t they realize we couldn’t give a shit about politics?”

  “I’d rather not get caught in an international incident out here,” Sophie said quietly.

  The Kurds were scattered across the entire region—nearly forty million of them, by some estimates, with at least six million in the autonomous region of northern Iraq now called Kurdistan. In late 2017, they’d voted for independence in overwhelming numbers, only to be pressured by the Iraqi government and military to call off any attempt to break away into their own independent state. The Turkish government was dealing with their own Kurdish insurgency and feared a truly independent Kurdistan would trigger a powder keg in an already volatile region. The Beneath Project—the archaeological dig Sophie had begun months ago—had been permitted by the Iraqi government, with supervision by their Office of Antiquities as well as a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government. But given that the dig was only a handful of miles from the Turkish border, and many conservatives in the Turkish government were suspicious of any international activity in the area, the Turks had tried to insist they be allowed to send observers as well, and they’d been rebuffed.

  “What did they think they’d accomplish by spying on us?” Martin asked.

  Sophie glanced at him in the rearview mirror … and saw the plume of dust rising from the road a couple of miles behind them.

  “Give it a few minutes,” she replied, her chest tightening, “and you can probably ask them.”

  Lamar twisted around in his seat. “Fuck! Sophie, floor it!”

  TWO

  Sophie floored it. The Jeep bounced over the rutted, cracked pavement, but she was more worried about the road ahead than the road beneath them. In a mile or so, they would have to turn northwest on a narrow dirt road that led along a twisting path among the foothills of the mountains that separated this part of Kurdistan from Turkey.

  “I don’t want them following us.” She glanced in the rearview mirror again, then had to swerve with the abrupt turn in the road. “Shit! We can’t let these guys track us back to the dig.”

  Lamar held on to the dashboard with one hand, twisted around in his seat and looked out the back window. “Why would they do it like this? I don’t get it. We’ve got Beyza at the dig every day. If these guys are Turkish, they could get anything they need from her bosses.”

  Sophie blinked. Her heartbeat thrummed in her ears, and she kept glancing at the road and the rearview, at Lamar and at Martin, trying to decide what to do. She couldn’t think about who might be chasing them now. Turkish spies made sense to her, but Lamar was right. Beyza Solak was a professor from Atatürk University whom the Iraqis had allowed to take part in the dig at the request of UNESCO.

  Martin unbuckled his seat belt and turned onto his knees, peering out the rear windshield. “Who the hell are those guys?”

  They hit a pothole so deep it made the whole car drop and then slam upward. Martin smashed his head into the hardtop and sprawled across the rear seat in a daze. He swore, rubbing his head, and started to buckle himself in again without Sophie having to bark at him to do so.

  Seconds passed by with Sophie and Lamar staring out at the road ahead of them. They rounded a bend and started down the dusty slope between two low hills. A stretch of woods awaited at the bottom of the slope, and Sophie wondered if she could hide the Jeep in there, let their pursuers pass, then turn around and hightail it back to Amadiya, where there were people who would bear witness if their pursuers tried anything.

  But the vehicle behind them seemed closer now. Whatever engine it had under its hood had more power than the Jeep’s. Her heart thrummed in her chest like the engine racing under the hood. She worried about her heart. Sometimes she had trouble catching her breath and her chest hurt, and she thought of all the warnings her childhood doctors had given her about adult complications from radiation and chemotherapy.

  You’re fine, she thought. Drive!

  “They’re closing on us,” Lamar said calmly as if he’d resigned himself to a fight.

  “Shit,” Martin muttered in the backseat, wincing in pain as he clutched at his skull. “What is wrong with these people?” He snapped his head up, catching Sophie’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Hold on—do you think they’re going to kill us?”

  The question went unanswered. The Jeep’s engine roared, and Sophie wondered how it had come to this. They were archaeologists, researchers, teachers. Martin was still a graduate student, but here they were on a stretch of
road in the middle of nowhere with men chasing them—men full of menace and malice and the presumption that they could do anything to anyone and get away with it.

  Sophie feared they might be right.

  In her pocket, her phone buzzed again. Damn it, Steven!

  She hoped it was Steven. Told herself it wasn’t her mother, that today wasn’t the day her father would leave the world.

  Sophie’s hands hurt from gripping the wheel so tightly. Her knuckles had turned white. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. She had been in danger before, been face-to-face with indigenous people or local militia who didn’t want an archaeology dig to continue. She’d been robbed at knifepoint on the New York subway by a man who’d put his hands on her in ways that still made her seek out crowds on public transit. She’d nearly died when an airline pilot decided to try to land in the middle of a blizzard that had turned away dozens of flights already at an airport that should have been closed. She’d endured the ominous physical encroachments of racist assholes just looking for a reason.

  You don’t know these men intend to kill you, she thought. Don’t be stupid.

  In truth, all she knew was that the mustache twins wanted to talk to them, question them where nobody else could hear, perhaps follow them to the dig. There were guards there—a unit made up of both American and Kurdish soldiers—but they would never make it to the camp before their pursuers caught up. For a moment, Sophie considered pulling over and getting out, forcing the men to reveal their intentions, but then it occurred to her that even if they fell short of murder, abduction might be on the table.

  Sophie had slowed to skid around the bend in the road. Now she floored it again. The Jeep roared down the hill, lost in the shade of the trees looming up on either side. Fifty yards later, the trees thinned out and they were out of the woods. Something buzzed overhead, dipping so low that she nearly swerved, thinking a bird might crash into the windshield.

  “Did you see it?” Lamar asked, twisting around again.

  “What was—” Martin began.

  “A drone,” Lamar said. “Someone’s following us with a goddamn drone. This is out of hand, Sophie. These crazy fuckers are going to start an international incident. What do they think—”

  “They’re not following us,” Martin said. He’d craned his neck to look behind them.

  Sophie hit the brakes. The Jeep skidded, dust flying up around them, and she brought the vehicle to a juddering halt before she flung the door open, undid her seat belt, and jumped out. Lamar and Martin piled out seconds later, and the three of them stood and stared back the way they’d come.

  The mustache twins had stopped their car. More accurately, they’d been stopped by a pair of unmarked Humvees that even now were disgorging half a dozen soldiers. Reality seemed to bend and flex for a moment, and Sophie felt as if she might be dreaming. Where the hell had they come from?

  “They weren’t there two minutes ago,” she said aloud, hot wind whipping around her. “We’d have seen them on the road.”

  The drone that had buzzed overhead now hovered back there at the edge of the woods, likely getting the entire scene on a live feed, but who was watching it? And where?

  “The trees,” Martin said. He walked toward the back of the Jeep, one hand rubbing at his aching skull. “They were hidden in the woods.”

  Sophie narrowed her eyes. These soldiers weren’t from the Beneath Project’s camp at Derveyî, but she saw U.S. Army markings on several of the soldiers, while others seemed to be Kurdish. The two militaries were working in tandem out of a base in Erbil, but that was intended to be a continuing struggle against ISIS remnants, the Americans ostensibly helping the Kurds to root out terrorist factions. So what were these other soldiers doing, staking out the road to her dig?

  “They were waiting,” Lamar said. “So they knew these guys would be coming after us?”

  “Well,” Sophie said, exhaling loudly as her heart began to calm. “Better they know than not know.”

  Lamar shot her a hard look. “You’re okay with them spying on us?”

  Martin laughed. “If men who mean us harm are going to spy on us, and there’s nothing we can do about it, I’m with Sophie. Let the ones who want to keep us safe watch all they like. Besides, they’re probably in contact with Ellison.”

  Sophie realized that must be true—that whatever these troops were up to, the commander of the unit guarding her dig, Major Ellison, had to know about it. She watched as the soldiers bundled the handcuffed mustache twins into the back of one of their vehicles, hoping this didn’t lead to further trouble. The whole region was in conflict, every moment of peace tenuous, and any spark of violence might set it all aflame. It had been a miracle that the European Union’s Alliance Européenne pour l’Exploration Scientifique had managed to persuade all the governments involved to allow the dig to proceed, even with sponsorship from UNESCO.

  “Let’s just hope whatever happens now, they do it quietly,” she said. “If we’re perceived as a potential problem, the U.S. and the Iraqis will kick us out of here without a second thought, no matter how loudly anyone complains.”

  In her pocket, her phone buzzed again, but this wasn’t a text message. Someone was calling. A flutter of fear went through her as she pulled the phone out, and she found herself hoping it was Steven. She recognized the irony, but that would be better than an unexpected call from her mother. As it turned out, it was neither of them.

  “Beyza?” Sophie said into her phone. “What’s going on?”

  Lamar and Martin turned their attention her way, but Sophie ignored them as she listened.

  “When will you be back, Dr. Durand?” Professor Beyza Solak asked. “You need to be here.”

  “Is something wrong? Has there been an accident?”

  Martin started asking questions, but Sophie shushed him with a raised hand.

  “A happy accident,” Beyza replied. “In the lowest level. The wall of the worship chamber—Alton cracked the wall.”

  Sophie’s heart jumped. She stared at Lamar as she spoke. “What do you mean he cracked the wall?”

  “It’s cracked. More than that,” Beyza said. “There’s a hole in it. And Sophie … there’s another room beyond it. With writing on the walls. Some kind of cuneiform, but nothing I’ve seen before. Nothing like we’ve found. We’ve only got a few inches cleared. The wall is unstable, so we must be very careful, but Sophie…”

  “Wow,” Sophie breathed. “Yeah, Beyza. I’m coming. Be there in fifteen minutes. Don’t let anyone in that room before I get there.”

  Beyza laughed. “No chance of that. The team’s more afraid of the wall collapsing on them than they are of you.”

  Sophie ended the call and slipped the phone into her pocket, texts from Steven forgotten. She glanced at Martin and Lamar, who were talking to her, though she couldn’t really process their questions. Her mind had already begun examining the information Beyza had given her, turning it all over, wondering what it might mean.

  The soldiers had climbed back into their vehicles. One of them was driving the mustache twins’ car. One of the Humvees rolled toward her, but Sophie had no time to deal with soldiers now. The excitement of this new mystery lit up inside her like a bonfire catching its first spark. This sort of thing was the very reason she’d given up academia, the taste of discovery, the thrill of the unknown past.

  “Lamar,” she said. “Stay and tell the soldiers whatever they want to know. Find out what you can. I’m taking Martin back to the dig, and then I’ll send someone out to pick you up.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Sophie cocked her head. “You heard at least part of that conversation. Do you think I’m kidding?”

  Lamar rolled his eyes. He’d known her long enough to realize when there was no point in arguing. He reached back into the Jeep and grabbed a bottle of water, then started walking back to meet the Humvee.

  Martin grinned and climbed into the passenger seat. Sophie got behind the whe
el, fired up the engine, and turned the Jeep around. She felt bad leaving Lamar in a cloud of dust, but when she pulled up adjacent to the Humvee and pointed back at Lamar, one of the soldiers nodded, and that was all the permission she needed.

  Later, Lamar would be pissed. She hoped whatever they found in this secret chamber would be enough to make him forgive her.

  THREE

  “This isn’t just crazy,” Beyza said. “It’s foolish, and it calls your leadership into question.”

  Sophie bristled, but she forced herself to remain calm. With Beyza voicing doubts about her leadership, snapping at her where others could hear was a terrible idea. What would she do, call out Beyza in front of the staff for the affair she’d been having for months with Elio Cortez, who was a graduate student? That would only make things worse.

  “Question all you like, but I’m project director,” Sophie replied calmly. “Your presence has been helpful, Professor, and your knowledge of the region’s history invaluable, but no one is insisting you stay.”

  A hush fell over the worship chamber. Sophie and Beyza had shifted their conversation into the most private corner of the room, an elevated stone platform they’d identified as an altar, and they tried to keep their voices down. Apparently, the acoustics were not helping.

  The worship chamber had an oblong design, perhaps fifty feet in length, half that in width, and a dozen feet high. The symbols on the walls and the altar had been well documented by now. At the height of its activity, the Beneath Project had employed eighty-seven people, not including the military guard unit in the aboveground camp, which they typically referred to as topside. By now, much of the work had begun to wrap up, and the numbers belowground had dwindled to fifty-one, with another dozen scheduled to depart in less than a week.

  Alton Carr had been tasked with making final notes before they officially closed the book on the worship chamber—at least for the purposes of their project. But then he’d noticed the crack the team had made in the wall while doing rubbings of the carvings there, and beyond the crack—a gap. Heavy stones had been piled up and sealed with a crude mortar, then covered over in an effort to obscure the presence of something on the other side. A farther chamber, perhaps an entire network of them.