As Safia stepped outside, she realized she had walked through the tomb in her shoes. She had also left her hair uncovered. She frowned.
Where was the caretaker?
She eyed the grounds, fearful for the man’s safety, again hoping he’d already left. The winds had kicked up, scurrying through the yard, bobbing the heads of a row of daylilies. The place appeared deserted, displaced in time.
Yet Safia sensed something…something she could not name, almost an expectation. Maybe it was the light. It cast everything-the neighboring mosque, the edges of the walls, even the hard-packed gravel of the garden path-in stark, flat detail, a silver negative held over a bright light. She sensed if she waited long enough, all would be revealed in full color and clarity.
But she didn’t have the time.
“What now?” Cassandra pressed, drawing her back.
Safia turned. Beside the entranceway, a small metal door was affixed to the ground. She bent to the handle, knowing what lay beneath it.
“What are you doing?” Cassandra asked.
“My job.” Safia let her disdain shine through, too tired to care if she provoked her captor. She tugged up the door.
Hidden below was a shallow pit, sixteen inches deep, dug from the stone. At the bottom was a pair of petrified prints: a large man’s bare footprint and a horse’s hoof.
“What’s all this?” Kane asked.
Safia explained, “If you remember my story of Job, he was afflicted with disease until God ordered him to strike his foot down and a healing spring was called forth.” She pointed into the stone pit, to the footprint. “That is supposedly Job’s footprint, where he struck the ground.”
She pointed to the hole in the ground. “And there is where the spring bubbled up, fed from a water source at the foot of the hill.”
“The water traveled uphill?” Kane asked.
“It wouldn’t be a miracle otherwise.”
Cassandra stared down. “What does the hoofprint have to do with the miracle?”
Safia’s brow crinkled as she stared at the hoof. It was stone, too. “There is no story associated with it,” she mumbled.
Still something tweaked her memory.
Petrified prints of a horse and a man.
Why did that sound familiar?
Throughout the region, there were countless stories of men or beasts turning to stone. Some even concerned Ubar. She shuffled through her memories. Two such stories, found in the Arabian Nights collection-“The Petrified City” and “The City of Brass”-related the discovery of a lost desert city, a place so evil it was damned and its inhabitants frozen in place for their sins, either petrified or turned to brass, depending on the story. It was a clear reference to Ubar. But in the second story, the treasure hunters hadn’t stumbled upon the condemned city by accident. There had been clues and signposts that led them to its gates.
Safia recalled the most significant signpost from this story: a sculpture of brass. It depicted a mounted horseman, who bore aloft a spear with an impaled head atop it. On the head, an inscription had been written. She knew the line from the story by heart, having done extensive research for Kara about Arabian mysteries:
O thou who comest unto me, if thou know not the way that leadeth to the City of Brass, rub the hand of the horseman, and he will turn, and then will stop, and in whatsoever direction he stoppeth, thither proceed, for it will lead thee to the City of Brass.
To Ubar.
Safia pondered the passage. A metallic sculpture turning with a touch to point to the next signpost. She pictured the iron heart, aligning itself like a compass needle atop the marble altar. The similarity was uncanny.
And now this.
She stared into the pit.
A man and a horse. Petrified.
Safia noted how both the foot- and hoofprint pointed in the same direction, as if the man were walking his mount. Was that the next direction? She frowned, sensing the answer was too easy, too obvious.
She lowered the lid and stood.
Cassandra kept at her side. “You’re onto something.”
Safia shook her head-lost in the mystery. She strode in the direction of the prints, walking where the long-dead prophet would have headed with his horse. She ended up at the entrance to the small archaeological site located behind the main tomb, separated from the newer building by a narrow alley. The ruins were a nondescript structure of four crumbling walls, no roof, outlining a small chamber ten feet across. It seemed once a part of a larger home, long gone. She walked through the threshold and into the interior.
While John Kane guarded the door, Cassandra followed her inside. “What is this place?”
“An ancient prayer room.” Safia stared up at the darkening skies as the sun sank away, then stepped over a kneeling rug on the floor.
Safia walked to where two of the walls had crude niches constructed into them, built to orient worshipers about the direction in which to pray. She knew the newer one faced toward Mecca. She crossed to the other, the older niche.
“Here is where the prophet Job prayed,” Safia mumbled, more to herself than Cassandra. “Always facing Jerusalem.”
To the northwest.
Safia stepped into the niche and faced backward, back the way she had come. Through the dimness, she made out the metal lid of the pit. The footsteps led right here.
She studied the niche. It was a solid wall of sandstone, quarried locally. The niche was a tumble of loose stone blocks, long deteriorated by age. She touched the inner wall.
Sandstone…like the sculpture where the iron heart had been found.
Cassandra stepped next to her. “What do you know that you’re not telling us?” A pistol pressed into Safia’s side, under her rib cage. Safia had not even seen the woman pull it free.
Keeping her hand flat against the wall, Safia turned to Cassandra. It was not the pistol that made her speak, but her own curiosity.
“I need a metal detector.”
6:40 P.M.
AS NIGHTfell, Painter turned off the main highway onto the gravel side road. A green sign with Arabic lettering statedJEBAL EITTEEN 9KM The truck bounced from the asphalt surface to gravel. Painter didn’t slow down, spitting a shower of stones onto the highway. Gravel rattled in the wheel wells, sounding distinctly like automatic fire. It heightened his anxiety.
Omaha sat in the shotgun seat, his window rolled half down.
Danny sat behind his brother in the backseat. “Remember, this piece of crap doesn’t have four-wheel drive.” His teeth rattled as much as the vehicle.
“I can’t risk slowing down,” Painter called back. “Once nearer, I’ll have to go more cautiously. With the lights off. But for now we have to push it.”
Omaha grunted his approval.
Painter punched the accelerator as they reached a steep incline. The vehicle fishtailed. Painter fought it steady. It was not a vehicle suited for backcountry trekking, but they had no other choice.
Upon returning from the Internet Cafй, Painter had found Captain al-Haffi waiting with a 1988 Volkswagen Eurovan. Coral was examining his other purchases: three Kalashnikov rifles, and a pair of Heckler amp; Koch 9mm handguns. All traded for the sultan’s stallion. And while the weapons were sound, with plenty of extra ammunition, the van would not have been Painter’s first choice. The captain hadn’t known they’d be leaving the city. And with time running short, they had no time to seek alternate transportation.
Still, at least, the van could carry all of them. Danny, Coral, and the two Desert Phantoms sat crammed in the backseat, Kara, Clay, and Captain al-Haffi in the extra third row. Painter had attempted to dissuade them all from accompanying him, but he had little time to state his case. The others wanted to come, and they unfortunately knew too much. Salalah was no longer safe for any of them. Cassandra could dispatch assassins at any time to silence them. There was no telling where she had eyes, and Painter didn’t know whom to trust. So they stuck together as a group.