Covenant A Novel

HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

GIVAT RAM CAMPUS


The Hebrew University of Jerusalem lay outside the Old City near the district of Rechavia, perched atop Mount Scopus. Ethan guided Rachel around the immense campus using a hastily scribbled set of directions, their MACE escort following, and after retracing his steps more than once finally located the Berman Building.

The Natural History Collections and Institute of Archaeology was enveloped in a hushed atmosphere as Ethan led Rachel through a maze of corridors, Cooper and Flint following in ominously silent formation until they reached a door bearing a plaque with the name Doctor Hans Karowitz etched into the surface. The door was half-open, the room apparently empty.

“He was Lucy’s mentor, according to her e-mails,” Rachel said, peering into the room.

Ethan knocked gently on the door, but there was no response. He walked inside, Rachel and their agents following behind.

The office was like a miniature lecture hall, complete with a lectern. Chairs were stacked neatly to one side beneath broad windows overlooking a sculptured garden. The room was silent, dust motes winking in the musty air as they floated between two rows of large display cases that dominated the rear of the office.

Ethan walked past the cases, each as tall as he was. Within each was the skeleton of a human or, more precisely, an ancient species of hominin. Ethan looked in fascination at each of them as he passed by, each specimen progressively taller and more recognizably human than its predecessor.

As he rounded the far end of the first row of cabinets, he found himself looking at the back of an old man who was staring into one of the second-row displays against the wall. From Ethan’s perspective, the old man’s reflection was ghoulishly superimposed over the ancient remains of a Neanderthal within the case.

“Dr. Karowitz?”

The old man seemed startled at the sound of Ethan’s voice. Ethan extended a hand and introduced Rachel. At his realization of who Rachel was, Karowitz’s eyes saddened.

“I am so sorry to hear of what has happened,” he said.

“Do you know where my daughter is?” Rachel asked.

“No, but there is no shortage of likely candidates for her kidnapping, creationist groups being the most likely to—”

Before he could finish, Agent Cooper barged in. “That is an unsubstantiated comment with no basis in reality. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

“Shut up and let him speak,” Ethan snapped.

Cooper’s jaw twisted around a shit-eating grin as he rested one hand on a Sig 9 mm pistol at his waist.

“Accept my judgment or you’ll be on the next plane back home, Warner, understood?”

Rachel looked at Karowitz. “Please, just tell us what you can.”

Hans Karowitz sighed, glancing warily at the MACE agents as he spoke.

“Creationists believe that the universe was created in seven days,” he said softly. “Yet the Torah, the Old Testament as recorded by the Hebrews, makes no such claim. It refers only to seven ‘periods of time,’ or yom, which meant aeon in ancient Hebrew. The error appeared as a result of translation between Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Therefore, the supposed creationist age of the Earth as less than ten thousand years is baseless.”

“What difference does it make?” Ethan asked.

Karowitz smiled faintly.

“Almost every major faith on our planet has a creation myth, in which their devotees believe without question regardless of evidence to the contrary. But it may be that such myths found their origin not in fantasy but in a sort of distorted historical record.”

Ethan glanced at Rachel before replying.

“I thought that science would oppose such a concept. You think that religious myths have a genuine historical origin too?”

“Possibly,” Karowitz qualified. “How much do you know about human evolution?”

Ethan, caught off balance, shrugged. “We evolved from apes, right?”

Karowitz spread his arms to encompass the room around them. “Look around, you’re surrounded by examples of evolution. These are the fragments of a human story that began eight million years ago in Africa’s Great Rift Valley and continues to this day.”

“To this day?” Ethan asked. “I thought that we were the last of our kind, the best of our species?”

“Evolution does not have a goal, it’s driven by unguided natural selection,” Karowitz said. “It is constantly in motion and simply represents change over time. It is driven in biological species by random genetic mutations and environmental influences that govern how species adapt to their environments, and thus how efficiently they can reproduce and pass their characteristics on to their offspring.”

“I never understood how one species can suddenly change into another,” Rachel said.

The Belgian shook his head and whistled through his teeth.

“They don’t. Creationist groups have long spread such rumors in an attempt to deceive uncritical minds into believing that humans are special, the product of a god. For decades they have deliberately spread disinformation, misquoted scientists and invented conspiracies, or claimed that evolution is only a theory, despite knowing that the word in science doesn’t mean the same as in daily life. You don’t hear them criticize Einstein’s theory of general relativity, another well-proven foundation of science that underpins everything from space flight to nuclear power and GPS systems.”

Karowitz gestured to the cases beside them, filled with ancient human skeletons.

“Part of the problem is that we’re not familiar with geological and evolutionary timescales. Humans live for perhaps a century, but life has evolved over billions of years, and only those who have a religious motive continue to deny what stares them in the face.”

“So you think that they’re afraid that what Lucy found might cost them their influence, these creationist groups?” Ethan hazarded.

“Exactly,” Karowitz said. “You said that we evolved from the apes, but that’s another creationist myth. We evolved alongside the apes and continue to do so. Our evolutionary paths diverged from a common ancestor some eight million years ago, eventually diversifying into some twenty different homonin species. But by the last million years or so, there were only four species of man left walking the Earth: Homo heidelbergensis, from whom Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis evolved, and our direct ancestors, Homo sapiens, who dwelled in Africa. As a result of natural selection, only we, Homo sapiens, remain to this day.”

“And our ancestors were what Lucy was originally looking for?” Ethan asked.

Karowitz nodded.

“Under my mentorship, Lucy made some incredible finds out in the southern Negev over a very short period of time. But she also began undertaking work for a private group, and somewhere out there she found something entirely different.”

“Something that was not one of our ancestral species,” Ethan said.

“No,” Karowitz said, “what Lucy found was—”

“Unknown,” Cooper interrupted sharply again.

“We have e-mails from Lucy,” Rachel said to Cooper, “detailing the remains and their appearance and—”

“And I get e-mails every day telling me I’ve won the Nigerian lottery,” Cooper rumbled. “But I haven’t started showering in frigging champagne.”

Ethan ignored Cooper, barging in front of him to speak to Karowitz. “What makes you so sure the remains were not human?”

“The physiology Lucy described was remarkably different,” Karowitz said. “The specimen’s bone structure was far more robust than a human and the chest plate was fused, therefore its lungs would have differed from ours. Its bones were latticed, something known to have been common in some dinosaurs to save weight, and it also bore an extended cranial cavity that may have served a communicative purpose by infrasound, again a known adaption in some species on Earth.”

Ethan nodded. “And you think that this species might have been responsible for interfering with human evolution?”

“Not our evolution,” Karowitz cautioned, “but our developmental history.” He looked at Rachel and began quoting. “‘And Azadel brought the men knowledge, and taught them of the metals and the fields and the things of the earth, and made them strong …’”

Rachel’s eyes glazed over as she instinctively took up the recital.

“‘…and God struck down the angel Azadel, and buried him amongst the earth, and covered him with sharp rocks and covered his eyes with earth so that they may not see.’” She looked at Karowitz. “The Book of Enoch.”

“Among many other books,” Karowitz said, pacing up and down as he spoke. “The supposed contacts between ancient man and their various gods share remarkable details that some people believe may record the presence of beings on this Earth of technological superiority so great that they would have appeared to early man to literally be gods.”

“Arthur C. Clarke said as much in one of his books,” Rachel said. “His Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.”

Ethan frowned thoughtfully.

“But if life in the Levant at the time was good, why would man have needed help?”

“Man was surviving, but only just,” Karowitz said. “The warming after the Last Glacial Maximum was interrupted by an event called the Younger Dryas, an extreme thousand-year chill that caused the Holocene Extinction Event, when all of the megafauna like mammoths became extinct. Mankind also almost died out, and those few who survived would have been greatly separated in small groups with poor genetic diversity.”

“What caused the event?” Ethan asked.

“Nobody’s sure,” Karowitz replied, “but a charred sediment layer at many sites that includes nanodiamonds, iridium, charcoal, and magnetic spherules is consistent with a major cometary strike at that time. The airburst explosion of a carbonaceous chondrite comet could have caused the major extinction around twelve thousand years ago.”

“Okay, so we survived, but things went down the can,” Ethan said.

“To put it mildly. The point is that it’s after this catastrophe, when human numbers and resources were severely depleted, that human civilization is born when it probably should have collapsed. We came out of the so-called Clovis culture of making flaked stone tools and entered the Copper Age. Suddenly, we’re forming civilizations and technology. The earliest true civilizations known to history appeared around seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia shortly after the Younger Dryas.”

“So you think that any intervention occurred between those two dates,” Rachel said.

“Perhaps because of the near extinction of mankind,” Karowitz said. “If we were indeed being watched by advanced species of unknown origin, then our near extinction may have prompted assistance. To impart the knowledge to achieve this leap would have required only the most basic of assistance in developing script, language, and novel construction methods.”

Ethan frowned again.

“This doesn’t help us figure out who exactly abducted Lucy.”

“But it could,” Karowitz said. “Lucy may have been abducted by people for whom faith is more important than truth. Such people are willing to pay mercenaries to locate such remains.”

Ethan tossed the idea around in his head, and somehow it seemed less desperate than radical jihadists abducting obscure scientists in a futile effort to change Western foreign policy. He glanced curiously at the remains in the cabinets around them.

“Mercenaries? Like fossil hunters? How much money would Lucy’s discovery be worth?”

“If Lucy’s discovery was the complete skeleton of an unidentified extraterrestrial species, then the value of the find would be astronomical.”

Cooper opened his mouth to speak, but Rachel ignored him and looked at Ethan.

“You think that somebody abducted her in order to steal the remains that she found?”

“It’s possible,” Karowitz answered for Ethan. “Fossils of prehistoric creatures often sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and creationist organizations have access to vast amounts of money.”

“If insurgents haven’t abducted Lucy, then Israel’s fear of media coverage is unfounded,” Ethan said. “We could use that to get the word out.”

“Israel’s media ban stays in place,” agent Flint said from beside them, speaking for the first time.

Ethan turned to face the two escorts.

“Anyone would think that you wanted her to stay kidnapped.”

“Our purpose,” Cooper said, smiling, “is to willingly put ourselves in harm’s way to protect both of you.”

“Please, you’re making me feel all warm and fluffy inside,” Ethan muttered.

Cooper didn’t respond.

“If it’s true,” Rachel said to Karowitz, “then Lucy could be anywhere by now.”

Ethan shook his head. “Not likely, they’d have to cross the Sinai into Egypt and they’d face the same problems there as here.” He turned to Karowitz. “Where was Lucy’s dig site?”

Karowitz balked as Cooper and Flint shook their heads at him in unison. “I don’t know.”

“Did the university send anyone to search for Lucy before raising the alarm?” Ethan asked instead.

“Yes, a local guide named Ahmed Khan, but I haven’t seen him since.”

Ethan made a mental note of the name and then came to a decision. He turned to Cooper.

“I need to use the can. You want to come hold my hand?”





Ethan walked down a corridor with Cooper following silently, turning as soon as he found the toilet door and going inside. The white-tiled interior was mercifully devoid of students as he strolled to a cubicle and unzipped, glancing over at Cooper.

“Want to hold it for me, or is that below your pay grade?”

Cooper stood with his hands clasped before him at the entrance to the cubicle, saying nothing. Ethan shrugged, finishing his business and washing his hands before turning and following Cooper toward the exit. As expected, Cooper held the door open for Ethan to pass through.

“Too kind.”

Ethan stepped through the open doorway onto his left foot, and then pivoted sideways and slammed backward into the half-open door, ramming Cooper against the tiled wall and pinning his arm against his chest. Ethan turned and jabbed the locked knuckles of his left hand up under Cooper’s thorax. The guard’s eyes bulged, swimming with panic as his throat momentarily collapsed under the blow and blocked his windpipe. Ethan yanked the door open, driving his left knee into Cooper’s plexus before hammering the point of an elbow down behind his ear as Cooper doubled over. Cooper crumpled sideways onto the tiles, his eyes rolling up into their sockets.

Ethan dragged the unconscious guard backward into a cubicle and checked that he was breathing clearly again before shutting the door behind him and hurrying back the way they had come. He walked into Karowitz’s office, and Flint turned to look at him.

Ethan wasted no time. Even as Flint’s jaw opened to ask where his colleague was, Ethan strode forward a pace and shot a fast left jab. Flint was quick, but not quite quick enough for the unexpected blow that caught him just above his left eye. As Flint’s head flicked backward and sideways, Ethan swung a roundhouse right that smashed across his temple with a loud crack. Flint’s legs quivered as he toppled across a desk and slumped onto the carpeted floor.

Rachel’s eyes flew wide. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Ethan turned to Karowitz.

“Which one of the fossil hunters you mentioned is most likely to have known where Lucy was?”

Karowitz stared in shock at the fallen guard.

“Bill Griffiths,” he stammered weakly. “He’s staying in Beit Hakarem, not far from here. Hassim Khan in Gaza might know too, but I haven’t heard from him in a week.”

Ethan approached Karowitz and clicked his fingers in the Belgian’s face to focus his attention.

“I need you to tell me the truth: what’s the chance that what Lucy found was just some kind of deformed human skeleton?”

“Zero,” Karowitz said confidently. “Lucy would have easily identified any kind of forgery or deformation of natural remains.”

Ethan turned, grabbed Rachel’s hand, and yanked her out of the lecture hall.

“You’re insane,” she snapped, struggling against his grip.

“If you want to find Lucy, we need to lose these MACE goons,” Ethan said, releasing her. “You can either stay here with them or come with me. Your call, but I’m leaving now.”

Ethan set off without her, suppressing a smile as he heard her run in pursuit.

“I just know I’m going to regret this,” Rachel muttered as they hurried out of the university compound.