Peter Clenott

Hunting The King | Synopsis

Father Sun and Mother ever rise over ancient Babylon. The world may have changed in many ways in two thousand years, but their daughter and her children await still, buried somewhere beneath the sands of war-torn Iraq.

On the evening of the American invasion of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, Imran Fawzi, the Director of the National Museum in Baghdad, receives a panicked telephone call from archaeologist Mohamoud Jama. Jama’s home is being invaded by looters, thieves. Jama is an old man who has been on many digs and whose house is filled with precious relics. But Fawzi knows there’s one thing in particular that the secretive Jama has long hidden from view, a find he made ten years earlier that so horrified him, he returned it to the soil keeping only a single artifact for himself.

 Several thousand miles from Iraq, American archaeologist Molly O’Dwyer heads a team on a dig in Turkmenistan. Five years earlier, in Egypt, she had stumbled upon the discovery of a lifetime, the Gospel of Hannaniah, either a fable, a fiction, or the true autobiography of a woman claiming to be the daughter of the Jewish prophet Jesus. In the mountainous Firezkhoi Highlands, just across the border into Afghanistan, whose border she has illegally crossed, she locates a burial mound, and the remains of a human related to the find in Mohamoud Jama’s basement.

In Boston, Molly returns to her normal teaching routine at Jesuit Mt. Auburn College. Vivid and frightening dreams of her past and of the death of her mother by fire haunt her every night. Dreams inhabited as well by Hannaniah, who looks so much like Molly they could be twins. Molly is driven to seek therapy with Jesuit priest Raymond Teague who specializes in past life regression as a method for getting Molly to explore her past and exorcise her ghosts.

Leaving therapy one night, she is confronted by two people who have been waiting for her in a campus parking lot. Nina Cavalacante has a reputation as an archaeologist who hunts the arcane, the witches and demons of our past. The man who accompanies her, Teodor Kwiatkowski, is an officer in the Polish army. When Cavalcante shows Molly symbols on an ancient text similar to ones Molly has seen in Egypt and Afghanistan, Molly agrees to brave a journey into Iraq, believing that she may end up coming face to face with Hannaniah herself.

Molly is not alone in her pursuit. Connected to the Vatican, Frenchman Andre Leveille-Gaus works for another master he secretly answers to. Abdul Azim Nur, a refugee from Saddam Hussein, recently returned from Iran, is intent upon removing all American occupiers. Ghazi Al-Tikriti, Hussein’s former intelligence chief, the Eight of Diamonds, will kill for anyone who will make him wealthy. And Andrew Milstein, working for American intelligence, who is having his own intense dreams of a life lived long ago and of a red-haired girl he must possess.

Through the terrorist bombing of the Kwiatkowski estate in Poland, to chaotic Baghdad, to Ur the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham, Molly tracks and is tracked, hunts and is hunted.

It has been 4000 years since Abraham abandoned Ur of the Chaldees for a new land promised him by the one God, two thousand years since Jesus returned with his daughter and their family. For Molly and the others, the descent into ancient Babylon goes far deeper than a few feet into the rocky soil of Iraq. In dream each recognizes that their journey into the past is far more personal and real than they could ever have imagined. Something more powerful than archaeological gold is drawing them together again. After two thousand years, Molly, Cavalcante, Nur, Milstein, Leveille-Gaus are reuniting, not as they are but as they had once been. With the greatest find imaginable in her grasp, Molly must ultimately decide between her faith and her intellect, whether to put the remains of Jesus and his daughter on display or to hide them once more under the secret sands of the Middle East.

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