BABEL

By: Adrian Carver

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The oldest word in human language has been waiting five thousand years to be found. Someone just found it. Someone else intends to use it as a weapon.

When Georgetown linguist Dr. Lawrence Cross receives an emergency call about the death of his mentor in the Vatican Secret Archives, he boards the next flight to Rome expecting a professional courtesy visit. Within twenty-four hours, his hotel room has been searched, a man is following him through the streets, and a suspended Dominican archivist has slid a photograph across a café table that stops him cold.

The photograph shows a single page of manuscript. In a language that should not exist on a three-thousand-year-old document. In characters that match, with statistical impossibility, Cross's own theoretical reconstruction of Proto-World — the hypothetical ancestor language from which every human tongue descends.

The language his mentor spent his life chasing. The language the academic establishment declared fantasy. The language that, it turns out, someone was still speaking three thousand years ago — and writing in, in a document that predates the split of the world's three great faiths and appears to be the shared sacred source text that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each independently claimed as exclusively their own.

Three institutions want it destroyed. A Saudi cultural foundation has been hunting it for nineteen years. A British tech billionaire with a theory about the measurable costs of organized religion has the resources to deliver it to three billion people simultaneously — with the wrong interpretation already attached.

And in the oldest freestanding stone temples on earth, carved into walls five millennia old, the complete text is waiting for the one person on earth with the tool to read it.

Cross has twelve days. He has a cipher tablet, a suspended nun who speaks seven languages and spent four years in UN diplomatic security, and a reconstruction of a dead language that the establishment told him was impossible.

He also has the right question: the document wasn't hidden to protect an institution.

It was hidden to protect the world.

BABEL is a high-octane linguistic thriller for readers of Dan Brown, Steve Berry, and Kate Mosse — a race across Rome, Istanbul, and Malta in pursuit of the secret buried beneath every language ever spoken.