by Kathy Reichs
I kept my eye on the latter.
After a fruitless ten minutes, Jake raised his hands in an I-give-up gesture. Turning to me he said, “This is pointless. We’re out of here.”
I joined him, and together we circled left.
The rabbi yelled a command. The battalion split. The right flank stayed at the tomb. The left flank stuck to Jake and me.
With long strides, Jake began climbing up out of the Kidron. I followed, taking two steps to every one of his.
Yard after yard I scrambled, panting, sweating, hauling myself up on rocks, vines, and bushes. My hip screamed. My legs grew heavy.
Now and then I glanced downhill. A dozen black hats dogged my trail. My neck and back stayed stiff, anticipating the impact of cobble on cranium.
Fortunately, our pursuers spent their days in temples and yeshivas, not gyms. Jake and I left the valley well in the lead.
A half dozen cars now occupied the clearing behind Silwan. Jake’s truck was where we’d left it, but the driver’s side window was not. Tiny cubes of glass flashed sunlight from the ground. Both the truck’s doors were open, and papers, books, and clothing lay tossed about.
“Shit!” Jake sprinted the last few yards, and began grabbing his belongings and tossing them into the back.
I joined in. Within seconds we’d gathered everything, slammed ourselves in, and hit the locks.
The first black hats crested the summit as Jake turned the key, palmed the gearshift, and hit the gas. The wheels spun, and we lurched forward, two plumes of dust following our wake.
I looked back.
The men were wiping brows, replacing headwear, shaking fists. They looked like a jittering troupe of black marionettes, momentarily tangled, but firm in their belief God was pulling the strings.
Jake made a left, then a right out of the village. I kept my eyes on the rear window.
At the blacktop, Jake slowed and put a hand on my arm to calm me.
“Think they’ll follow?” I asked.
Jake’s fingers closed like a vise.
I turned to him.
And felt yet another rush of fear.
Jake’s left hand was gripping the wheel hard. Too hard. His knuckles protruded like bony white knobs. His face was pasty and his breath was coming in short, shallow gasps.
“Are you all right?”
The truck was losing speed, as though Jake couldn’t keep his mind on both accelerating and steering.
Jake turned to me. One pupil was a speck, the other a vacant black hole.
I grabbed the wheel just as Jake collapsed forward onto it, his boot dropping full on the gas.
The truck lurched. The speedometer rose. Twenty. Twenty-two. Twenty-five.
My first reaction was panic. Naturally, that didn’t slow the pickup.
My brain kicked in.
One-arming Jake against the seat back, I grabbed the wheel.
The truck continued gathering speed.
While steering with my left hand, I struggled to shift Jake’s leg with my right. The leg was dead weight. I couldn’t lift or jostle it sideways.
The truck was on a downslope and accelerating fast. Twenty-seven. Thirty.
I tried shoving Jake’s leg. Kicking it with my heel.
My movements jerked the wheel. The truck swerved and a tire dropped onto the shoulder. I corrected. Gravel flew, and the truck hopped back up onto the pavement.
Trees were clipping by faster and faster. We hit thirty-five. I had to do something.
The Mount of Olives formed a sheer rock face on the left. Twenty yards up, I saw a recess fronted by a small clearing overgrown with brambles.
I fought the urge to spin the wheel. Not yet. Wait.
Please, God! Hold the traffic!
Now!
I swung the wheel left. The truck veered over the center line and careened on the rims of two wheels. Abandoning my attempts at steering, I wedged both hands under Jake’s thigh and heaved upward. His boot lifted a few millimeters. The engine hitched and backed off.
The truck shattered a wooden guardrail, pitched sideways, and slid, spewing dirt and gravel. Brambles and cold, Cambrian rock closed in.
I yanked Jake toward me and down. Then I threw myself over him, arms covering our heads.
Branches clawed the side panels. Something popped against the windshield.
I heard a loud metallic crunch, felt a jolt, and Jake and I pitched into the wheel.
The engine cut off.
No voice called out. No bee bumbled. No car whizzed past. Just the silence of the Mount and my own frenzied breathing.
For several heartbeats, I stayed motionless, feeling adrenaline making the rounds.
Finally, one bird threw out a tentative caw.
I sat up and checked Jake. His forehead had a lump the size of a bluepoint oyster. His eyelids looked mauve, and his skin felt clammy. He needed a doc. Pronto.
Could I move him?
Would the engine turn over?
Opening my door against the resistance of the brambles, I slid to the ground, and plowed my way around the truck.
Pull Jake out? Shove him sideways?
Jake was six-six and weighed 170. I was five-five and weighed, well, less.
Fighting vegetation, I yanked the driver’s side door and stepped in. I was wriggling an arm under Jake’s back when a vehicle slowed and left the pavement behind me. Gravel crunched as it rolled to a stop.
A Samaritan? A zealot?
Withdrawing my arm, I turned.
White Corolla. Two men in front.
The men looked at me through the windshield. I looked back.
The men conferred.
My gaze dropped to the license plate. White numbers, red background.
Relief flooded through me.
Both men got out. One wore a sport jacket and khakis. The other wore a pale blue shirt with black epaulettes, black shoulder patch, and black braided cord looping the armpit and running into the left breast pocket. A silver pin over the right pocket proclaimed in Hebrew what I assumed to be the cop’s name.
“Shalom.” The cop had a high forehead capped by a thin blond crew cut. He looked about thirty. I gave him two years until he started pricing hair plugs.
“Shalom,” I replied.
“Geveret, HaKol beseder?” Madam, is everything all right?
“My friend needs medical attention,” I said in English.
Crew Cut approached. His partner remained behind the open door of their vehicle, right hand cocked at his hip.
Clawing free of the bushes I stepped away from the truck, nonthreatening.
“And you would be?”
“Temperance Brennan. I’m a forensic anthropologist. American.”
“Uh. Huh.”
“The driver is Dr. Jacob Drum. He’s an American archaeologist working here in Israel.”
Jake made an odd gurgling sound in his throat. Crew Cut’s gaze cut to him, and then to the remains of Jake’s driver’s side window.
Jake chose that moment to rejoin the conscious. Or perhaps he’d been awake and listening to the exchange. Bending forward, he retrieved his sunglasses from among the pedals, slipped them on, and straightened.
Glancing from the cop to me and back, Jake slid to the passenger side to facilitate conversation.
The cop circled to him.
More shaloms were exchanged.
“Are you injured, sir?”
“Just a bump.” Jake’s laugh was convincing. The blue point on his forehead was not.
“Shall I radio for an ambulance?”
“No need.”
Crew Cut’s face looked dubious. Perhaps it was the incongruity between the injury to Jake and the injury to Jake’s window. Perhaps it was always that way. It had looked dubious upon its exit from the Corolla.
“Really,” Jake said. “I’m fine.”
I should have objected. I didn’t.
“I must have hit a pothole, or dropped a wheel or something.” Jake gave a sel
f-deprecating laugh. “Dumb-ass move.”
Crew Cut glanced at the blacktop, then back at Jake.
“I’m excavating a site near Talpiot. Working with a crew from the Rockefeller Museum.”
So Jake had heard me.
“Just showing the little lady around.”
Little lady?
Crew Cut’s mouth moved to say something, reconsidered, merely requested the usual papers.
Jake produced a U.S. passport, an Israeli driver’s license, and the truck’s registration. I forked over my passport.
Crew Cut studied each document. Then, “I’ll be a moment.” To Jake, “Please stay in your vehicle.”
“Mind if I see if this piece of junk will start?”
“Don’t move the vehicle.”
While Crew Cut ran our names, Jake tried the ignition, again and again, with no luck. The wounded piece of junk had gone as far as it was going that day.
A semi rumbled by. A bus. An army Jeep. I watched each recede, its taillights growing smaller and closer together.
Jake slumped against the seat back and swallowed several times. I suspected he was feeling queasy.
Crew Cut returned and handed back our documents. I checked the side mirror. The plainclothes cop was now slouched behind the wheel.
“Can I offer you a ride, Dr. Drum?”
“Yeah.” Jake’s bravado had evaporated. “Thanks.”
We got out. Pointlessly, Jake locked the truck, then we followed Crew Cut and climbed into the Corolla’s backseat.
The plainclothes cop eyed us, nodded. He wore silver-rimmed glasses on a tired face. Crew Cut introduced him as Sergeant Schenck.
“Where to?” Schenck asked.
Jake started to give directions to his apartment in Beit Hanina. I cut him off.
“A hospital.”
“I’m fine,” Jake protested. Weakly.
“Take us to an ER.” My tone suggested not an inch of wiggle room.
“You’re staying at the American Colony, Dr. Brennan?” Schenck.
The boys had been thorough.
“Yes.”
Schenck made a U-turn onto the blacktop.
During the ride, Jake stayed awake, but grew passive. At my request, Schenck radioed ahead to the ER.
When Schenck pulled up, two orderlies swept Jake from the car, strapped him to a gurney, and whisked him away for CTs or MRIs or whatever techno-wizardry is brought to bear in cases of head trauma.
Schenck and Crew Cut handed me a form. I signed. They sped off.
A nurse pumped me for information on Jake. I supplied what I could. I signed other forms. I learned I was at Hadassah Hospital, on the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University, just a few minutes north of the Israel National Police Headquarters.
Paperwork completed, I took a seat in the waiting area, prepared for a long stay. I’d been there ten minutes when a tall man in aviator shades pushed through the double doors.
I felt, what? Relief? Gratitude? Embarrassment?
Drawing close, Ryan slid the aviators onto his head.
“You good, soldier?” The electric blues were filled with concern.
“Dandy.”
“Offense run scrimmages on your face?”
“I slipped in a tomb.”
“I hate it when that happens.” Ryan’s mouth did that twitchy thing it does when I’m looking like hell.
“Don’t say it,” I warned.
My hair was sweaty from climbing in and out of the Kidron. My face was scraped and swollen from my tunnel dive. My jacket was smeared with paw prints. I was dirt-speckled, bramble-scratched, and my jeans and fingernails were caked with enough crypt mud to plaster a hut.
Ryan dropped into the chair beside me.
“What went down out there?”
I told him about the tomb and the jackal, and about the incoming rounds from the Hevrat Kadisha.
“Jake lost consciousness?”
“Briefly.” I left out details of the runaway truck.
“Probably a mild concussion.”
“Probably.”
“Where’s Max?”
I told him.
“Better hope these guys follow their own dictates and let the dead lie.”
I explained Jake’s theory that the James ossuary had been looted from this tomb, making the place the Jesus family crypt.
“This hypothesis is based on carvings on old boxes?”
“Jake claims to have more proof at his lab. Says it’s dynamite.”
A woman arrived with an infant. The infant was crying. The woman eyed me, kept walking, and took a seat in the farthest bank of chairs.
“I saw something, Ryan.” With one thumbnail, I dug mud from under the other. “When I was in the lower chamber.”
“Something?”
I described what I’d spotted through the hole created when the rock fell out.
“You’re sure?”
I nodded.
Across the room the baby was picking up steam. The mother rose and began pacing the floor.
I thought of Katy. I remembered the night she spiked a temperature of 105, and the emergency-room run with Pete. Suddenly, I missed my daughter very much.
“How did you know we were here?” I asked, dragging my thoughts back to the present.
“Schenck’s major crimes. He knew Friedman was working Kaplan, and that I’d come to Israel with some female American anthropologist. Schenck put two and two together and dimed Friedman.”
“Any news on that front?”
“Kaplan’s denying he copped the necklace.”
“That’s it?”
“Not quite.”
24
“TURNS OUT THE ACCUSED, THAT WOULD BE Kaplan, and the wronged, that would be Litvak, go way back.”
“Kaplan is a friend of the shopkeeper he robbed?”
“Distant cousin and sometime supplier. Kaplan provides Litvak with the occasional, how did Litvak phrase it? Item of curiosity.”
“Litvak deals in antiquities?”
Ryan nodded.
“Illegal?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not.”
“Litvak and Kaplan had had words just prior to the disappearance of the necklace.”
“Words over what?”
“Kaplan promised something and failed to deliver. Litvak was pissed. Things got heated. Kaplan stormed out.”
“Palming the necklace on his way.”
Ryan nodded. “Litvak was so peeved he called the cops.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Litvak’s not the sharpest knife in the set. And a bit of a hothead.”
The infant was cranking up for a personal best. The woman walked by, patting its back.
Ryan and I smiled them past.
“What was Kaplan supposed to have delivered to Litvak?” I asked when mother and child had moved off.
“An item of curiosity.”
I rolled my eyes. It hurt.
Ryan folded his shades and slid them into his shirt pocket. Leaning back, he stretched his legs and laced his fingers on top of his stomach.
“A gen-oo-ine Masada relic.”
I was about to say something clever like, “No shit!” when the triage nurse entered the waiting area and strode our way. Ryan and I stood.
“Mr. Drum has suffered a mild concussion. Dr. Epstein has decided to keep him overnight.”
“You’re admitting him?”
“For observation. It’s standard. Other than a headache and possibly some irritability, Mr. Drum should be fine in a day or two.”
“When can I see him?”
“It’ll be an hour or two until he’s transferred upstairs.”
When the nurse had gone, Ryan turned in his chair.
“How about lunch?”
“Sounds good.”
“How about lunch with strong liquor, then sex?”
“You are one silver-tongued devil.”
Ryan’s face lit up.
&
nbsp; “But, no.”
Ryan’s face fell.
“I need to tell Jake what I saw in that tomb.”
* * *
Two hours later, Ryan and I were in Jake’s room. The patient was wearing one of those tie-at-the-nape gowns that had seen way too much bleach. Tubing ran from his right arm. His left was thrown over his forehead, palm out.
“It wasn’t the tomb,” Jake snapped, voice thick, face paler than the gown.
“Then why the demonstration?”
“The Hevrat Kadisha were targeting you!”
The nurse hadn’t been kidding about irritability.
“Me?”
“They know why you’re in Israel.”
“How could they?”
“You called the IAA.”
“Not since I’ve been here.”
“You contacted Tovya Blotnik from Montreal.” Barked like one who might eat his own young.
“Yes, but—”
“The phones at the IAA are bugged.”
“By whom?” I wasn’t believing this.
“The ultra-Orthodox.”
“Who think you are a child of the devil,” Ryan inserted.
I threw him a look that said I wasn’t amused.
Jake ignored the exchange.
“These people are lunatics,” he went on. “They throw rocks so people can’t drive on the Sabbath. They put up posters damning archaeologists by name. I get calls over and over in the middle of the night, recorded messages, cursing me to die of cancer, hoping that terrible things happen to my family.”
Jake’s eyes closed against the fluorescents burning overhead.
“It wasn’t the tomb,” he repeated. “They know that tomb’s empty. And they haven’t a clue about its true importance.”
“Then what did they want?” I asked, confused.
Jake’s eyes opened.
“I’ll tell you what they wanted. The rabbi kept demanding the remains of the hero of Masada.”
Masada Max.
Whom we’d left in a loculus not twenty feet from them.
“Will they search the tomb?”
“What do you think?” An ornery ten-year-old.
I refused to be sucked in by Jake’s foul mood.
“I think it depends on whether they saw us with the hockey bag.”
“Give the lady a big gold star.”
The little lady.
Jake lowered his arm and stared at his clenched fist. For a few seconds, no one spoke.