by Jeff Spence
"Ready?" Marina had put her shirt back on, wet, but in much better shape than it had been. Her nipples were still apparent, perhaps more so now, covered in the cool cloth, but Ben looked her directly in the eyes and nodded.
She smiled, as aware of his avoidance as he was. Had they a little more time, she might have taken the opportunity to let off a little steam. But they didn't have time; not for that, anyway. They slid the trash can from in front of the door, pulled back the little bolt, and left the restroom to continue their journey. Then Ben stopped.
"What is it?"
"Why the stadium?"
"What do you mean? You know a better place to hide? Here maybe?"
"No. The stadium might be the best place to hide, but that's the point." She waited for him to continue. "We can hide. They can look for us. We hide again. Where does that end?"
"I don't know… when we find the treasure?"
"That's just it: no one knows where the treasure is."
"But you can find it. They are all after you because they think you can find it, and they know that they can't…"
"…They can't find it."
She paused and his reasoning opened in her own thoughts like a flower. "So if we are following the clues from the scroll…"
"…They won't know where we are anyway. By the time they find someone else who can read it, we'll be miles ahead of them… well, a few steps at least. Could be enough."
She paused, "That might work."
"It's our best chance. It might even seem random or unpredictable from their point of view. If we hide just anywhere, they'll find us. I'm sure they have their ways and means to root out fugitives, especially fugitives who don't know what they're doing and who don't know the area."
She nodded, pretty sure she could hold her own if it came to it. "But you know the area, right? You studied here."
"Emphasis on 'studied,' I was no tourist. In and out on a student's budget… and schedule. I’m not much help there.”
"Then where can we go?"
Ben felt in his front pocket. The credit card was there. "I have a pretty good idea," he said, taking her by the hand and heading up the stairs toward the rear entrance and the hill.
The skateboarders paused as the man with the bleeding leg limped past, heading for the stadium. He did not ask them if a similarly bloodied couple had passed by before him. Their surprise at seeing him and lack of comment told him all he needed to know: Ben and Marina had not come this way, not this far, at any rate. It was possible that they had walked by unnoticed, had made it out of the crash without any injuries, but very unlikely.
He paused and looked around.
There was only one place they could have hidden: a building off to the side. Doors open. Cool and dim-looking inside. Not a bad idea. He took a few limping strides toward it.
Tan Jacket turned the corner at a slow jog, and tried too late to dodge into the bushes at the side of the path before his quarry had seen him.
Magazine dove behind the low retaining wall as he pulled his gun from its hiding place. His hand tangled in, and then pulled free of the tail of his shirt as the Jacket pumped three shots in his direction. The kids screamed and all but one froze where they stood. The other turned and ran into the trees, leaving board and friends behind. Magazine smiled, grimly. Survival instinct… that kid would probably outlive them all. A moment later his friends turned and followed him, leaving the two men alone on the empty path.
As Ben followed Marina into the back seat of the cab, he took a deep breath and tried to still his nerves. His heart was racing and his mind was getting away from him. Every sound made him jump and glance over his shoulder. He needed to get a grip if they were going to survive this thing.
He even imagined, as he closed the door on the heat of mid-day Jerusalem, that he heard more gunfire in the distance.
SIXTEEN
Leonard Kantor finished his evening Shema prayer and sat on the side of his bed. The sound was turned off on his mobile phone, but the light flickered on. A call from his primary field man in the Ben Gela affair. He picked up the phone and tapped the accept button.
"Kantor here."
"Mr. Kantor," laboured breathing, "There has been a complication."
"I see."
"The subject has slipped surveillance. The woman as well."
"How did this happen?"
"There was an attack on the road. Professional."
"A hit?"
"Maybe. We didn't give them the chance, but we lost personnel."
"Identities of the interference?"
"Nothing solid. Ex-military or current."
"Israeli?"
"Yes sir, I think so. Fairly local, anyway. Could have been Jordanian."
"Anything more? Is Gela alright?"
"Nothing more at this time. I am looking for them. Still engaged with one contact.”
This was not good news. Bass was a big player, but it would have been difficult for him to organise an Israeli-based team at such short notice — especially military. Kantor also didn't like the sound of the singular 'I am looking for them.' He knew this likely meant the deaths of the rest of the team, but he didn't ask. The man was a professional and would do the professional thing. It was not Kantor's place to interfere on that level. Each person bore self-responsibility when it came to choice of career or vocation. Consequences and benefits came to each one in kind. He paid well and gave full, pertinent information as available. That was his part.
"Keep me updated. I will expect word by six tomorrow morning, either way." Leonard tapped the end call button and set the phone back down.
"Yes sir."
Magazine spoke into the phone even as the call disconnected. He adjusted his position, lying on his side in the dirt beside the low retaining wall, in an effort to ease the pain. He then looked down to his abdomen.
It had stopped bleeding, at least externally, but he would need to have it looked at soon. Internal bleeding was almost a given, and then there would be infection to worry about, and shock.
He reached over and grabbed a discarded hoodie from the low wall where the skateboarders had been practicing. The kids themselves were nowhere to be seen. No civilian casualties there, it seemed. Good. He didn't like collateral damage. Muddied things and brought undue attention to already hot situations. He wrapped the hoodie around his waist, up high enough to hide the wound in his side and to drape down over the bleeding leg. Imperfect camouflage, but better than none.
He popped his head up and scanned the path back toward the traffic circle, hoping for a flash of tan or bit of movement in the cover.
Nothing. And twilight was fast approaching.
He lowered his head again. He hadn't seen any of his shots hit the target. The man had fired back several times as well, only wounding him via ricochet. The bullet, or a fragment of the building block it had hit, had punctured his abdomen just below the navel. No way to tell how deep it was, but it was not superficial, he knew that much. As long as it hadn't nicked the bowel, he would be fine. If it had… not worth thinking about that it the moment. Nothing could be done about it at the moment anyway. His primary concern was avoiding another hit.
He glanced at his watch. Neither one of them had fired for a full two minutes now, and authorities might already be on their way to this second battleground. He knew they had to move. He knew Tan Jacket would know that too, if he were still there, and breathing. Maybe he had already gone, slipping away through the brush and trusting in the authorities to take care of his opponent, or leaving the reckoning for another time.
It was a waiting game, each one could be hoping the other would step out into the open first. Neither one knowing if the other were alive, if he were waiting for a corpse to make the first move.
A little farther back down the path, next to the youth science centre, Tan Jacket lay in the dirt, his breaths coming fast and shallow. He had a bullet hole next to his clavicle. The bullet had entered at a steep angle, and gone deep. A steady strea
m of blood was flowing from it, showing dark against the light canvass. He could tell by the weight on every breath that there was internal damage. With each breath his lungs were on fire. He had little time.
Peering through the leaves, keeping an eye on the path ahead, he pulled out his phone and typed in a local telephone number. He waited while the call was received and relayed to an online system. Then in two rings, a voice answered on the other end.
"Yes?"
"They got away, brother."
"How?"
"They had protection. Pros. We got most of them… but I'm the last one… Think I hit him…" His focus was fading. He closed his eyes a moment.
"Hit who? Gela? Who did you hit?"
"They're gone though… Alone…"
"Is Gela hit?!"
He saw the other gunman slip over the wall to the path. He was wounded too, at least one shot had hit. He was slow and unsteady. Tan Jacket raised his gun. The effort blurred his vision and his hands were shaking. He tried to hold his breath, but that made it worse. He gazed into the blur of distant colour and squeezed the trigger two more times.
"What the fuck was that?!" The man on the phone was screaming at him now, "What's happening?!"
Gulam Thoma stared at the message. He read it a second time. Then a third.
His operatives had been wiped out, killed for the most part, or injured beyond being useful in the near future. The message told of the failure and included a warning to stay away from the contact point. No more money would be required at that point, but the operation was, for the moment, at a stall. Thoma knew by the wording that no money would be returned, either. Seventy-thousand Dinars gone… and for nothing. The professor and the woman had fled to an unknown location and seemingly had the protection of armed security forces. The message went on to say that he would advise Thoma at a later time if there were any developments.
“If…”
Thoma sat back in his chair. He had just spent seventy thousand dinars on a massacre of his own people. He was no further ahead than when he had first heard of the scroll. Much further behind in fact; soon Khoury would want to know how things were going. What could he tell him? And how would he explain the new car, parked prominently on the front drive of Thoma’s compound?
Outside his window, the sound of amplified prayer floated through the air and he stepped over to his prayer rug without really thinking. He knelt on it and lowered his head to the floor, let it bump softly against the mat. Allaaahu, Akbar. Allaaahu, Akbar.
The words were a howling wind in his empty body.
SEVENTEEN
At a small table in a tea shop near the Old City in Jerusalem, a man sat sipping from a tiny cup and taking small bites from a layered pastry. A cane leaned against his thigh. He had been making some inquiries since his release from the hospital, and this was where he was to meet his informant. Bass would not be happy to hear what had happened on the plane, but Cane was not yet ready to inform his employer of the turn of events. He was not new to his chosen career and made it a practice to always deliver news of a problem with news of a pending solution.
This case was a tough one.
He had regained consciousness in a Tel Aviv hospital, somewhat to his own surprise. He had thought the man who had stuck the syringe into his side had been there to kill him. That would have been Cane's move. Dead men can't come back to fuck up plans later on. But Cane wasn't dead, and his intention was to find whoever had done this to him and to apply his little motto in as painful a manner as possible.
He had checked out, telling the doctor that he had merely made a mistake taking his medication, but that he was fine now. The doctor had not fallen for the story, but had little choice. Any crime that had occurred had been against Cane, and if the man didn’t want to acknowledge that fact, there was little the hospital could do about it. The man’s lower back, where the needle had pierced him, still harboured a deep ache and he was grateful to have the cane with him still, fulfilling an ironic secondary purpose since the attack.
From the hospital in Tel Aviv, he had moved quickly to Jerusalem and made contact with associates in the security sector who might be able to shed light on what was happening at street level, if anything.
They had had a lot to say.
Firefights in the streets, a kid injured while fleeing from one of them, half a dozen bullet-ridden bodies left cooling at a roundabout half a mile away — there was no doubt of the connection. The timing was too perfect for it to be otherwise, and the security dogs had moved at speed from the one site to the other, following a trail clear to them, even if the senses of their human handlers couldn’t pick up the signs. It was a fuck-up of major proportions, and if he really analysed it, chances were his run-in with the needle-bearing fellow passenger had removed him from a potentially deadly firefight. He was, after all, armed only with a cane. Ah well, he could remedy that soon enough.
His thoughts were interrupted by the approach of a woman. Caucasian. Tall and thin and blonde, drawing much more attention in the little bazaar than Cane had wanted.
"Good afternoon. I am your contact from BPS — you made an inquiry?" The accent was Dutch. Maybe South African. He had never been really good at sussing out those things.
He nodded, saying nothing. She sat down beside him.
"Name please?"
He told her, not his real name, but the one he had used when he had made contact. She nodded and continued.
"The subjects were intercepted while in transit from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Some negatives, but the subjects were not among them. Later interceptions indicate further interactions. Subjects still in the positive, by all indications. The identified party from Tel Aviv is a verified participant, but there is an additional player from east of the sea. The interception appears to be instigated by the second party."
"ID?"
"Provided via text following this contact. Do you have any further inquiries at this time?"
Cane thought it over. "No, if I do after the text I will contact your colleague again."
The woman stood, smiled sweetly as if she had just met with a beloved uncle or an older lover, and walked away from the table. Ten seconds later, Cane's mobile pinged. He looked at the name in the text. It meant nothing to him. No matter though, it was a place to start.
With a deep breath, he tapped the second number on the speed dial. Couldn’t put this off any longer. On the other side of the world, the clear sound of a bamboo chime rang out in the Texas night.
Greg Bass lowered the phone from his ear. It had disconnected. He popped the back cover from it and levered the chip from the body. He dropped it into his shredder and the brief, harsh grind was deeply satisfying. It was a burner phone, untraceable now that the call had ended. The operative's phone was a burner too, but even if the police were to get their hands on it, all they would find at the only number it had ever called was a small office with a telephone relay in it. If they managed to crack that, they would find the call was routed to Switzerland, not the most cooperative of governments when it came to outside interference, and from there to a string of prepaid cell phones from Walmart, each one from a case purchased with cash by an unidentified woman in a scarf and sunglasses.
Bass sat on his chair, facing out of the big windows of the ranch house, the moonlight showing the distant hills with a ghostly light. Gela was on the run. Kantor was aware of Bass's involvement — no longer just a theory — and now there was a third party involved. More locals, more or less. It was getting more intense, and trying to keep on top of things was going to get increasingly difficult.
For one thing, he now knew that Gela had armed help. Whether it was the Arabs or Kantor's men, he didn't know, but it complicated things, raised the stakes considerably. Bass had hoped to avoid this kind of dynamic. He doubted that the academic had arranged all this himself, at least not in an effort to take the item or the treasure for himself. The unassuming scholar just wasn't the type.
He also knew that Gela had a
ll but the last two pages of photos. Bass reasoned that the final clues would be on those last two, and without them, Gela would not be able to take the final steps to the trove. Unless…
There was one other person who did have those final two photographs, the final bits of information that any treasure hunter would need: Leonard Kantor. If Kantor was Gela's partner, then Bass could be cut out of the deal and all of his efforts and investment wasted.
That was not going to happen.
Bass knew Kantor's man had been in Indiana, so he had only one conclusion: Gela had chosen a different side, and backed out on the deal in favour of the Israeli Jew. A brotherhood thing, maybe. Well, at least Gela thought he had backed out. Bass had other ideas.
But first he had have to find him.
EIGHTEEN
Marina stared out of the third floor window of their hotel room. It was a beautiful view. The suite was expensive, and the luxury was a needed change from the fear and danger in which they had been immersed for the past three days.
Ben had used his credit card to secure it and would pay with cash when they left. He hoped in that way to avoid any credit card searches. At least he had had the card, tucked safely away in his front pocket. Without that, he knew, he wouldn't be able to secure a decent room no matter how much cash he had. And he had no desire to hole up in a seedy dive with who-knows-what going on by the hour in the next rooms over.
He had the photographs fanned out on the table, with the last one off to his right. He was using a yellow legal notepad, scribbling away on two lines, writing some words under the others and some next to them in the regular style.
Marina drank in the view, as if to save it to savour later, and then pulled her head back in through the window, into the cool shadows that would sooth and, possibly, protect her from those who searched for them. Part of her hated being holed up, waiting for someone else to make a move. She would far rather have done something herself, gone after the men who'd been shooting at them, or something. At least the guy who did have something to do was on her side, and was wasting no time with it. Things could be much worse.