by Fritz Galt
He finished the chocolate-covered donut and licked his fingers. A sip of the tea helped wash it all down. He turned to the glazed donut next.
His simple American repast left him hungering for the cuisine of the Levant. His tea was engineered to simulate some sort of Oriental delight. Give him his strong, thick Turkish coffee anytime.
The television had switched to an interview with a presidential candidate and he prepared to go. He couldn’t be bothered with domestic politics. The whole terminology of politics from “campaigns” to “war rooms” turned him off. If politicians experienced real warfare, they wouldn’t use such terms. They were merely beating their chests and aping warriors, and making monkeys of themselves in the process.
The Directorate of Intelligence had a special wing devoted to translation, interpretation and linguistics, and that was where he headed next. Just how that department would handle the manuscript was unclear to him.
He found a tall, blonde receptionist laboring hard over an emery board. But she looked up when he walked in and seemed willing to help.
“Let me take that back for you,” she offered.
“No. I’d rather carry it myself and talk with your analyst.”
“Okay, then. Follow me.” She unfurled her long legs, whisked her hair over one shoulder and led him into a room full of cubicles. She stopped at a glassed-in office and rapped on the door with her fingernails.
“Can you take another customer?” she asked inside.
The nameplate read, “Sidney Allen.” All Dean saw were the soles of a pair of shoes and the back of a Chinese newspaper.
Dean was prepared to reject the guy. He needed a Hebrew speaker, not a Chinese-American. The guy finally took his feet off his desk, put his newspaper down and stood up. He wasn’t Chinese. Nor did he look Jewish. He was African-American. Dean had entered a department where people’s appearance gave no clue as to the languages they spoke.
After a brief discussion, Dean got the idea across that the manuscript was rare, undoubtedly valuable, fragile, and contained information relevant to his mission. Specifically, he needed to go to the city or building indicated on the first page of the manuscript. Where was he expected to go?
Sidney nodded. “That’s Rachel’s department.” He signaled to the receptionist to lead Dean there.
The willowy receptionist swayed into a hallway that led to another set of cubicles. Dean wasn’t sure he could find the place again without help.
“Here you go,” she said, and pointed at a small laboratory that contained several worktables under fluorescent light. Bottles of chemicals sat on countertops. “This is Rachel Levy.”
The only person in the room was a technician in a lab coat. She was using a magnifying glass to examine an artifact that lay on the table before her.
“I’ll leave you two together,” the receptionist said sweetly, and left.
Rachel didn’t look up for a full minute, during which Dean had to stand and wait.
At last, she set the magnifying glass aside, typed some notes into a laptop and pushed everything away. She pulled a loose strand of long, dark hair out of her eyes and eased off the stool on which she sat. She shoved her hands in her pockets and blinked several times, presumably to focus on the newcomer.
“How can I help you?” Her voice was soft as if she were still preoccupied with her work.
“I’m Dean Wells from the Near East bureau. I was given several pieces of old parchment. I need someone to translate the words on the first page.”
“What’s the purpose?”
“I was given these pages as a message telling me where I should go next in my travels.”
She rocked her chin with a funny twist of her face. “I can help you.”
The words came as a relief. Finally, someone in that huge complex full of psychologists and area specialists and linguistic analysts could help him determine the next step in his quest to stop al-Qaeda.
He set the attaché case on the nearest table and Rachel appeared at his side.
He clicked the latches open and revealed the yellowed pages.
Her breathing came to a halt. “It’s ancient,” she said in a hushed voice.
He nodded. “I could have told you that.”
“No. I mean really ancient. I’ve never seen a codex that old.”
“Codex?”
She moved in on the attaché case. Not touching it, she examined everything inside like a forensics expert. Everything demanded scientific scrutiny, from pens, passport, airplane ticket stubs, official letters from the State Department’s visa office and wads of cash to the parchment.
“It’s just the pages I’m interested in.”
“Don’t even breathe on them.” She donned latex gloves and set a stainless steel tray on the table. Then she shut the door and turned off the lights. Only dim red light glowed over the table.
He stepped back to give her room.
With a steady hand, she lifted the sheets of parchment as a whole out of the attaché case.
He recalled the loose pages separating as they fell from his contact’s hand. “They were partially bound when I first saw them yesterday,” he said. “And then they fell apart and scattered on the floor. I doubt they’re still in their original order.”
She resumed breathing only after she had placed the document safely in the tray. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure out the right order.”
She leaned over the topmost page and began reading to herself. The manuscript was written in three neat columns. “Vowel and cantillation marks,” she observed.
That explained the strange dots. It was written for a cantor to sing.
“Masoretic commentary as well,” she said, taking in the entire page.
“Masoretic?”
“Very old method used by Hebrew scribes to preserve the meaning of the text.”
She spent another full minute on the page, then straightened up. Again she pulled her hair away from her dark, intense eyes. “What we have here is a Bible.”
He could have told her that.
“I would have to verify this, but my guess is that it contains passages from the Pentateuch.”
He nodded. The Pentateuch consisted of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. The five books were Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, which formed the rules, or laws, of Judaism and comprised the Torah.
“So it’s old?”
“Not old like a scroll,” she said. “For example, the Dead Sea scrolls were written during Christ’s lifetime. Only later were they assembled into one book. This appears to be one such book. Where did you get it?”
“In Syria.”
She didn’t blink. “Where in Syria?”
“Aleppo.”
She remained expressionless. She was either unimpressed, or stunned.
At last, she turned and found a stool upon which to sit. “You may well have found missing pages of the Aleppo Codex.”
It didn’t ring a bell. “That means nothing to me.”
“You may have found The Keter, The Crown.”
Chapter 6
When Dean stepped into his townhouse in McLean, Virginia, his Siamese cat maintained a watchful distance. Dean had been gone for three days, and Missy must have grown accustomed to her privacy.
He reached into a jar and pulled out a fish-flavored biscuit. Usually, she would come purring and rub against his legs.
That night, she did not.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Didn’t you miss me?”
Even his cat was mad at him.
Mail had piled up behind the front door, and he kicked it out of his way. He hardly relied on the Postal Service any more, something that caused him deep guilt. Suppose his mail carrier told him that the country no longer needed the CIA?
Then again, the mail carrier might be right. What had the taxpayer gotten out of his trip to Syria? A dead Palestinian.
Speaking of taxes, he took a second look at the pile of envelopes. One contained the
seal of his tax preparer. It would contain his tax return for the previous tax year. Would he get money back or did he owe it?
It comforted him to know his taxes went toward his own salary. It justified all the money he had paid the government that year.
He slit the large envelope open with an index finger and pulled out the return. He went straight to the bottom of the summary page. The amount he owed was blank. He looked at the next line, the amount he’d get back.
The government owed him $134,000.
How in the world had he overpaid that much?
State and federal governments owed him a combined total of $134,000 and would deposit it directly into his checking account. All they needed was his signature.
He had paid estimated taxes on a quarterly basis in addition to his payroll tax. The economy had performed poorly and his stock earnings had flat-lined. Still, how could it all add up to such an overpayment?
He nudged Missy aside and carried the return to his study to check his records. The study wall boasted a fine collection of knives he had picked up over the years. There were scimitars from around the Middle East, a khanjar dagger from Oman, and a Moroccan jambiya knife with its upturned blade. They all held a place of honor on his wall.
As was his custom, he reached behind his tax folder on the top shelf of his closet and felt around. His SIG service pistol was gone.
Had he simply misplaced it? He took out all his tax records and checked the shelf. It wasn’t there. He hadn’t carried it out of the house for over a year.
Had he been robbed? He checked his office safe. No tampering with the lock. He opened it and looked inside. All his valuables were there.
Who would come into his house and steal only his pistol? Then he thought about his neighbor with a key. Would she have taken his gun? He’d call her the next day.
Still preoccupied by the tax question, he grabbed the records, sank into his office chair and turned on the reading light.
Half an hour later, he had double-checked the tax preparer’s figures. The numbers they had transcribed from his statements were all in order. But without going through the lengthy calculations, he couldn’t be sure that they arrived at the correct sum. On the other hand, who was he to second-guess Shmael & Cohen, LLC, his tax preparers?
By the time he peeled himself off the seat, he was feeling less uncertainty, and even nursed a minor grudge. How had he let the government deprive him of all his money for so long when he could have been spending it?
On what? Frozen dinners from Trader Joe’s rather than frozen burritos from Giant?
Never mind that he didn’t know how to spend money. It was the principle.
How would someone else spend such a windfall? Like that inquisitive Italian-American he had met at the Mental Health Unit. She would take a cruise on the Mediterranean.
What would she think of his hermit-like existence? Would she pity him?
Or how would Rachel, the soft-spoken linguist, react to his sterile townhouse in that bedroom community? Would she laugh at the condo association’s restrictions on trash placement? He didn’t mind the rules, but would she ridicule them? Worse yet, write him off?
$134,000. Boy how that could change one’s life.
He could sell the townhouse and check into a cosmopolitan pad in the District. He could shop at Dean & Deluca for Brillo di Treviso cheese and catch the latest cinema retrospective at the Uptown rather than stand in a rope line at the $2 theater to watch a shredded version of the previous season’s blockbuster.
Suppose he asked a woman to marry him. Say one of those he had met at work that day. How could he make his double life work?
It always came down to that. He didn’t live easily with deceit, and he especially didn’t want to lie to someone he loved. It was hard enough keeping his career a secret from his mom and dad. They had gone to their graves proud of his status as a diplomat.
And then there were the foreign assignments. Would a professional woman that he truly admired drop everything to move overseas? Maybe to work as a cashier at the American Club?
To be truly honest, sometimes his own work overseas was dull. There were compensations, of course. And that was where he missed a companion most sorely. Eating the excellent cuisine in Rabat and combing through Roman ruins in Jordan were fun, but they would be infinitely more enjoyable if he had someone to share them with.
There was no use dwelling on what could never be.
He yawned. He had run out of time to review the tax return. He pulled out a pen, signed the return and sealed it in the provided envelope. He would mail it the next day.
He turned off the reading light and felt his way toward the kitchen.
Missy was determined to trip him up by crisscrossing in front of him. He reached down and stroked her fine white fur.
“Hungry now?” he asked.
But when he turned on the kitchen light, her bowl was still full.
“Haven’t you been eating? Aren’t you hungry?”
Well, he was.
There was leftover birthday cake he had made for an office party. He picked at the coconut crust and contemplated diving completely into the chocolate beneath. Time had hardened the cake, but not dulled the taste.
He cut off a slice and put a piece in his mouth. Then he held out a piece for Missy.
She sniffed at it and walked away.
Chapter 7
The next day, Hart Baxter lumbered into his office and sank into his leather chair. As Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had just come from another tedious meeting.
A former federal prosecutor, he was a man who preferred action. He studied the framed photographs on his desk. One showed a limp deer thrown in the back of his pickup. In another, he posed with a vice-president brandishing their shotguns. In a third, he was shown hunting with a Justice of the Supreme Court.
With a big frame and alert eyes, he was born to hunt. The bigger the game, the better. He had shot grizzly in Alaska and boar in Morocco. Such hunting expeditions made him good at his job, which required the same skills to track down culprits, select the right firepower and impose justice.
As such, he had taken his current position straightening out the merry mix-ups of the CIA in stride. There were the bad weeds, the troublemakers, and those guilty of malfeasance. But he hewed to the straight and narrow, just like at the FAA and NSA. He only took cases referred to him, and he never played favorites.
So when Ron McAdam, a career CIA man with no ax to grind, entered the office unannounced, Hart assumed that Ron was bringing another referral.
But Ron was from the Mental Health Unit. Had a case unexpectedly revealed wrongdoing in the agency? The idea intrigued him.
Ron took a seat opposite Hart and wiped his nose with a handkerchief.
“Fire away,” Hart said.
“I was wondering where you were taking the Dean Wells investigation,” Ron finally said.
Hart was confused. “There is no such investigation.”
“Wasn’t he referred to you as a matter of course?” Ron said. “CIA employee working undercover meets contact, his contact is shot in cold blood and there are five witnesses to the crime?”
“Nobody ever brought the case to me.”
Ron seemed unprepared for Hart’s answer. “I suppose I’m bringing the case to you, then. Strange that it wasn’t reported.”
Hart got out a fresh referral form. “Fill this out, and we’ll get working on it.”
“Mind if I toss out a question before you start a full-blown investigation?”
“Shoot.”
“Security brought us the case and I had my colleague Carla Martino analyze the subject, Dean Wells. According to her, he’s completely rational and utterly innocent of murder. It’s all the other circumstances that don’t add up.”
“Okay, I’ll bear that in mind.”
“So don’t target him. I think you’ll need a wider investigation.”
Hart didn’t even know who De
an Wells was. “It might help if you were more specific.”
Ron shifted uncomfortably. “I think this situation calls for an investigative rather than a prosecutorial approach.”
“What do you mean? I can’t assign a detective to the case.”
Ron spread his hands. “If your department doesn’t conduct criminal investigations, who does?”
“The FBI.”
Ron stared at him. “That would be subtle.”
Finally, it dawned on Hart. “I see what you’re driving at. You’d like me to assign an investigator with an open mind and who won’t step on any toes.”
Ron nodded.
Hart put on his sternest look. “I’m sorry. That’s not how I operate and that’s not the kind of people I hire. When I launch an investigation, I tear the weed out by its roots and chop it up into tiny pieces.”
Ron’s face grew pale. He placed the form back on Hart’s desk.
Hart couldn’t contain his mirth any longer. He let out a laugh that boomed into the outer office. “Ron, I’m just yanking your chain. We’re 31 Flavors around here. We have all sorts of approaches. But just remember one thing: if Mr. Wells has blood on his hands, no matter what the reason, he is fried.”
Ron nodded uncertainly.
“Fine. Then take the form and fill it out.”
After Ron left the office, Hart leaned on his intercom.
If murder was involved, he needed the toughest investigator on his staff. He didn’t need some namby-pamby. He also didn’t want the crime leaked to the press before he was aggressively on the case. He needed someone who was fast, lean and mean. A straight shooter. And he had just the guy.
“Get me Barry Wiseman.”
Chapter 8
Rachel Levy arrived at work early, as usual.
She knew every light switch in the Language Department and worked her way quickly to her lab. The Aleppo Codex had preoccupied her thoughts the previous night and she wanted to check on it.
She had begun the previous evening reflecting fondly on Hebrew class. Whereas other Jewish kids struggled with the backwards text, it had come naturally to her. And it still stuck with her, like any first foreign language.