by Fritz Galt
Dean flipped the lapel of his suit coat over. “See? A camera.” That brought a stampede of women out of the stalls.
“Who is this man?” Omar said, pointing at Ari.
“He’s with Israeli intelligence.” That sent the women out the door.
“I have pictures of the party,” Dean said. “I have you massaging the young Oriental man. I have you smoking a pipe with a Mossad agent. And lastly, I have you escaping in women’s clothing. The pictures are all here. Do you want to see them?”
Omar’s face had gone white and he stared at the floor. He was cornered. But worse than that, he was humiliated.
“Now, this can remain our little secret,” Dean said, waving the camera in the air. “Or I can post the pictures all over the Web.”
Omar looked sick. “What do you want from me?”
“Your country will be governed by a constitution, not Sharia law.”
“We will be governed by a constitution,” Omar repeated.
“Not Sharia law.”
“Not Sharia law.”
Dean felt like he was dictating the terms of a surrender. He couldn’t afford to leave any leeway for the guy to wriggle out.
“You will condemn al-Qaeda and its tactics.”
“I will condemn them.”
“You will actively seize all al-Qaeda assets.”
Omar shrugged helplessly. “I will actively seize al-Qaeda assets.”
“All assets. That means people, weapons and money.”
“All assets, including people, weapons and money.”
“And finally.” This was the biggie. “I don’t want you to weasel out of this. You will continue to run for President of the Palestinian Authority.”
Omar had gone completely ashen. “I will continue to run for president.”
“And you will make every effort to win.”
Omar nodded. “I will try to win.”
“Good.” Dean extended a hand. “We wish you success.”
Omar looked at the proffered hand.
“Is it a deal?” Dean said.
“Deal,” Omar spat out.
The two shook hands. The relieved look on Omar’s face told Dean that he would have made far more concessions. Omar would sooner die than be exposed. The burqa slipped back over his face and Dean led the two men out of the restroom.
The band had stopped playing, but the dance floor still glowed and a disco ball still sprayed pinpricks of light into the dark recesses of the room. Men and women stood frozen in place.
The only sound was that of someone rushing in through the main entrance.
Dean whirled about and stared at the newcomer. The muscular man in a black outfit and ski mask had whipped out a Beretta pocket pistol.
“Where’s Omar?” the man shouted, his voice muffled by the mask.
Omar’s eyes didn’t blink as he crouched within his burqa.
The pistol moved over the faces. The Algerian flinched, then a half-naked woman. Ari and a belly dancer stood their ground. Then the gun was pointed at Dean.
“Who are you looking for?” Dean asked.
“Omar al-Farak,” the voice said with a strong Arabic accent.
Dean wasn’t about to let someone kill Omar, who was far more valuable alive than dead. “Look around you. He’s not here.”
The man swept his gun over the den of iniquity. He seemed to overlook the figure in the burqa. No Arab man would ever hide in that.
He turned back to Dean in anger. “Where did he go?”
“I believe he left for the night. He was suffering from a diving accident.”
“Crap.” The gunman backed away, looking around nervously, then darted out a side door.
The face in the burqa lifted and met Dean. “You saved my life,” Omar whispered. “Why?”
“You’re important to me,” Dean whispered back.
“That man will come after me again.”
Dean nodded slightly. “I’ll try to stop him.”
“I’d rather die like a man.”
“As long as I have these pictures, you have nothing to worry about. But break your word, and these photos will be published in every tabloid in the world. Do you understand?”
There was a solemn nod.
“Good luck with your speech at the Arab League tomorrow. I’ll be watching.”
“Trust me. I’ll go to Amman where our entourage will drive to Jerusalem. There, I will negotiate for peaceful terms.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.”
Dean heard a pair of heels spike the floor. They were approaching from the elevator lobby. He turned around. It was that woman from the agency, the psychologist. She wore a slinky green number and her face gave off a radiant glow. It took him a moment to remember her name. “Carla Marino. What a surprise.”
“Martino.”
“Sorry, Martino.”
She came to within a foot of him and crossed her arms. Though her coiffure and clothing were slightly askew, she stared at him levelly.
“I’ve come to a decision,” she said. “It’s okay for you to kill him.”
“What?”
“It’s your business. Everybody has a job to do. Kill him if you must.”
The burqa was trembling visibly.
Dean put a hand on her shoulder and turned her away from the others. “It’s okay. I won’t kill him.”
“No. Don’t stop because of me.”
Meanwhile, the burqa lifted slightly and scurried out of the room.
Just as Omar was exiting, Dean heard footsteps approaching.
Before Dean could turn, a pair of powerful arms locked around him. His hands were jerked backward, and cold metal was clasped around his wrists.
He smelled thick tobacco smoke and perspiration, the scent of a hardworking individual with little time for personal hygiene.
“Mr. Wells, you are under arrest.”
Alas, it was inevitable.
“Who do you think you are?” Carla demanded of the policeman.
“I’m Captain Malek of the Sharm el-Sheikh police, and I have a warrant for the arrest of this man.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but he’s an innocent man. Now take those cop locks off him this very instant.”
The captain stared at her dumbfounded. He had probably never been ordered around by a woman before. “Who are you?”
“I’m Carla Martino from the Central Intelligence Agency. I can vouch for this man.”
“Isn’t this Dean Wells, who is registered at the Four Seasons?” the captain said.
“Yes,” she said.
What? Suddenly Dean was suspicious.
Carla turned the full force of her professional bearing on the captain. “I am a licensed psychologist and a full member of the American Psychological Association, and this man is my patient.”
Oh great. Now he was a psycho. That gave him real credibility.
“Stand back,” the captain said. “I’m taking him to the station.”
Chapter 69
The sun struck Mount Sinai before it reached other parts of the desert.
The temperature had sunk to the low forties, as Rachel stuck her head out of the Bedouin tent.
The only restroom was the area behind the camels. She had to sneak between the dark forms lying on their bellies and find a private place behind a rock.
By the time Bruce emerged from his tent, Rachel had paced the length of the encampment several times and learned about a nearby tourist attraction. At the foot of the sun-tipped mountain was a Greek Orthodox monastery. Built in the 500s, it was the oldest surviving monastery in the world.
After a bowl of camel milk soup to warm up, she concentrated on tracking down the men who had eluded them in the night.
“Did two men pass through this morning?” she inquired in Arabic of a woman stirring the coals of a fire.
“Two men rented camels.” She glanced up a stone path that climbed the slope behind the encampment.
Rachel and Bruce traded g
lances. What were they waiting for? They had to follow the men.
Bruce asked about the price of a camel.
The woman must have understood that they were in a hurry. She pointed to two pillars, after which the path split and one route broke to the right. “You can go faster if you go on foot straight up.”
Rachel eyed the path that headed straight up the hill. “How long is the climb?”
The woman held up three fingers.
Okay. Three miles. Three kilometers. Three something.
“You will need this.” The woman placed warm blankets across their shoulders and handed them a bag of potato chips.
Rachel was appreciative. “Thank you so much.”
But the woman also held out a hand.
She was a good host, but also a vendor. Her tent had been a freebee as long as they paid for the blankets and chips.
Bruce scrounged around his wrinkled trousers and gave the woman some cash. Then they began to hike up the mountain.
They were exposed to the wind on the treeless slope. They were also visible to those they were tracking. They had to move fast. The vigorous effort got Rachel’s blood circulating and after an hour, she no longer needed the blanket.
Finally, they rounded a corner and faced the peak. Were the men up there? If so, they would have abandoned their camels because the rest of the way was a dizzying flight of steps.
Below, a tiny oasis of cypress trees sprouted out of the barren rock. Two camels were tied to a tree. A small campfire was still smoldering.
“They must have heard us coming up the mountain,” Bruce said. “They were just here.”
She shielded her eyes and looked up the peak. “I hear them, but I can’t see them.”
Giant steps were carved out of the mountain and led up between what looked like the pipes of an organ. Footsteps and grunting echoed among the rocks.
The men had gone the only direction possible: straight up.
Bruce took long strides up the flight of steps, and Rachel scrambled after him. She was in good physical shape, but her legs weren’t used to the height of the steps. Someone had painstakingly carved the stone, but the rest of the work was up to her.
At one point, she wavered and nearly lost her balance. But Bruce reached back and caught her.
“Thanks, mate,” she said.
“Good on you, Sheila.”
She didn’t count the steps, but after a few hundred, they stopped.
“There’s the portfolio,” Bruce said.
She looked up the vertical face of the mountain. The two men were putting in a respectable performance. The slimmer one lugged the black portfolio over one shoulder. Where did they think they were going?
She threw the blanket aside and picked up her speed.
Two hundred steps later, she paused to catch her breath. The steps were turning into a path. Between the crevices of rock, she made out a hard, horizontal edge.
Dedicated people had carved stones at the top of Mount Sinai into a building.
Rachel had reached the summit. There were few places for the men to hide.
Panting and damp with perspiration, she sprinted the final distance to the peaked roof structure. She poked her head inside. It was a chapel, large enough for a small wedding. Stained glass windows illuminated icons at an elaborate wooden altar. But the room was otherwise empty.
Bruce circled the outside of the chapel. “I found them!”
She heard feet scuffling and the heavy thud of fists against bodies.
She hurried around the building. Bruce was pummeling a man while the other lunged at him from behind. It was a starkly beautiful location, but a dangerous place to fight. One of them could easily lose his footing and tumble to his death.
The man was defending himself with the portfolio. That was too much for her. She ran toward him, preparing to ram him with a shoulder as he teetered at the edge of the drop-off.
With a flick of the wrist, he flung the portfolio over an iron fence at the back of the chapel. She slid to a halt, just inches from the man. Forget him. She wanted the portfolio.
She climbed over the fence to get to the portfolio. It was awkward and her legs burned, but she dropped into the shadow of the chapel. The portfolio lay against natural rock formations.
She clutched it to her chest, thinking of the ancient pages inside.
The men gave up the fight and slipped=543 down a narrow path that led downhill behind the chapel.
“Are you okay?” Bruce came up, gasping.
She partially unzipped the portfolio. She slid a hand inside and felt around.
She closed her eyes. “It’s here.”
Bruce leaned against the fence and tried to catch his breath.
She drew the parchment out of the portfolio. Remarkably, it wasn’t damaged. The five pages had remained flat throughout the flight from Sharm el-Sheikh and looked just as she had left them in her hotel room.
“Did you know,” he said between gasps, “that you’re sitting in the cleft…in which God placed Moses for safety…as He passed by?”
“How do you know that?”
“Exodus 33:22.”
Had he memorized the Bible?
He pointed to a sign, complete with the quotation from Exodus, that marked the spot.
Oh.
It felt strange sitting where Moses had sat, so she got to her feet.
“May I give you a hand?” Bruce offered.
She was just gaining a foothold on her side of the fence when a sudden gust of wind tore the portfolio out of her grasp. One of the codex pages fluttered away in the breeze.
“Get it,” she cried.
Bruce stooped to gather the portfolio before more pages blew away. She dropped to the ground and ran to the ridge. On the crumbling edge, she caught the page under her sandal. Rock fell away and dropped down the seven-thousand-foot cliff.
She picked up the page and shielded it from the sunlight. The manuscript was as crisp as the day it had been written.
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery,” it read. “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below…”
“I’m on top of Mount Sinai,” she whispered. “And I was just given the Ten Commandments.”
When she looked over the edge, the two men were hightailing it down a perilous trail.
They were heading on the route toward the walled monastery, but she had no energy to pursue them.
From her vantage point, she could see roads leading from the monastery. One headed west toward Cairo, and the other split east toward Israel. Where were the men going?
Where were they from?
Bruce came to sit beside her. “What now?”
His voice trailed off in the stillness of the desert. In the distance and far below lay a cluster of buildings and other evidence of man’s presence. “I propose we deliver the Ten Commandments.”
Chapter 70
Dean had spent the night in police detention. The facility was well lit, modern and cool. It wasn’t bad for an Egyptian jail.
At last he was hauled into an interrogation room.
There, he sat in the center of the room stripped to his waist. He glanced at his clothes piled in the corner of the room. As far as he knew, his camera with its pictures of Omar al-Farak was still there.
If nothing else, he had to get the news out that Omar’s life was in danger. “You must let me go, or the killer will assassinate Omar al-Farak.”
Captain Malek stood in front of the door. “You mean so you can assassinate Omar.”
Dean wanted to tell the police captain that he had evidence to prove he would never assassinate Omar, but that was his little secret with the Palestinian foreign minister. He didn’t want the pictures to fall into the wrong hands.
“You can follow me,” Dean said at last. “Heck, you can even fly me back to Israel. Photograph my
every move. Strap a GPS to me. But we have to prevent Omar’s assassination.”
“How can we trust you? You’re a killer.”
“Where do you get your information?”
Malek drummed a rap sheet he had been faxed. “The FBI has evidence that you committed two murders in the past two weeks.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“A SIG service pistol and a silver stiletto. Both belonged to you and both bore your fingerprints. Then there is another murder attempt, a car bombing in the United States.”
“Evidence?”
“A police sketch.”
Dean studied the far wall. The case they had was airtight. He had been completely and expertly framed, from the eyewitnesses down to the murder weapons.
Law enforcement professionals had done their job well.
There was only one flaw in their case.
“Did you check my hotel room?”
Malek stepped forward and confronted him.
“What hotel?”
“The Four Seasons, of course.” If they couldn’t tie him to the Four Seasons, it might make them reconsider his arrest.
“It is true,” Malek said. “We have no record of your staying there. I can only assume you used an alias.”
“Did you check my wallet?”
Malek laughed. “Why should I care what’s in your wallet?”
“No matter what name I used, the hotel would still have an imprint of my credit card. And that would be in my wallet.”
Malek signaled his lieutenant to find the wallet. The man picked up Dean’s clothes in the corner and found it.
“Whose name is on the credit cards?” Malek asked.
The lieutenant shook his head. “All the cards say Dean Wells.”
“See?” Dean said. “That wasn’t me at the Four Seasons.”
Malek hesitated. “Then the CIA was wrong. You tricked them, but we found you anyway.” He scrutinized the arrest warrant in his hand. “It says right here, ‘Dean Wells.’”
Dean shook his head. “Maybe the man the FBI mistook me for has gotten away.”
The lieutenant put the wallet back in the breast pocket of Dean’s coat. “What’s this?”
He pulled a small object off the back of the lapel.
It was the spy camera.