by Fritz Galt
“Taking pictures, were we?” Malek said.
“Yes. But not killing people. I had every opportunity to kill Omar and I didn’t.”
“Instead you were taking pictures?”
“My guess is the would-be assassin is already getting away.”
They were interrupted by a knock on the metal door.
“Sir, a call for you,” a voice said.
Malek pocketed the tiny camera and left the room.
Dean’s face was burning. Malek had taken the blackmail evidence with him. If someone published the pictures, it would be the end of Omar’s career and the end of the CIA’s influence over the Palestinian Authority.
A man guarded the door with a gruff expression.
Dean could hear Malek conferring in the next room. He sounded upset. A minute later, he reappeared. “It seems that you are right. My men just missed catching the suspect at the airport. They identified him from the photo and gave him chase. He fired at them and wounded one of my men in the leg. He managed to escape.”
“Escape? Where to?”
“He got away in a private jet.”
Dean was both relieved and disappointed. “Where was he headed?” The pilot must have filed a flight plan.
Malek turned a chair backwards and straddled it. He rested his chin in his hands and faced Dean squarely. “He’s flying to Cyprus.”
That was odd. But it did explain a lot. The island, like an aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean, was the perfect launch pad for any destination in the Middle East. “Greek Cyprus or Turkish?”
“Greek,” Malek said. “He’s flying to Nicosia.”
“I’ll need an airplane,” Dean told him.
Malek looked away. He didn’t appear ready to do him any favors.
“Do you want to be the one who let Omar get assassinated?” Dean said.
Malek seemed to consider the point. Finally, he nodded in consent. “I’ll have a private airplane and pilot available by the time you get to the airport.”
“And can I have my camera back?”
Malek grinned and patted his pocket. “No. This is mine.”
Dean didn’t want to push his luck. He did get an airplane out of the deal.
Dean pointed with his chin at the camera. “Can I trust you with that?”
“No,” Malek said with a grin.
Suddenly the Egyptians had much more control over the Palestinians than ever before. Dean had to trust that they wouldn’t abuse that power.
Ari was heading back to Israel, he was sure, but he’d sure like to know what had happened to Rachel, Bruce and the codex pages. If he didn’t get the pages to Israel, he’d never get the IRS off his back.
After he put his clothes on, he grabbed his cell phone and dialed Rachel’s number.
She answered with a surprised, “Who is this?”
“It’s Dean.”
A strong wind whistled through the air on her end of the line. “I could have sworn it was God,” she said.
He didn’t get that, but let it go. “Did you find the codex?”
“Let’s just say it was handed to me personally.”
“Good work. Can you deliver it to Israel?”
“Sure thing. I’ll hitch up my little camel and head over there. It might take me forty days and forty nights.”
“What are you telling me? Are you stranded?”
“More or less. I’m on top of Mount Sinai with Bruce, and there doesn’t seem to be much transportation around here.”
“Okay. Listen carefully. Make your way to St. Catherine’s Monastery. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
He was met with an incredulous laugh. “How will you get here?”
“There’s an international airport servicing the monastery.”
“What? For flying nuns?”
“No. It’s for people on pilgrimages. Just get to the monastery, and I’ll meet you by the burning bush.”
“Oh. You have got to be kidding.”
“Do I sound like I’m kidding?”
The line went dead. He hoped she took him seriously.
He stepped out of the police station into the simmering heat of another day. Carla was waiting for him across the street. She stood under a tree and waved discreetly at him.
What a funny woman.
He checked for traffic, but Naama Bay was a ghost town during daylight hours. He crossed over to her. “Thanks for waiting,” he said. “I hope you weren’t up all night.”
“I guess we missed our flight to Cyprus, huh?”
What in the world…?
He stared at her friendly green eyes. More than friendly, she was lifting her eyebrows in a suggestive way.
Was she mistaking him for the killer, or was it some sort of joke?
He decided to play along. “I, uh, decided not to fly to Cyprus.”
She shrugged. “Oh well. We’ll save it for later.”
“Sure. Later. How about a flight over the Sinai instead? I need to get to St. Catherine’s Monastery.”
She motioned toward an overnight bag in the grass at her feet. “You don’t mind that I stayed in your room last night?”
He had to think about that one.
“Never mind,” she said. “I didn’t run up the bill.”
Before he could help her with the bag, she bent down and grabbed it. “So, which way to the airport?” she said.
Chapter 71
Dean sat facing his female companion as they flew in the small, private jet toward the monastery in the central part of the peninsula. Carla was glued to the airplane window and seemed mesmerized by the dry and hilly landscape.
“Young lady?”
She turned to him. Her eyes were an even deeper green than he had seen before.
“You have lovely eyes,”’ he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a deep emerald.”
“Oh, it’s just the lighting.”
“I don’t think so.”
She was a curious person, so unabashedly excited by the trip, so unexpectedly childlike in her trust.
“Uh, you know why we’re going,” he said.
“We’re going to grab Rachel.”
“…and the codex pages.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is that why Rachel came to Egypt?”
He nodded.
“Only that?”
“I called her in Washington and asked her to bring the pages. She’ll be waiting for us at the monastery.”
Carla seemed to make several mental notes, but took the information in stride.
“Then where to after that?” she asked, a note of the world-weary traveler in her voice.
“We’ll return the pages to Jerusalem.”
Her expression softened as if her real emotions were showing through. He guessed he was doing the right thing returning the codex pages to Israel.
He stared at the dry, inhospitable land they were passing over. Sometimes he wondered if Egypt had really wanted to be handed back the Sinai Peninsula during the Camp David Accords. The Bedouin were nothing but a thorn in Cairo’s side: hostile to the regime in Cairo and complicit in breaking the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip. If it weren’t for the lucrative resort towns on the Red Sea and control over the Suez Canal, Egypt had little reason to hold onto the desert.
There was no better case for a new country, or at least autonomy, than the Sinai. It was Bedouin land, and the desert tribes chafed under Cairo’s yoke.
The circumstances of the Bedouin mirrored those of the Palestinians on the far side of the Sinai Desert.
The people of Palestine, split apart by Israel, yearned for their own country. Once called the “Jews of the Middle East,” the Palestinians were known for their admirable Levantine traits of amiability and resilience. The land they lived on had been ruled by the Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders and Turks. And from those conquests, a strong identity had been forged.
The Jewish st
ate of Israel was only the latest in a long succession of powers trying to exert control over them. Some regimes had been overt in their domination and others had used the subtlest means imaginable. Israel had used both.
Perhaps the people of Palestine had become the Jews of the Middle East for another reason. Huddled in refugee camps, cornered on small parcels of land and surrounded by hostile neighbors, they were a threatened culture on the verge of annihilation. It seemed logical that they would take the same approach as Israel in self-defense: they lashed out aggressively and negotiated their way back to security.
The only obstacle to self-determination and having their own country, as Americans saw it, was that their methods of aggression were different from Israel’s. Whereas Israel used a large, American-funded army to roll over foreign lands, from the Sinai to the West Bank to the Golan Heights, Palestinians planted bombs, fired missiles and sent in their young men and women wearing backpacks laden with explosives to blow themselves up among civilians.
Many in the U.S. Government were guilty of hypocrisy, or intellectual laziness at the very least, in dealing with the Middle East. They adhered to the principle of the Rule of Law in trying to create peace in Israel. They would chase down those who broke criminal laws, but bend the more tenuous international laws in favor of the military.
It seemed to Dean that Americans sometimes used the Rule of Law as a cudgel because it was the only intellectual tool America had available. Rounding up and punishing terrorists and siding with overwhelming military force gave one a sense of moral justice.
Maybe he had rattled around the State Department too long, but solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict didn’t require punishing parties for their tactics. It hinged on redressing their grievances, real or perceived, and making them whole again.
Sun blazed directly on the mountains below, eliminating any hope for shade. It was incredible how Israel could have taken the intractable land so quickly in the Six-Day War. It was even more alarming to consider that the Israelis attacked Jordan at the same time, lugging all their heavy equipment across the rugged hills of the West Bank to threaten the capital city of Amman. Then, holding a more powerful hand, Israel negotiated a peace agreement.
Palestinians were similarly aggressive in startling ways. They staged two uprisings, the intifadas, where youths armed with stones took to the streets to confront Israeli soldiers. There were other, even darker, periods of shelling civilians and planting bombs in buses and cafés, followed by attempts at negotiating a resolution of their demands.
The Israelis and Palestinians were alike in so many ways. They loved the same land, they shared a similar sense of isolation and they employed the same strategy of violence followed by negotiation.
Somehow, both sides needed to break the deadlock.
But Dean didn’t have the power to settle things forever. He would be lucky to prevent or delay Palestine from becoming a beachhead for al-Qaeda.
Getting Israel or the Palestinian Authority to unilaterally compromise in the peace talks would be next to impossible. Unless…
“Change of plans,” he announced.
Carla’s wavy hair bounced around as she looked at him.
“First we go to Amman,” he said.
“You lost me there.”
“Amman is the capital of Jordan. It’s where the Palestinian Authority will depart for Jerusalem. It’s where Omar al-Farak will be.”
“And you’re going to plug him there?”
He stared at her. What had gotten into her? He remembered liking her for her sharp analytical skills and sensitive nature.
“You know,”’ she said, “Omar was proposing an arms buildup in Palestine to defeat the Israelis.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But there will be no killing this time. Omar is working for us.”
She didn’t seem to follow him.
“Once we get the codex pages,” he said, “we’ll bring them to Omar.”
Her eyebrows knit together. “What are you saying? The codex is a Jewish treasure.”
He held up a finger. “It’s not only a Jewish treasure. It lays the foundation for the Christian Bible and the Koran.”
“Okay, but Israel wants it. Why give it to Omar?”
“Because Omar will give it to Israel.”
She squinted at him. “Why in the world would he do that?”
He patted her on the knee. “I could tell you why, but I’d rather keep this conversation G-rated. Just think what it would mean to Israel if the Foreign Minister of the Palestinian Authority offered such an olive branch on a unilateral basis to the Jewish people.”
“It would be nice.”
“Just nice?”
She frowned. “Look. I don’t know much about Israel and Palestine. I don’t live and breathe the issues on a daily basis. Frankly, I think both sides could take a Valium and undergo a lot of evaluation. So don’t expect me to grasp the full implication of what you’re proposing.”
“Fair enough. Suffice it to say that if we get the codex pages to Omar, this could be big.”
She turned her gorgeous eyes to his hand on her knee. “I was just getting used to the idea of assassination.”
Chapter 72
Carla and Dean’s jet needed to make a few hair-raising turns among the mountains of the Sinai to line up for the runway.
She stared down in wonder at the fabled land. She remembered stories from the Old Testament taught in catechism class and by Hollywood. And the Sinai played an important part. Moses had floated in a basket down a river and was found by the Pharaoh’s servants. They had brought the baby into the palace, where he was raised to young adulthood, unaware of his Hebrew origins. One day, Moses witnessed a slave master cruelly beating a Hebrew slave. That so infuriated him, he attacked and killed the slave master.
That provoked the court to punish him. Before they could catch him, he fled east into the desert. There he lived the life of a shepherd for forty years. At the base of Mt. Sinai, he saw a burning bush, but the bush wasn’t consumed by the fire. Instead, it spoke to him, conveying the words of the Lord. Moses was told to return to Egypt and free his people.
So Moses returned and warned the Hebrews of upcoming plagues. They must follow him to the Promised Land. Then God sent ten plagues upon the people of Egypt, the last being the Lord taking the lives of every firstborn son. If the Hebrews painted lambs’ blood on their doorposts, Moses said, the Lord would pass over their houses, which indeed happened.
Consequently, Moses was able to lead them out of Egypt. The Lord parted the seawaters and the Hebrews passed safely to the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian army pursued them, but the waters closed in around them and swallowed them up.
Then Moses led his people through the wilderness until they got fed up with him and started worshiping a golden calf. Distraught, Moses turned to the Lord for help. A cloud hung over Mt. Sinai and Moses entered the cloud. Forty days later, he emerged with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. But when he saw his people worshiping the golden calf, he was so angry he dashed one of the tablets against the ground and it shattered.
He had to return to the top of the mountain for another forty days and came back with new tablets, which formed the laws of a new morality.
Carla was jolted slightly as the plane touched down. Out the window was nothing but barren desert and precipitous hills shimmering in the heat. She had just landed in the middle of history.
What mission were these mortals around her embarked upon? It all seemed so ephemeral in the overall scope of time.
Dean was there to rescue Rachel Levy, then take them all to Jerusalem. He was the new Moses, leading his people to the Promised Land.
Which got her thinking. What exactly was his relationship with Rachel? Why was he really going out of his way to pick her up in the middle of the desert?
“I suppose you’ll get your Rachel now.” The words slipped out before she could stop them. “The only thing to worry about now is the IRS hounding you and de
aling with your tax fraud.”
Dean looked across the facing seats at her with a quizzical expression. “Why do you call her my Rachel?”
“Let’s face it. She followed you here for some reason.”
“Yes. We already talked about that. I asked her to bring the codex pages.”
“Sure, but wasn’t that asking a lot of her?”
“All right. Let me explain. I was desperate. I still am desperate. The reason why the IRS is after me seems to be political. A tax attorney named Leon Pavel recommended by my CPA hinted that if I gave the codex pages to Israel, the IRS would drop their charges. Someone in the government wants Israel’s historical and religious artifacts back at any cost.”
“Someone in the government?”
“My suspicion is that it’s part of the Jewish Defense League or some such group that has people placed in various positions of power within the Federal government.”
“So no tax fraud?”
“No, I didn’t commit tax fraud. For some reason, I had an inexplicably large tax refund this year, and someone in the government is using that to pressure me to return the pages to Israel.”
“So you didn’t get a million dollars from some Yemeni source?”
“Of course not. Where did you get that story?”
“That’s why I came down here, Dean. I read it on the front page of the Washington Post, and I had to warn you.”
He frowned. “What a smear campaign.”
“So no million dollars?”
He shook his head.
“And no Yemeni bank?”
He stared at her. “Do you believe that?”
She had to admit that she was slightly disappointed. There was something exhilarating about being involved with an outlaw.
Her thoughts returned to Rachel. “Okay, so you told Rachel you were desperate. What was in it for her?”
He hung his head sheepishly. “I may have exaggerated to her. Or maybe I didn’t.” He lifted his eyes to meet hers. “I told her that Middle East peace hung in the balance.”
Carla watched as the plane taxied up to the terminal.
For the first time, she saw a whole new side of Rachel. Maybe the young woman wasn’t in love with Dean. Maybe she was simply an idealist, seeking peace and thinking that Dean could deliver it.