by Fritz Galt
“You aren’t going to win Middle East peace with that codex,” she said. “Are you?”
He furrowed his brow. “I’ll try.”
Returning the codex pages was a bold stroke, perhaps a touch delusional, but it was a novel approach, and she could be there to cushion the blow if it failed.
Dean had a more complex personality than she had imagined. It was a good thing most of her patients weren’t that layered. Here was a man who thought that shooting people and stabbing them in the back was the route to Middle East peace. At the same time, he believed that the simple gesture of returning a scrap of old paper could set the world right again.
No wonder he was living a double life. There were two warring factions within him, something the human mind was hardly equipped to handle. No wonder he exhibited erratic, hard-to-explain behavior. An important scientific paper might come out of this.
Aside from keeping Dean sane, she had her own job to do. She had to clear his name. She had to prove to the CIA that Dean was a stand-up employee just doing his job.
But he was more than that. He was a modern-day Moses putting his life and reputation on the line every day. First he fired a poisoned dart underwater at a Palestinian foreign minister who planned to launch attacks against Israel, then he planned to ask that same foreign minister to deliver a highly sought-after codex to Israel as a peace gesture.
It angered her that Hart Baxter might bring counterespionage charges against him by the end of the week. And it was already Thursday!
It finally dawned on her that she had to get a hold of that twerp from the FBI, the one who dismissed her flair for criminal investigation. What was his name? Greg Ferguson.
As soon as they rescued Rachel and got hold of the codex, Carla would give the FBI guy a call and fill him in on the exact nature of, and motivation behind, Dean’s bizarre behavior.
Chapter 73
It might have been noon in Egypt, but for Greg Ferguson in Virginia, it was early morning.
News that the wanted man had taken a flight from Sharm el-Sheikh to Cyprus spread quickly around the world. The Sharm police had initiated the process by alerting the Deputy Minister for Public Security in Cairo, who in turn posted the information on Interpol’s 24/7 secure worldwide communications network. The FBI had picked up the news within a minute of its being posted and called Greg Ferguson in the middle of the night.
In his search for Dean Wells and the mole within the CIA who was tipping Dean off, Greg had pinpointed Wells at the Four Seasons in Sharm el-Sheikh. The man staying at the Four Seasons had brandished a gun while searching for the Palestinian Foreign Minister, then had fled the scene and departed by private jet for Cyprus.
The interesting twist was that that man wasn’t Dean Wells. In fact, Dean Wells was currently in a jail cell in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Greg drove in to Langley early, but still suffered from dizziness and dehydration from the day before. He sat hunched over a cafeteria table, staring at dry crackers and a can of ginger ale. He hadn’t touched a bite of food since his bout of the runs. In fact, he had developed a slight fear of food. He wasn’t even sure of the food he’d brought from home.
Call him paranoid, but the place was creepy. The Central Intelligence Agency crawled with spooks, people with false identities doing classified work that even the Congress knew nothing about. They even spied on each other, which was his job that day.
He tried to visualize the scene described by the Egyptian police. At a Sharm el-Sheikh party, Dean had been stopped by another man in a black outfit and ski mask. Greg had a new mission now. He was at the CIA to weed out that rogue assassin who had stayed at the Four Seasons, brandished a gun in an assumed attempt on Palestinian Foreign Minister’s life and was heading for Cyprus while Dean Wells rotted in jail. Furthermore, Greg had to find the local employee who was directing this second operative behind Dean’s back.
How many employees were stabbing each other in the back?
After a week at Langley, Greg found the law a tenuous thing. It was subject to individual interpretation. How did he know a lawbreaker wasn’t working for a higher purpose?
But catching offenders was Greg’s job. And the FBI was telling him that the wanted man had departed Egypt for Cyprus. Maybe the killer’s handler within the CIA had communicated with Cyprus in the past few hours. Greg could use that information to find the killer and ferret out the informant.
Was the telephone tracer still up and running? Matt Nelson should have arrived at work by now.
Greg dragged into the neatly organized office of the head of Personnel Security and threw his suit coat over the back of a chair. “Pull up the phone tracer,” ‘he told Matt. “We may have a match.”
“Can you do a search of all phone calls going in and out of this building in the past twenty-four hours?”
“I don’t like doing it, but I can.” Matt opened a window showing a simple list of times, locations called, and originating telephone numbers.
“We’re looking for Cyprus,” he told Matt.
Matt entered the search criteria, and several screens full of records scrolled by. He turned from the console and looked at Greg. “Can you give me a more specific timeframe?”
Greg was thinking more clearly now. “The Sharm el-Sheikh police recorded the flight leaving for Cyprus in the early morning, Egypt time. Say midnight our time. The flight to Cyprus must have taken an hour or so. Then the guy would have to get to a landline. If a call ever went through, it would have been made first thing this morning, Washington time.”
Matt adjusted the time criteria and waited for the results.
“Hold on,” Greg said. “I see one.”
It was an incoming call from Nicosia, Cyprus.
“Who was the guy trying to reach at Langley?”
Matt scanned across the screen. “You aren’t going to believe this.”
“Who did he call?”
“José.”
Greg stared at him.
José Gomez? Greg remembered how the kooky psychologist had interviewed José, asking who had set off the car bomb, and José had convinced her that it was al-Qaeda and not Palestinian terrorists. The junior sleuth had bought the story and moved on to other leads. But was the head of the Near East and North Africa Bureau overriding Dean Wells and running a counter-operation?
“What was the duration of the call?” Greg asked.
“Fifteen seconds.”
That was hardly enough time for a conversation. “Maybe José hasn’t yet come in to the office and the caller left a message,” Greg said.
“Hmm. The caller didn’t try again.”
That gave Greg an idea. “Can you zero in on just the calls José received before he left last night?”
Matt changed the criteria and studied the data that appeared on the screen. “José received calls from Tunisia, Yemen and Lebanon,” he read off. “You won’t believe this.”
“What?”
“The last call he got yesterday was from Egypt.”
“Where in Egypt?”
Matt queried the city code.
“Sharm el-Sheikh.”
Greg didn’t know whether to be upset or ecstatic. They had their informant.
“Duration of last night’s call?” he asked.
“Three minutes and five seconds.”
Long enough to be a real conversation. He stood up and stared at the computer. “What did José discuss?”
Matt turned around and smiled. “Sorry. We don’t record conversations.”
“C’mon,” Greg said. “This is the premier spy agency in the world. Surely you tap your own phones.”
“Shocking, huh?”
Upon further consideration, maybe it wasn’t so strange that they preserved some forms of privacy. Since eavesdropping was their profession, maybe the CIA was more aware of the harm it could cause.
“So, it’s José Gomez,” Matt said softly. “José has been running a second operative behind Dean’s back and left Dean in the
clutches of the Egyptian police. How do you want to proceed from here?”
Chapter 74
Dean had never been to Mount Sinai Airport or St. Catherine’s Monastery before.
He put on his sunglasses and, together with Carla Martino, stepped off the plane. The airport terminal was hardly the international setting he had imagined, purportedly having scheduled flights from Cairo and Tel Aviv. Their plane was the only one on the tarmac.
When he entered the terminal, wind howled through the building. He expected some sort of immigration control, but the glass booth was empty and a pair of boots stuck out of a back room. He recognized police boots when he saw them, but he didn’t want to disturb the man.
He had read about the ancient monastery, however, and looked forward to exploring it as a living artifact of history. The wall surrounding the monastery had once been virtually impregnable, save for a small door high up one side. Mohammed had hidden there, and later wrote a decree to spare all those living within its walls. Napoleon had promised to protect it as well.
However, as Dean lifted his eyes up to the place, he had to admit he was disappointed. The church and gardens were small. How could one tell that it housed the oldest collection of religious icons in the world? And its library held some of the most valuable scrolls and codices, four thousand five hundred of them, more than anywhere in the world after the Vatican? Researchers were still stumbling across old works stored there.
He took off his sunglasses and wiped his brow. The dry desert climate was a wonderful environment to protect such works.
But how did that bush grow there?
Rachel and Bruce were standing in the shade of a fenced-off plant whose leafy branches reached over their heads. The two were involved in conversation with their arms around each other and didn’t see him and Carla approaching.
“Hi, you two lovebirds,” Carla called out.
The pair looked around. Rachel’s normally pale face blushed with embarrassment. “Bruce was telling me that this bush is the only one of its species and that no clipping has survived when transplanted elsewhere in the world.”
“Really?” Carla said.
“Yes,” Rachel said. “This is the burning bush.”
Carla took a long look at it. “Sure it is.”
Dean saw a black portfolio lying in the dust by Rachel’s’ feet. “You found the codex.”
“Oh that,” she said. “You can have it.”
Given her attitude, it must not have been much trouble getting it back. He picked it up and dusted it off.
Carla was circling Bruce. “And who is this young man?”
“Bruce Johnson,” he said, and extended a hand.
His fingers completely enveloped hers as they shook hands.
She placed her other hand on top of his. “Take good care of my roommate,” she said.
He grinned. “She is a handful.”
Rachel intervened. “So, I guess Bruce and I are off to Cairo.” Clearly, she had no intention of following Dean to Jerusalem.
“First,” Dean said, “have you been inside this building?”
Rachel shook her head. “No. Why?”
He led the small group into the largest building on the compound. It was a massive stone structure scrubbed by the wind down to its original support beams.
“This is the library,” Dean said.
“Library?” Rachel looked skeptical.
A stooped figure in a brown robe was just stepping in through a side door.
“Naharak.” Good afternoon, Dean said in Egyptian Arabic.
“Come again?” the old man replied.
“Oh. You’re American,” Dean said.
“Texan, to be precise. And you?”
“Er, Virginian, I guess. We’d like to see the library. We have a linguist among us.”
The monk peered from under his bushy white eyebrows. “Which one of you is it?”
Rachel stepped forward. “I guess that would be me. What kind of holdings does your library have?”
The old guy regarded her with interest. “Would you like me to show you?”
“Sure.”
The four of them followed him into a room that was so crammed with papers, it reminded Dean of a professor’s attic.
“Scholars from around the world pass through here,” the monk said. “Muslims, Jews, Orthodox, Copts, Armenians, Syrian Jacobites, you name it. Here’s where it all began.”
“I saw the mosque out there,” Rachel said, a touch of awe in her voice.
“Built for pilgrims traveling to Mecca,” he said. “Have you seen the Skull House?”
They all shook their heads.
“It’s where I’ll end up,” the monk said. “It’s a small chapel with stacks of skulls from deceased monks.”
Rachel’s attention was drawn to parchment pages laid open on a wooden stand. She leaned forward and began to read it aloud in Greek. Eventually she straightened up and announced, “Another early codex.”
“From the Fourth Century,” the monk explained. “That’s part of the Codex Sinaiticus that I just ran across.”
Rachel raised an eyebrow. “That’s five hundred years before the Aleppo Codex.”
The monk looked impressed.
Dean hefted the portfolio, but said nothing. What a wonderful final repository the monastery would make for the Aleppo Codex. Here was a shared religious site with no haggling over ownership. People of all faiths could fly in and study the ancient script. It was tempting to offer the Aleppo pages to the monk.
But that wasn’t possible. The pages had a more earthly role to play. And in the end, they belonged with the rest of the text that resided in Jerusalem. The pages had a rough journey ahead to get to their legal owner and restore peace talks.
Still, the codex should be accessible to those who really wanted to see it, not those who regarded it more as a political symbol.
Bruce was paging through a few loose scraps of paper.
“And those are the missing pages I found to ibn Fadlan’s diary covering his visit to the Vikings in the Tenth Century,” the monk said.
“You’re kidding,” Rachel broke in and gently removed the pages from Bruce’s grip. “I assume you’re referring to the Varangians, known as the ‘eastern’ Vikings.”
The monk nodded.
“I took a course from a Russian medievalist in graduate school,” Rachel explained. “The Varangians plied the river routes between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea to Constantinople and beyond. There’s been a debate over their role in the formation of the early Rus state.”
“The Norman Theory,” Bruce said.
“That’s right,” Rachel said, shooting him a look of admiration.
“Well,” the monk said, “I’ve been translating the diary. It might be my final contribution to academia.”
Nobody spoke. It was obvious that the man was too old to continue much longer.
“I’m looking forward to joining my friends at the Skull House.”
The group shared an uneasy laugh.
The old guy looked Rachel up and down. “Listen, honey. I’m not going to be around much longer and I’m looking for someone to take over the business.”
Rachel blinked, her eyes wide. “Are you kidding? This would be a dream come true.”
“The conditions are somewhat primitive,” the monk said.
“I know. I’ve seen the bathroom,” she said. “That’s the first thing that would change around here.”
Carla smiled at Dean. “I think I’m losing a roommate.”
Dean squeezed her shoulders. “Well, it looks like Carla and I had better be moving along. We have another flight ahead of us.”
Carla went straight to Rachel and gave her an enormous hug. “If this doesn’t work out, I’ve got a permanent position at the snack bar.”
Dean didn’t know what she was referring to, but it appeared that Rachel knew exactly what she meant. He turned to Bruce and shook his hand. “I believe you can call a taxi to t
ake you back to Cairo.”
“Thanks. Somehow I don’t think Rachel and I will be needing one for a while.” He winked at her.
Rachel approached Dean. She was nearly as tall as he was. “I want to apologize,” she said, her voice low. “I thought you blew up my car.”
“It was an honest mistake.”
“Then I let the codex pages get stolen.”
“I’m glad you brought them.”
“I want you to succeed in Jerusalem.”
He looked into her frank eyes and nodded. How could he let her down?
Her shoulders relaxed and she set her weight back on one foot. She was a beautiful woman with rare talents.
“Thank you,” she said. She grabbed Bruce by the arm and looked around at the vault of uncatalogued material. “For all of this.”
Dean smiled to let her know that all was well between them.
With that, he steered Carla out of the room.
The codex gripped tightly in one hand, he led her to the garden where a primitive well had been dug over a thousand years before. “I wonder if our cell phones work out here.”
She gave him a funny smile that twisted her lips into an appealing bow.
He whipped out his phone and calculated the time difference between there and Washington. In DC, the workday was just beginning.
Before dialing his boss, he stared at Mount Sinai. Someday he’d have to climb that thing. It felt sacrilegious to talk business with Washington at such a sacred spot.
José Gomez picked up on the first ring.
“Hi, chief,” Dean said. “Mission accomplished. I took the blackmail photos of Omar al-Farak. He’s on our side now.”
“Where is he?”
“Returning to the West Bank. In fact, he’ll be handing over the missing codex pages to Israel at the Shrine of the Book, rather than ordering weapons from al-Qaeda.”
“Boy, you’ve really got him by the balls.”
“Another feather in our caps, boss,” Dean said.
There was a momentary pause, and Dean pictured Gomez savoring the victory and mentally rewriting his own employee evaluation report.