Secret of the Scroll (Greg McKenzie Mysteries)

by Campbell, Chester D.

  “Why?”

  I repeated what David had said.

  “I wonder what got him so worked up? Are you going to call Zalman?”

  “I probably should, but I’d sure like to talk to David first.”

  “If Zalman and Lipkowitz are ex-Mossad, they’re bound to be pretty sharp people. Maybe they could help you track down Jill.”

  That was a possibility. From what limited contact I had had with Mossad operatives, I knew them to be top-notch intelligence agents. But they could also be brutally ruthless, and Ted’s FBI source believed Zalman had been involved in Israeli assassination missions.

  “I’m not sure how much to trust them.”

  “What have you got to lose, Boss? We’re about back to square one.”

  “True.”

  We looked around as Pat Intermaggio streaked past in his Lincoln Town Car, headed out of the Star Express lot. “Let’s get out of here,” Ted said, “go pick up my car.”

  I parked beside Ted’s Mercury. He went into the market to get us a couple of cappuccinos, one of Jill’s favorite picker-uppers, and that thought put urgency into my actions. I dialed Wolfson’s office, only to be told he had gone to a client meeting which would last the rest of the afternoon.

  What should I do about Zalman? I wondered. I was not ready to put my trust in him, but I decided calling him might shed light on David’s curious message.

  I punched in the number Zalman had left and he answered immediately.

  “Thank you for returning my call,” he said. “Did you give Kamal Nazari the scroll?” He sounded like a man in a hurry.

  “No.” I didn’t volunteer anything further.

  “You did meet with him though.”

  He made it a statement. Was he bluffing, or had he tracked down Nazari and followed him to Cool Springs?

  “Were you there?”

  “I have my sources,” he said.

  “Then they must have told you Nazari tried to lure me into a trap. I tried to catch him but he got away. I dropped a decoy can, similar to the one the scroll came in. One of his people picked it up.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “In case you haven’t heard, Nazari is dead.”

  “Really? Where did you hear that?”

  “From the Metro Police, as well as the Tennessee Highway Patrol. He and a companion were killed. Their truck hit a tree. It burned up.”

  “And your wife?”

  “My wife was in there when I last saw them at Cool Springs. Now she’s missing.”

  His voice softened. “At least there’s a chance she’s alive. Perhaps she escaped and is now in hiding, trying to get in touch with you.”

  “Not likely. She could have gotten to me the same way you did.”

  “I see. But you do still have the document?”

  “I do.”

  “It was stolen from us, you know. We are authorized to compensate you well for your trouble. But we need to get it immediately. Time is of the essence.”

  What was the hurry? If it had been stolen from the Temple Alliance, surely they would have decoded its contents already. And Nazari had claimed the scroll belonged to his people.

  “Are you aware of the message it contains?” I asked.

  “How do you know this?”

  A new note in his voice.

  “That piece of parchment has caused me no end of trouble,” I said. “I’ve been checking into it.”

  “We will take it off your hands,” Zalman said. “How quickly can we meet?”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “How long would it take you to get near the airport?”

  I glanced at my watch. It was about two o’clock. Nashville International Airport was only a few miles away on I-40. “Ten minutes, more or less.”

  “Good. Bring the document. Use the Jeep Cherokee.”

  He must have had a dossier on me. And that made me even more wary. “My friend Ted, who you talked with this morning, will be with me,” I said. “We will be in his car. It’s a black Mercury with a Coffee County plate.”

  Zalman did not sound too happy with that news, but he instructed me to come out I-40 and turn left on Donelson Pike, going away from the airport entrance. “Not far past McDonald’s you will see a small jewelry store on the right with a large diamond stone on the sign,” he said. “The name is Golan Jewelers.”

  “As in Golan Heights?”

  “Correct. Come inside and ask for Mr. Benjamin. And for your own good, hurry.”

  He hung up.

  For my own good?

  Ted walked up to the driver’s side, gingerly carrying two twenty-ounce cups, just as I put down the phone. I lowered the window to take my cappuccino. The rain had stopped, but it was still cold and damp. I lit a cigarette to go with my drink. I watched the windshield steam up from the cappuccino.

  “Zalman wants me to bring the scroll to a shop on Donelson Pike,” I said.

  “Did he agree to help find Jill?”

  “I didn’t ask. Frankly, I’m not too happy with the whole deal.”

  I related the conversation with the Israeli.

  Ted shrugged. “But you did say we would come out there in my car. So let’s go and see what happens.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But I’m not taking the scroll. I have a friend from church who runs a machine shop near here. Follow me. I’ll park my Jeep at his place, then we’ll go meet the Israeli.”

  “Okay.”

  The sky still had a brooding look, not one Jill would have enjoyed flying through. I parked at the rear of my friend’s building, where the Jeep could not be seen from the street. After sticking my head in to tell him I would be back for it soon, I climbed into Ted’s car with my cappuccino cup and we struck out toward I-40. The mid-afternoon traffic was light, except for the semis. We reached the Donelson Pike exit, just past the airport cutoff, at around 2:15. That four o’clock deadline was closing in. It was getting likely that I would need the help of the Metro Police Department. But I dreaded the thought of facing Detective Phillip Adamson and having to confess what had been taking place.

  We found the jewelry shop in a small strip center and parked out front. A dumpy, white-haired man with thick glasses greeted us from behind a showcase filled with rings and bracelets. “Can I help you?”

  “We’re looking for Mr. Benjamin,” I said.

  He nodded, opened a door at the rear of the showroom and pointed down a narrow hallway covered with dark paneling. “Last door on the right.”

  I hadn’t really thought about my safety until now, but I reached around to feel the reassuring bulk of the Beretta. I glanced at Ted. “Ready?”

  He nodded.

  The door was painted solid black. I knocked and waited. It was opened by a dark-haired man I judged to be in his late thirties. He had heavy brows and penetrating gray eyes. Dressed casually, he had the physique of a professional athlete.

  He held out his hand. “Eli Zalman, Mr. McKenzie. Come in.”

  I watched his eyes search me and harden.

  I stepped inside. “This is Ted Kennerly, Mr. Zalman. A colleague of mine.”

  “Does he have the document?”

  “It’s in a safe place,” I said.

  “I told you we had little time,” he said. His mouth twitched.

  “We have enough time for you to tell me a bit more about yourself and about Kamal Nazari and his group.” I glanced at the tall, muscular man who stood silently at the back of the room, leaning against a wall. “I presume this is Mr. Lipkowitz.”

  “Yes,” Zalman replied.

  Lipkowitz nodded. He had a long, angular face and dark cold eyes. He reminded me of a sleek black panther I had once seen at the St. Louis Zoo.

  We were in a workroom with a counter on one side that held a supply of stationery and envelopes, a postage meter and other office paraphernalia. A large copy machine stood beside it. Faded walls. There was a table, several chairs.

  Zalman motioned to the chairs. “Have a seat, if we
must. But we have little time.”

  Could he know about Detective Adamson? I wondered. We took our seats like players at a Friday night poker party, Zalman on my right.

  “Tell me about the scroll,” I said.

  “It was taken from us by the Guardians of Palestine, a shadowy militant group cast in the same mold as Hezbollah. They have contacts in southern Lebanon as well as Syria and Jordan. And, of course, here in the U.S.A. It was one of their people who ‘sold’ you the fake Dead Sea Scroll in Old Jaffa.”

  “How did you find out about it?”

  “We have excellent contacts, including Mossad and Shin Bet. They discovered a worker at Middle East Tours had turned over the list of your tour group to her brother, a Guardians leader. This man contacted Nazari, who checked out the names and selected you to be their courier. They wanted to get the document out of the country because they knew nothing of the kabbalist codes and didn’t trust giving it to anyone inside Israel.”

  “So they were sending it to one of their trusted agents over here.”

  “Correct.”

  Just as I thought. But from the way Zalman was acting, his people hadn’t broken the code, either. And considering that David Wolfson had decoded it easily, that would likely mean the Temple Alliance had never actually possessed the scroll.

  “How were you able to get to Nashville so quickly after we got back?” I asked.

  “Our friends located the souvenir seller and interrogated him. By the time they had all the necessary information, however, you were on your way home. We were dispatched immediately.”

  “Nazari must have received a warning that you were headed his way.”

  “I’m sure his Guardians contact learned of our departure.” He glanced at his watch. “Will you bring our document to us now?”

  “That depends on whether it is your document,” I said.

  “Of course it is. I told you it was stolen from us.”

  “What is your connection to the Temple Alliance?”

  “Mr. Lipkowitz and I are members of the security staff. It is our job to return the scroll to its rightful owner.”

  Over the course of many years as an investigator, I had become something of an armchair psychologist–maybe more like a fortune teller, seeking to read people by the way they spoke and acted. Here I saw a man who preferred action to talk, and his body language showed I was pushing him close to the edge.

  I leaned forward on my elbows and stared at him across the table. “I don’t believe your story, Mr. Zalman.”

  “Preposterous. Why would I not tell you the truth?”

  “Let me put it to you this way. If the scroll had been in possession of the Temple Alliance, you would have translated it quickly, as I had someone do. Then you would have run the codes program on it and learned where the menorahs were buried.”

  The Israeli’s eyes flashed in anger and I could feel Ted tensing himself for an onslaught.

  “As I suspected,” Zalman said. “The greedy American colonel intends to dig for the gold himself.”

  “Not so.”

  “You never had any intention of delivering the document. You have done nothing but delay us from the start. Well, I have something I think will change your mind, Gregory McKenzie.”

  Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out something shiny and tossed it on the table in front of me. I stared, my heart nearly stopping. It was a ring with a large ruby set among small diamonds. The ring Jill had worn when I last saw her yesterday morning.

  Zalman glanced at his watch. “At this very moment, a corporate jet belonging to a major Temple Alliance supporter is taking off from the airport. Had you cooperated and turned over the document as promised, I would have called the pilot and instructed him to abort the mission.”

  “What mission?” Ted asked.

  “Mrs. Jill McKenzie is aboard the aircraft, bound for Israel. But for your greed, she would have been released.”

  I stared at him, feeling the anger boil up like molten lead. Then I was going for him. I struck out with my right hand, which connected with a stiffened wrist. But my left was just behind it and caught him solidly under the nose, breaking cartilage. I heard it pop.

  Israeli armed forces teach a particularly lethal unarmed combat synthesized from several schools of martial arts. I had my moment based on surprise. When the backfist cracked the side of my skull, I went down and out.

  Book Two

  The Unholy Land

  Chapter 24

  In the two weeks since Khaled Assah had returned to the Bethany dig site, he had agonized over the disastrous journey prompted by his finding of the ancient scroll. He was moody and nervous and prone to bouts of depression.

  After holding him overnight, during which they continued to bombard him with questions, the Shin Bet agents had become convinced he was telling the truth. He had given the old sheet of parchment to his cousin and had no knowledge of who Abdullah Kafi planned to contact about it.

  Lacking any physical evidence of a crime, the agents decided on a charade that would intimidate their suspect into silence. While Khaled sat in the room within hearing distance, the Shin Bet operatives began to discuss what to do about him.

  “Let’s just do away with him,” said the bald man with the knife-scarred cheek. “One less Palestinian who might come back to haunt us later.”

  The dark-skinned agent with black hair folded his arms. “I agree. But the status of relations with the Palestinian Authority is in a damned delicate state at the moment. If they should somehow get wind of what we did, it might cause us some real problems.”

  By the time the investigators had finished, Khaled was thoroughly demoralized. The Israelis then told him they had no charge against him since the scroll had disappeared. They would release him, but he was warned to say nothing. They knew how to find him.

  “We can reach across the Jordan and the Dead Sea,” Scarface said. “We will come after you.”

  They had freed him at the Allenby Bridge, where Khaled caught a bus back to Bethany. He was promptly berated by his archeological team leader for being late in returning, and he was saddled with extra assignments to make up for it.

  He accepted the work stoically, but what he had suffered at the hands of the Shin Bet was another matter. The experience had taken its toll, and everyone, faculty and students alike, noticed the change that had come over him. It was a girl–a black-haired, dark-eyed junior from Amman named Yolla–who finally pressed him about his moodiness. The daughter of a government official, she came from a family where young women were allowed to pursue careers of their own.

  Yolla broached the subject as they worked on their knees in a new area being excavated. Twine strung around wooden stakes marked the site, which contained remnants of pottery and cooking implements from many centuries past. Khaled was dusting around an odd-shaped piece of baked clay when Yolla leaned toward him.

  “What is worrying you so, Khaled? I have never seen you so moody and distracted.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, continuing to dust.

  “Come on,” she said, “it must be something. Is it your parents? Didn’t you go home because of your mother’s illness a couple of weeks ago?”

  “She’s all right.” He looked up at those bright eyes, so clear and dazzling. “It’s my cousin, Abdullah. He was killed about the time I left to return here. That has really bothered me.”

  “Was he killed by the Israelis?”

  “No. A car hit him. It was an accident.”

  “How terrible. I know it must have really hurt you. I remember how I cried when it was only a pet run over by a car. Were you and your cousin close?”

  “We had played together as boys.” He looked away shyly. “Abdullah was always the more adventuresome. He said I was the smart one.”

  Yolla smiled. “You must have been adventuresome the night before you left for Ramallah. Yosuf told me you came in with dust all over your pants, like you had been out on the qattar.”

&nbs
p; “I was curious about how it would look at sundown,” he said. “It was eerie.”

  “Would you show me this evening?” she asked, her face glowing.

  Having had no experience with girls, Khaled succumbed to the flattering attention, ignoring the trouble caused by his last visit to the chalky hills. He met Yolla outside the compound late that afternoon, and they walked toward the marl formation. She kept up a steady beat of questions and found Khaled always ready with an answer.

  When she asked what had most fascinated him, she got an answer he had not meant to reveal: “I found a cave hidden out here.”

  She stopped short, eyes open wide. “A cave? Where?”

  He frowned, remembering Scarface. “We probably shouldn’t go there.”

  She slipped her arm around his and pressed close to him. “Show me, Khaled. I must see it.”

  A few minutes later, they were sliding down the hillside to the concealed opening. She squeezed through behind him and clutched his arm in the darkness, her eyes following the beam of his flashlight as he swept it around the chamber.

  “How fascinating,” she said. Then, as he darted the light past a reddish object, she stopped him. “What was that?”

  Reluctantly, he shined the flashlight on the small jar. “An old clay pot.”

  She worked her way over to it and turned it around in her slender hands. Then she looked back with a mischievous grin. “You know what this is. Even I would know that. Let’s take it outside.”

  Khaled’s heart was thumping. He hesitated, then handed her the flashlight and carried the jar outside.

  She examined the container closely and turned to him with a curious frown. “It looks like there has been something inside. What happened?”

  Khaled sat down on the dusty hillside and buried his face in his hands. He began to tremble. “I can’t tell you. It was too horrible.”

  Yolla sat beside him and put her arm around his shoulders. She spoke in a soft, urgent voice. “This is what has been troubling you, isn’t it? Please tell me, Khaled. I want to help you.”