by Gregg Loomis
The president paused in midphrase. “Oh? Why not?”
“Next week is your ‘Friendship Initiative,’ the visit to Venezuela and President Chavez. When you return, you have a major address to the AFL/CIO convention in Detroit before you leave to talk with the president of Iran. A week later, the Russian president comes here to commend your decision to cancel the Eastern European missile-shield program . . .”
“OK. OK. I get the picture. Work it in somehow. ASAP. In the meantime, we must be certain to do nothing that could be considered hostile to either Haiti or China. I . . .” He looked at the pained expression on the CIA director’s face. “What’s bothering you, Jerry?”
“Mr. President,” the CIA director said slowly. “There’s a couple of things you need to know.”
The president’s confidence seeped away like water into dry soil. He despised surprises. “Like what?”
“Like this Chinese-Haitian thing. We had an asset keeping an eye on things, until he disappeared. Then one of our best handlers recruited a former agent, the one I told you about a few minutes ago, to find out what was going on, and he did. Unfortunately, the Chinese know about it and are trying to kill him and his wife, who went to Haiti with him.”
“I would think we can convince the Chinese to lay off by not opposing whatever they are doing in Haiti.”
“Possibly so, yes, sir, if we can convince them before they succeed. Unfortunately we, the CIA, are protecting him and his family right now.”
The presidential eyebrows arched. “You are conducting a mission in the United States?”
The director was studying the presidential seal in the blue carpet. “Well, sort of. Just providing protection for the man’s family. We did sort of promise him that.”
The presidential scowl was obvious. At his level of politics, promises were obstacles easily overcome or circumvented. “You know your agency is prohibited from conducting operations, any operations, on U.S. soil. Providing domestic protection is the FBI’s job.”
“Yes, sir. But you see, we’re also providing protection for this, er, asset out of the country. He’s trying to find out exactly what the Haitians want in exchange for letting the Chinese pretty much do as they wish.”
The president thought that over a second. “Since we are now welcoming them, it no longer matters, does it?”
The CIA director, thankful the conversation had taken a turn in a direction other than his, nodded. “I wouldn’t think so. As a matter of fact, this asset, this former agent, could become an embarrassment if what he knows became public too soon.” He looked over at the chief of staff. “Even you would have a hard time hushing up an on-site report of exactly what the Chinese are up to.”
“He’s right,” the president agreed. “Jerry, since you are providing protection to this man and his family, there should be no problem picking them up. We can detain them under the Patriot Act until I have a chance to calm the nation’s possible uneasiness about all this.”
The SecDef started to point out the present administration had a bill before Congress to repeal that law, the series of statutes enacted in the wave of panic following 9/11 that gave the federal government more police powers than it had enjoyed since the laws Lincoln had had enacted at the outbreak of the Civil War. Some of the similarities—suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the prohibitions against search and seizure—were frightening.
He thought better of it and instead said, “Mr. President, do I understand you are planning to arrest and detain American citizens because they gained knowledge this country asked them to obtain but which now becomes politically inexpedient?”
“Of course not!” the chief of staff snapped. “We’re simply continuing to perform promises made to these people. The only difference is we can protect them far better in a facility of our choosing.”
“And if they decline your offer?”
“Then we’ll have to act in the best interests of the country.”
Somehow, the SecDef doubted if these unnamed “assets” would see it that way.
Cemetery of Terra Santa
Faful wondered if the four men were really Bedouins. He, like several other laborers of the excavation crew, had grown up a nomad in the Western Desert, immigrating to the city and a more settled existence when he was fourteen. These men who had appeared at the dig had removed guns from under their flowing dishdashas, robes with sleeves tied back with cord, over which they wore the vestlike aba. The head cover was the traditional kaffiyeh, bound with bright camel-hair rope. The flowing tails of the headdress were drawn across faces, leaving only the eyes showing, as though the men were in a sandstorm.
But under the dishdashas they wore saronglike skirts, something typical of nomads of the southern Arabia Peninsula, not Egyptian Bedouins, who went bare legged.
Either way, though, Bedouins would have attracted no attention on the streets of Alexandria.
More importantly, they had ordered everyone into the administration tent, the largest of several such canvas structures.
This one was where records were kept and artifacts stored until the end of each day, when they were removed for safekeeping to the basement of the National Museum of Alexandria. This tent was the only one large enough to hold the entire crew remaining aboveground, which was why they were there under the watchful eyes of two of the Bedouins. If that was what they really were.
At first, Fafal had thought these men meant to steal whatever antiquities were on hand. Bedouins were notorious for plundering unguarded archaeological sites for artifacts to sell to unscrupulous dealers in such things. But stealth, not force, was the common method. Perhaps these men were not after artifacts.
Also, the strange Bedouins communicated mostly with gestures but occasionally in a language Faful had never heard before. Perhaps they were not Bedouin at all.
Shielded from the fitful sea breeze, the interior of the tent was going from uncomfortably hot to stifling, but the men with the guns seemed not to notice. Two of them had carried a wooden box outside. Though the flap of the tent was closed, Fafal could hear their sandals crunching in the sandy soil, toward the Alabaster Tomb.
What were they after?
His question was answered moments later when the ground shook with a muffled explosion.
Faful’s first reaction was even more puzzlement. Why would they blow up the Alabaster Tomb? If it was antiquities they were after, destroying the work already done at the dig was going to also destroy what they wanted. Besides, the sound would draw the police.
Unless these men had arranged otherwise.
A few Egyptian pound notes of baksheesh could guarantee the indifference of all three street-level law-enforcement agencies—municipal police, Tourist Police or Central Security Forces—to any event smaller than a nuclear blast.
That still left the question, why?
Less than a hundred yards away and nearly a hundred feet down, Lang played his flashlight on the water gathering around his feet. Only an inch or so a few minutes ago, it was trickling over the top of his ankle-high boots now.
He sensed Rossi was making the same observation. “How long do you think it will take to run out of air or drown if we stay here?”
“Do not think of such things. Our crew will dig us out before there is even such a possibility.”
Lang started to say that if, as he believed, an explosion had sealed them in, the crew above were probably not free to rescue anyone. They were either dead, wounded or being restrained from taking action.
Instead, he said, “On the off chance they can’t do it quickly enough, is there another exit here somewhere?”
The fact oxygen was getting thinner and thinner in the air provided one answer he didn’t want to hear.
“Wealthy Greeks and pre-Christian Romans were entombed in sepulcra, what we would today call mausoleums, rather than simple tombs. They were like small houses, complete with wall paintings, sculpture and housewares. We are in a rather elaborate example. It was customa
ry to leave a small hole at the top so visitors, family and friends of the deceased might share food and wine with the spirit of the dead.”
“So, there would be one here?”
The doubt in Rossi’s tone was not encouraging. “Possibly, but this hole would have never been large enough for an adult to get through.”
“But it would at least let in air.”
“My friend, this tomb has been here for more than two millennia, below ground level for almost as long. Whatever aperture might have existed in the ceiling would have long been sealed by dirt and vegetation.”
“True,” Lang agreed, “but two thousand years of debris and vegetation has got to be easier digging than solid rock.” He shifted his light to the ceiling. “And trying to find it beats waiting to either suffocate or drown.”
“But my crew . . . ,” Rossi protested.
“If they are able to dig us out, swell. I, for one, don’t intend to bet my life on it.”
Muttering among some of the crew who had come down here with them suggested they shared Lang’s feelings.
Lang swept the beam of his flashlight upward. Where the ceiling had fallen, roots of vegetation grasped downward like bony fingers.
“I doubt you will find anything,” Rossi commented.
“Better hope I do. In case you haven’t noticed, the water is already halfway to my waist and rising.”
Although he couldn’t see it in the darkness, Lang would have bet Rossi was in the midst of a very Italian shrug. “Even if you find such a thing, how will you reach it?”
Good question.
Iris Garden, Atlanta
Gurt took Manfred by the hand, keeping her voice level. “We will go home now.”
“Aw, Mom,” the little boy protested, “Wynn Three and Grumps and me were just beginning to have fun.” His eyes flicked to her face, noting she was unpersuaded. “And Wynn Three doesn’t have to . . .”
Another look at his mother’s face told him the argument, if there had been one, was over.
Paige, startled by the abruptness of Gurt’s decision to leave, asked, “What . . . ?”
But she was speaking to Gurt’s back.
Her hand clasping Manfred’s, the other on the butt of the Glock in her pocket, Grumps grudgingly following, Gurt climbed the gentle hill, feet planted firmly through the crust of ice with each step. When she reached street level, she had a better view of her surroundings. Randy’s SUV was still parked in front of her house, although the tinted glass prevented her from seeing if he was in it. After his insistence on accompanying her, she doubted he would have returned to the vehicle while she was still in the park.
She almost missed it: about a hundred yards away, a streak, a trough in the coating of ice on the hillside on the opposite side of the park, where it looked like something had been dragged. Her eyes followed the trail to a pair of frozen shallow ponds connected by a short stream, that part of the park directly across from the house. The ice on the lower pool had been broken and something was extending out of it, something that could be a fallen branch, explaining the shattered ice or . . .
Or a human arm.
The distance was too great to be sure, but she wasn’t going to delay reaching the security of the house to find out. She increased her pace, almost dragging Manfred in her haste.
Then she stopped. Ambling toward her was one of Atlanta’s homeless, a man pushing a grocery-store cart filled to overflowing with an assortment of rags, a clear plastic trash bag of tin cans and junk she could not identify.
Agency training had made her permanently aware of her surroundings, alert to anomalies. With ice on the ground and the temperature below freezing, anyone with a modicum of sanity would have sought refuge in any of a number of the city’s shelters or, at least, found a steam vent over which to camp. His clothes, an orange ski jacket and heavy sweat pants, though dirty, were not torn, not the ragged hand-me-downs that were the uniform of most of society’s jetsam. Add to these observations the fact that no stringy hair hung out from beneath the watch cap and he appeared to have shaved recently.
The shoes were the clincher, sneakers that looked like one of the more expensive Nike models. The footwear was always the giveaway. Although a torn and laceless pair would have been more in keeping with the persona someone was trying to create, no professional was going to risk wearing anything not securely bound to the foot. A fight in which a shoe might come off with a kick, a chase in which pursuer or pursued lost the race because of the loss of a shoe . . . No, shoes were the one part of a disguise no one who knew what he or she was doing would compromise.
Stifling her impulse to just pick Manfred up and flee, Gurt bent over, pretending to adjust his jacket and giving her an opportunity to look behind without obviously doing so. She was not surprised to see a second man, his lower face covered by a muffler shoved into the turned-up collar of his overcoat.
Miles?
He had promised to have a man or two keep watch, like the one who had come out of nowhere the night of the attempted firebombing. But this was no surveillance, not two men in this weather, converging at once on a sidewalk glazed with ice. She recognized the classic maneuver intended to surround an enemy before he was aware of what was happening.
For an instant, she considered brandishing the Glock. Perhaps seeing that she was armed would make whoever these men were back off. Unlikely. More probable they were armed, too. A sudden display of a weapon could precipitate gunplay with the chance of a stray shot hitting Manfred.
No, surprise was her only logical weapon, to continue as though she suspected nothing, turning on the false tramp at the last moment. Nonchalantly, she shifted Manfred to her other side, the one away from the approaching stranger.
Usually, in dangerous situations, her mind seemed to slow down as it worked out points of attack, favorable angles and the like. As she closed with the homeless look-alike, she thought about a quick shot through her coat, another at the man behind before he could react. No, foolish. What if, as improbable as it sounded, they were exactly what they appeared to be: a hobo and a guy just coincidentally walking down a quiet residential street?
Mostly, though, she was considering Manfred’s safety.
And where the hell were Miles’s people?
Cemetery of Terra Santa
If there had been any doubt as to their peril, it was dispelled by the sound of rushing water. The flooding of the corridor outside had apparently defeated the braces against the water pressure on its walls. Water was up to Lang’s waist and he was taking two or three deep breaths at a time just to keep a minimum of air in his lungs. He was experiencing a mild dizziness, the first signs of oxygen starvation. He could hear the crew panting in the dark like a pack of exhausted dogs as the lights on their miner’s helmets moved, fruitlessly seeking an escape route.
“I don’t think we can wait for your people,” he gulped to Rossi.
“You have a plan?” Rossi croaked back.
“Maybe.”
Lang played his light around the chamber until it centered on the place the stone slab had become invisible underwater. Moving slowly to conserve breath, he sloshed through the water until his foot touched something solid. With the next step, he climbed on top.
“That will help little,” Rossi gasped. “The water will continue to rise. You will drown on that piece of rock.”
Lang shook his head. “Not if I’m not on it.”
“But, how . . . ?”
Rossi’s gaze followed Lang’s flashlight to the roots hanging from the ceiling. “You cannot reach them. Even if you could—”
“I appreciate your eternal optimism,” Lang snapped a little harsher than he had intended. “How about a little help instead?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m guessing if there was a hole in the ceiling of this sepulcrum, it would be right over where the sarcophagus was.”
“So? It is nearly ten meters high. You cannot reach it.”
Rather than expe
nd breath uselessly, Lang swung his light among the now-silent crew. Picking the smallest man he could see, he beckoned. “You, come here.”
“Dante,” Rossi said. “His name is Dante, like the poet.”
Rossi translated and the man cautiously joined Lang on the stone slab. Lang handed him a hand pick one of the crew had dropped and said haltingly, waiting for Rossi to translate each phrase while pointing to the roots overhead, “Dante, here is what we’re going to do: you climb onto my shoulders and see if you can snare one of those roots with the pick. Do you think you can climb it?”
Dante, short, squat and muscular, listened to Rossi and nodded enthusiastically, beginning to see hope where there had been none before.
Lang continued, using his hands to illustrate. “When you get close enough, I want you to use that pick to dig just above us, capisce?”
He waited for Rossi’s translation, just to make sure.
Dante nodded understanding again, this time smiling.
On the first attempt, the poet’s namesake leaped from Lang’s shoulders, pick extended, missed a large cluster of roots and splashed into the rapidly accumulating water. Though the effort would have produced howls of laughter under normal circumstances, no one even chuckled.
Dante climbed onto Lang’s shoulders again, this time directing the light on his miner’s helmet from one clump of roots to another before making a decision. Lang let go of the man’s ankles as Dante leaped again. This time he succeeded in grasping a tangle of roots, climbing upward with the agility of a monkey. Had the task not been far from complete, Lang would have congratulated himself on his choice of men.
There was still a long way to go, and the humid air was getting thinner as the water rose.
Almost without thought, Lang transferred his BlackBerry and wallet from his pants pocket to the one in his shirt.
His one arm and his legs wrapped around the root cluster to hold him in place, Dante took a one-handed swing at the roof of dirt, roots and remnants of stone ceiling. He was rewarded by being pelted with a curtain of loose dirt. Undeterred, he took another swing with the same result. Below, the crew, the lamps on their helmets trained upward, watched in silence. The only sounds were the bite of Dante’s pick accompanied by the splash of detritus freed from the earthy roof, and the collective gasps for breath.