A Walk in the Darkness - [Kamal & Barnea 03]

by Jon Land

  * * * *

  A Walk in the Darkness

  [Kamal & Barnea 03]

  By John Land

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

  * * * *

  THE PLOT

  JERUSALEM, CIRCA A.D. 33

  T

  he old doctor heard heavy feet sloshing through the mud before he saw the two shadowy figures lugging a third between them.

  “I’ve been waiting since sundown, Captain,” the doctor said, holding the door open. “Hurry up and get him inside.”

  The soldiers carried the man into the dim glow cast by the room’s oil light. They smelled like the rank and spoiled street muck that coated their feet. Perspiration, strong and salty, glistened on their brows and dropped from their cheeks. The trail of blood that had speckled the mud in their wake followed them across the stone floor.

  “Lay him on the table,” the doctor ordered. He closed the door behind him and made sure all the shutters were latched. “He is still alive, I presume.”

  “We wouldn’t have bothered, if he wasn’t,” the captain replied, straightening the unconscious man’s legs upon a heavy wood table matted with straw that crackled under his weight.

  “A fool’s errand, nonetheless,” the doctor said, approaching the table with lantern in hand.

  “We all have our orders.” The captain frowned. “To follow whether we approve of them or not.”

  “I’m not a member of your Roman guard.”

  “You are a citizen, all the same.”

  “But not a miracle worker.” The doctor moved his lantern closer to the prisoner and ran it along the length of his body, stopping at his head, where plum-colored blood soaked the table in a widening swatch. “Do your superiors really expect to get away with this?”

  “They have no choice.”

  The doctor looked up from the prisoner and swallowed hard. “And this has no chance.”

  “Just do your part. What happens afterward is not your concern.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “My orders are to kill you.”

  The doctor laid a goatskin bag containing his instruments on a stone pedestal within easy reach of the table. “Then I suppose I should get started.”

  He lifted a pot from the open flame where he had set it long before to boil and placed it too on the pedestal next to a rag. Next he removed the first instrument from his bag and inspected it in the dull glow of the oil light.

  “All the same, Captain, even if this works it will change nothing.”

  “You’d better hope it does,” the captain said grimly, “for all our sakes.”

  * * * *

  THE DIG

  EPHESUS, TURKEY, 1948

  H

  ow does the work go today, Sayin Daws?”

  Winston Daws redoubled his handkerchief and dabbed the sweat from his forehead. The four-post tent shielded him from the sun, but not the heat and humidity. “Slowly,” he told Kamir, the Turkish work foreman who had just returned to the site with fresh supplies.

  Kamir shrugged and his forehead wrinkled with concern.

  Daws went back to the microscope set on the table beneath him, hoping to find some clue in the minor writings and artifacts his team had found thus far. Around him the group of young archaeologists were busy excavating twelve separate square trenches. Their painstaking work progressed very slowly, and he had begun to fear that the lack of tangible finds would begin to take its toll on their eagerness and enthusiasm. The group had been at it for nine weeks now, the many abandoned spots that had yielded nothing noticeable from the darker dirt used to plug holes. The sum total of their descent through the ages barely filled five airtight storage canisters, one for each of the different uncovered layers distinguishing the ancient settlements that had been built atop each other.

  But Daws had reason for optimism. Recent finds of iron fragments indicated they were at last drawing closer to the target era of the first century a.d. This coming as the sun began to bake the air with the daytime temperatures unseasonably stretching well into the nineties.

  Kamir hovered next to Daws under the tent that provided the site’s only shade. “Perhaps, Sayin Daws, today is the day you will tell me what you are really looking for.”

  “This is strictly an educational expedition, Kamir. You know that.”

  “As I know what it cost you to secure the necessary permits.” Kamir smiled slightly, showing a hint of his pearl-white teeth. “Two of the Turkish officials were my cousins.”

  Daws again moved his eye from the microscope. “You have waited all these weeks to mention that?”

  “Because it occurs to me that your young disciples do not know the truth either.” Kamir’s eyes filled with trepidation. “And that they may be in danger.”

  “That is not your concern.”

  “Two of them are also my cousins, Sayin.” The foreman shielded his eyes and gazed outward. Beyond the tent Daws’s students were busy at work, their faces tinted a pale coral by the breeze-blown dust. “That makes it my concern.”

  “This is Ephesus, Kamir,” Daws said, recalling his earliest study of the region as a London schoolboy. Located on the Aegean coast in southwestern Turkey, the rolling, fertile plains and hills of Ephesus had yielded such finds as the Basilica of St. John, the Library of Celsus, and purportedly the final resting place of the Virgin Mary. But this site was located in the middle of the area’s arid bushy lowlands miles from any other reported find, an area known only for mundane and previously charted settlements that had never produced anything of profound significance.

  “And in Ephesus there isalways danger,” Daws continued, “which explains why I have already taken the precautions I have.”

  Kamir and Daws both eyed the four Turkish soldiers positioned strategically about the perimeter. They were rotated in three shifts, on duty twenty-four hours a day. But that was only a small part of the expense being incurred by Daws through the course of this expedition. In addition to the field archaeologists, there was a surveyor to make the plans, a photographer to maintain a visual record of selected finds, a registrar and draftsmen to receive and record those finds, and technicians to treat and preserve the most delicate discoveries. The day-to-day feeding and housing of such a large staff was a massive undertaking in itself that had already begun to take its toll on Daws’s resources.

  But the import of what he was seeking required that he not abandon the search, especially now that at least limited evidence of the era in question had been found.

  “Still, Sayin,” Kamir persisted, “my fear is that—”

  “Bir sey bulduk! Bir sey bulduk!”

  The excited shout came from one of the excavated trenches, the deepest where one of Kamir’s cousins had been at work all morning. “Iste! Cabuk!” the young man shouted. “Sanlrlm, aradiglmlzl bulduk! Cabuk!”

  Kamir swung fast toward the now standing Daws. “He says that—”

  “He found something,” Daws completed, and reached for his camera before heading toward the trench.

  “Cabuk! Cabuk!” Kamir’s nephew continued to urge excitedly.

  Daws eased the camera’s strap over his head and dropped down into the trench, closely followed by Kamir. He could see the face of the foreman’s cousin was encrusted with chalk-white dust and yellowed dirt. Sweat painted streaks down his cheeks and forehead. The young man thrust a yellowed finger toward a depression in the layer of earth he had uncovered, Daws recognizing the fortuitous discovery as a tomb, where the most meaningful finds were often made.

  He knelt over the depression and shifted his camera aside so it wouldn’t be in the way. Then he pulled a small whisk broom from his b
ack pocket and used it to gently brush away dirt and pebbles from a rectangular object, realizing it was made of wood. A small chest that was easily large enough to contain precisely the find he was searching for.

  Coughing the relentless dust from his lungs, Daws gently eased the chest from the depression in which it had lain for nearly two thousand years. The iron latch was still in place, preserved by the hard claylike texture of the dirt. Daws eased a pencil beneath the chest to check the integrity of its underside. Then, after being satisfied it was intact, he lifted the chest gingerly from the ground.

  “Is this what you have been looking for, Sayin?” Kamir asked him.

  Straightening slowly, Daws turned toward his foreman with the box in hand. “Let’s open it and find out.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  D

  anielle Barnea flipped the air-conditioning switch up higher as the hot sun of the Judean Desert baked her through the car’s glass. The wave of nausea she had felt passed quickly, and she returned all of her attention to the road. She had gotten the call while sitting in the doctor’s waiting room and had driven from the clinic straight to the West Bank.

  The final stretch of the drive to the crime scene took Danielle east through the Judean Desert toward the Dead Sea along a flattened dirt route. Around her the land was arid and scorched, only thin patches of gray vegetation scattered across the rock-strewn landscape. She could feel the dryness even in the cool air flooding the Jeep’s cabin. Besides occasional nomadic bedouin tribes, she knew there were no settlements anywhere for miles.

  At length, Danielle approached a makeshift military checkpoint just up ahead. She flashed her ID and an Israeli soldier swiftly waved her through toward a campsite set in the lee of the hillside another mile up the road. Israeli Defense Forces vehicles rimmed the encampment, along with enclosed jeeps bearing medical markings. White rectangular tents erected over worktables fluttered in the wind. Four miniature Quonset huts with canvas flap fronts rose haphazardly out of the desert like unwelcome brush, now watched over by armed soldiers. Danielle noticed wooden plates nailed to boards driven into the desert ground named three of the huts after American hotel chains in hastily scrawled printing: holiday inn, motel 6, and howard Johnson’s. A trio of old Land Rovers were parked to make use of what little shade there was, while not far away a pair of covered cargo trucks roasted in the sun. Up a steep rise, just beyond the camp, she could see a doorway-sized opening into the jagged stretch of hillside, also guarded.

  As she drew her Jeep to a halt near the others, Danielle got her first glimpse of the bodies covered by white plastic that crackled in the heat and wind. She climbed out of the car and walked toward the scene slowly. She noticed an Israeli army captain conferring with an old bedouin man in flowing white robes that billowed outward and headed toward him. The bedouin’s hands trembled badly, his eyes red, drawn, and gazing somewhere else. The Israeli captain saw her and slid away from the old man.

  “Pakad Danielle Barnea, Captain,” Danielle greeted, handing him her ID.

  The man took it reluctantly. “Captain Dov Aroche. We weren’t told anyone from National Police was coming,” he said, returning her identification after a cursory inspection.

  Danielle chose to ignore his words. “You were first on the scene?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then someone from your office was simply following procedure.”

  Captain Aroche did not relax. “I was under the impression this was a military matter, military jurisdiction.”

  “If there are security issues, yes. But the murder of foreign nationals is a civilian matter, unless terrorism is involved. Do you have any reason to suspect that here?”

  “We have fourteen bodies, all shot to death, apparently from very close range as they slept. Beyond that, I don’t know what to suspect at this point, Pakad.”

  “How many were American?” Danielle asked Aroche.

  “Twelve.”

  “Archaeologists, I was told.”

  The captain nodded. “I guess no one told them these hills were picked clean years ago.”

  Even though no stranger to carnage, Aroche sounded plainly unsettled. Danielle could smell tobacco smoke on him and a half-empty cigarette pack protruded from the lapel pocket of his shirt, the plastic hanging down over his nametag.

  She looked over his shoulder toward the old bedouin man. “He found the bodies, I take it.”

  The captain nodded. “There were four bedouins bringing supplies not long after dawn. The old man sent the others to go for help. They came upon one of our patrols three hours ago now.”

  “What else has he told you?”

  “Nothing. We can’t make sense of his language, even if he stopped ranting.”

  “Ranting?”

  The captain nodded. “He seems to know one of the dead. We have just finished compiling a list of their names from IDs we were able to recover.”

  “Show me this list.”

  Aroche hedged. “I’m not sure if I have—”

  “Now, Captain.”

  Aroche shrugged and reluctantly led Danielle to the hood of a truck that had become his temporary headquarters. Atop the hood lay an assortment of wallets, passports, and identification cards. Aroche snatched a pair of pages from beneath a rock that had kept them from blowing away in the breeze.

  “It’s preliminary,” he explained, handing it to Danielle with some reluctance, “but we still believe it to be complete.”

  “Very good, Captain,” Danielle said, grateful for the time Aroche had saved her.

  She scanned the handwritten list cursorily, until the ninth name stunned her. She swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and felt the hot, dusty air burn her mouth.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  I

  sraeli soldiers had parked their jeeps diagonally across the road, blocking Ben Kamal’s access to the Judean Desert. There were other ways to reach the reported crime scene, but only in the kind of utility vehicles capable of handling the terrain. This route running east from Bethlehem toward the Dead Sea, though unpaved, was naturally flat, manageable even for Ben’s Peugeot.

  Ben snailed his car to a halt even before the Israeli soldiers signaled him to stop. They took a long look at his white Palestinian license plates and then eased their hands to their automatic rifles.

  The leader, a sergeant, walked to the passenger side of Ben’s car. The private hung back, bringing a second hand to his rifle.

  “You have entered a restricted area,” the sergeant told Ben. “I must ask you to turn your vehicle around.”

  Ben produced his identification instead. “Inspector Bayan Kamal of the Palestinian police.”

  He had now spent five years as a detective in the West Bank after returning to his homeland to help train the Palestinian police force. His family had immigrated to the United States in 1967 shortly before the Six-Day War, though Ben had never considered a return until tragedy left him with nothing but memories in Detroit. Such a homecoming became an opportunity to start fresh with no baggage, he thought.

  Until he created some. While attempting to train the fledgling Palestinian police force in proper investigative techniques, Ben found himself mired in the case of a murdered cabdriver suspected of collaborating with the Israelis. Meeting the man’s widow and children gave him all the motivation he needed to uncover police corruption and a trail that led to a trio of officers who had killed and mutilated an innocent man.

  The resulting outcry when the police officers were found guilty by a Palestinian military court led, ironically, to Ben himself being labeled a traitor. He realized he had drastically misjudged the landscape and the politics, found himself shunned as an outsider who had run out of places to which he could flee. He thought he could outlast the atmosphere of mistrust, but after five years had found relative isolation to be the only way to accomplish that.

  The Israeli army sergeant inspected the ID, matching the picture of Ben’s face. He fl
apped the wallet closed and returned it, unimpressed.

  “I am sorry, Inspector, but you are out of your jurisdiction.”

  “I am here at the request of Pakad Danielle Barnea of the National Police.”

  “I know of no such request.”

  “She is the chief investigating officer at the crime scene in question.”

  The thick bands of muscle lining the sergeant’s neck tensed. “And my orders are to deny access to the area to all but those who have the proper authorization.”