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

by Jon Land

  “Yes, here.”

  Shoshanna Tavi pried Danielle’s hands off her jacket and almost laughed. “I didn’t know illusions were a side effect of your condition. Look around you.”

  Danielle jammed her gloved hands inside her pockets and gazed about at the massive structure of the Ulysses GBS. Huge cranelike towers rose in equidistant corners of an inner rectangle of what she imagined as a fortlike structure. Below, huge pointed retaining walls had been erected around the base to protect the complex from the powerful waves of even a hurricane or the thrust of an iceberg.

  “This is a floating death trap,” Danielle insisted.

  “We’re not actually floating at all,” Tavi said. “GBS, you see, stands for ‘gravity-based system,’ meaning this rig has a concrete base driven into the ocean floor. We’re standing over seven hundred feet up atop more than a million tons.” She shook her head. “No, the only way you’ll die out here is if I kill you myself.”

  Danielle gazed at the icebergs floating in the distance, looking like flecks of frosting atop a dark chocolate sea. A pair of large barges zigzagged slowly away from them, heading toward the Ulysses.

  “They’re just practicing,” Shoshanna Tavi said, following her eyes.

  “At what?”

  “When we get an iceberg alert those barges are dispatched to either blow the berg from its path, or lasso it to change its direction.”

  “Did you say lasso?” Danielle asked her.

  “Just like a rodeo, only with heavy-gauge steel cable instead of rope. Once the barges get hold of a berg, they tow it into a different course so it’s guaranteed to miss the Ulysses.”

  “They practice a lot?”

  “All the time, I’m told. You can never be too careful.”

  Danielle walked away from Tavi, listening to the heavy clank of machinery battle the wind for supremacy. The men in hard hats and cold-weather suits blew misting breath from their mouths as they coaxed oil from the ocean floor several hundred feet below. Its strong, bitter smell permeated the air and clung to everything it touched.

  Danielle swung to find Shoshanna Tavi right on her heels. “If you want to be careful, then listen to me, Captain. It wasn’t oil that got those Americans killed in the Judean, it was something they found in the cave above the site. A discovery somebody desperately wants to keep secret. That’s why they were killed . . . and why we will be too, unless you do something.” Tavi reached out to grab her arm and Danielle swiped it away. “I’m a liability now, and so are you because they think we’re onto whatever it is they’ve been trying to keep secret.”

  Shoshanna Tavi looked as if she almost found that funny. “Do I look like I give a shit?”

  “You should; you’re in as much danger as I am.”

  Danielle gazed at the men working nonstop on the levels that spiraled over her. She had the feeling she was trapped in a vast open shaft. The machinery continued to churn and grind, enclosed within covered housings to shield it from the slap of the wind and the water as it pulled oil up through the dark depths below. Just beyond there was a trio of modular seven-story buildings, set in a U, which contained the offices and living quarters for the three hundred workers on board the Ulysses at any time. Three hundred workers who, if Danielle’s hunch proved right, were about to come under siege.

  Shoshanna Tavi’s hand crept inside her jacket. “Just get moving.”

  Danielle looked at the gun Tavi was ready to draw. “Kill me, Captain, and you’ll only save whoever’s out there the trouble.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 54

  B

  en knew he could expect bad news when Nabril al-Asi asked to meet him outside the office, even worse when the colonel was late. He sat sipping strong coffee laced with cardamom in a small outdoor Jericho cafe that was virtually deserted this late in the afternoon. Checked his pager again, in case he had somehow missed a message from Danielle.

  Where is she? What has happened?

  They had not spoken since meeting with Ari Coen the day before. Ben had returned home from Father Mike’s expecting there would be a message on his answering machine and called Danielle at home when there wasn’t. He left the first of a dozen message on both her apartment machine and office voice mail. Tried beeping her to no avail.

  After lunch he had finally phoned al-Asi and asked the colonel to see what he could find out. Two hours later the colonel had called back and suggested they meet here.

  As he sipped his coffee, Ben finally saw al-Asi’s Mercedes pull up to the curb. The colonel climbed out and approached Ben’s canopied table, missing his usual smile but holding a manila envelope in his hand.

  “I’m afraid the news isn’t good, Inspector.”

  Ben leaned forward and nearly spilled his coffee.

  “Pakad Barnea has apparently disappeared. According to my sources she has not been seen in over a day. Her Jeep was recovered outside a medical office building in Jerusalem, but she never went inside to see any doctor.”

  Ben’s mouth had gone bone-dry. It was hard for him to speak. “That’s all?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. A man she was briefly acquainted with was murdered two nights ago. Another American. A man named Wynn.”

  “The treasure hunter she told me about ...”

  “One bullet to the head, I’m told.”

  “Just like the Americans in the desert.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.” Al-Asi tried to pump some hope into his voice. “But no blood was found in or around Pakad Barnea’s Jeep and there were no signs of a struggle.”

  “They’ve got her, they must.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Ben said and tightened his hands into fists as an empty feeling of despair built up inside him.

  “Perhaps I can help,” al-Asi offered, sliding his chair closer to the table so he could lay his manila envelope atop it. He unclasped the envelope and removed a single color photograph. “Does this look familiar, Inspector?”

  Ben’s gaze widened and he snatched the picture from the colonel’s hand. “It’s the red cross the killers wear tattooed on their forearms,” he said, eyes locked on the blunt, wedge-shaped arms that formed the cross. “But it looks different somehow.”

  “That’s because you’re looking at it the opposite way. The tattoo makes the cross look upside down.”

  “The sign of the devil,” Ben realized. “The one that Abid Rahman identified from a half century ago and then again last week.”

  Al-Asi nodded. “But not the sign of the devil at all. This insignia, better known as a cross patee, was used by the Knights Templars almost a thousand years ago.”

  “What are the Knights Templars?”

  “An elite order of soldiers who grew out of a small military band formed by the church to protect pilgrims visiting Palestine after the First Crusade. They actually obtained papal sanction for their order and effectively became the church’s private army. The earliest guerrilla fighters, some call them. They originally wore the insignia of a red cross just like this as a shoulder patch and later on the left lapel of their robes.”

  “And now?”

  “By all accounts, they don’t exist anymore, at least not in their original form. They continue in a sense as members of the York Rite of the Masons, not soldiers. I believe you can join over the Internet. The annual fee is one hundred American dollars. For that you get a patch, a certificate, and four newsletters a year.”

  “Obviously, some of them still take their work more seriously.”

  “Quite. I did some additional checking, contacted a number of my sources with knowledge of paramilitary activities. Apparently the Vatican has been quite active in providing a regular number of elite commandoes with specialized training they wouldn’t need just to keep order at papal masses. This dates back to the early days after World War II when Pius had real reason to fear for his life. By all indications, he must have recruited soldiers from all over Europe with a strong allegiance to the c
hurch and ordered the Knights Templars reestablished to protect him. Placed them under the auspices of the Swiss Guard, in the guise of the defunct Noble Guard, so no one would be the wiser.”

  “What does killing archaeologists have to do with protecting the pope?”

  “Nothing, because someone at the Vatican must have decided that the Knights Templars had another more important role.”

  Ben could feel the coffee cup cooling between his hands. “Starting in 1948, of course, when they wiped out Daws’s team in Ephesus. Then last week they murdered the Americans in the Judean Desert. Protecting the same secret both times, because one of these Knights couldn’t bring himself to destroy the scroll Daws found when he had the chance. Buried it for a second time instead.”

  “Necessitating his return. Or, at least, the return of his successors.”

  “Too bad we don’t know who he is.”

  As if on cue, al-Asi finally flashed his familiar smile. “Perhaps we do.” With that, al-Asi removed a single sheet of paper from inside the same manila envelope. He straightened its folds and handed it to Ben.

  “The man in this picture was caught innocently by a journalist in the background of a shot that later ran inLook magazine in 1948. Not that anyone really noticed, Inspector. Until now.”

  Ben could tell the reproduction had been enlarged and very likely enhanced by a computer. It showed a powerfully built man with chiseled features approaching St. Anne’s Gate outside the Vatican. The man’s rolled-up sleeves revealed the tattoo of the now-familiar red cross along his right forearm.

  “You’re saying this is the man, Colonel?”

  “Computers can do miraculous things with faces these days, Inspector, especially with the power and access to databases a man like Ari Coen has. Why, his equipment can take a picture shot in 1948 and use distinguishing facial features to age it indefinitely in the course of the search.”

  Ben again studied the grainy shot of a sharply angular face dominated by a pointed chin. Even in the black and white shot it was clear the man had olive skin and jet-black hair cropped close to his head. The dark spheres of his eyes seemed to have swallowed all of the whites and his eyebrows almost joined in the center.

  “I took the liberty of showing this picture to Abid Rahman, Inspector,” the colonel continued. “When the shock finally wore off, and I was able to calm him down, he indentified the man in the picture as the same man he escorted into the Judean Desert as a boy fifty-two years ago. Rahman was being sedated when I left.”

  “Who is the man in the picture, Colonel?”

  “His name is Gianni Lorenzo,” al-Asi replied, “once a captain in the Italian army and currently head of the Vatican’s Swiss Guard.”

  * * * *

  I

  was also able to locate this,” the colonel continued, reaching into a different pocket as Ben held the computer-enhanced picture of Gianni Lorenzo before him. It seemed to tremble in his hand.

  Al-Asi unfolded a copy of a newspaper article and handed it to Ben. Ben saw that the logline read “TURKEY” and the date at the top was “April 10, 1948.” A photocopying machine had cut off part of the article but the picture was clear enough.

  “Courtesy of the London Times,” the colonel explained, “and unfortunately the only item they had in their archives pertaining to the Winston Daws expedition.”

  The picture showed Daws, a tall, strapping man with thinning hair and glasses, standing in the center of the students who had accompanied him to Ephesus, where all but one had died four weeks after this picture had been taken. Daws had his arms around the shoulders of the students on either side of him, young men who at that point had only one month to live. A camera hung from a strap around Daws’s neck. Ben tried to pick out Mordecai Lev, the only one to survive, but couldn’t even imagine what the leader of the Amudei Ha’aretz had looked like all those years ago.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t do better,” said al-Asi.

  Ben was about to pocket the clipping when a new thought made him return his attention to it. What if.. .

  “If there’s anything else I can do, Inspector . . .”

  “There is,” Ben told him, looking up from the article. “If you can find a way of tracing correspondence in and out of Daws’s camp. Postal records, perhaps.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Addressees where Daws may have sent letters, parcels, reports—anything.”

  Al-Asi didn’t look too optimistic about the prospects, but he used his Montblanc pen to make a notation in a burgundy leather notepad. “I’ll check.”

  “Phone records too, from anywhere he was likely to have called from in Turkey.”

  “It is doubtful such records still exist.”

  “But you’ll try.”

  “Of course.”

  “And one more thing: an inventory from the crime scene.”

  “Again, I doubt the Turkish officials—”

  “It was British nationals who were murdered, Colonel. You may have better luck with Britain’s Foreign Office or even Scotland Yard.”

  Al-Asi nodded and made some more notations on the small pad. “And what will you be doing in the meantime, Inspector?” he asked, looking up.

  Ben folded the picture of Gianni Lorenzo into threes and stuffed it into his pocket. “Visiting the one man who can help me get Lorenzo before it’s too late.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 55

  F

  rom the Café, Ben drove straight to Rabbi Mordecai Lev’s settlement outside of Hebron, cutting through a barren plain that had once been home to row after row of fertile olive groves. He remembered the groves from his boyhood and wondered what had happened to them. It would have been easy to blame the Israelis, but the truth was Palestinians had probably let the fields fall into deep neglect before abandoning them altogether.

  The first thing Ben noticed was the absence of spotters on the roadside, calling ahead to alert the settlement guards of his—or anyone’s—impending arrival. He found this strange and was at once alert as he approached the settlement’s gate.

  The gate was open, blowing back and forth slightly in the breeze. Even from this distance he could see that no one manned the guard towers and the settlement grounds looked empty.

  Ben slowed when he neared the open gate, still expecting a guard to appear and ask for his identification. But no one approached his car. The post had been abandoned.

  He drove on into the complex.

  * * * *

  D

  anielle had slept in the cabin through the bulk of the day. The effects of the sedatives used in her long flight had taken their toll. To revive herself, she finally began pacing back and forth in the small cabin in which she had been locked. Judging from the appointments, the cabin must have belonged to a member of the Ulysses GBS’s senior crew. There was a cot, a cramped bathroom, and a security system featuring a close-circuit monitor capable of zeroing in on any part of the platform.

  Danielle considered the option of picking the lock and taking her chances back on deck. Whatever Shoshanna Tavi’s orders might have been to the contrary, Danielle felt certain the woman from Shin Bet intended to make sure she never left the Ulysses GBS alive. But she was also just as certain that the same force that had killed the American geological team and J. P. Wynn might beat her to the task. Danielle had nothing to lose, then, but also no plan to pursue at the present time. She wondered where Ben was now, if he had been any more lucky than she, when an alarm began to ring.

  * * * *

  B

  en saw the first of the bodies at the same moment he smelled the bitter stench of cordite and sulphur hanging unwelcome in the air. There were two corpses lying facedown in the ankle-high undergrowth. Each had been shot multiple times. Both their weapons were still shouldered.

  Ben pressed on, drawing closer to the completed structures, the smell of gunpowder residue strengthening. He could see the effects of small arms fire on buildings now, their concrete exter
iors dappled and pockmarked, windows shattered or fragmented amid blackened concrete. An arm lay over the top of the nearest guard tower. Clearly, Gianni Lorenzo’s Knights Templars had gone for more than just head shots this time: they had struck during daylight hours in an all-out attack.

  The dry wind whistled, sounding like laughter, and Ben spun about, gun held ridiculously in hand as if it might help him fend off the killers who had been here and gone. He approached a building with drawings pasted across neat rows of windows, children’s drawings done in crayon and fingerpaint. A few had magazine cutouts pasted into themed collages. Around the artwork, the glass had been shattered randomly, leaving some of the drawings flapping in the wind.