Cam couldn’t really argue—Willum had other things to think about besides Astarte. “I’m going to keep looking if you’re okay with that.”
Willum nodded again. “Of course.”
“But first I better give Amanda an update. Can you let the guards know I want to talk to her through the gate?”
Astarte woke up in a dark room. She still felt very tired, like her body had sunk deep into her mattress. But she wasn’t on a mattress.
She fought to remember where she was—not home in Westford, and not in a hotel. It came to her—in the dome with Miss Clarisse. She reached up, her arm heavy, expecting to feel the tent above her. But there was only air. She couldn’t see much, but it didn’t feel big and airy like the dome she fell asleep in. And it smelled like a basement.
“Miss Clarisse?” she whispered. “Are you there?”
A flashlight flicked on, its beam shining right in her eyes. A man’s voice: “Don’t be frightened.”
Astarte gasped. She held her hand up to shield her eyes. “Who are you?”
“My name does not matter. I won’t hurt you as long as you do as I say.”
“Where is Miss Clarisse?” She knew she had to be brave. Like the princesses in the movies.
“I’m going to leave now. When I do, I’ll turn a light on for you. There’s some food and juice here for you.” She didn’t recognize the voice. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Don’t try to yell—nobody can hear you.”
Astarte heard a door open, then close. A light came on as the man promised. She looked around—she was in a bathroom. The cot she was on had been wedged into the bathtub; a tray with her breakfast rested on the sink near the door.
Climbing out of the tub, she walked to the door. She knew it would be locked, but she tried anyway. And there were no windows in the room either. She collapsed onto the toilet and eyed the food, her eyes pooling with tears. She should be hungry. But she was too scared to even try to eat.
Cam staggered through the front gate just before dawn. He had searched the entire compound but couldn’t find any sign of Astarte.
The explosion and radiation leak had, apparently, resulted in a change of orders. The lockdown had ended and compound residents who wished to leave were being ushered directly into a decontamination tent. Cam allowed himself to be hosed down and examined by a young medic.
“Looks like that bunny suit worked well. I’m detecting only low levels of radiation on you.”
“Should I take iodide pills?”
“They only work if you take them before exposure. But you should be fine.”
Cam jogged along the highway shoulder toward the SUV, barely visible in the dim light. At least he had been active—Amanda was stuck out in the desert, pacing, waiting for word. She ran out to meet him as he approached.
He shook his head. “Sorry. I couldn’t find her.”
Amanda buried her face in her hands and let out a single wail, the cry cutting through the night like a feral cat.
He wrapped her in his arms. “Listen,” he said. “If we didn’t find her that means she went someplace. Maybe she just took off during the commotion.”
“I’ve been in touch with Georgia,” she sobbed. “She’s been on the phone with the military people. Nobody’s seen her.”
“All right. Then she must be inside the compound still. We’ll just keep looking….”
Cam’s cell interrupted. He pulled it from his pocket. “Unknown. Should I take it?”
“It’s five in the morning and Astarte is missing,” she sniffled. “Of course take it.”
He nodded. “This is Cam.”
“I have the girl.” Cam’s breath caught in his throat. A deep voice, unfamiliar. Maybe a New York accent. Cam pressed the speaker button.
“Is she okay?”
“For now, yes.”
For now? “Who is this?”
“Charlie Boone.” He paused. “You know me as Boonie.”
Amanda’s eyes widened. She leaned into the phone. “What kind of game are you playing?”
“Believe me, this is not a game.” He sounded different, more authoritative. A chill passed through Cam—had Boonie’s dim-wittedness been an act?
“What do you want with her?” Amanda asked.
“It’s not what I want from her. It’s what I want from you.”
CHAPTER 9
“Cam,” Amanda said, “we have to do it.”
They were in the SUV, still parked on the side of the highway outside the desert compound. Boonie had made a simple demand: Persuade Willum to make another fuel cell and deliver it to him. It was no easy task, but at least Astarte was alive and safe. And there was no sense debating the morality of the action—they both knew they would do almost anything to ensure Astarte’s well-being. “It’s going to be tough. Willum is going to be more paranoid than ever. And more pissed at the feds—he probably thinks Clarisse was working for the them”
“Maybe she was.”
“Now Boonie says he’s working for the feds also,” Cam said. “But I’m not sure I believe him.”
“I do. It’s a perfect cover. It reminds me of an old Cold War thriller I read once, where an American spy lives as a homeless person in Eastern Europe for, like, thirty years, just waiting to make one drop.”
“So if they already have someone imbedded in the compound, why did they need to recruit me?”
“Good question. If you think about it, it’s a pretty good feint—recruiting someone to go undercover to distract from the bloke you’ve already snuck in. Or maybe the answer is that Boonie’s so imbedded that even Georgia and her team don’t know about it.”
“Well, if he really is working for the feds, I’d like to know when they got in the business of kidnapping little girls. First Ellis, now him.”
“Perhaps Willum is right to fear them. Perhaps they are out of control.”
“So how are we going to convince Willum to give them the fuel cell?”
Amanda shook her head. “We’re going to have to fool him, or trick him somehow. And we agree, right? We can’t tell Willum or Georgia that Boonie has her.”
“For now,” Cam said. Boonie had been clear: The deal was off if they blew Boonie’s cover. It was his only condition. “But it was weird he said we could tell Ellis and ask for his help.”
“Great. Just who we want to trust.” Amanda had rallied, as Cam knew she would. Now that she knew what they needed to do to free Astarte, she would devote her full energies to it. It was the not knowing that debilitated her.
“We might need his help. We might need him to get the government to back off.”
Amanda said, “This is the same deal Willum rejected a couple of days ago.” Ironically, because he had been loyal to the disloyal Boonie.
“Well, it’s our job to get him to accept it now.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the sun rise over the foothills. “So, it turns out there was a lot going on inside that compound that we didn’t know about,” Cam said. “Boonie not being who he said he was, Clarisse trying to steal the fuel cell, who knows what else….”
“And we mocked Willum for being paranoid.” Amanda said. “So was Clarisse working with Boonie; is that why she was trying to steal the fuel cell?”
“I don’t think so. Willum mentioned that Boonie was the only one who knew the fuel cell had been booby-trapped. If Clarisse and Boonie were working together, he would have warned her.”
“So why was Clarisse trying to steal it?”
Cam shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll ever know. Money, maybe? But it does make me wonder about her. When we found her body, she had a bag of the white powder in her pocket. Willum said it had gone missing.”
“So she stole that also?”
“Yup.” Cam reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “And check this out; I almost forgot about it. When I went back to search Clarisse’s tent, I found a Bible. This page was marked. Read the highlighted text. It’s Exodus 32,
Verse 20.”
“You ripped a page out of a Bible?”
Cam sniffed. “Damn straight. It might be a clue to help find Astarte.”
Amanda unfolded the paper and read aloud:
“Moses took the golden calf which they had made, melted it, ground it into fine powder, and mixed it with water. Then he made the people of Israel drink it.”
“We talked about this already. Making the people ingest the gold was an odd thing for Moses to do, but why did Clarisse focus on it?”
Cam felt like a guy in the eye doctor’s office as the ophthalmologist clicked through varying lens magnifications. “Which is clearer, lens one … or lens two? One … or two?” Nothing was clear; everything was blurry. But every click of the lens brought the picture more into focus.
He turned to Amanda. “Hold on. If you melt down gold, you get molten gold, not powder. So someone who knew the secrets of alchemy—one of the priests—must have transformed it to powder first. Powdered gold. Amanda, this passage is talking about making mfkzt.”
“Oh my God, you’re right. How did we not figure this out?” She stared at the Bible page. “But why would Moses feed the mfkzt to the people? Wasn’t this stuff supposed to just be for the pharaohs so they could speak to the gods?”
“Think about it. The Egyptians used the mfkzt to enhance spirituality. It was some kind of aphrodisiac, or mind-expander—that’s why the pharaohs were supposedly able to converse with their gods after ingesting it. So look at the timing of this passage. Moses comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments and finds that the people are worshiping the old gods, the golden calf. He’s pissed, but he also needs to convince them to abide by these new laws. Think about the story he’s trying to sell: ‘Listen up. I spoke to God. He told me to be your leader. He wrote down all these new rules you need to follow, including getting rid of your other gods. And one other thing: Only I can see him and talk to him. So you have to do everything I say.’” Cam shook his head. “It’s a pretty tough sell.”
Amanda brushed her hair out of her eyes with her hand. “So Moses melts down the gold, transforms it to mfkzt, and makes all the people drink it.”
“He knew how to make mfkzt from his days in exile, when he was in Serabit el Khadim, where they made the stuff.”
Amanda nodded. “Soon they start to feel all spiritual.” She paused for a second. Cam knew she had reached the same conclusion he had. But it was a tough thing to wrap your brain around.
Finally she took a deep breath. “Are we saying Moses got the Israelites to accept the bloody Ten Commandments by drugging them?”
Willum sat atop one of the domes, alone in a sniper’s nest, watching the sun rise. He tried to fight back the nausea, but finally gave into it and puked over the railing onto the curved dome roof. But the queasiness didn’t dissipate. Radiation sickness. He swigged some water and rinsed his mouth. At some point he’d need to get to the hospital. But he knew once he left the compound the feds would never let him back in.
Worse than the nausea was the depression. The realization that Clarisse had betrayed him had wormed its way into his gut and wouldn’t stop twisting. It had been bad enough that she tried to steal the fuel cell. From what he had figured out, she was trying to consummate the deal he had reneged on earlier in the week: Trade the fuel cell for an agreement the feds wouldn’t storm the compound. If so, and if that’s all it was, maybe she had the compound’s best interest at heart.
But the bag of white powder in Clarisse’s pocket was like a key unlocking a door that revealed a whole other layer of plotting and subterfuge. There was no denying the obvious: Clarisse had been drugging the compound residents, experimenting first on Boonie, using her position as self-appointed kitchen chief to feed white powder, the stuff the ancient Egyptians used to call mfkzt, to them all. Including Willum.
It hadn’t taken Willum long on the internet to retrace Clarisse’s steps. A quick Google search for white powder of gold revealed numerous testimonials regarding the spiritual benefits of the substance. The powder didn’t appear to be mind-altering like a drug or alcohol; rather, the substance seemed to make people more communal and self-sacrificing. As Willum read the testimonials, he pictured sit-in rather than rock concert. Not that Google was always the most reliable source, but most of the recipes called for one-quarter of a teaspoon of the powder to be diluted in a gallon of water, with a daily dosage of three ounces. So the bag Clarisse stole could easily feed the compound for weeks. Apparently the powder didn’t fully dilute, instead remaining suspended in a semi-gelatinous state in the distilled water. That’s probably why Clarisse had made things like clam chowder and pancake mix—thick, creamy meals that would hide the powder.
Now that he had solved the mystery, so many unexplained things suddenly made sense. The two-day fast Clarisse suggested was obviously a ruse to cleanse their systems in preparation for the mfkzt. Clarisse’s willingness to serve as head chef put her in perfect position to carry out her plan. The residents’ boundless energy, their enhanced spirituality, their new-found pack mentality, and even their willingness to die for their cause—all attributable to the ingestion of the white powder of gold. He shook his head. Clarisse had brought them to the edge of a Jim Jones-like catastrophe, the Kool-Aid taking the form of white powder of gold. And the terrifying, mind-numbing truth was that he, Willum Smoot, was the messianic figurehead they were willing to follow to the grave.
And he hadn’t even known it. Hadn’t a clue as to what she was orchestrating. Shit, he didn’t even get suspicious when she put up those goddamn posters of him.
He smacked himself on the side of the head. What, did he think he was so charismatic, so dynamic, such a natural leader that the residents would blindly follow him? Did he think he was some modern-day Moses? How could he have not realized how stupid that was, how utterly unfathomable it was?
He was Willum Smoot. A science geek. A fat loser. A paranoid ex-con. About as far from Moses as you could get.
Ellis Kincaid had been monitoring the situation at the compound. Frankly, he had no idea what was going on. Apparently Clarisse had done as instructed and tried to steal the fuel cell. But Smoot had booby-trapped it, killing her. Not a great situation—she had been a useful ally—but not a fatal blow to Ellis’s plans either.
But Ellis hadn’t foreseen the radiation fallout. And he hadn’t foreseen the abduction of Astarte. The first was simply bad luck—but eventually the radiation would dissipate and the compound would probably go back into lockdown. So no real change. But the second meant there were forces at play here that he knew nothing about. Ellis was not the only puppet master on the stage.
And the other guy seemed to have the bigger puppets.
Cam and Amanda spent the night searching the compound. They hung as the residents began to stir, hoping perhaps someone would have found Astarte. But after a couple of hours it had become obvious they were wasting their time. Boonie had her well-hidden.
“I’m not sure we’re doing much good hanging out here,” Amanda said. “We need to come up with a plan to get Willum to hand over the fuel cell.” Boonie had said he would phone them again at noon.
Cam started the engine of the SUV. “I’ve been trying to come up with something, but no luck,” Cam said.
“Maybe we should talk to Kincaid. He might have some answers. And if not, much as I despise him, he’s got the kind of devious mind that might concoct something.”
“We need to be careful with him. I think we have to assume he’s working with Boonie. Why else would Boonie suggest we contact him?”
Amanda mulled it over. “Which makes sense, if Boonie really is a federal agent.”
“It also makes sense if Boonie is a crook, and Kincaid is in cahoots with him,” Cam said. “That fuel cell would be worth millions, maybe even billions. I could see Kincaid selling out for that kind of cash.”
Amanda nodded. “Fair point. Either way, we should assume Kincaid will be reporting back to Boonie.”
&n
bsp; They drove for a few more minutes. Amanda sighed. “This still doesn’t add up. If Boonie and Kincaid are working together, why did Kincaid accuse Boonie of setting the roadside bomb?”
“You’re right. There’s something we’re missing.” Cam turned and smirked. “Mind if I try to beat some answers out of Kincaid?”
“Only if you get to him first.”
Ellis was only half-dressed, his hair still wet from the shower, when someone banged on his door. He zipped up his jeans. “Who is it?”
“Cam. And Amanda. Open the door.”
Shouldn’t they be at the compound, looking for the girl? He flicked the deadbolt and pulled the door open. Before he could brace himself Thorne bull-rushed him, driving his shoulder in Ellis’s bare chest and driving him to the carpeted floor. Straddling him, Thorne grabbed Ellis’s hair with his left hand, lifted his head a few inches and drove his right fist straight into Ellis’s nose. Ellis saw the rage in Thorne’s eyes, saw the determination in his clenched jaw, even saw the desperation in the way he threw the punch—as if the harder he hit Ellis, the more likely he would be to rescue Astarte. And there was nothing Ellis could do about any of it other than wait for the blow to land….
He must have passed out for a few seconds because when he awoke, still on the floor, Thorne was standing above him and Amanda was holding a bloodied white towel over his nose. He pushed her hand away, took the towel himself, and worked himself into a sitting position against the bed. Even the slight movement made his nose throb. Blinking back the tears, he forced his eyes to focus, then took an extra few seconds to calm himself before speaking. Ignore the pain; swallow the anger. At some point he would bloody Thorne a bit also, but for now he needed information.
“If you think I had anything to do with Astarte’s disappearance, you’re wrong.” He spat out some blood that had dripped into the back of his throat.
“You mean other than kidnapping her and driving her out there,” Thorne said.
Powdered Gold: Templars and the American Ark of the Covenant (Templars in America Series Book 3) Page 26