The 13th Tribe

by Robert Liparulo

  But this was Elias—

  He’d been shot in the chest. She pulled off a glove, careful not to detach the cord that kept it invisible. She probed the wound, and her finger slipped in. Something pulsed weakly against the tip, and she thought it was his heart.

  “Nevaeh,” Phin said, his voice squeaky.

  “All right, all right.” She brushed her fingers over Elias’s facemask, leaving a streak of blood, and stood, slipping her hand back into the glove. She looked across the parking lot toward the trees, depressed a button in her own mask by her earlobe, and said, “Jordan.”

  The boy’s voice came through an earbud. “What happened? Is that Elias—?”

  “He got shot. I need you to hide him and the guard. Hurry.”

  “Both? I can’t—”

  “Wait.” She leaned over and turned Elias’s suit on again. He vanished. No way a camera would pick up the hovering bloodstain. “Okay,” she said. “Just the guard. Drag him out between the cars, and don’t let the camera catch you. Move it.”

  She watched the tree across the lot until she saw the silhouette of Jordan’s eleven-year-old body descend from a branch and drop. Speaking to Ben’s eyes, she said, “Let’s go,” then stepped toward the doorway. Phin turned away, taking his bouncing peepers with him. Nevaeh and Ben entered the hallway and shut the door behind them.

  [ 3 ]

  With the smell of Elias’s blood still in her nostrils and her heart racing from the excitement of taking down the guard, Nevaeh hoped for more action—someone spotting their eyes or a security code that had changed since Ben’s informant had given it to him—anything that would force them to take a prisoner and get the intel they needed through good old-fashioned violence.

  And she meant good, as in God. After all, everything they did was for him. To get his attention, to please him. Anyone who had a hard time reconciling their methods with God’s Word hadn’t read the Old Testament. He ordered violence against his enemies, and all they were doing was carrying out those orders. Someone had to do it, and more people should; if they did, maybe the Tribe wouldn’t be so necessary and God would call them home. Finally.

  So bring it on, she thought. His furious wrath moves our muscles and cuts with our swords.

  But there would be no cutting tonight. After the incident with the guard outside, everything else flowed without a hitch, and she supposed that was for the best. Ben had outlined a contingency plan to cover the break-in, but the farther into the building they could be traced, the more likely their true agenda would be discovered. And that would blow their grand plans to make a statement against evil that the world wouldn’t soon forget.

  Ben had memorized the layout, and every door opened at his digital command. They coasted past glass-walled rooms inside which workers in hazmat suits layered electronic circuitry into silicon wafers, tested them on monstrous computers, and etched or silkscreened model and lot numbers on their surfaces. The three intruders lowered their heads to keep cameras from catching their eyes and turned their faces away from assembly personnel and guards even as they breezed past them, close enough to smell their perfume, aftershave, and sweat.

  Within minutes they’d found the company’s most secure storage room and the vault inside. Ben punched in a code, passed an infrared security chip over a reader, and pressed a fingerprint on a square of transparent film against a biometric scanner. The vault door opened, revealing shelves of aluminum Halliburton cases, labeled with numbers. With his back to Nevaeh he was completely invisible, so when he pulled a case off its shelf, it appeared to spring up and dance in the air on its own. An identical case materialized, drawn from a metamaterial pack on Ben’s back. It floated onto the shelf, and the original vanished into the pack.

  The case contained twenty microchips that would give them access to sophisticated military weapons, enough to level a city. These chips were backups of ones already in the Pentagon’s hands. Chances were they would be inventoried but never used, and the dummy duplicates Ben had left in their stead meant their theft would go unnoticed—at least until it was too late. Their tech wizard, Sebastian, had created them from specs provided by their informant, a man privy to top secret government contracts and who sympathized with their cause.

  The vault door closed, and Nevaeh and Phin followed Ben back to their point of entrance. Before exiting, Phin produced a can of spray paint and graffitied the hallway wall: STOP HELPING BUTCHERS! And on the opposite wall: THIS TIME, THIS FAR. NEXT TIME, ALL THE WAY.

  MicroTech had been the target of protests over their Pentagon contracts. The idea was to pin the attack on the break-in on radical peaceniks, content—this time—to demonstrate their ability to breach the company’s security. The guard’s claims of invisible beings would be chalked up to his head trauma, and the cameras would show that no one had penetrated any deeper than this hallway.

  Ben punched in a code, and they stepped into the night.

  [ 4 ]

  Back on his perch in the tree, Jordan watched through binoculars as the rear door opened and closed. A few moments later Elias appeared, slouched against the brick wall beside the door; someone had turned off his suit, probably to check on his condition.

  Lord, make him all right, he prayed. Elias was a bit scruffy, and sometimes his penchant for one-word answers came across as grouchy, but like Jordan he was partial to Western movies and comic books—Wolverine and G.I. Joe were their favorites. And over the years, Jordan had learned about God more from Elias than from any of the others, even Ben with his books and scrolls and big brain. Creed—who had remained home with Hannah, Toby, and Sebastian—once said that Elias’s instruction was like God’s “still small voice” coming to Elijah on the mountain, and Ben’s was God’s voice “like the roar of rushing waters and a loud peal of thunder” that the apostle John had heard in his dream.

  Through the binocs he saw Elias rise, and Jordan’s heart thumped with joy. Then he realized two of the others had lifted him, carrying him between them with Elias’s arms draped over their invisible shoulders. He appeared to be skimming over the pavement, his toes dragging behind, arms outstretched and head drooped like a crucified zombie. And that was just creepy.

  Jordan spoke into his mic, “Could you guys turn off your ghost suits now? You’re freaking me out.”

  Nevaeh popped into view on Elias’s left side, then Ben on his right. As they started up the berm, Jordan dropped down and looked around. “Where’s Phin?” Then he jumped and yipped in surprise.

  Phin’s suit beeped and he appeared behind Jordan, his gloved hand on his shoulder.

  Jordan swatted at it and stepped away. “Don’t do that!”

  Phin just laughed.

  Jerk.

  X I I I

  Nevaeh wanted only to get back to their rented van, then to their private jet and out of this city. Elias’s weight wasn’t a bother—she’d lugged much heavier things—but that guard would be waking soon. Everything had gone too smoothly to get caught now.

  She and Ben carried Elias past Jordan and Phin and pushed through the hole in the chain link they had let Jordan cut, which he had thought was “totally sick”: after spraying it with liquid nitrogen, the metal had broken under his fingers like ice. They traversed a park on the other side and piled into the van, laying Elias on the floor in the back. Ben and Jordan crouched next to him, Ben peeling the mask off Elias’s gray-bearded face.

  Nevaeh got into the passenger seat and yanked off her mask, releasing long black hair that flowed over her shoulders. She shook it out of her face and looked at Phin behind the wheel. He’d already removed his mask and was rubbing at the metamaterial paint with which they’d coated their eyelids.

  “This stuff is terrible,” he said. “Every time I blink, I have to force my eyes open again.”

  “But you’re so pretty,” she said. “You’d have made a beautiful glam-rocker.”

  He scowled at her, and she could see the crazy in his eyes. She tried to remember if Phin had always been a
bit bats. No, just hyper. The loony part had crept in slowly—like what, over a couple centuries? Seemed like it.

  “So,” she said, “what are you waiting for? Let’s go.”

  He started the van, but before he could put it into gear, Ben stopped him. “A second, please.” In the glow of the dome light he nodded at the others, bowed his head, and they began to pray. Correction: the three conscious males prayed; Nevaeh couldn’t get into it, not this time. Ben intoned the same request for God to accept their work she had heard how many times? She’d lost count long ago. His voice was deep and measured, every word perfectly formed.

  “. . . guide our labor, for we are your obedient children . . .”

  Oh please, she thought, then squeezed her eyes shut. I mean, please . . . do guide us back into your arms at long last. At long, long last. After so many years, it was hard to maintain confidence in their missions. But if she stopped believing, their torment would never end, and just the thought of that sent spiders skittering through her stomach. She felt as though she’d been hanging from a ledge by her fingers forever. The abyss of nothingness below her kept her fighting for leverage, spurring her to struggle and strain. But how long before her muscles simply could not take anymore?

  Every mission, every killing was her cry for help, for forgiveness—so many cries that her soul was bleeding and raw. Still, every cry had apparently fallen on deaf ears.

  She realized Ben had stopped talking, and opened her eyes. He was staring at her, his intense gaze piercing holes into her. Phin and Jordan were watching as well.

  “Amen,” she said.

  Elias pulled in a loud, sharp breath and sat straight up. He pushed himself back to rest against the van’s rear doors, reached into a pocket, and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette and lighter. A shaking hand put the cigarette to his lips, and he lit up. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and blew out a stream of smoke. He shook his head, then rubbed his chest, finally ripping the suit open from neck to navel. Blood caked his chest hair into red paisleys. Over his heart, a dime-sized dimple showed mostly scar tissue. At its center was a pinprick hole from which a thin rivulet of blood snaked down his chest.

  Nevaeh remembered the hole that been there thirty minutes before, large enough to stick her finger in and touch his heart. Couldn’t do that now, and by morning it would look like nothing more than a vaccination scar.

  Elias looked at each of his compatriots in turn, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and said, “Wow. That was a trip.”

  [ 5 ]

  The blazing Egyptian sun baked Jagger Baird’s face, and he tipped his head to let the brim of his boonie hat shade his eyes: his sunglasses were about as effective as tissue in a rainstorm. A gust of wind tossed sand at him, and he turned his back until it passed.

  Standing outside the southeast wall of St. Catherine’s monastery, he surveyed the tight valley stretching out before him. The hard ground dipped and rose, formed grooves and cracks, ravines and sharp ledges, as though it had been hacked into existence. Sand and loose rock had come down off the mountains and settled into a tiger-stripe pattern of treacherous terrain on top of bedrock—all of it sun-bleached to the color of old bones. The term that came to mind was godforsaken, which flew in the face of everything the area stood for. The mountain looming to his right, behind the monastery, was Jabel Musa—Moses’s Mountain. Most of the world believed it to be the biblical Mt. Sinai, where God spoke to Moses through a burning bush and gave him the Ten Commandments.

  On a pilgrimage here in the fourth century, Helena, mother of Constantine, claimed she had found the actual burning bush and built a small church around it. Two hundred years later, in 527, Emperor Justinian I ordered the construction of a protective wall around the church. The result became the monastery, no larger than a city block—with walls sixty feet high and nine feet thick. For 1500 years, the walls and monks inside had weathered crusaders and invaders, political and religious turbulence, famine and fires.

  The latest onslaught was tourists, flocking to touch the bush, marvel at the monastery’s ancient structures, and climb the mountain to the spot where Moses received the Decalogue. Probably why the mountains as they rose gradually took on a reddish hue, Jagger thought: they were irritated by the bumbling trespassers, the way too much alcohol inflames a drunkard’s nose.

  His gaze moved from the mountain to the cloudless sky—denim blue at the northern horizon, brightening to brushed aluminum overhead—then down to the archaeological excavation that had brought him here as head of security. It consisted primarily of two Olympic-pool-sized rectangles, each stepping down to a depth of about twenty feet. They were positioned perpendicular to the slope rising from the valley floor to the base of Mt. Sinai. The hole—or unit—closest to the mountain was higher up the slope and had been dubbed Annabelle. The lower hole was Bertha. Ollie—Dr. Oliver Hoffmann, the lead archaeologist—had explained that their official designations were 55E60 and 48E122, respectively. These names indicated their positions in relation to a site datum, a point from which all dig activity was measured. On site, the lead arc was expected to christen them with easier monikers.

  “So I did,” he’d said with a grin badly in need of dental assistance.

  “Meaning A and B?” Jagger had asked.

  “Meaning two lovely ladies of my youth who left holes in my heart. Now I dig holes in their honor.”

  They’d been at a tavern in the nearby town of St. Catherine’s, and Ollie had raised his glass to take a swig. The beer was Stella, an Egyptian concoction that many connoisseurs considered the best in the world. Judging by Ollie’s consumption of it, he didn’t disagree.

  Downhill from the holes was a line of five beige tents, their aprons now fluttering in the breeze. Ollie used one as an office; the others provided storage space and shelter from the sun, a place to rest.

  Ten yards below the tents, past a split-rail fence, ran the trail that led from the monastery to the two routes up Mt. Sinai—Siket El Basha, a gradually ascending, winding path; and Siket Sayidna Musa, a much steeper ascent of 3,800 steps chiseled into the mountain’s granite by monks.

  Jagger couldn’t imagine the dedication required to accomplish that, kneeling on the harsh slope, pounding on hard stone in sweltering heat day after day for decades. But then, any faith that inspired such dedication was beyond him. He was fully aware of his sour disposition, and the reason for it: since a particular night fourteen months ago, his life had mirrored a Reader’s Digest survival story gone wrong. His wife, Beth, had written a few of them; he knew the drill: an average person is thrust into the eye of a hurricane named Disaster and somehow finds the strength to overcome, even triumph. Take out overcome and triumph, and you got Jagger’s story. He was still looking for his happy ending.

  If Beth were plotting a piece on him, it’d look something like this: Ivy Leaguer meets girl of his dreams. Whirlwind courtship. Wedding bells. Baby! Sheepskin. Commissioned as 2Lt, U.S. Army . . . Rangers . . . CID. Starts personal protection company with college/army BFF. Family/ career bliss. Car crash . . . other driver drunk! BFF + BFF’s family dies. Arm amputated. Prosthesis. Depression. Survivor’s guilt. Furious at God.

  Jagger crouched and picked up a stone. His boots had burnished a stable flat spot on the rocky slope. It was his favorite observation point, from which he could see the entire excavation with the monastery’s wall protecting his back. Rolling the stone in his palm, he watched two university students carry buckets of dirt out of Bertha. They dumped them into a screen-bottomed box on wooden legs, then began shaking the box to sift for treasures. As fascinating as he considered the idea of finding traces of long-lost people, he had quickly realized it was grueling and boring work, something he could never do. He’d take a gun over a trowel any day.

  Security-and-protection: that interested him, and through stints as an Army Ranger, a military investigator, and then a personal protection specialist—aka an executive bodyguard—he’d discovered a knack for it. Whether protecting a
dignitary or an archaeological dig, he took his responsibilities seriously. More seriously, it seemed, than most archaeologists were accustomed to. When he’d arrived, the four guards already on site might have been recruited from a Cairo shopping mall. They’d worn no uniforms, except for what Jagger thought of as high school grunge, and, incredibly, spent most of their time playing cards on the other side of the monastery, where the gardens provided a measure of shade but no way to do their jobs.

  It bugged him that here in Egypt the word gun was merely a metaphor for his profession. Firearms were stringently regulated, and Ollie had told him to anticipate at least a year for the government to approve his application, if it was approved at all. Used to be, Jagger wouldn’t go a week without firing a weapon on a range. Now it’d been four months since he’d last felt the weight of a gun in his hand or smelled the clean fragrance of gun oil. He felt naked without firepower. He touched the hilt of a collapsible baton in a quick-release holster hanging at his hip where a pistol should have been. For crying out loud.