The 13th Tribe

by Robert Liparulo

  The stranger.

  Jagger shook his head and tried not to think of him.

  He let his eyes rise above the Southwest Range Building’s central dome to Mount Sinai, a looming presence, darker than the sky. Last night, sitting with Beth, it had been magical and holy; tonight it seemed like a dark being maliciously lording over a colony of caged insects.

  He shifted his attention to the third floor of the guest quarters. A light burned in their apartment. He imagined Tyler asleep in his bedroom, Beth in the living room—which also served as dining room and kitchenette—studying C. S. Lewis or Thomas à Kempis with a Bible in her lap and a pen in her hand. The image made him want to get his rounds finished faster.

  He turned and stepped into the deeper shadows near the mosque and switched on a flashlight. A white beam cut down an alley, exposing two startled cats. They darted away, and he followed slowly, swinging the beam between the walls.

  After the teen had handed his butt to him on a platter, he’d cornered Gheronda and told him about it, gun and all. The old monk expressed concern, but in the end patted him on the shoulder and told him he was sure the boy and the arrival of the man were coincidental. He’d proven as closed-mouthed about the stranger as Leo. Jagger had then visited the little police station in St. Catherine’s Village. Predictably, the two cops inside had nodded, mumbled assurances, and continued playing cards.

  Jagger tried not to let his frustration turn to anger, tried to convince himself he was being as paranoid as everyone else apparently thought he was.

  A noise startled him. He spun around in the ally, flashing the light back toward the main gate. No huge figure with twin machine guns. No monster loping toward him. Nothing at all.

  “Hello?” His voice echoed and faded.

  He willed his heart to calm down, but he couldn’t quite release his grip on the baton, still resting in its quick-release scabbard. He continued down the alley, keeping the beam away from the windows.

  The noise came rushing up behind him, reverberating off the walls. Loud, jangling, insistent. Jagger swung around, yanking out the baton, snapping it open. A wobbling light blinded him for a moment, until he ducked away. It was sailing down the alley at him. Then in the moment before his own flashlight beam landed on his attacker, he knew who it was.

  Kich-kich-kich-kich-kich . . .

  Tyler’s grinning face glowed in the light, bouncing up and down as he ran—his hair bounding a second out of sync. “I scared you!” he said and laughed. He grabbed Jagger’s waistband as he ran past, snapping to a stop like a dog reaching the end of a chain and nearly tugging Jagger off his feet. They spun toward each, and Tyler doubled over with laughter, his face turned up to show Jagger slits of eyes and a mouth stretched wide.

  It took all of a quarter second of that face, that laughter to rid Jagger of worry and anger over the noise his son was making in this preeminently quiet place.

  “You!” he said and threw a couple soft punches at his son’s belly and chest.

  Tyler slapped Jagger’s fists away. “You . . . you . . . shoulda . . .” Tyler sucked in a deep breath. “Shoulda seen your face.” He laughed harder.

  “Okay, shhh.” But Jagger himself had to laugh. He grabbed Tyler’s shoulders and pulled him into a hug.

  “I thought you didn’t get scared,” Tyler said.

  “I never said that. A lot of things scare me.”

  “You never jump,” Tyler said. “Not when I wake you up or jump out at you . . . not normally.” He laughed again.

  “I guess you caught me in a scareable mood.” Jagger released him. “What are you doing up anyway?”

  “Mom said I could come find you. She said you need help patrolling.”

  “She did?” He looked around. Amazingly, none of the windows facing the alley showed fresh lights. “Not a good time tonight, sport.”

  “Why? You hardly ever patrol the monastery . . . and never at night.” He said it as though it was the coolest thing ever.

  “There’s a reason I’m on guard tonight,” Jagger said.

  “Danger?” Tyler’s eyes flashed big.

  “Maybe.”

  “Just for a little bit? Please?” He looked up the dark alley to where it ended in the jaundiced glow of another light. “Just to the burning bush?”

  Jagger ran his fingers through Tyler’s hair. “All right, but then I’ll walk you home, and you go to bed.”

  “Deal.” Tyler raised his hand and Jagger slapped it.

  “And no more scaring me,” Jagger said.

  His son’s grin stretched wide. He said, “I’ll try to restrain myself.”

  “And can you not rattle? Didn’t you see the sign that read ‘Hush, monks asleep’?”

  Tyler put his hand on the utility case. “It only rattles when I run.”

  “Don’t run.”

  Tyler agreed, and the two of them continued on down the ally, flashlight beams bobbing and weaving. Tyler shifted around to Jagger’s right side so they could hold hands.

  After a few steps he said, “Dad?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What would you do if you found a bad guy?”

  “I’d arrest him.”

  “What if he fought you?”

  “I’d fight back, get him in handcuffs.”

  “What if he was tougher than you?”

  Jagger looked at Tyler and smiled, then they did what they always did when Jagger’s masculinity was questioned: they both laughed.

  And Jagger tried to push aside the memory of the teenager whupping him in the cave.

  [ 35 ]

  The Jeep shook and rattled over what was suppose to be a dirt road, but Toby suspected the only thing that differentiated it from the desert was that the Jeep was rolling over it. Its wheels seemed to jump on their own into pits and rocks his night vision goggles had not revealed. They traveled without headlights, so only he could see the terrain, a luminous green wasteland rushing toward them. He wondered how well the roar of the engine and clattering of the suspension carried through the desert air. He strained his arm muscles to keep the vehicle from whipping side to side and rolling, and still the steering wheel pendulumed his hands back and forth as though he were helming a schooner on high seas.

  A hand gripped his shoulder from behind. Ben said, “A little slower, please.”

  Toby said nothing and kept his foot on the gas. Nevaeh had appointed him driver, which meant he would stay outside the compound with the engine running while the others took care of business inside. He hadn’t complained—it wouldn’t have done any good, never did, and whining just made him sound like a kid—but he didn’t have to like it.

  In the passenger seat beside him, Nevaeh pulled metamaterial gloves over her hands. The neck hole of the scaly gray shirt was rolled down, exposing her throat. She reached into the footwell and came back with a gorget. The metal collar was about four inches wide with outwardly curved edges. It hinged in the middle, which lined up with the center of the throat and clamped in the back. Nevaeh slipped it on, groaning as she did.

  “Are these absolutely necessary?” she said.

  “This time especially,” Ben said. “We fight a knowledgeable enemy.”

  Nevaeh rolled the shirt collar up over the gorget. She reached behind her and pulled the hood over her head and face. The suit’s battery pack and computer resided in a paperback-book-sized box situated just below the shoulder blades, forcing her to sit forward in her seat. She twisted around.

  “Ben,” she said, “check me.”

  She switched on the suit, and when Toby glanced over she was gone, invisible even through the goggles. Only her eyes remained, hovering between him and the door pillar.

  “You gotta do something about the eyes, Ben,” Toby said. “That’s really creepy.”

  “And a major glitch in the suit’s effectiveness,” said Phin from the seat behind her. He stretched his eyelids open with his fingers and glared at Ben.

  Toby suspected Phin’s bouncing was only pa
rtially the result of the jostling Jeep.

  “So is your ‘cologne,’ ” Nev said.

  “It’s psychological warfare,” Phin said. “The odor of blood freaks people out. It makes them pause, gives me an advantage, if only for a second.”

  Toby caught Phin’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Well, it freaks me out that you wear it like perfume on missions.”

  “‘Here’s the smell of blood still,’ ” Phin quoted. “‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ ”

  “Lady Macbeth was referring to her guilt over killing the king,” Ben said matter-of-factly. He was fiddling with something on the cuff of his suit. “As far as the problem with making the eyes invisible, DARPA’s working it. My associates there are still trying to develop a photocell that can bend light and remain transparent when viewed from behind. That’s what we need, two-way metamaterial goggles. It’ll take an amorphous silicon ferromagnetic thin film to achieve it, but the technology hasn’t been invented yet. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Toby rolled his eyes. Throwing big words at him was Ben’s way of telling him to shut up. He said, “That’s what I thought.”

  The Jeep hit a rut, tossing them into the air. Toby’s thighs smacked the steering wheel; his head brushed the canvas canopy.

  “Tobias,” Ben said evenly, “five minutes sooner or later makes no difference. Our arriving in one piece does.”

  Nev’s suit beeped again, and she reappeared. In the skintight suit she appeared more like a mannequin than a flesh-and-blood woman, but Toby had to admit she made a fine mannequin. She leaned into the footwell again. When she straightened, she set a pistol and machete-like sword on her lap. Toby’s stomach rolled. That she’d brought the sword instead of her daggers reminded him of their reason for being here. Maybe his role as driver wasn’t such a bad gig after all.

  Nev slipped the gun into a pocket stitched into the invisibility suit under her left arm. Toby knew she’d wait to stow the sword. The pocket for it ran the length of her upper leg, from hip to knee. It was a pain to get it in and out while sitting.

  Ben tapped Toby on the arm and pointed at the GPS unit suction-cupped to the windshield. “Main road in two minutes. We should hit it on the monastery side of the police checkpoint.”

  The Sinai was nasty with police and U.N. checkpoints, left over from the Israeli-Egyptian hostilities of the 1970s and more recent terrorist activities.

  “Turn right and we’ll be there. Bring us close, but not too close.”

  “Got it,” Toby said. Whether or not he liked his role, the mission was on, and he didn’t mess around when it came to missions. None of them did. In the rearview he saw Phin insert two earbuds and drop an MP3 player into a pocket. Phin pulled on his mask, and a few seconds later everything but his eyes evaporated.

  Behind him, Ben yanked the slide back on a semiauto pistol and let it slam back into place, chambering a round.

  “Ready, everyone?” he said. “Three minutes.”

  [ 36 ]

  Jagger and Tyler had walked for five minutes and still hadn’t reached the burning bush. Tyler had suggested they take the “scenic route,” which was anything but. They traversed a tight tunnel between two buildings, with a ceiling created by structures built on top of them and spanning the narrow alley. Jagger knew of three such tunnels in the monastery, and he wasn’t sure there weren’t others. None was a straight shot from end to end; they all zigged one way, then zagged the other, making them eerily cavelike. The erratic placement and angles of the buildings, the dead ends, stairs, levels, and bridges from one rooftop to another all conspired to turn the complex into a labyrinth on par with the trickiest mouse maze. It was a nine-year-old boy’s dream and a security specialist’s nightmare.

  They made loop-de-loops along the walls and ceiling with the flashlight beams till they emerged from the tunnel at the base of a narrow flight of stone stairs. Tyler started up, pulling Jagger with him. At the top they walked along a terrace to a rooftop, lighted by an amber bulb and sporting a single wooden chair. Jagger stopped in the light.

  “Hold on,” he said. “I have something for you.” He dug into his breast pocket and pulled out the coin he’d found in the cave with the teen’s belongings.

  Tyler took it from him and held it up to the light, turning it to examine both sides. “Wow.”

  “I showed it to Dr. Hoffmann,” Jagger said. “It’s not Egyptian. He thought maybe a tourist dropped it, and it would be okay for us to keep it.” He didn’t mention the “tourist” it may have belonged to. “Ollie called it a ‘Charon’s obol.’ People put it in the mouth of a loved one they were burying. That way the dead person would have money to pay the ferryman who brought souls across the river that separated the living from the dead.”

  “This was in some dead guy’s mouth?” Tyler said. “Cool.” He stretched out the word, like a fascinated gasp. He looked at both sides again, then unsnapped the lid of his utility case and dropped it in. He smiled at Jagger. “Thanks.”

  Tyler gripped Jagger’s hand again, and they started down a gradual slope of wide steps that arced around a curved wall. When they descended the last step, they were standing behind the basilica, where they’d attended services that morning and Jagger had prayed for the first time in sixteen months. Across the walkway, an eight-foot-tall round wall of rough stones and sloppy mortar protruded from another chapel and acted like a giant planter. Sprouting from the top was an enormous bush, billowing up six feet and cascading down like a fountain. It hung over the walkway, within touching distance of daytime tourists who’d stripped the leaves off the last foot of its stems. Its official name was Rubus sanctus—Holy Bramble. The monks believed this was the actual burning bush through which God had spoken to Moses, still alive and flourishing. Centuries past, a chapel had been built around it, but lack of sunlight had distressed the bush, so it was moved a dozen feet to its current location.

  Jagger started toward it, but Tyler held him back.

  “Wait,” the boy said. He sat on the bottom step, put his flashlight into the utility case, and tugged off a sneaker. “It’s holy ground. God told Moses to take off his sandals.” He stripped away his sock and started on the other sneaker.

  “We’re not Mo—” Jagger began, then sighed and sat beside Tyler to unlace his boots. Before the first one was off, Tyler was barefoot and standing, scrunching his toes on the stone ground.

  “Do you think God was really in that bush?” he said, eyeing the scraggly bramble.

  “In the bush or was the bush, I don’t know,” Jagger said. “But yes, I believe the story.”

  “Why do so many people come here? You know, to see it and go up the mountain too?”

  “Like you said, it’s holy.”

  “When they see the mountain and the bush, they’re so . . . so . . .”

  “Amazed?”

  “No . . . kind of like the way you look at Mom.”

  “In love?”

  Tyler thought about it, nodding slowly, but not quite sure.

  Jagger understood what Tyler was grasping for. Some visitors had the look of This is it? That’s all? I came all this way, spent all this money, hiked and sweated in the sun—for what, a bush, a mountain? But Tyler was thinking of the others, the ones who seemed in awe of being here, so near the bush and mountain. They seemed at peace. They prayed. They had a glow about them, as people say of pregnant women. They didn’t see a brambly shrub, a rock; they saw God.

  He said, “I think it’s a mixture of a lot of things: love, respect, awe, reverence . . .”

  “Because God was here, because he touched it?”

  “That’s part of it,” Jagger said, working on his second boot.

  Tyler turned to face him. “But isn’t God everywhere? Hasn’t he touched everything? That’s what you and Mom say.”

  Jagger squinted up at him. “That’s true too.”

  Tyler thought a moment. “Then isn’t everything holy?”

  “In a way
. . . I guess.” He wasn’t sure now was the time to launch into a theological discussion about original sin and free will.

  Tyler made a firm face, coming to some conclusion.

  “What?” Jagger said.

  “If people love what’s holy, and people are holy, then they should be nicer to each other.”

  Jagger’s heart ached for Tyler’s idealism: the beauty and simplicity of it. “I wish that was the way it worked, Ty.”

  “Well, I say there’s something wrong when people treat a bush better than they treat each other.”