The Lost Codex (OPSIG Team Black Series Book 3)

by Alan Jacobson

  Knox came up alongside Vail. “Glad you made it.” He squinted in the dim light. “You’ve got blood spatter all over your clothing.”

  “You should see the other guy.”

  Knox tilted his head and a smile teased the corners of his mouth, a sign of approval.

  “Agent Vail.” Tamar’s voice echoed in the empty room. She was holding her white-gloved hands vertically, like a surgeon in an operating room. “Other than some Arabic papers, this tube is empty.”

  “What?” Vail leapt down the steps. She lifted the container and peered inside, then looked at the table. What the hell? Could they have fallen out when I dropped the tube? No. I would’ve seen them.

  “Where are the documents?” Askel asked.

  “I—I don’t understand.” She brought her gaze up and looked at him. Then at Knox.

  “Hector called me two hours ago,” Knox said. “He told me each of you were bringing portions of the codex and scroll.”

  Footsteps drew their attention. They looked up in unison to see DeSantos walking in, a portfolio in his hand.

  Vail could tell he was reading their faces as Tamar reached over and took the bag from him.

  “My tube was empty,” Vail said. “There’s no way I lost the pages. I mean, I guess it’s possible but I can’t see how. I would’ve seen them.”

  A moment later, Tamar’s stern voice echoed in the chamber. “This is empty as well.” Even in the understated light, Vail could see that her jaw was firm, her eyes fiery.

  What the hell is going on?

  DeSantos rooted out his phone, started dialing.

  “You’re calling Uzi?”

  DeSantos did not answer. He lowered the handset and cursed under his breath.

  “Either of you hear from Fahad?” Knox asked.

  Vail bit her lip. “Nothing.”

  DeSantos indicated likewise.

  Seven minutes passed. Knox paced. Vail and DeSantos sat on the bottom steps of the shrine.

  Vail was concerned about Uzi. Thinking about the two ancient documents they had been entrusted with. And starting to have doubts about Fahad’s true intentions: were they as DeSantos claimed—nefarious—or beneficent, as Uzi claimed?

  DeSantos rose up and began to stretch when Uzi walked in. Vail immediately noticed that he was not carrying anything.

  Aksel was the first to question him. “Where’s your—”

  “Gone. I was intercepted by al Humat militants and I got away with a GSW to the arm. I lost the tube, but—”

  “Our docs are missing,” Vail said. “My tube and Hector’s portfolio are empty.”

  “I know.”

  DeSantos stepped forward. “What do you mean, ‘I know’?”

  “I gave it all to Mo.”

  Knox descended the steps and stood face-to-face with Uzi. “You what?”

  DeSantos’s face shaded red. “Boychick, are you crazy? We’ve been worried about him since the day he joined our team. He may’ve been the one who almost got you killed.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Aksel came up beside Knox and folded his short, thick arms across his chest. “Let me get this straight. You gave two of the most ancient, most holy documents of the Jewish people, to a Palestinian? A CIA operative? After what I told you? And you expected him to bring it here, to turn it over to Israel?”

  “Yes.”

  DeSantos shook his head and walked out of the chamber, heading for the shrine’s exit.

  Knox cleared his throat. “Agent Uziel, you should’ve consulted me on this.”

  “No time, sir. Al Humat was approaching Sahmoud’s house. We had to get out right then—or we wouldn’t have made it out alive.”

  That’s not entirely true. You had to put everything in Mo’s satchel before we knew they were coming.

  “Given the situation, I felt he stood the best chance of getting back here safely, without being challenged and detained. Or killed.”

  “The situation?” Knox asked.

  “He’s Palestinian, sir. He speaks Arabic, he looks like them, he knows their culture, he’s got friends in Gaza.” Uzi swallowed. “And family.”

  Yeah, he’s got family there, all right. A brother named Nazir al Dosari.

  “Director Tasset was running a covert counter-op with him,” Knox said, “which I only found out about a little while ago. He was working with the White House to secure the documents for the president. Had we known, Secretary McNamara and I never would’ve put him on this mission.”

  Uzi sat down on the step and bowed his head. A long moment passed. “I didn’t know. I really thought we could trust him.”

  “Mo only thinks he has parts of the codex and the scroll,” Vail said. “Even if he felt compelled to carry out his mission, it wouldn’t do the president much good.”

  “But if he looked inside, he’d know he had everything,” Aksel said. “Brilliant move, Uzi. You’ve managed to fuck things up again.”

  Vail expected Knox to say something in his operative’s defense, but the director remained silent—in effect, endorsing Aksel’s comment.

  A moment later, the shrine door opened and closed. All heads swiveled in that direction, where DeSantos and Fahad were entering.

  “Thank god,” Knox said.

  Amen to that.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Fahad said. “Stopped by a friend’s to get a ride to the checkpoint. Turns out he’s now with al Humat. Could’ve gone south real quick, but he got the call about Sahmoud and took off.” He stopped and seemed to realize that everyone was staring at him.

  “You have something for us?” Knox asked.

  He pulled the satchel off his shoulder and handed it to the director, who gave it to Tamar. She regloved and immediately went to work with her team.

  They huddled around Tamar’s makeshift laboratory as the curator carefully unzipped the case and splayed it open. She pulled off a few layers of tissue paper and the pages of the Aleppo Codex stared back at them.

  Aksel’s lips parted, while Knox pushed his glasses up his nose with a finger and leaned over the table to get a better look.

  “Extraordinary,” Tamar said. The other conservationists concurred.

  Tamar glanced at Fahad and gave him an appreciative nod, then moved on to the other item, a tubular shaped object similarly wrapped. She gently removed the paper and exposed a well preserved scroll. With gloved hands, she and two of the men carefully peeled back the first several inches.

  Everyone leaned in for a glimpse. Tamar remained longer than the others, examining it with a jeweler’s loupe before straightening up. “More tests are needed, but it does, in fact, look like the genuine article.” She turned to the other woman, who was hunched over the codex.

  She lifted her magnifying lens and spoke to Tamar. “I have to study this further in the lab, but I believe these are the missing pages of the Aleppo Codex.”

  Uzi tapped Vail on her shoulder and gestured to the others to follow. He led them outside to a raised lookout over a one acre scale model of ancient Jerusalem and the Second Temple, shortly before its destruction in 70 CE—the precise time documented in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  Uzi sought out Fahad, who was following a dozen feet behind. “Be right back,” he told Vail.

  “A MINUTE?” Uzi asked as he approached Fahad.

  “Sure.”

  Uzi gave him a shoulder hug. “Thank you, man.”

  Fahad canted his head. “Hey, just doing my job.”

  “No, not for that. For renewing my faith that your people and my people can get along. After what happened with Batula Hakim and her brother and all that other bad shit with Hamas and al Humat, I’ve had my doubts.”

  “Believe me, I’ve had my moments too. I’m not without baggage.”

  “So there’s hope.”

  F
ahad rocked back on his heels. “Well, now that we’ve solved the Israeli-Palestinian issue, maybe we should become diplomats and tackle other world crises.”

  They both laughed.

  “I’ve gotta go brief my boss,” Fahad said. “Not gonna be an easy conversation. Tasset’s going to be pissed.” He paused, then deadpanned, “You think there are any job openings at the Bureau?”

  Uzi chuckled. “You’ll be fine.”

  “See you on the plane.” He pulled out his phone and headed for a nearby bench.

  UZI REJOINED VAIL AND DeSANTOS at the railing overlooking the Second Temple model.

  Vail was slipping her phone back in her pocket. “Got an email from my boss. He just put a new file on my desk and wanted to know how soon I can get back to doing some important work—profiling serial killers.”

  “What’d you tell him?” Uzi asked.

  Vail smiled wanly. “Told him I can’t wait.”

  Uzi took a deep breath of damp, cool air. “I hope we’re making headway against those cells back home. Santa—how long till you think we’ll hear something?”

  “Spoke to Hot Rod on the way over here. The list of cells we got from Sahmoud’s was spot-on. We’ve got tac teams in eleven cities ready to strike simultaneously—FBI, marshals, local PD. Massive operation.”

  “You think we’ll get ’em all?” Vail asked.

  DeSantos considered that. “Eleven’s pretty damn good. But no. I don’t think we’ll get them all.” He stared into the darkness for a moment. “We dealt them some major blows. I think we’ll be okay for now. Things will be quiet. A few months, a year, two years. Who knows.”

  “What about Connerly?” Uzi asked.

  DeSantos shrugged. “NSA intercepted a call between his phone and a number the CIA had been tracking belonging to Hussein Rudenko. Don’t know what was discussed, and we can’t be sure it was Connerly, or Rudenko, on the line, but—”

  “There’d be no reason for the president’s chief of staff to have a phone call with an arms dealer and terrorist who’s on the FBI most wanted list.”

  “Without having a recording of the conversation,” Vail said, “you can’t prove Rudenko and Connerly were talking.”

  “Not a smoking gun,” Uzi said. “But we might be on to something.”

  “Or it might mean nothing,” Vail said.

  Uzi shook his head. “I don’t believe in coincidences where things like this are concerned. I think Sahmoud was telling us the truth.”

  “Good luck with that,” DeSantos said. “We can’t put the president’s chief of staff in a black site room and interrogate him. There’ll be lawyers.”

  That’s torture enough.

  “It’s now Knox’s problem,” DeSantos said. “And the attorney general’s. When, and if, they find something, justice will be served. If not, Sahmoud is a really bad guy who did really bad things. He was a whole lot worse than Connerly. We take our wins where we can get them.”

  “Where have I heard that before?”

  Uzi pursed his lips. “I believe it was on a naval carrier on the Atlantic Ocean somewhere off the coast of England.”

  They laughed again.

  “You know,” Vail said, “if I didn’t know any better, it looked like you and Mo are in a good place.”

  Uzi turned to DeSantos. “Yeah, well, hate to say I told you so.”

  “But you’re gonna say it anyway.”

  “No, no, no,” Vail said with a shake of her head. “I’m not buying that whole ‘I trusted him’ line, Uzi. I know you better than that. You embedded some tracking chip in Mo’s jacket, didn’t you?”

  “Nope. I knew we could trust him.”

  “Really,” DeSantos said.

  “Trust has to start somewhere, Santa, and, really, we were trusting him with far more important things—our lives. I had faith in human nature, in Mo, to do the right thing. He’s a real person. True to himself. To who he is, who his family is. And was.”

  Vail looked at him. “Remember what the rabbi said about truth? That there may not be such a thing?”

  “I still think there are some truths in life.”

  “And I still think you were at risk of being played a fool.”

  “I made sure he wasn’t,” DeSantos said.

  Uzi tilted his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “I hedged our bets. Sorry, Boychick. Too much at stake. I took the active tag chip out of my satphone and slipped it into Fahad’s satchel right before we left the house. Need be, we could track it.” DeSantos chuckled. “Of course, I wasn’t anticipating cloud cover.”

  Uzi leaned back against the railing. “So you’re saying that you didn’t trust my judgment.”

  DeSantos considered that. “Faith is powerful, but at the end of the day, we’re just people. And people approach things with their own biases.”

  Vail grunted. “Kind of like what the rabbi said about truth. We see things through our own lens. We think what we’re doing is right.”

  “But others may not see it that way—and they may be wrong. So I needed an insurance policy that these historic treasures were not only placed in their rightful place but that they were not used as blackmail in peace negotiations. Those were our orders.”

  “If Mo figured out that you’d given him everything,” Vail said, “and if he wanted to turn it all over to the Agency, and if he knew about the chip, he could’ve ditched your tech and disappeared.”

  DeSantos nodded slowly. “Then I guess in the end, it all came down to trust. And some luck.”

  Knox came up behind them as DeSantos’s phone rang. He excused himself, pulled out his cell, and took a few steps away.

  Knox placed a hand on Uzi’s shoulder. “Thank you both for a job well done.”

  “What will come of the scroll?” Vail asked.

  Knox looked out over the brightly lit model of ancient Jerusalem. “They’re going to store it in the museum vault and keep it quiet. Their goal was always to bring it home. Disclosure of its contents was never part of the plan.”

  “Do you believe it’s possible to keep it under wraps?” Vail asked.

  “I know Prime Minister Wolff,” Knox said. “Making it public, causing harm, that’s not what he’s about. The director general told me it wasn’t their place to release any ancient text that would denigrate, in any way, Christianity’s belief structure. No one would benefit from that. Looking at it pragmatically, it’d drive a wedge between Judaism and the Catholic Church, requiring decades, if not centuries, to heal. I’m sure the prime minister doesn’t want that to happen. Neither does the Vatican. There’s a lot going on here.”

  “That means we’re sworn to secrecy as well.”

  “That goes for the entire mission, Agent Vail.” Knox leaned both hands on the railing. “The president has been pushing construction of a new airport in the West Bank and a shipping port in Gaza. I’m told he’s been riding the Israelis really hard. They’ve said that without a properly negotiated settlement and monitoring forces in place, and without the dismantling of Hamas, al Humat, Islamic Jihad, and Islamic State, the airport and shipping port would be significant threats to Israel’s survival. Friends of mine in the military and intelligence community agree. That’s what was at stake. That’s why we did what we did. That’s why we defied the White House.”

  They absorbed that for a moment.

  “Why do you think we had to defy the president in the first place?” Vail asked.

  Knox stared off into the distance. His jaw tightened. “Our work is done here. Thank you both again for a job well done.”

  As he walked off, Uzi gestured at the blood spatter on her clothes. “Tough time?”

  Vail pulled the Tanto from its sheath. “Your gift saved my life tonight.”

  “You know,” he said, “that knife is taking on legendary proportions
: first it saved my life. And now yours. It’s got its own built-in mojo.”

  “Should we do a Game of Thrones thing?”

  Uzi tilted his head. “A what?”

  “Game of Thrones. The TV show. HBO.”

  Uzi shrugged. “Don’t watch much TV.”

  “Robby and Jonathan got me into it. A medieval soap opera. The knights name their swords. What do you say we name this knife, ‘Tango slayer’?”

  Uzi chuckled. “Hey, it’s yours now. Name it whatever you like.”

  “I’ll have to think on it.”

  After a moment, he said, “How about Tzedek?”

  “Tzedek?”

  “It’s a Hebrew word. For justice.”

  Vail looked at the blade, spit on it, and wiped the dried blood from its surface with her blouse. “Tzedek. Justice. I like it.” She angled it forward, catching the glow of a nearby spotlight against its black matte finish. “You familiar with the Bible?”

  He cocked his head to the left. “I think I’ve heard of it.”

  “There’s a verse … ‘Never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God.’”

  Uzi shrugged. “I think a little revenge is okay sometimes. As long as it’s done with well reasoned moral intentions. To right a wrong. A tooth for a tooth.”

  I’ve definitely had those feelings. “One of the psalms says, ‘Blessed are they who maintain justice, who constantly do what is right.’”

  Uzi leaned back. “I never took you for a religious person. I learn something new about you every day, Karen. You’re a very complex individual, you know that?”

  “Complex? Yeah. Religious? Not so much. The psalm is just something my mother used to tell me when I was a kid. I wrote it on an index card and had it above my computer screen in my office. I thought it expressed what I do as a federal agent. We maintain justice, always striving to do what’s right.”

  Uzi examined her face a moment. “You said you had it over your desk. Past tense.”

  Vail turned away. “After Robby disappeared … I—” She shook her head. “I did what I had to do. But I didn’t do what was right, I didn’t maintain justice. I stepped over the line.”