by Glen Craney
The CrossArrow mercenaries now studied Cas with newfound admiration.
“The ragheads nicknamed him Cas the Dervish. Wild man of the desert.”
“Give it a rest,” Cas said.
But no, the CrossArrow warlord was on a roll. “Only, like everything else he did, from eating to screwing, Casbo took things too far. Says he wants to flood the mosque with a few million gallons of water. In the middle of a desert He plans to electrocute the bastards by adding a few thousand kilowatts of high-powered voltage to the mix. Even the Saudis think he’s loco.”
Cas’s temper was rising with the mercury. “Nobody wants to hear about the old times.”
Jubal ran his hand under his cavalry bonnet, shaking off the perspiration from his close-cropped head. “But, hey, our hero here goes with a backup plan. He funnels in lethal gas and starts dropping hand grenades day and night for two weeks. It’s like rolling out depth charges to catch farmed salmon. Finally, those religious fruitcakes holding the mosque hostage go secular all of a sudden, and damned if they don’t surrender. They said they’d rather face God’s judgment than the depravities of Casbo the Dervish.”
The gate guard who had been cold-cocked now looked thankful to be alive.
Jubal lowered his voice for dramatic effect. “But then ol’ Casbo of Arabia here goes native on us. Starts to buy into all of that religious mumbo-jumbo those rug smugglers try to sell you. See, he goes desert diving on what’s supposed to be a Top Secret op, but instead comes up with a family.”
Cas fingered his trigger, itching to bring story hour to a close.
Jubal grabbed a white towel hanging in the guard station and hung it over his Stetson, mocking a Bedouin headdress. “Sure, he collected a ton of priceless intel for us. But in the process, thanks to indigenous poontang and—wait for it, boys—even siring a fucking kid, he completely loses his shit.” He glared at Cas through an ice-cold pause and jammed his finger repeatedly into his own beer-keg chest, now worked up into a spitting rant. “Of course, that’s when I get called to go in and extract his ass. But, it’s already too late. By then, he’d blown every goddamn thing he’d been working for, including, apparently, his American ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of as much fucking wealth as you can accumulate in half a lifetime.”
“Happiness, asshole. The Constitution says the ‘pursuit of happiness.’”
Jubal exploded in angry laughter. “Semantics! Anyway, from the looks of it, you haven’t been pursuing much of either lately.”
“That was some nifty history lesson. Now, about the money you owe me?”
“Easy, Casbo. It’s good to know those Left Coast commies haven’t totally scrubbed the capitalist ethic from your blood. … Why don’t you come back to my office, let me buy you a cold beer. We’ll talk things over.”
“You’ve obviously forgotten that I swore never to step foot again in that black hole you call a headquarters.”
“Suit yourself. Hell, you always do.” Jubal draped an arm around Cas’s shoulders. “But humor me, at least, and take a little walk first.”
“Make this quick, capiche? All I want is the cheddar due me.”
Jubal laughed scornfully. “You’re kidding me, right? You drove all the way out here to collect on a few bucks?” He gripped Cas’s shoulder more tightly. “You must have way too much time on your hands.”
Cas shook off Jubal’s hold. “No, but I have too many of your incompetent wannabes spoiling my afternoons on the beach.” Feeling the general’s boring glare, he finally admitted, “Okay, and maybe I was a little curious about why you would drag me out here, instead of just calling.”
Jubal waited until they had walked out of earshot of the others. “Tell me what you know about this Mecca Stone.”
Cas had been wondering when that question would finally rear its head. He shrugged and played dumb. “Now there’s a rock in a hard place.”
Jubal forced a smile, as if humoring his crack in an effort to get information. “You must remember something about it?”
“Not much to tell. Muslims say the rock fell from the sky at the time of Adam and Eve.”
Jubal rolled his eyes. “We need a more detailed description.”
“Google it.”
Jubal pulled a wad of legal tender from his pocket, peeled off five hundred bucks, and stuffed the bills into Cas’s shirt pocket. “That ought to make you a lot smarter a lot faster.”
Cas detected a hint of desperation in Jubal’s nervous cackle. Grinning at winning the standoff, he reached for his wallet and pulled out a folded Xeroxed copy of a book page. After his confrontation on the Malibu beach with Jubal’s advance boys, he’d done a little advance snooping at the UCLA Rare Books library. A professor in Middle Eastern studies there had shown him a tome containing the first description of the Black Stone in Western literature, written by two Swiss explorers in the early nineteenth century who had managed to sneak into Mecca disguised as Muslims:
It is an irregular oval, about seven inches in diameter, with an undulating surface, composed of about a dozen smaller stones of different sizes and shapes, well joined together with a small quantity of cement, and perfectly well smoothed; it looks as if the whole had been broken into as many pieces by a violent blow, and then united again. It is very difficult to determine accurately the quality of this stone which has been worn to its present surface by the millions of touches and kisses it has received. It appeared to me like lava, containing several small extraneous particles of a whitish and of a yellow substance. Its colour is now a deep reddish brown approaching to black. It is surrounded on all sides by a border composed of a substance which I took to be a close cement of pitch and gravel of a similar, but not quite the same, brownish colour. This border serves to support its detached pieces; it is two or three inches in breadth, and rises a little above the surface of the stone. Both the border and the stone itself are encircled by a silver band, broader below than above, and on the two sides, with a considerable swelling below, as if a part of the stone were hidden under it. The lower part of the border is studded with silver nails.
Jubal looked increasingly dubious as he scanned the photocopy, apparently not convinced that an encyclopedia entry from a couple of Swiss pacifists was worth five hundred dollars. “How long’s the Stone been in Mecca?”
Cas examined the bills, making sure they weren’t counterfeit. “No one knows for sure. Long before Mohammed got there, at least. The ground where the Kaaba now sits was once a pagan shrine. It was pretty common in that part of the world for places believed to be blessed with divine power to be marked with an unusual stone. But the Koran says Mohammed placed the Black Stone right there at the Kaaba. Some Muslims even believe the Stone will come alive on the Day of Judgment and rat out those whose faith is false.”
Jubal angled his hat farther down over his face to shield his eyes from the brutal Mojave sun. “Lemme get this straight. Some burnt stone falls outa the sky, and just because of that, it suddenly becomes connected with God?” After mocking confusion, he curled a thin smile, suggesting he knew a lot more than he was letting on. “That would have to be one very special rock, don’t you think? One that’s different from all the others.”
Cas let the silence of the desert wedge some distance between them. Finally, he asked the question that he knew Jubal was waiting to hear, “Okay, clue me in. What are you getting at?”
“In my experience, not that many stones fall from the sky. I can think of only one kind.”
“Which would be?”
Jubal plucked the five hundred dollars from Cas’s grasp and stuffed the wad into his own pocket again. “If I have to do your job, I’m not going to get robbed in the process.”
Cas tried to wrangle the money back, until Jubal unbuttoned the strap on the pistol in his side holster. Cas kicked at the sand in anger. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I had my analysts do a little checking while I was waiting for you to arrive in your magical mystery tour bus
over there. There’s an astrophysicist at Columbia University who specializes in meteorites. She hits our sweet spot. Not far enough up the academic ladder to alert notice from the powers that be, but she seems to know what she’s talking about, at least enough to write articles for a couple academic journals.” He handed Cas a card with a name and phone number on it. “I suggest you pay her a discreet—and I mean discreet—visit. Find out what she knows about strange stones dropping out of the sky.”
Cas read the name on the card: Dr. Marly McKinney.
“Worth checking out,” Jubal said. “You know the old saying, Leave no stone unturned.” He laughed crudely at his own pun.
Cas wasn’t following. “What difference does it make if the Saudi relic came from Mars or some slag heap in Arabia? I thought you just wanted it back?”
Jubal shrugged. “I don’t care if somebody flushed it from a john on a 747. Right now, we’re flat out of leads. And for some reason, my client thinks you’re the only one who can retrieve the damn thing. You used to know how to clean up these Saudi messes. Just do us all a favor and don’t go making another one.”
Cas just stood there, mystified at why the general, who hated pointy-headed university types about as much as he hated Arab terrorists, would want him to go traipsing around gown town.
Jubal turned to leave, but seeing Cas still lingering in confusion, he stopped, exasperated. “Do I have to spell everything out for you in capital letters? If that Arab stone really is a meteorite, this Ivy League broad might help you find it in the pocket of some bazaar crier in Istanbul or Cairo who plans to sell it for a hefty profit on the black market.”
Cas shook his head at Jubal’s naiveté. “It’s not as if those Islamist radicals who stole it are going to sell the Black Stone. That’s not why they took it.”
“You know what, Fielding?” Jubal drawled, mimicking Cas’s California twang. “I don’t really give a camel’s left testicle what you think. Just follow it up like I said and see what this university broad knows about tracking down rocks harder than your head. You might actually stumble into some useful information for once.”
“And if I can’t find it?”
“You remember that lone operative we dropped into Pakistan to find Bin Laden two years before we finally got the sonofabitch?”
“Yeah, Billie Conley. Whatever happened to him?”
Jubal’s eyes went cold. “If you’re captured or outed while you’re over there, you know the drill. We deny any knowledge of you. You’re on your own.”
“Damn. And I was hoping to use you as a reference on LinkedIn.”
Jubal wasn’t amused. “You might also want to lose that smartass beach-boy attitude for a change. First off, it’s not all that charming. Second, things have changed in the Middle East since you rode camels with the Bedouin. These ISIS types have become savvy to even the faintest of American footprints, real ones and virtual ones. And this Syrian mayhem is causing its own problems for us. Catch my drift?”
“Where do I deliver the package?”
“Don’t worry about that.” Jubal tapped on his watch as he began walking toward his armored SUV. “We’ll send a FedEx pickup. You have a week.”
Cas didn’t need to be told what would happen if a few million Muslims showed up for Hajj and found their Stone missing. Given the way things were on the Arab street these days, it wouldn’t surprise him if the Saudis unleashed some sort of nuclear retaliation for the relic that had vanished on their watch. Forget about Tehran and Damascus. And nobody could ever offer a better reason to point a finger—and a ballistic missile or two—at Tel Aviv.
But more to the point, he desperately wanted to get his son back. He longed to tell Farid the truth and make amends for the fact that the man he had grown up knowing only as his father was, in fact, an American spy. He looked up at the sedan and called after his former boss. “Hey, Jubal!” He pulled his wallet out again and pointed at it. “You forget something?”
Before climbing inside the SUV, Jubal glanced at the disabled wreck of a van. He gave Cas the thumbs up. “I’ll have one of my men see that it gets towed to the nearest gas station. A whole new set tires, on us.”
Cas shook his head at his old boss’s attempt to deflect the obvious. “Thanks, but I’m planning on buying a new ride—one of those badass Dartz bitches—with the million bucks you’ll be handing over before I leave today.” He opened his palm. “Let’s have it.”
Jubal affected a look of surprise. “My boys in Malibu didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“I’ve opened a Swiss account on your behalf. A million dollars, converted to Swiss francs, was deposited into it this morning.”
“Sweet. Just give me the account number.”
“I’ll text it over. But it won’t do you any good. Not at the moment, at least.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a joint account. In your name and your son’s. Both of you will have to be present to sign and withdraw the money.”
Cas reddened. “That wasn’t the deal!”
Jubal enjoyed a wicked laugh as he climbed in the SUV and slammed the door. He rolled down the window. “You’re losing your edge, Fielding! The operative I trained years ago would have dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s on any arrangement before heading all the way out here to kiss my ring.” He blew Cas a fake smooch goodbye. “You’d better get your white scrawny ass back in operational shape before taking on those Arab carpet thieves again.”
* * *
CHAPTER SEVEN
Manhattan, New York
THE NOVEMBER RAIN PATTERING THE the windows of Dr. Marly McKinney’s third-floor apartment mimicked the throb in her overheated head. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was nearly ten, almost time for bed. Exhausted from six straight hours of work, she uncoiled her long legs and pushed from her desk and her two computer monitors. Even the text of her scientific paper she was reading on her Kindle, which sat near her mug of cold coffee, had become blurry under the dim glow from her desk lamp.
Rubbing her eyes, she glided her socked feet across the lacquered hardwood floors and gazed out at the gloomy night from the wide window that overlooked West 118th Street. These brick walls around her were mostly bare now, with only a few framed posters from MOMA and the Air & Space Museum. She had boxed up all the photographs of Steve, except the one of him in his desert fatigues in Iraq. She looked down at her feet and pressed her toes into the Persian rug that he had managed to ship to her from Fallujah. It had arrived only two days before her fiancé’s remains were returned to Dover Air Force Base. Studying the large collection of rocks that sat on a bookshelf next to her desk, she picked out a beryl crystal and examined it, hoping to find written in its cracks a hidden message.
It was the first gem they had found together.
Steve had been the reason for her love affair with minerals. The summer before their senior year in college, his parents had taken them both on a trip to see a gem mine in the forests near Asheville, North Carolina. The whole experience turned out to be pretty cheesy. She thought they’d be spelunking in some deep, mysterious cave wearing hardhats and headlamps, but instead they had parked outside a trailer park whose grounds were littered with junk cars and drooping clotheslines. There, along a small stream, they had sat together for hours, sifting through the mud in the flume while hoping to find rocks that might contain citrine or pyrite. Not very glamorous, but she had loved every second of it.
After his death in Iraq, she had escaped to Russia to work with the team studying the remains of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which had injured 1,500 people in February of 2013. Some of the meteorites recovered there proved to be more ancient than the Murchison meteorite, the notorious roof-bashing stone in Australia whose fragments were 4.5 billion years old. While on the Chelyabinsk project, she had stumbled onto her life’s purpose after engaging in several mind-blowing discussions with other scientists about molecular RNA in space rock. After completing her own doctoral disse
rtation, “Uracil & Xanthine: Molecular Makeup of Meteorites to Support Panspermia Theory,” she had been hired for an ultra-secret follow-up project to the Stardust space probe, which in turn led her to the teaching job here at Columbia. With her plans for a family cruelly dashed, she had thrown herself into the research work, devoting what remained of her life to stalking the answer to one question:
What made us?
Yawning, she poured another cup of coffee and, feeling cold, put on shoes to walk around the apartment. She felt on the verge of a breakthrough, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She was desperate to know the source of the single-ringed uracil and the double-ringed xanthine in the meteorites. Uracil was a component of RNA, and, as everyone knew from Watson and Crick’s Nobel Prize-winning work in the early 1950s, ribonucleic acid, along with DNA, formed the building blocks of human life. But how did those particular molecules get into chunks of space rock? She rubbed her stinging eyes again and reached to turn off the lamp—
A violent banging rattled the door. She nearly jumped through the ceiling.
Who could that be at half past ten? Had that daffy Mrs. Arenson left the building’s entrance ajar again while walking her poodle? Sidling up to the steel door with its array of deadbolts and chain locks, she yelled, “Who is it?”
The pounding persisted. “Dr. McKinney!” shouted a man’s voice.
She looked around for something to use as a weapon. “No one here by that name!”
The man pounded twice more. “You need to open the door now.”
“Go away! Or I’m calling the police!”
“Dr. McKinney, you have information that threatens your life.”
She thought about calling a friend who lived down the street, but she couldn’t find her cell phone. “Oh, and you happen to know more about what I know than I do.”
“You should really update your firewall software.”