by Glen Craney
Shaking off the moisture in his eyes, he checked his watch and glanced with concern at Marly, who sat in the passenger seat, staring at the crush around them. As instructed, she had dispensed with the female Arab garb and now, like him, wore a male construction worker’s outfit. With her new scruffy beard, geeky black sunglasses, dark construction coveralls, black steel-toed boots, and white hardhat, she looked passable, barely, as a male laborer. He could do nothing now but count on this uptight chick to collect the shavings that might lead him to the Stone. If she came through—and, after watching her in action, he now gave it less than fifty-fifty odds—he would finally be able to return to Malibu and live out the rest of his life quietly with his son.
Maybe, when this was all over, he’d even teach Farid to surf.
Steering with one hand, he grabbed Marly’s wrist to stop her from scratching the phony beard. “Some of that stuff might come off.”
She repulsed his attempted restraint and itched her cheek anyway. Pressing her nose against the window, she watched with growing dismay as the pilgrims on foot passed them by. “At this rate, it’ll be daylight by the time we get there.”
“You’re right.” Without warning, Cas wheeled the sedan off the main drag into an alley, sending her flying into the door. He cut the engine.
Marly jackknifed back upright in her seat. “You’re just going to leave it here? What if we get a ticket?”
“I’m not planning on coming back for traffic court, are you?” Cas got out, motioning for her to follow him. With Marly on his heels, he looked down the alley, making sure no one saw them abandon the sedan. Then, he sauntered out toward the main thoroughfare.
She hurried to keep aside him. “Will you slow down!”
“Lose the testosterone vocals, Doc. You have perfect chords for a Saudi Binladen Group engineer.” He couldn’t see her eyes through the dark lenses, but he saw her hands shaking with nervousness. “Just relax, will ya.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll just relax. Speaking of losing, when do we shed these Halloween costumes? Never mind the ridiculous sunglasses. It’s dark, you know.”
They merged into the crowd that was surging toward the sprawling Masjid.
Cas double-checked the laminated SBG tag on her shirt, complete with bar-coded credentials. He had to trust the identification cards that Roz the Clipper had made for them would pass muster. He leaned into Marly’s covered ear and went over the plan with her one last time, “The Saudi authorities and the imams have draped the Kaaba with a big black tent, even bigger than the normal black cloth that always covers it. Got me so far?”
She nodded while gripping the tool bag on her waist that swayed with her gait. Everything she would need to collect any shavings would be at her fingertips, along with latex gloves to hide her female hands.
Cas kept his head down while plowing through the crowds. “Binladen construction people have been wandering around here for the last several days. They hire British Muslims from time to time, so the fact that we’re not wearing robes and headdresses won’t be any big surprise.” He adjusted his ill-fitting hardhat. “And don’t even think about opening your mouth—”
“Sure. No problem. As if I could get a word in edgewise.”
Cas’s heart jumped when turned the corner and saw the Kaaba, the giant black cube that had stood on that same spot for centuries. The Holy Koran said that Adam had first built the structure and that Abraham, father of the world’s three great religions, had rebuilt the foundation. The shimmering Masjid stood just ahead, illuminated by high, glaring lights that gave the mosque the feel of a football stadium. Thousands of worshippers milled about in a veritable human cattle drive, all for one purpose—to become one with something ineffable. As if by some habit from his desert days, he began reciting aloud in musical Arabic the 127th verse of the Koran’s 2nd Sura. Then, he took a deep breath and pulled Marly closer. “You ready for this?”
Marly studied him hard. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”
His eyes darted off. “Such as?”
“Something hasn’t been adding up for me about this meteorite job. You don’t impress me as a guy who’s motivated by money. Especially when your life is on the line. Why are you doing this? Really.”
“I told you. It’s just a business deal.”
She shot over to the side of the street, refusing to move until he came clean with the truth.
Cas glanced worriedly at the pilgrims hurrying past them. Finally, he whispered, “Okay, I guess you deserve to know. … There is something else.”
“I knew it! What did they promise you? Free women for the rest—”
“My son.”
She stumbled for the next words. “You … have a son?”
“Look, it’s a long story. Now’s not the time.”
“What exactly does the Black Stone have to do with your son?”
He forced her to keeping moving by nudging up against her. “I don’t want to put any more pressure on you, but if we botch this little operation, I’ll never see him again.”
“My God.”
“Just don’t think about it.”
He pressed her elbow to hurry her along toward the phalanx of guards standing on high alert around the Kaaba. The Saudi royal police had their hands full keeping the masses from getting close to the shrine and discovering that, behind its big black tent, the silver container for the precious Stone was empty.
Marly still looked shaken by what he had just revealed, but she reluctantly peeled off from him, just as he had instructed. Without glancing back, she made her way toward the far end of the Kaaba tent.
While she took her position, Cas kept an eye on the Saudi officer in charge, the one with that all-important wasta influence, one of the guiding principles of any transaction in the Arabic world. Working alone now, Cas bowed to the officer slightly and said with forced confidence, “I understand that you are the man to see here, sahib.” He brought his right hand to his heart in a show of respect, and then flashed his SBG badge at the nonplussed Saudi.
The Saudi officer refused him the courtesy of a direct glance. “No authorizations have come for additional construction laborers.”
Cas had expected the haughty treatment. Yet his pulse quickened as he saw the officer’s eyes travel toward the Kaaba tent and linger a bit too long on Marly, even though she was keeping her chin down. Suddenly, at the officer’s signal, the soldiers swarmed them. One of the guards yanked Marly’s gear bag from her hip and ripped it open, spilling some of the gleaming technical equipment across the marble courtyard. Thankfully, Marly kept her wits about her and didn’t resist. She calmly picked up the tools and put them back into her bag.
Cas whipped a notebook from the pocket of his coveralls and lunged toward the officer in charge. “I will have your name!” He got within an inch of the startled man’s face. “Sir Brighton Birdwell has paid for us to come here!”
The officer scoffed. “I do not know who—”
“The president of Binexport’s London operation! I am here at the express wishes of the Royal Family, to gather forensic evidence—”
“There will be no more talking!” The Saudi officer glared at him, as if questioning why a British national, particularly one of such low station, would have been told of the Stone’s theft, let alone be involved in its investigation. “I know nothing of this matter.”
First rule of spook work, Cas remembered, was that the best defense is always a good offense. So, he doubled down on his fake fit and ignored the order to maintain silence. “I suppose, then, sir, we will have to fulfill our contract with Binexport the hard way!”
“What contract?”
“Are you going to make me say it in front of all these people? You know very well of the incident about which I was sent here to, how shall I say, address.”
The officer hesitated, as if not knowing whether to acknowledge the implication of the Stone’s theft, or continue to act uninformed of it. “I need some additional indication of
your intent.”
“You need indication, do you? Perhaps, if I announce my indication to all of these pilgrims present, that will suffice?”
The officer’s eyes rounded with alarm. He called his junior officers around him, and for nearly a minute, they conferred in private whispers.
“I would ask you one question,” Cas said, still hectoring the officer. “Would I have been granted such knowledge if I were not here on Royal Family business?”
“What knowledge?”
Cas motioned the officer back to him, away from the other guards. He whispered into the officer’s ear. “I know what is behind that tent. Or should I say, what is not behind that tent.”
Stunned, the Saudi officer blinked hard. “I have orders—”
“And I will have your name!” Cas shouted. “To report it to Yehia bin Laden, praise be upon him!” He waited until the name of one of the SBG founder’s fifty-three sons—of whom thirteen were Saudi Binladen Group board members— sank in. “Then, I will report you directly to—”
The officer put his hand in Cas’s face to signal that was enough.
“Imam Faisal!” Cas persisted, referring to one of Mecca’s chief clerics.
“Cease your talking at once!” the exasperated officer shouted. “I will call in this request to the Ministry.”
Cas was about to protest the necessity of that decision when he felt a tug on his coveralls. Bracing for an arrest, or worse, he glanced to his right and found Marly standing aside him, as if glued to his arm. She had the look of a canary that had just swallowed a cat. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and then shot him a telling glance that was underscored by the faint beginnings of a smile.
Cas forced his eyes back into his sockets. He realized that, in the confusion of his shouting match with the Saudi officer, she had apparently slipped into the tent and harvested the scraping samples. Winking his admiration for her bold move, he returned his attention to the officer and barked, “That’ll be quite enough, indeed! We will return tomorrow with the written authorization!” He threw an arm around Marly’s shoulder in a fake gesture of comradeship and, pulling her away, warned the flummoxed officer, “You have not heard the last from us!”
The officer, baffled, watched the two construction workers stomp away.
Stifling grins, Cas and Marly glided off through the sea of oncoming worshippers and hurried for the nearest gate.
* * *
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Shaaba Farms, Israel
BRIDGET WHELAN LUGGED HER SUITCASE up the metal steps of the drab kibbutz barracks and scanned the lodging sheets tacked to the announcements board. Exhausted from her flight and the teeth-rattling drive to the northeastern corner of this maddening country, she staggered down the hall and finally found the volunteer’s room she’d been assigned. The cell, no larger than a walk-in closet, was empty, and the cold cement floor reeked of manure and ammonia. Hebrew graffiti and mold-filled cracks latticed the puke-colored plaster walls. Were those bullet holes above the windowsill?
Too bonked to worry about random gunfire, she collapsed on the lower bed of a double bunk whose flimsy mattress was covered with a threadbare sheet that looked as if it had been used for some biblical prophet’s burial shroud. She had been in Israel only twelve hours, but already she wished she were back home. She had bribed her mother to take care of the baby for this?
Given her boss’s obsession with business appearances, she had been expecting to stay in a plush hotel like the King David in Jerusalem. But this wasteland—the locals called it northern Galilee—looked like a war zone set in the scrubbiest part of the Texas Panhandle. At a gas-station stop on the highway from Tel Aviv, a Moonie-eyed Pentecostal missionary from Alabama had given her the proselytizing treatment. Brainwashed into believing that every American was en route to the Rapture, the boy tried to impress her by bragging how Jesus had walked on water not far from here. What really impressed her, she told him, was that Jesus was smart enough to hightail it out of these miserable boondocks to look for more action in the big city, even if things didn’t turn out so well.
Everyone in this neurotic country seemed pissed off or crazy. From the moment she walked into Ben Gurion International Airport—only to be welcomed by scowling soldiers armed with machine guns—she’d been drawing suspicious stares and mumbled whispers. That officious officer at Customs had treated her as if she were carrying in the bubonic plague, and some nut job standing next to her in Baggage Claim had started yelling curses at her about the carnal sins of Jezebel.
Apparently they’d never encountered a modern pagan goddess. They oughta take a look in the mirror if they wanted to see weird. The whole bunch of them could pass for gun-toting Amish. And up here, on the northern border of the Promised Land, the Orthodox settlers were the worst of the lot. These aloof Old Testament reenactors packed serious heat, even when they sat at the dinner table, and kept looking toward the mountains to the west as if expecting a horde of locusts to cross the hills at any moment. They reminded her of those crazy militia creeps that hung around the bars in Lubbock.
And the farms? Ant colonies compared to the ranches in Texas. It was a miracle that anything grew on these scraggy hills, parched as they were from lack of rain and constantly overrun by tunneling Islamist suicide bombers. The Israelis accessorized their tractors with rifle racks and fitted their bulldozers with battering rams. Along the way here, she had seen a few irrigated fields rowed with cabbage, sorghum and wheat, but she had noticed only a few herds of cattle, and those looked scrawny and swarmed with flies.
The land of milk and honey, my Canaanite goddess ass.
What was Cohanim thinking, coming out here, anyway? This was the last place on Earth she would have picked to develop genetically enhanced bovines. Hell’s bells, these kibbutzim couldn’t even afford to build a decent barn. And yes, she would have asked her boss about all of this, had he been with her. Instead, Cohanim had decided to ride in the ambulance that carried the frozen embryo from Tel Aviv, sending her separately by hired car.
Her driver, a Palestinian student who attended engineering school on weekends, had jabbered non-stop during the entire six hours, explaining in broken English how the Shaaba Farms—as if she cared—sat in a triangle surrounded by Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. He had also told her that these fields had been fought over for so many years that even the residents now argued among themselves about their own nationality. The nearest town, Al Ghajar, had once been part of Syria before the Israelis occupied it. When the Israeli Defense Forces finally agreed to withdraw in 2000, the United Nations left the town divided, half in Lebanon and half in Israeli-occupied Syria. Most residents in Al Ghajar were Alawites, a Syrian religious sect.
When she had asked the driver if this kibbutz was ever in danger, he told her with a smile not to worry, that Hezbollah—the Lebanese Muslim militia—fired its rockets over your head here, trying to reach the wealthy Israelis in the center of the country. It all sounded like a big splatter of cow pod, along the lines of the poop parade between the Mexicans in Ciudad Juárez and the Texans across the border in El Paso.
HOURS LATER, STIRRING IN THE creaking bunk, Bridget forced open her sleep-caked eyes. She checked her watch. It was nearly nine in the evening. She hadn’t eaten since lunch, so she decided to drag herself out of the bed and walk over to the dining hall to see if the kitchen was still serving.
She staggered from the room half-groggy and walked past the shelves of open mailboxes where letters were left. She noticed that her name had already been taped over one of the nooks. An envelope was inside. She pulled it out and found a message from Mr. Cohanim:
I have a dinner meeting with a client this evening in Al Ghajar. Going over the recombinant DNA data and financial arrangements. No need for you to attend. Get some sleep and we’ll get to work on finding the surrogate cow candidate tomorrow.
She shook her head in amazement. How did he do it? A sixty-year-old man who could fly halfway around the world and still be sha
rp enough without even a nap to discuss complex scientific stuff?
She walked out of the barracks and headed down the main drag. The dingy buildings in this kibbutz reminded her of a dirt-poor community college built in the early 1950s. One new office, though, sat apart from the others. She strode over to check it out and noticed the smell of fresh-set concrete and new paint. There was a sign on the door:
LIGHTGIVER TECHNOLOGIES LLC CATTLE LABORATORY.
Are you kidding me?
Cohanim must have ponied up some serious shekels to get a state-of-the-art facility built in this backwater. All so he could play God with a few cows? Man, the boss had to be really rolling in the dough.
She peered through the door’s thick glass window. The interior looked downright spiffy. On the wall next to the entrance, a handprint security monitor had been installed. She wondered if Cohanim had already transferred the codes from the Dallas lab. Looking around first, she pressed her hand to the pad.
The door buzzed open. Sweet!
Inside, she found an immaculate, brand-king-new lab, a stainless-steel heaven. In the corner, some baggage lay opened. Cohanim, she realized, must have dropped off his gear before taking off for dinner. She opened the storage refrigerator. There it was … the Holy Grail.
Four Petri dishes, all marked with their percolating cultures.
She checked them out. The first container held the embryo generated from the DNA of the calf tooth and the rock minerals. She was still convinced that her boss’s genetic-homeopathic idea was harebrained. But, hey, whatever paid the bills. Next to it sat the dish with the backup donor egg, just in case the first embryo didn’t take and they had to start over. The other two dishes held the remaining DNA from the tooth and the extracts from the iron-rich rock.