by Glen Craney
Hells bells, she hoped the blood of the cow they chose wouldn’t react adversely to the embryo and flood antibodies into the recombinant DNA—
Oh, frack! The recombinant DNA data!
The boss had given her that binder to carry in her luggage. If he went to his meeting without it, he’d come off looking like a complete fool to the Israelis. And she’d catch the blame.
She rushed out of the lab and found the dining hall. Hurrying inside, she cornered one of the kibbutz students who was cleaning the tables, an Israeli boy crowned with shocks of wild black hair under a yarmulke and dressed in a patterned short-sleeved shirt that her grandfather might have worn. “Excuse me. Do you speak English?”
He curled a grin that, roughly translated, suggested there wasn’t much social activity here and that he had just hit the jackpot with the new tail. “Yes, of course. Would you like me to show you around?”
She batted her thick black Elmira lashes to reel him in. “Actually, maybe later. But right now I need some information.”
“Sure.”
“How far is Al Ghajar from here?”
“No more than seven kilometers. I can take you on my scooter.”
She did the math: That was about four miles, too far to walk, especially in a foreign land at night. “How many restaurants are there in the town?”
“Maybe five.”
“If you were a businessman wanting to impress someone important, which restaurant would you choose?”
“Abu Kamal serves the best grilled lamb and tabouleh south of Damascus. The mayor owns it. All the fat cats around here go there to eat.”
She debated the risk-reward ratio of accepting his offer to take her into town. Finally, she agreed. “Before we go, I need to get something from my room first.”
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER—AND AFTER a promise to go out with Scooter Boy on a date later in the week—Bridget finally convinced him to drop her in front of the restaurant. She wouldn’t need him around to take her back. After she saved Cohanim’s rich ass, the old curmudgeon would obviously feel obliged to buy her dinner and return her to the kibbutz. Besides, she didn’t want to have to pay off the horny little toad with some suck-face, or worse.
The village of Al Ghajar looked to be about the size of Seminole or Portales, maybe two thousand souls tops. The restaurant was crowded, just as her new kibbutz friend had promised, but she didn’t notice any women in the place. Huge platters of mouth-watering dishes that smelled like a spice bazaar sat on long trestles between decanters of wine. On divans in the corners, heavy-lidded men hovered over strange kettles and sucked on pipes attached to hoses.
She scanned the seats but didn’t see Mr. Cohanim. That made sense. He was probably in one of the exclusive back rooms reserved for VIPs. Clutching the data binder, she opened the door and entered.
All eyes turned and stabbed at her.
The owner, bald as a cantaloupe and amply girthed, reacted to her appearance as if a swarm of rats had just invaded his establishment. “I am sorry, madam,” he said with a hint of a French accent. “But we have no tables available this evening.”
“I’m looking for a business colleague. Seth Cohanim’s his name. He’s an American.”
The owner shook his head. “No Americans have been here tonight.”
Damn. Her bad luck just kept pouring down in buckets. Sure, Mercury was retrograde, but come on. Cohanim would have to go and choose some obscure joint for his little rendezvous. “Where is the next closest restaurant?”
The owner led her outside, away from the disgusted customers. He pointed down a creepy street that was poorly lit and littered with trash. “The Alhambra is five blocks that way, then turn right. But it is not a safe place for a woman to go alone.”
Could it get any worse? What was she going to do now?
She hadn’t changed enough dollars at the airport to pay for a taxi back, even if she could find one around here willing to pick her up. She had no choice but to try the next restaurant down and hope Cohanim was there. As she hurried past the closed shops, she drew glares from the clusters of cigarette-puffing men who were loitering on the corners. Her heart was racing—and worse, she had to piss like a donkey. She wasn’t about to squat over one of those holes like the women here had been forced to do since King David pulled off that stunning upset with his peashooter.
To ward off any lurking demons, she whispered every curse spell she could remember from Harry Potter. The sky seemed to be devoid of stars, and the moon was absent, too. In the near-total blackness, she could barely see where to put one foot in front of other. These cobblestones were chewing up her new Eccos like sandpaper. How many gagging new odors could assault her in one place—smoke, sewage, grilled meat, and human sweat? These old mud walls felt as if they were closing in on her. She could see the headlines on the CNN news ticker now: Texas woman taken hostage. Terrorists threaten to decapitate her unless ransom is paid. Yeah, right. Those bastards in Lubbock would probably take up a collection and send a telegram offering to pay double to keep her locked up over here.
She heard a flapping noise, and turned. Was somebody following her? She cocked her ear and tried to muffle her steps to better hear what was behind her. Did that restaurant owner say four blocks or five? She hid the data binder under her jacket. If she were mugged, she didn’t want to lose her job, too. Feeling more and more uneasy, she decided to turn right at the next side street and prayed that this was the one.
In the distance, another sound rose and died … was that a moan?
She froze. Several yards ahead, shadowy silhouettes—she couldn’t make out how many—darted across the street. Hoping that they didn’t see her, she veered over to a dingy apartment building and pressed her back against the dust-coated stone wall. She sucked in her stomach and straightened her spine to avoid standing out. She heard a man’s voice …
“She checks out as the perfect carrier. Every trait you requested.”
“I want her younger than the last one,” another man's voice drawled in reply.
Bridget grinned—that Texas twang she knew all too well. Cohanim and the client must have finished dinner and were now taking a stroll to discuss the surrogate cow for the embryo implant in the morning. Relieved, she rushed toward the men to greet her boss, but they turned a corner before she could reach them. When she caught up, they had disappeared into the tunneling darkness.
The street was empty. Where the hell could they have gone?
Alleys and side streets all branched in different directions. She walked as fast as she could down one of the narrow wynds that was circumscribed and arched by towering old tenements. Above her, from the dozens of small apartments, she could hear muted conversations and pots clanging and televisions blaring Arab game shows. At last, the tight warren opened up to another cross street. She turned the corner.
On the far curb, a neon sign flickered, revealing Cohanim and the other man. They were dragging an unconscious girl toward an ambulance whose headlights were dark.
What are they doing?
Wait a minute. Wasn’t that the ambulance that Cohanim had taken to transport the frozen embryo? Yeah, she could see the reflective lettering on the vehicle glow in the dim light: Yeshiva Medical Transport. She had seen that same sign at the airport pickup station.
Had her boss hit the girl by accident? She didn’t see any damage on the front fender or skid marks anywhere. The prone girl didn’t even look bloodied or traumatized. If an accident had occurred, wouldn’t the ambulance driver have its bubbles flashing? And wouldn’t the villagers be out congregating to see what the commotion was all about?
She ducked back behind the corner, into the shadows, and tried to make sense of what she was witnessing. She drew a deep breath and forced herself to inch her eyes around the wall again. She fought a rising tide of paranoia.
The rear door of the ambulance opened.
Cohanim and the other man lifted the girl to a gurney inside.
For a fleeting moment,
she saw the victim’s face from a distance, illuminated by the overhead light from the open door. The unconscious girl looked to be perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, stunningly beautiful, with long black hair and perfect olive skin. Her eyes were closed, but her head trembled slightly, as if she were in the throes of a seizure. The man with Cohanim leaned over the girl and dropped a syringe into a medical bag under the gurney. He secured her with two straps, then, realizing that the light was on, clicked the button. The interior snapped into darkness.
Cohanim slowly closed the ambulance door, pulling its lock gently to avoid making a noise. He looked up and down the street and, reassured that no one had seen him, gave a thumbs-up signal to the driver. He patted the rear door as the ambulance began to creep down the street with its headlights still off. Then, it disappeared into the night. Alone now in the street, Cohanim lit a cigar and took several long puffs.
Bridget blinked hard. She had never seen him smoke.
Who is this guy, anyway?
She saw him look up at the apartment building, as if studying the address number engraved over the door. She squinted to see what he was reading. The lettering was in Arabic; all those squiggly flourishes and dots and slashes looked the same to her. She searched for anything that could serve as a landmark to help her remember this place. The window on the third floor had a flag hanging from its balcony: two red bars surrounding a white bar, with a green tree in the middle. Was that a country? Maybe it was the insignia for a soccer team.
Third floor. Green-and-white flag. She burned that image into her mind’s eye.
Cohanim began walking down the street, straight toward her. She pressed herself into a cranny behind a water pipe and prayed to Demeter that her boss wouldn’t see her here in the shadows. He walked past briskly, so close to her that she could have touched him.
When he was a block away, she released her breath and dropped her hands to her shaking knees.
* * *
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Paris, France
WEARING SAFETY GOGGLES, CAS LOOKED like an irradiated fly as he leaned over Marly’s shoulder and watched her prepare the Kaaba shavings for testing in a Sorbonne University laboratory.
She poured a highly flammable chemical over the mineral residue in a tube and lifted it to the light to examine. The liquid sizzled. She slid the tube into a centrifuge, locked down the cover, and shimmied the contents like a paint can in a hardware store mixer.
“How long until we know?” Cas asked.
She nudged his chin back with her shoulder to ease his breath off her neck. “It takes two minutes for the emulsifier to break down the compounds. Then, another ten minutes to settle. We’ll have the test results in less time than it takes you to embarrass yourself or piss somebody off.”
He had grown used to her pouting coldness, so her newfound willingness to respond with more than a few clipped words threw him, but only for a moment. He checked his watch: almost noon, the prime café hour. It was just his luck that the only testing lab available on short notice happened to be in Paris. He was still a little ragged from the overnight flight from Dubai, but what better time to make his move? “I know a great little bistro in the Marais,” he said. “I’ll buy lunch.”
“Are you actually asking me out on a date?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Your answer.”
Marly slid off her goggles and returned them to the cabinet. The more time she spent around this man, the stranger he seemed. Here he was hitting on her while the reunion with his long-lost son hung in the balance with these test results. She was starting to suspect that his crass sense of humor and inappropriate comments were just unconscious defenses against the pain of dealing with his sadness and grief. Maybe spooks like him had no choice but to hide behind such personality masks to survive. Still, as oddly charming as he sometimes came across, she wasn’t about to get romantically involved with a guy so broken emotionally. She retreated into a formal tone. “I think it’s best that we keep our relationship professional. I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that my fee is negotiable.”
Cas’s soufflé of seduction deflated before it had a chance to set. “You call what we’ve been doing professional?”
She edged away from him, but he just kept moving closer. Finally, she stopped and turned to confront him. “Look, I don’t date older men.”
He winced. “Yowze.”
“Besides, you’re California-fusion with guacamole for brains. And I’m Upper West Side Barney Greengrass lox-and-bagels. That’s a recipe for indigestion.”
The timer went off on the centrifuge.
She sighed in relief, thankful for being saved by the bell.
“Okay, your loss.” Cas shrugged off what would have been humiliation for mere mortals. “Just remember. Guacamole can be tasty and healthy. And, I swear to god, avocados are an aphrodisiac. The Aztecs called the tree a ‘testicle tree,’ soooo …”
“You all really do think with your groin brains, don’t you?”
He was surprised again, this time by her coarseness. Maybe he was getting to her.
When the test tube had been sufficiently shaken, she pulled it from the rack and stared at its murky contents. “I’m betting we have a positive here.”
“What are you looking for exactly?”
“Usually I have the rock itself to examine,” she said. “This protocol is a little unorthodox. I have a list I check off. First, does the sample have a black exterior coating that’s extremely thin? If so, that’s a sign of melting under extreme heat when it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere.”
“That would explain why the Kaaba Stone is white inside and black on the outside.”
“Could be. Or maybe somebody painted it black to fool somebody. What shape was the Stone supposed to have been in?”
“Seven fragments, held together with some kind of serious cement,” he said. “The largest fragment of the original Stone was described as roundish.”
Marly brightened. “That sounds promising, then. The pressure on falling meteorites tends to smooth their curvature. How about the texture?”
“Looked like the fragments had bubbles, maybe. At least at one time.”
Marly’s eyes flashed with rising anticipation. “Spongy. Another good sign.”
“I bet you could make a handy little profit selling these on the side, huh?”
“Only if you know what you’re doing,” she said. “There’s a whole meteorite-treasure underworld out there. You have to have contacts who will let you know when one is seen shooting across the sky. Most of them burn up in entry, but about five hundred a year make it to the ground.”
“How large are they, usually?”
“Anywhere from the size of a pea to a medicine ball. Most are too small to find. Of those five hundred, half a dozen will be recovered in any given year and make it to market.”
“How many hunters are looking for them?”
“Hard to say. Thousands, probably. The odds aren’t very good, though. Most of the meteorite prospectors hover around the best impact areas, like Barringer Crater in Arizona and Odessa Crater in Texas. For every one found, you can usually plan on logging in about a hundred hours of searching.”
Cas shook his head. “These things must be more valuable than gold.”
“The going rate is one-fifty an ounce.”
“Whew. For the same jack, you can get some investment-grade silver—or middling weed.”
That made Marly laugh. She glanced at the clock on the wall with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. “Fingers crossed.”
Cas braced for the results. “Hey, it’s only two million dollars and my son’s release from prison. No big deal.”
Marly took a deep breath as she printed out the page with the compound results. She scanned the lines of data, giving no hint of a reaction. Finally, she said, “Widmanstatten pattern.”
“Gesundheit.” Cas leaned closer to her while waitin
g for an explanation. He tapped her on the shoulder. “Hello? Remember, you’re dealing with guacamole brains here.”
Marly seemed to be talking to herself. “A series of bands in geometric shapes. Created by the merging of two different iron-nickel minerals formed during slow cooling. Only two percent of all extraterrestrial stones have this composition. It’s a pallisite. Very rare.”
“So our God Stone is from space. Just as the Muslims believe.”
She looked more confused than triumphant. “Yes, but that’s not all. There’s an unusual level of hydrogen and crystallization here, too. All meteorites have crystallization, but this level is off the charts.”
“I was afraid of that,” Cas said lightly, as if he had any idea what she meant.
“It’s the same level of hydrogen found in black diamonds.”
His mouth dropped a couple notches. “You’re saying that our missing rock once held a diamond?”
“If this is right, it makes the Hope Diamond look like a Cracker Jacks toy.”
Cas paced the lab, trying to make sense of the findings. “Y’know, Doc, you might want to show a little more excitement. We’re talking major paydirt here, and you are a step closer to retirement, after all.” When she didn’t react to his gibe, he put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her to face him. “What’s wrong?”
She broke off from her examination of the results. “It’s probably nothing. This data also shows an unusually high level of carbon and sugar phosphate. It’s odd for those elements to survive, especially given the extreme temperatures that a meteorite endures to land here.”
“Does that have anything to do with the price of popcorn in Bollywood?”
She shook her head. “I guess not.”
“Then, hello, let’s focus here.”
She took off her lab coat and hung it on a peg. “All right, so your Kaaba Stone is a meteorite. Jump for joy. But how does any of this help us figure out where the Stone is now? And how does it help us get it back?”