The 13 th tribe if-1

by Robert Liparulo

  Elias looked at each of his compatriots in turn, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and said, “Wow. That was a trip.”

  5

  The blazing Egyptian sun baked Jagger Baird’s face, and he tipped his head to let the brim of his boonie hat shade his eyes: his sunglasses were about as effective as tissue in a rainstorm. A gust of wind tossed sand at him, and he turned his back until it passed.

  Standing outside the southeast wall of St. Catherine’s monastery, he surveyed the tight valley stretching out before him. The hard ground dipped and rose, formed grooves and cracks, ravines and sharp ledges, as though it had been hacked into existence. Sand and loose rock had come down off the mountains and settled into a tiger-stripe pattern of treacherous terrain on top of bedrock-all of it sun-bleached to the color of old bones. The term that came to mind was godforsaken, which flew in the face of everything the area stood for. The mountain looming to his right, behind the monastery, was Jabel Musa-Moses’s Mountain. Most of the world believed it to be the biblical Mt. Sinai, where God spoke to Moses through a burning bush and gave him the Ten Commandments.

  On a pilgrimage here in the fourth century, Helena, mother of Constantine, claimed she had found the actual burning bush and built a small church around it. Two hundred years later, in 527, Emperor Justinian I ordered the construction of a protective wall around the church. The result became the monastery, no larger than a city block-with walls sixty feet high and nine feet thick. For 1500 years, the walls and monks inside had weathered crusaders and invaders, political and religious turbulence, famine and fires.

  The latest onslaught was tourists, flocking to touch the bush, marvel at the monastery’s ancient structures, and climb the mountain to the spot where Moses received the Decalogue. Probably why the mountains as they rose gradually took on a reddish hue, Jagger thought: they were irritated by the bumbling trespassers, the way too much alcohol inflames a drunkard’s nose.

  His gaze moved from the mountain to the cloudless sky-denim blue at the northern horizon, brightening to brushed aluminum overhead-then down to the archaeological excavation that had brought him here as head of security. It consisted primarily of two Olympic-pool-sized rectangles, each stepping down to a depth of about twenty feet. They were positioned perpendicular to the slope rising from the valley floor to the base of Mt. Sinai. The hole-or unit — closest to the mountain was higher up the slope and had been dubbed Annabelle. The lower hole was Bertha. Ollie-Dr. Oliver Hoffmann, the lead archaeologist-had explained that their official designations were 55E60 and 48E122, respectively. These names indicated their positions in relation to a site datum, a point from which all dig activity was measured. On site, the lead arc was expected to christen them with easier monikers.

  “So I did,” he’d said with a grin badly in need of dental assistance.

  “Meaning A and B?” Jagger had asked.

  “Meaning two lovely ladies of my youth who left holes in my heart. Now I dig holes in their honor.”

  They’d been at a tavern in the nearby town of St. Catherine’s, and Ollie had raised his glass to take a swig. The beer was Stella, an Egyptian concoction that many connoisseurs considered the best in the world. Judging by Ollie’s consumption of it, he didn’t disagree.

  Downhill from the holes was a line of five beige tents, their aprons now fluttering in the breeze. Ollie used one as an office; the others provided storage space and shelter from the sun, a place to rest.

  Ten yards below the tents, past a split-rail fence, ran the trail that led from the monastery to the two routes up Mt. Sinai-Siket El Basha, a gradually ascending, winding path; and Siket Sayidna Musa, a much steeper ascent of 3,800 steps chiseled into the mountain’s granite by monks.

  Jagger couldn’t imagine the dedication required to accomplish that, kneeling on the harsh slope, pounding on hard stone in sweltering heat day after day for decades. But then, any faith that inspired such dedication was beyond him. He was fully aware of his sour disposition, and the reason for it: since a particular night fourteen months ago, his life had mirrored a Reader’s Digest survival story gone wrong. His wife, Beth, had written a few of them; he knew the drill: an average person is thrust into the eye of a hurricane named Disaster and somehow finds the strength to overcome, even triumph. Take out overcome and triumph, and you got Jagger’s story. He was still looking for his happy ending.

  If Beth were plotting a piece on him, it’d look something like this: Ivy Leaguer meets girl of his dreams. Whirlwind courtship. Wedding bells. Baby! Sheepskin. Commissioned as 2Lt, U.S. Army… Rangers… CID. Starts personal protection company with college/army BFF. Family/ career bliss. Car crash… other driver drunk! BFF + BFF’s family dies. Arm amputated. Prosthesis. Depression. Survivor’s guilt. Furious at God.

  Jagger crouched and picked up a stone. His boots had burnished a stable flat spot on the rocky slope. It was his favorite observation point, from which he could see the entire excavation with the monastery’s wall protecting his back. Rolling the stone in his palm, he watched two university students carry buckets of dirt out of Bertha. They dumped them into a screen-bottomed box on wooden legs, then began shaking the box to sift for treasures. As fascinating as he considered the idea of finding traces of long-lost people, he had quickly realized it was grueling and boring work, something he could never do. He’d take a gun over a trowel any day.

  Security-and-protection: that interested him, and through stints as an Army Ranger, a military investigator, and then a personal protection specialist-aka an executive bodyguard-he’d discovered a knack for it. Whether protecting a dignitary or an archaeological dig, he took his responsibilities seriously. More seriously, it seemed, than most archaeologists were accustomed to. When he’d arrived, the four guards already on site might have been recruited from a Cairo shopping mall. They’d worn no uniforms, except for what Jagger thought of as high school grunge, and, incredibly, spent most of their time playing cards on the other side of the monastery, where the gardens provided a measure of shade but no way to do their jobs.

  It bugged him that here in Egypt the word gun was merely a metaphor for his profession. Firearms were stringently regulated, and Ollie had told him to anticipate at least a year for the government to approve his application, if it was approved at all. Used to be, Jagger wouldn’t go a week without firing a weapon on a range. Now it’d been four months since he’d last felt the weight of a gun in his hand or smelled the clean fragrance of gun oil. He felt naked without firepower. He touched the hilt of a collapsible baton in a quick-release holster hanging at his hip where a pistol should have been. For crying out loud.

  He tossed the stone, watched it clatter over larger rocks and settle among a thousand like it, and he changed his mind: this inhospitable land wasn’t godforsaken; it was God- embraced, the perfect representation of the God he knew, a God more inclined toward punishment than compassion. Emotion stirred in his chest: not anger this time, but a grief at having lost something he’d once cherished.

  Before he worked it into a melancholy that would carry him through the rest of his shift, he was yanked out of himself by a woman’s screams.

  6

  She screamed again, and Jagger ripped off his glasses, scanning for the source. Workers were turning toward the tents, and he saw a canvas wall bulge out, then flutter back. He leaped forward, scrambling deftly over the treacherous surface-unlike his first few weeks here, when he’d spent most of the time twisting his ankles and landing on his butt.

  No more screams, but the tent was shaking as though caught in a wind much stronger than the breeze coming through the valley. Jagger hit the strip of earth that had been cleared and leveled for the tents and picked up speed. Skidding to a stop, he whipped back the tent’s entry flap.

  A man was holding a woman facedown against the tent’s plastic groundsheet, pulling an arm behind her back, pushing her face into the floor. Jagger recognized her kinky red hair: Addison Brooke, a doctoral student from Cambridge, here to work as Oliver’s
assistant.

  Jagger grabbed the back of the man’s collar and hoisted him off her. The man turned, swinging a fist at Jagger, who parried it with his prosthetic left arm. The man’s face twisted in pain at the blow to his wrist. Jagger, still with a fistful of collar, got hold of the man’s waistband. He spun, ready to hurl the guy into a shelving unit.

  “No!” Addison yelled. “Not the shelves!”

  At that moment Jagger didn’t give a lick for the artifacts on them

  … but everyone else did, so he continued to whip his hostage around in a circle. He stuck out a leg, tripping the man. He put his muscles into making sure the guy hit the ground hard, then dropped his knee onto the man’s spine. He rose enough to roll his adversary over, then pinned his knee into the attacker’s sternum. Still the man struggled, ramming a fist into Jagger’s thigh.

  Jagger clamped the hooks that had replaced his left hand over the man’s neck, an act that effectively hit the off switch on the guy’s movements. Jagger glanced up at Addison, sitting near the front corner of the roomlike tent. “You okay?”

  She brushed hair away from moist eyes and nodded.

  “You know him?” he asked.

  She said, “M-muscle.” It was what the arcs called a local hired to move dirt and do grunt work.

  The tent flap pulled away and Hanif, one of the site’s guards, rushed in. Ollie followed and knelt beside Addison. “What happened?”

  “He… he…” She closed her eyes, covered her mouth with a shaking hand, and pulled in a deep breath. “I caught him stealing artifacts.” Her voice was thin and tiny, like a little girl’s.

  The workman rattled out something in Egyptian. The words were raspy, squeezed through a windpipe pinched under Jagger’s grasp. Jagger eased up on the pressure… a little.

  “He says it’s not true,” Hanif translated, his own speech heavily accented. “He was simply putting away some new finds.”

  Addison shook her head. “Look in his satchel.”

  Jagger rose up off the man. He yanked him to his feet, but didn’t release him.

  Ollie grabbed the canvas bag hanging from the man’s shoulder and pulled out what looked to Jagger like a broken ashtray. He shook it in front of Mume’s face. “A potsherd. We uncovered it this morning.”

  Hanif reached behind him and produced a set of handcuffs-a piece of equipment Jagger had insisted his guards carry, along with walkie-talkies, canteens, and batons. He’d also instituted uniforms-Desert Storm-style fatigues-and weekly training sessions. Hanif stepped behind the workman and forced his hands around.

  When Jagger heard the ratcheting of the cuffs he let go, leaving a red mark on either side of the man’s neck. He went to Addison and held his hand out to her. She grabbed it and smiled up at him. Bloody teeth caused his heart to skip. Her bottom lip had split open. Blood oozed out, and it was smeared across her chin. He turned and swung his fist into the culprit’s face. The man flew back, out of Hanif’s grip, and crashed into a makeshift table. He broke through cheap plywood, sending tools, papers, and unidentifiable debris flipping into the air. By the time they rained down, he had hit the floor and slid halfway through the bottom of the tent wall.

  Hanif grabbed his feet and tugged him back in. The workman was shaking his head in agony, splattering blood from a shattered nose and wailing out a string of sharp words Jagger didn’t understand.

  Rubbing his knuckles on his hip, Jagger took in Ollie’s stunned look and said, “Sorry.”

  Ollie grinned. “Only thing to be sorry about is beating me to it.” He patted Jagger on the shoulder and turned to Addison. “Come on, I’m taking you to the clinic.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “Go back to Annabelle. Just let me clean up a bit.”

  Ollie squeezed her arm, then slipped out. His voice returned, “Okay, everyone, back to work! Nothing to see here.”

  Hanif got the workman to his feet. Snot and blood covered the guy’s lower face like a veil. “I’ll bring him in,” Hanif said.

  “Don’t bother,” Jagger said. The village’s tiny police force didn’t give a squat what happened at the dig and would let the guy go as soon as Hanif was out of sight. “Send him on his way and tell him if I see his face again, it won’t be just a busted nose.”

  Hanif gripped his prisoner’s waistband and tugged him out of the tent.

  Addison touched Jagger’s hand. “Thank you.”

  “You sure about the clinic?” It was in the village a mile from the monastery.

  She made a face. “I’ve fended off boyfriends rougher than him.”

  Jagger didn’t believe it-she was way too smart to get entangled with people like that. But he understood.

  “You didn’t have to punch him, you know.”

  “Yeah, I did.” What he shouldn’t have done was grip the guy’s neck with his hooks. That could have gone terribly wrong. “Is the artifact he tried to steal worth much?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “We won’t know until we date it.”

  Jagger nodded. He’d spent two years as a special agent for the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. The more he learned about archaeology, the more amazed he was by how similar the two disciplines were. The best investigators never made assumptions, always pursued the smallest detail, and found connections that baffled others but in reality were based on a knowledge of human behavior-descriptors that equally applied to successful archaeologists.

  Addison touched her lip, winced, then stared at the blood on her finger. She sniffed back a sob.

  He suspected it wasn’t pain that had her on the brink of tears: it was the feeling of helplessness, of being overpowered. Being at the mercy of another person, someone malicious, was staggeringly frightening. Jagger was muscular, agile, and trained to fight, all of which put him at the top of the food chain. But he had learned the hard way that there was always someone bigger and tougher. He picked up a roll of paper towels, unrolled two clean squares, and pulled them off. He poured water from his canteen onto them and handed the wad to her.

  She dabbed at her lip and wiped her chin.

  “Why don’t you go see Beth?” he suggested. His wife and Addison had hit it off right away, and Jagger was grateful that Beth had a friend in this lonely place. He knew she would provide the balm Addison needed: a sympathetic heart and comforting words.

  “I will,” Addison said, “later. Really, I’m fine.” She tossed the bloody wad into the rubble of the table and its contents. She started out of the tent, then stopped. “For a moment I thought you were going to kill him.”

  Jagger tried to smile but ended up frowning. “Me too.” And what frightened him most was the realization that he wouldn’t have felt much if he had.

  [7]

  Nevaeh strolled through a dark corridor, lighted only by a few candles set in small recesses carved close to the ceiling. This section of the tunnels had been wired with electricity, but she liked it this way better: she’d spent more time on earth without electricity than with it, and natural light calmed her like a warm bath.

  As she walked, she raked the nails of her left hand along a wall of jawless skulls. They screeched over a fleshless forehead, then slid off to click against the temple of the next skull. Screeeeech-click, over and over again, like a vinyl record skipping back over two seconds of static. Her fingernail found a gaping crack, and she wondered if it had been inflicted postmortem or if it evinced the event that had separated body from soul.

  Lucky you, she thought.

  Her S.W.A.T.-style boots padded softly against the limestone floor. She imagined watching herself at that moment in a movie: her dark clothes and hair drifting silently in the shadows, only her face and hands standing out, as if disembodied, perhaps a spirit looking for her bones among the thousands around her. In this long-forgotten place, she could forever pace the length of the corridor, slowly wearing grooves into the skulls, and no one would notice.

  On her right, the wall was made of stone blocks. Arched doors, spaced every thirty
feet or so, marked the many rooms that lined the long corridor. In addition to the location’s seclusion and secrecy, these rooms were one of the reasons the Tribe had chosen to call this place home for the past decade. Each of the nine remaining members had his or her own room, except the smaller children, Jordan and Hannah, who shared one. That left rooms for a kitchen and dining room, bathroom, storage area, an armory, and a cell for the rare “visitor.” Most of the bedrooms doubled as something else: Ben’s was also the Tribe’s library and chapel; Sebastian’s was used for planning and for their computer needs; Toby’s was an entertainment center, with televisions and game consoles.

  Nevaeh veered across the corridor to listen at Toby’s door. Voices came through: Toby, Phin, and Sebastian were playing on the Xbox. She supposed playing wasn’t quite right. They were using a flight simulator to train for their upcoming mission, the one that had taken a huge leap from dream to reality now that they had the chips from MicroTech in hand.

  Good. Success of the Amalek Project, as Ben had dubbed it, depended on their ability to control the weapons.

  She scanned the tunnel and didn’t see light seeping under any doors. Though it was late morning, they had returned from Baltimore only hours before, and most of them had headed straight to bed. They could sleep on the jet, but it was never restful.

  Nevaeh suspected Creed was in his room brooding. He opposed Amalek and was becoming more vocal about it as the date approached. Tough. It would happen with or without him, and the fact that everything was coming together was proof God approved.

  But she didn’t like dissent among the Tribe, and just thinking of Creed stirred the beginnings of a headache. As usual, it wouldn’t be severe nor last long, but it intensified her exhaustion, and she considered heading for her own bed. No, as keyed up as she was about a lot of things-the events in Baltimore, Amalek, needing to kill something the way Elias needed his cigarettes-she’d only toss and turn.