The 13 th tribe if-1

by Robert Liparulo

  “I know. Will we have our own chapter?”

  “Nah, too boring.”

  “Dad!” Tyler called. He had edged halfway to the line of tents. “Come on!”

  “When do you need him back?” Jagger asked her.

  “Gheronda’s expecting us at two.”

  He raised his arm to look at his watch, then realized he’d raised the wrong one. He closed his eyes and sighed. He didn’t know which was worse, that after more than a year he still hadn’t mastered the change in his body or that he’d suffered the involuntary change in the first place.

  Beth squeezed his shoulder. He forced a smile and checked the time. “By two,” he said. “No problem.”

  She returned the thermos to the lunchbox and handed it to him. “There are some extra cups in there for Ollie and Addison. And a sandwich for you.”

  He took it, kissed her again, and watched her walk toward the monastery until she turned to smile back at him and wave. Then he watched a little longer.

  Tyler had returned and now tugged at his hook. “Come on, come on, come on.”

  Jagger scooped him up and deposited him on the other side of the fence. “Last one there does the dishes tonight.”

  As the boy bounded away, Jagger turned to look back toward the monastery, but Beth had disappeared in the crowd.

  [13]

  From her position in the center of the dark intersection at the end of the tunnel, Nevaeh watched Phin storm out of Toby’s room. He turned back and said, “There’s something wrong with the controls. I should have cleared the building that time!”

  Sebastian stepped into the corridor and put his hand on Phin’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Get some rest and we’ll try again later.”

  Phin jerked himself free. “Fix the controls and we will.” He stormed away and entered his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

  Sebastian shook his head, walked to his room, and disappeared into it. Light splashed into the corridor. Nevaeh waited for him to shut the door, but he didn’t.

  A minute later Toby came out of his room, strolled to the kids’ room, and opened the door. The light clicked on, illuminating the skulls opposite the door. “Come on, guys,” Toby said. “Let’s do something.”

  Nevaeh could hear Jordan’s groggy voice, but not his words. She guessed they weren’t very pleasant.

  She rose and walked through the first flickering sphere of candlelight. The kitchen door was open, and a light over the stove showed an empty room. She continued past Ben’s door and stopped at her own. Three doors away, Jordan bolted out of his and Hannah’s bedroom. He grabbed two skulls to keep from crashing into the wall, then looked back into the room as Hannah pattered out, giggling. Jordan’s hair stood up on one side, and he wore pajamas covered with cartoon skateboarders; Hannah had on a pink nightgown and slippers like pink clouds. It didn’t matter that Toby had just rousted them, nor that it was just after noon: in this windowless dungeon, night reigned around the clock, and the kids had taken to never wearing street clothes unless they were heading out.

  Jordan looked in Nevaeh’s direction, stiffened, and squinted into the darkness.

  She stepped into the light of a candle so he could see her. He smiled and pressed a finger to his lips. He grabbed Hannah’s hand, and they ran the other direction.

  Toby’s voice came out of the bedroom: “… six… seven… eight…”

  The children flashed through three pools of light, then disappeared into the black throat of the corridor.

  A few seconds later Toby stepped into view. The teenager had on his typical uniform of layered shirts and fashionable jeans: heaven forbid he should ever be caught in pj’s. He looked both directions and addressed Nevaeh in a loud whisper: “Where’d they go?”

  She shrugged, and Toby took off. Nevaeh knew he’d never find them: ever exploring, Jordan had found a place where the skulls had crumbled, revealing another room beyond. And she was sure that was only one of many hiding places the boy had discovered.

  She thanked God for Jordan. He had been like a son to her since she’d woken up with her legs draped over him on that awful day so long ago. She was thankful, too, that the children’s personalities and mental states had remained childlike. Ben had a biological explanation for that too, but she knew it was God. Without their constant youthful energy, quick laughter, and optimistic outlook, she would have gone crazy a long time ago. Maybe Phin should spend more time with them.

  She walked the corridor to Sebastian’s room and looked in. He was sitting at a table against the far wall, his back to her. Three laptop computers crowded in front of him, like children listening to a story. Another device, which resembled a black soda can capped by a glass dome, sat off to one side. Wires ran from it and disappeared behind the computers.

  She walked silently toward him, past a big workbench on which he’d arranged his shark fishing gear: rod, reel, fighting harness, sonar. Stacked in a basket on the desk were hand-annotated underwater topographic maps from places like Vigo Port, Spain; Terceira, Azores; and Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica. The chair in front of the workbench was the floor-mounted fighting chair from which he’d caught a record-setting marlin-1,362 pounds and 15 feet long. Displayed on the wall was a selection of old whaling harpoons: two-flue and one-flue, toggling, and a bomb lance. They had nothing to do with shark fishing, but Sebastian was nostalgic about them, having used them on a Dutch whaling expedition in 1880. When Nevaeh protested his hobby-reminding him that even Peter Benchley had become a shark conservationist-he’d said the only reason she didn’t shark fish herself stemmed from a general distaste for cannibalism.

  Sebastian’s fingers clicked over the center keyboard. He paused to watch numbers and graphs construct themselves on the monitor. Before they stopped moving, his hands flashed over the keys again, restarting the process.

  She stopped behind him and watched him work. She considered grabbing hold of his close-cropped Afro, then thought her nails on the back of his neck would give him a better scare. She raised her hand.

  “What do you want, Nevaeh?” he said, clicking away.

  She slapped the back of his head. “You’re no fun.”

  “I’m busy. Go away.”

  She turned and rested her backside against the edge of the desk. “Have you cracked the code on the microchips yet?”

  “You just got back with them.”

  “And we should be heading for the zone of operations by now, but we can’t move until you have the chips ready for the control panels.”

  “Can’t stand still, can you? I had a dog like that once.” He glanced at her. “Had to put him down, made me too nervous.”

  She picked up the soda can thing, drawing its wires tight against her side as she examined it. Under the glass dome rested an octagonal computer chip about the diameter and thickness of a dime. At each of its corners, a thin gold peg disappeared into a hole in the top of the can. It looked to Nevaeh like a spider caught in a trap.

  “Hey, hey,” Sebastian said, standing and taking the can from her. He replaced it on the desk. “Do you want me to decode this thing or not? Get out of here, Nev. I mean it.”

  She crossed her arms. “Give me an ETA.”

  He sighed and dropped back into the chair. He waved a hand at the monitors, as though tossing sand at them. “These chips are designed not to be decoded. Each UAV requires two chips onboard and two matching chips at the control console. All four have to communicate with each other as well as the rest of the fleet for the drone to work. Thanks to your success at MicroTech, we now have duplicates of the control console chips. But they’re encoded and unusable until unlocked by the commanding officer-or me. Trouble is, each one has its own AES-256 encryption block.” He smiled at the confusion on her face. “That’s the most secure encryption in the world-NSA standard.”

  “Can’t you just give me an ETA?”

  “How long until the field test?” he said. It was their one window of opportunity, the only time the particular co
mbat drones they planned on hijacking would be fully armed outside a theater of combat. The U.S. military had ordered beefed-up versions of their premier hunter-killer drones, each with enough firepower to bring down a skyscraper. They also wanted fleets of these flying killing machines to work in unison, with the ultimate goal of creating the most powerful conventional warfare unit of destruction ever. The field test was slated to be a demonstration of an operational ten-unit fleet. It was the Tribe’s intention to make it a demonstration of much more.

  “Two weeks.”

  Sebastian made a dismissive sound with his mouth.

  “But Ben’s inside man says they always change the date for security purposes. Could be anytime.”

  Ben-forever cultivating connections within multiple countries’ seats of power-had been particularly secretive about this one. The source must have had umbra-level clearance: he’d told Ben about the drones’ field test, the microchips that controlled them, and how to get the manufacturer’s secret spare set.

  “I’ll have them cracked by tomorrow, okay?”

  “I knew we could count on you. How’re Toby and Phin coming along? I heard them practicing their piloting skills on the Xbox.”

  “They need a couple more days.”

  She shook her head. “The field command center has been set up for weeks. All we need to do is plug in the manpower and the chips. You got the chips, and they’re still not ready?”

  “It’s not as easy as it looks, Nev,” Sebastian said. “Lot of things to learn, and it has to be second nature to them, no time to think once they’re moving. They’ve been practicing all day. They need a break.”

  “We should go as soon as you’ve cracked the chips. Let’s at least get on-site.”

  “Talk to Ben.”

  “I don’t need to talk to Ben.”

  Sebastian shrugged. “Whatever.”

  They stared at each other for a few beats. They both understood the balance of power. Ben was calculating and meticulous; Nevaeh swift and impetuous. Every mission required a mix of both personalities. How much of one or the other depended on a number of factors, such as the levels of risk, covertness, and political sensitivity. Either Ben or Nevaeh would take charge once they’d determined the mix. The Baltimore trip exemplified the concept. Ben had acquired the intel and planned the theft. Once there, however, Nevaeh had pushed them into action and taken care of the guard. Ben was the Tribe’s head; she was its muscle.

  No one doubted that this new project’s size and importance-its potential impact-pushed it firmly into Ben’s purview.

  She nodded and strode toward the door. “We’d better not miss it,” she said. She turned left into the corridor and stuck her head into the next room. Phin was sitting on his bed, balancing a bottle of whiskey on his knee and moving his head to music she couldn’t hear. When he saw her and plucked out an earbud, she said, “Want to kill someone?”

  “Who do you have in mind?”

  She pulled a sheet of paper from her back pocket and held it up. “A bad guy, who else?”

  [14]

  By the time Jagger had reached the first pit, Tyler was running around the next, uppermost dig to reach its shallow end. The boy hopped in and disappeared. Jagger waved to the dozen workers in the first hole. Several nodded in return, their hands occupied by a shovel and a trowel, a wood-framed screen and a camera. He passed Bertha, crossed the ground between the holes, and stopped at the edge of Annabelle’s deep end. Twenty feet below, Oliver, Addison, and Tyler crouched around a small lump protruding from the floor. Oliver brushed at the object while Addison made notes on a clipboard. Tyler was leaning close, as though inspecting a new kind of insect.

  “Playing in the dirt again?” Jagger said.

  Oliver cranked his neck to look at him and laughed. “In grad school I had a T-shirt with those very words. How’re things, Jag?”

  “All quiet on the Middle Eastern front.”

  Oliver flashed a big smile. “For now,” he said. He turned back to his brushing.

  “Expecting trouble?” Jagger said.

  “I hope so,” Oliver said without looking. “When we find what we’re looking for, the looters will descend like vultures. And the anarchists. Then you’ll really earn your keep.” He glanced up. “Not that you don’t now.”

  “Something like this?” Tyler said, leaning closer to the protruding clump. “Is it special?”

  “Probably not,” Oliver said. “Just a piece of pottery. Not even from the right era.”

  “Then why are you being so careful?”

  Oliver leaned back onto his heels and sighed. “Because you never know.”

  Addison nudged Tyler with her elbow. “Some villagers in Jordan once found what they thought was a headstone,” she said. “They broke it up to sell pieces to tourists. Turns out it was an ancient memorial celebrating a Moabite ruler’s victories over Omri, king of Israel.”

  “The stone mentions the House of David and Yahweh, the Jewish name for God,” Oliver added. “It pretty much shut up some groups who said there never was a King David.”

  “People said that?” Tyler said.

  “Anything to disprove the Bible.”

  “But why?”

  Addison shrugged. “They think religion is stupid, I guess. They want to live by their own rules, not God’s.”

  Jagger squatted at the edge of the hole and set down the lunchbox. “We talked about that, Tyler,” he said. “That’s why Dr. Hoffmann’s digging here.”

  Tyler chimed in. “’Cause some people say there was no Moses, right, Ollie?”

  “They specifically deny the Exodus, that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt.”

  “Even that the Red Sea parted?” Tyler said.

  “Especially the miracles,” Oliver agreed. “Just too crazy for them.”

  Tyler looked out of the hole at the mountain rising above them. “Or the Ten Commandments?”

  “They don’t believe any of it,” Oliver said. He stood and brushed dust off his khaki trousers. “Thing is, no one has found any proof that the Israelites were ever here, which is sort of amazing, considering how many of them there were.”

  “Like… how many?”

  “Oh, about two and a half million,” Addison said.

  “Or twenty thousand,” Oliver said, “depending on whom you listen to. Either way, it was a lot of people. They should have left some evidence that they were here.”

  Tyler stared at the find Oliver had brushed. “Like what?”

  “Bones, a gravesite. When Moses came down from the peak with the first tablets God had given him and found the people worshipping a golden calf, he had the Levites kill three thousand people. The bodies have to be somewhere.”

  Tyler made a face. “They just killed them?”

  “For disobeying God. The rest of them had to wander in the desertthis desert-for forty years, until most of them died off. God wanted their children to inherit the Promised Land, not them.”

  “Wow.” Tyler turned a horrified expression toward his father.

  Jagger said, “And you think a spanking is bad.”

  Oliver continued: “Normally, archaeologists would look some distance away from encampments or settlements for gravesites. But scholars believe Moses would have had the slain buried right here at the base of the mountain, to warn the others of what happens when they sin against God. Plus, here’s where we have the best chance of finding other evidence… like jewelry, lots of it. Moses said they didn’t deserve to be decorated with ornaments, so the Israelites stripped off all their jewelry before leaving this place.”

  Tyler started to say something, but Oliver held up his hand to stop him. “Oh, and what if, just what if, we found”-he raised his hands and gaped theatrically at Tyler-“the holy grail of the Old Testament?”

  “ What?” Tyler exclaimed. “The real holy grail, like in that old Indiana Jones movie?”

  Oliver laughed. “No, no. My holy grail, the greatest discovery I can imagine.”

&n
bsp; Tyler just stared.

  “A piece of the original tablets,” Oliver said. “A shard of the tablets that Moses broke when he saw the Israelites worshipping the idol. Written in stone by the finger of God himself.”

  “Really?” Tyler said. He looked at the walls of the dig. “Here?”

  “If anywhere,” Oliver said. “Can you imagine?”

  He looked up, and Jagger could see on Oliver’s face the wonderment that children display so easily and adults rarely rediscover. He realized it was what kept the man digging in the dirt, and he hoped it was never lost under too many potsherds and bottle caps.

  “How would you know?” Jagger said. “If you found it… how would you know it’s really from the tablets?”

  “I think,” Oliver said, furrowing his brow. “I think we’d just know. I mean, they couldn’t be just rock, could they?”

  Jagger smiled. “You don’t sound much like a scientist.”

  “I’m a Christian first, Jagger,” Oliver said. “I believe in miracles.” He shook his head vigorously, as if shaking his dream out of his mind. “Besides, I’ll settle for any evidence: a trinket… the gold dust Moses made them drink after grinding up the calf… coprolite.”

  “Copro-what?” Tyler said.

  Addison grinned. “Poop.”

  “Huh?”

  “Human waste,” Oliver said. “There were a lot of people; they had to go to the bathroom somewhere.”

  Tyler stood quickly and studied the ground where he’d been kneeling. “What’s it look like?”

  “Like lava rock,” Addison said. “It’s rare, though. It usually dissolves into the ground. Sometimes you get lucky.”

  “Lucky?” Tyler said. “To find poop?”

  “Proof,” Oliver corrected.

  “Still want to be an archaeologist?” Jagger said.

  Tyler looked at Addison, who nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Yeah.”

  Oliver slapped the boy’s back. “You want to help unearth the potsherd?” He handed him a tool.

  Tyler examined it. “This looks like a chopstick.”