The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  Zafer said nothing.

  “You two! Get on your knees!”

  A massive hand thumped against Drew’s shoulder; he glanced imploringly at Zafer.

  As if cued, the Turk twisted his torso violently, and his left arm came down in a sweeping movement until his hand caught hold of Nabil’s wrist.

  Drew gasped as a forearm locked across his throat. He expected to hear the pistol go off, but he didn’t have time to be afraid of getting shot; he couldn’t breathe. His body reacted without him—his left arm shot up under the Egyptian’s armpit, his right leg swung back, and he squirmed out of the larger man’s grasp. But he hadn’t put enough space between him and Nabil’s gorilla. The Egyptian plowed into him and—goddamn dress shoes—Drew lost some of his footing. He fought not to be thrown to the ground, his vision suddenly made of cards someone was shuffling.

  He shut his eyes.

  He was in tight now where he could feel shifts in the other man’s center of gravity, where he’d be able to intuit how to offset what he was going to do. He slipped deftly to one side, and Nabil’s goon lost his balance. Straightening up so he was almost chest to chest with him, Drew snaked an arm around the thick waist, over-hooked an arm, and paused for a second. The Egyptian threw all of his weight forward and tried to lock up a bear hug. The momentum was what Drew needed. Stepping to one side and pinning the over-hooked arm with his own, he threw the Egyptian over his hip. The man’s feet were suddenly where his head had been. Drew bent at the knees and lowered his weight to accelerate his descent. He landed with a wicked thud. He lay gasping, the wind knocked out of him.

  Drew knew exactly how he felt. A Russian he’d faced in a freestyle tournament had taught him that throw—the hard way. Drew whirled around to see what had happened to Kadir.

  The dwarf and the other Egyptian were on the ground. Kadir had latched onto his legs—he must have cannonballed in and tackled him—but Nabil’s man was holding his upper body up with one arm and whacking Kadir’s shoulder with the other.

  Drew grabbed the stick and twisted it away from him. Adrenalin flooding his veins, he brought the stick down in a swift backhand. The Egyptian raised a forearm but turned his head away at the same time, and Drew cracked him behind an ear. The man went so limp Drew thought he was dead.

  The goon Drew had hip-tossed had rolled to his side and was trying to get to his hands and knees.

  Zafer shouted something in Arabic, and the Egyptian stopped moving.

  Face-down, Nabil started to moan. Zafer had his pistol in one hand, and with the other, held Nabil’s arm in a lock that involved using his knee as a fulcrum. From a wrestler’s perspective, the hold was impressive. Also highly illegal.

  The moan turned into a scream.

  “You’re a Christian, aren’t you?” Zafer asked.

  “Yes!”

  Drew should have known: the gold rings.

  “Who else is looking for the scrolls?”

  “The Ecole Biblique. Two men.”

  “The Ecole Biblique?” Drew remembered the name—a Dominican school based in Jerusalem. Father Roland de Vaux, the man primarily responsible for refusing other scholars access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, had operated from there. It made perfect sense: Q was far more threatening than any Dead Sea Scroll.

  “Names,” Zafer said.

  “In my wallet.” Nabil grunted. “Their cards.”

  “Kadir. Get his wallet. Chabuk ol. Drew, keep an eye on the other one.”

  Kadir took out the wallet and began searching through it.

  Drew stood over the guy he’d dropped, the night stick still in his hand. The situation seemed all the more surreal to him because he was dressed as though he were on his way to a wedding. Glancing up, he saw a boy gazing down from a balcony.

  “What do they look like?” Zafer asked.

  Nabil’s cheek was pressed against the dirt. “One is blond. Very short hair. Blue eyes. Tall. The other … small. Black hair. Dark eyes. He looks like a businessman. Thirty. Thirty-five.”

  “Buldum.” Kadir held up two cards.

  “Good. Take back our money too,” Zafer said. He asked Nabil, “How much is the scroll worth?”

  Nabil didn’t answer.

  Zafer torqued his arm until the dealer screamed.

  “Four million dollars.” He was panting heavily. Maybe five.”

  “Oh-ha!” Kadir gasped.

  Two Egyptians rounded the same corner from which Nabil must have come. They stopped but didn’t seem to know what to do.

  Zafer spoke to them sharply in Arabic.

  “Kadir, hold up the money and drop the wallet,” he said in Turkish. The wallet hit the dirt with a slap.

  The boy on the balcony joined in the conversation, speaking excitedly and pointing at the fallen men.

  The one Drew had clubbed was stirring. Drew tried to hide the stick behind an arm.

  “Hadi, gidelim,” Zafer said. Let’s go. He bent down close to Nabil’s ear. “If you try to follow us, I’ll kill you. With your own pistol.”

  As they left, the two new arrivals helped Nabil to his feet.

  “The kid backed us up, didn’t he?” Drew asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I said Nabil owed me money.”

  4: 7

  EPITAPH

  THE TAXI TOOK THEM over the Nile, which was plied by miniature, floating carnivals—party boats throwing off light and blaring music. Zamalek, an island in the river, was an upscale quarter with a large population of Europeans and Americans. The basement bar Zafer took them to was one of the few drinking establishments in Cairo that wasn’t attached to a hotel. The walls paneled with oak, the tables and chairs burnished to a shine, and the huge mirror in a gilded baroque frame were all meant to evoke Europe.

  At least, Drew thought, I’m not particularly overdressed.

  “Ya, my shoulder tries to kill me,” Kadir moaned.

  He and Drew sat down at a table with a copper ashtray in its center, like a single dull eye.

  Zafer went to the bar and brought back half-liter bottles of beer. The three men were arranged like the apexes of an equilateral triangle superimposed on the round table.

  “You’re crazy you know that?” Drew sipped his beer. “Nabil had a gun in your back.”

  Zafer grinned. “Nothing better for an unarmed man than a shooter who feels secure with the barrel of his weapon pressed against you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because average reaction time is about a quarter of a second—a little faster for women. Anyone—I mean anyone—can knock the gun away before the shooter can fire. The problem is, most people don’t know what to do after that. I do.”

  “I noticed.”

  Zafer lifted his chin. “You had me a little worried when that cave bear grabbed you.”

  Moves Drew hadn’t used in years had lain intact somewhere in his body, like train tracks beneath asphalt. “You could’ve ended that a lot sooner,” Drew accused.

  “I wanted to watch.” Zafer smirked and reached over and slapped Drew on the back with a heavy hand. “You did all right. Didn’t even fuck up the suit.”

  Kadir held up his bottle. “Better than Turkish beer.”

  Zafer reached into a jacket pocket. “And now we know something about who we’re dealing with. We know they’re French. We know their home base.” He snapped two cards down on the table. One for Raymond Duvall, one for Jean Saint-Savoy. Special Acquisitions, Ecole Biblique had been written under their names. The address in Jerusalem, office phone, and fax number were the same; only the cell phone numbers were different.

  “You surprised me, too.” Drew jabbed a finger at Kadir. “You’re tougher than I thought.”

  Kadir grunted. “His head kills him worse than my shoulder kills me I think.”

  “I whacked ‘im good, trust me.”

  “Dostum!” My friend. Kadir lifted his glass. “Sherefe!” To honor!

  “Sherefe.” Zafer and Drew cli
nked their glasses against his.

  “So how did you guys meet?” Drew asked.

  “I am friend to this bastard for long time.” Kadir slapped Zafer’s shoulder. “Since the days of high school.”

  “My family is from Urfa,” Zafer said. “Kadir and I were neighbors after we moved to Istanbul.”

  “Urfa? Not too many Turks there. I guess that’s why your Arabic is so good. How did you get into MIT?”

  “I told you … not MIT, Special Forces. But I did have about six months training in Army intelligence before I got kicked out. Speaking of intelligence, here’s an update: the professor’s house in London was wiped clean. A friend of mine who does work for MIT looked into it. It was precise, not like the mess in Istanbul. The professor’s computer was still there, but there were no files on the hard drive. No flash discs lying around either.”

  “What about his flat in Antakya?”

  Zafer lit a cigarette. “Untouched from the looks of it, but no discs, no manuscript pages.”

  “Inanmiyorum!” Kadir slid off his chair but wasn’t any taller. “This man I know.” He looked across the bar toward a far corner. “He is a runner, like Tariq. Maybe we can make some business.” Kadir beckoned to Zafer with his head. “You come, too.”

  Zafer rolled his eyes as he pushed back his chair. “He has a scroll worth five million dollars and he wants to make another hundred lira. Hold onto our seats, will you?”

  Drew nodded and glanced around the bar without really seeing it.

  He’d been a tourist on his last trip to Egypt and seen a dozen or so dead pharaohs in the museum. Thutmoses IV, whose name sounded like a lung ailment, had been one of the best-preserved. His face was unwrapped, the black skin exposed for the crowd filing past his glass coffin. Nose slightly hooked, lips pressed grimly together, hair still clung to the scalp in wisps. Judging by Thutmoses, the face of immortality was neither youthful nor cherubic; it was shrunken, skeletal, and nearly as inhuman as the pocket of void over which the parchment-dry skin had been stretched.

  If the pharaohs were to be remembered by their mummies, pyramids, and tombs, Stephen would be remembered by his articles and books. And his students.

  Zafer pulled out a chair and sat back down. “The Egyptian’s English is worse than Kadir’s, but they can manage without me.”

  Drew nodded.

  “You look depressed all of the sudden. What happened?”

  Stephen’s death had left Drew feeling as though his liver and heart and lungs had been removed and dumped into canopic jars. “Thinking about Stephen.”

  Zafer nodded. “But the professor—”

  “Yeah, I know. He’d want us to go after Q. Which is probably a forgery. Which means he died for nothing.”

  “We don’t know that.” Zafer lifted his chin. “What about you? Kadir says all ‘ex-patriotics’ are running from something.”

  Drew smirked. “My father, I guess. My mother doesn’t get me, but she’s okay with that. My old man is a hard-assed Slav, and he just keeps hammering at me like … like I’m a piece of clay, and if he pounds long enough, I’ll come out the right shape.”

  Zafer grinned. “Sounds like a Turkish father.”

  “The war in Iraq made everything worse. He was all for it. I accused him of being uneducated and naïve. He accused me of being an unpatriotic dupe playing into the hands of terrorists.” Drew took a swig of beer. Kadir was right; it wasn’t bad. “How could my father be so … so ignorant?”

  Zafer shrugged. “People believe what they want to believe. Just like the professor said. And you have to remember your father comes from another generation. No college, right?”

  “No.”

  “You have to make …” At a loss for a word, Zafer gestured with a hand.

  “Allowances?”

  “Allowances.”

  “You’re probably right.” He drank from the bottle, held the fizz in his puffed-out cheeks for a second, and swallowed.

  “The war’s what got me in trouble,” Zafer said. “I was in Baghdad right after the city fell. A joint operation with the Americans. You have no idea … no idea what went on over there.”

  “What happened?”

  Zafer shrugged. “Saw something I wasn’t supposed to. A couple of executions in a bombed-out building. The Ministry of Education to be exact. You know who your guys killed? Not soldiers or terrorists or Ba’athists. Intellectuals. The kind of men who could have rebuilt the museums and libraries.”

  “And?”

  “The American still had his pistol in his hand, and the bodies were at his feet. I had a rifle in mine. We were like … like a couple of predators that had never seen each other before. A bear and a lion, maybe. Unsure what the other was capable of. We locked eyes trying to figure out who was going to do what.”

  “And…?”

  “I think my body reacted. His arm moved, a millimeter maybe. Maybe less. I took him out.”

  Drew grunted. “Damn.”

  Zafer nodded. “I had a lot of explaining to do. The Americans wanted my head, but they couldn’t afford to alienate the Turks. The bombing runs on Iraq take off from the American base near Adana. But I was done.” He rubbed his hands together as though wiping chalk off them. “Out of the military.”

  “Better than prison.”

  “True.”

  “You know, since the professor died, the littlest thing can bring me to tears. I just want to … I want to hear him say something again. Anything. I want to give the old bastard a hug. You know what he smelled like? Like one of those secondhand bookshops where the pages are falling out of the books. It was a good smell … I don’t know, grandfatherly.” Drew put out a hand toward Zafer, but couldn’t find anything to take hold of, so he made a fist over the table instead. “Why am I like this? Why do I feel like my father died?”

  Zafer finished the beer in his glass. “Because he did.”

  4: 8

  TRUE CHRISTIANS

  THE TAXI DROPPED THEM about a half mile from their hotel. Zafer motioned for them to take a side street while he kept an eye on passing traffic. After he was satisfied nothing was out of the ordinary, he followed, walking on the balls of his feet as if he had too much energy to be flatfooted.

  Drew felt a bit dazed. Not from a couple of beers, but because Zafer had slapped him awake. Stephen hadn’t been his father, but a visit from Drew was generally an occasion to open a bottle of wine rather than deliver a lecture on how to live his life. Far from criticizing Drew’s interests ad nauseum, Stephen had shared them. He’d even accepted Drew’s … all right, laziness. Stephen hadn’t been his father; he’d been the father Drew had always wanted.

  When they turned up the familiar alley of their hotel, Zafer was in front, his jacket stretched tight across his shoulders. One hand rested protectively on the satchel at his side.

  The three of them crowded in the glass-and-wood elevator and took it to the third floor. Zafer went to the reception counter to pick up the key. A couple of steps behind, Drew saw Zafer’s back tense right through his jacket. He barely had time to register the two Egyptians in the lobby who stood up—one in a suit, the other in a priest’s black robe—and the absence of the hotel manager. Zafer lunged at the one in the suit with a punch, but the man parried with a forearm.

  “Please—!” The priest put both of his hands out.

  Drew didn’t watch how Zafer followed up. Dropping his body to waist level, he shot forward looking for a basic double-leg take-down. The priest collapsed. Besides being surprisingly light, the priest offered no resistance whatsoever. Drew felt like he’d taken out a scarecrow.

  “Please! We just want to talk.” Lying on his back, the priest held his hands open, his forehead a wrinkled map of worry lines. “Please!”

  Zafer and the Egyptian in the suit were locked in a kind of martial ballet, with Zafer offering all of the offense and his opponent backing up and countering deftly. It was mesmerizing. Both moved with startling speed and fluidity, both seemed awar
e of nothing outside their own contest, and, except for a few moments of indecisive grappling and a leg sweep at Zafer’s ankle that made him stumble into a coffee table, it seemed to have been choreographed.

  Zafer suddenly stopped and let his hands fall to his sides. “You’re just countering.”

  The Egyptian in the suit smiled, although he hadn’t relaxed his defensive stance. “We only want to talk.”

  Zafer glanced back and saw Drew sitting on the priest.

  Kadir, for the first time since Drew had met him, had nothing to say.

  “Yes, we want to talk.” The priest kept his open hands in front of him.

  The hotel manager, who had come down the stairs by this time, looked horrified.

  Drew let the priest up and offered a lame smile.

  The Egyptian in the suit put a hand on Zafer’s uneasy shoulder and looked at the manager. “We trained together in the army. We never could decide who was better!”

  The manager, who seemed half-relieved, limped behind the counter.

  Getting up, Drew noticed the priest had a peculiar smell to him— not at all unpleasant, just … foreign. Not quite sweet, but a scent that reminded Drew of incense.

  Zafer took advantage of the Egyptian’s vulnerable stance and frisked his upper body. All he came up with was a cell phone.

  “We don’t carry weapons.” He held out a hand. “Nathan, by the way.”

  His accent, Drew noticed, was American. Probably East Coast.

  The Turk pressed the back of his hand against the man’s crotch, inside his thighs, around his waist and even his socks. Finally he took the offered hand. “Nice to meet you. Zafer.”

  “I am Father Hawass,” the priest said. “We are Ebionites. Violence in any form is unacceptable to us.”

  “Ebionites?” One of the professor’s keywords had dropped into his hands.

  “True Christians.” Father Hawass raised his chin slightly. “Our church is founded not on the teaching of the apostate Paul, but on those of Jesus, Our Savior, and James the Just, the brother of the Lord.”