by Alex Lukeman
"They're here," he said. "I've talked with our friend. He's waiting for me to give him the heads up."
"Excellent."
Anderson wasn't worried about the call being intercepted. The phone he was using was encrypted with the latest technology. Only the chip at the other end could decode the transmission. The idea that all satellite transmissions could be successfully monitored was fiction. Captured, yes. Decrypted, no. Still, he spoke carefully out of habit.
"Do you want me to ask our friend to invite them to his house? They'd have a lot to talk about."
"It won't be necessary."
"I know he would like to entertain them."
"Entertainment has already been arranged." Harrison ended the call.
Anderson put his phone away and smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
"We have to ride horses?" Lamont said.
"Where's your sense of adventure? No vehicles allowed. See the signs?" Nick pointed. "We can walk, or we can rent a horse. This looks like a good time for my hat."
"What hat?" Selena said.
Nick pulled out a crumpled brown felt hat and put it on. He tugged on the brim.
"You have got to be kidding," she said.
They stood outside the visitor center near the Siq, a narrow canyon that formed the entrance to Petra. They'd paid their fees and been provided with a mandatory guide. His name, he told them in passable English, was Ahmed.
Ahmed was short and dark, weathered from the sun. He grinned, flashing a metal tooth. "Horse better. You are friend of Indiana Jones, yes?"
"Yes. Okay, horses. Saddle up."
They took the horses at a walk though the narrow passage. The bottom of the Siq was deep in shadow. Higher up, the sun found the walls and turned them into glowing rose. The stone was alive with color, polished by millennia of sun and wind and water, marked with infinite striations of light and dark.
"This is really something," Ronnie said.
"Wait till you see the city," Selena said. "We're going to come out in front of what's called the Treasury. That's where they filmed the movie."
"When were you here?" Nick asked.
"My uncle brought me here when I was seventeen." Something passed over her face and was gone. "A lifetime ago."
Twenty minutes later they emerged from the Siq. The walls opened out and they were looking at the building called the Treasury.
"Wow," Lamont said.
The tomb was hewn from the rock of the canyon wall. The facade was a hundred and fifty feet high, carved with figures and faces. Six graceful columns with floral capstones rose to an elaborate, carved pediment. A wide flight of steps led to a porch cut into the mountain and the open entrance into the tomb. The interior of the tomb was in darkness. Above the pediment, the facade climbed up the side of the canyon and into the sun. Four more columns were topped by triangular pediments, placed to the sides of a central round tower capped with scalloped edges. Everything radiated a vibrant rose color in the sunlight.
"It's a big city," Selena said. "There are a lot of fancy tombs. But this one is special."
They dismounted.
Ahmed pointed at a group of donkeys tied nearby. "Horses no good, here. You ride or walk?"
"Walk," Nick said. "Ahmed, where is Jabal al-Madhbaḥ?"
"It is in front of you." The guide gestured at the tomb and the mountain above. "Very holy mountain."
"Can we walk to the top?"
"Yes, many steps. I show you."
They followed him to where the steps began.
"We'd like to go alone," Nick said. He slipped a 50 dinar note into Ahmed's hand, about $35.00 US.
Ahmed looked at the steps and the note disappeared into the folds of his gown.
"You must be very careful," he said. "Do not touch the altars."
"We'll be careful. Wait here for us."
Nick led the way. The steps were steep, cut from the rock wall. They were sweating by the time they reached the summit. Dozens of flat stone altars covered the top of the mountain.
"Gives me the creeps," Lamont said. "They must have done sacrifices here."
"Animals, not people," Selena said.
"Still gives me the creeps."
"Look for a cross and dome," Nick said. He took off his hat and wiped sweat away. "Isn't that what Nostradamus said?"
"It would be cut into the rock." Selena touched one of the altars. "It could be hard to see, worn by weather."
For an hour they examined the altars. They found nothing.
"There's nothing here," Ronnie said. "Just old rock."
"All right. We'll go back down and cool off."
Ahmed waited at the bottom of the steps. They walked over to the porch of the Treasury and sat on the top steps in the shade.
"You have enjoyed the view?" the guide said.
"Yeah, it was great." Lamont sat down with his back against a column.
"There's something else we should see," Selena said. Ahmed looked expectant. "There's a crusader castle here."
"Oh yes, two castles," Ahmed said.
"Two?"
"One very high on Jebal al Habis. You can only go so far. One smaller, very nice."
"A small castle," Nick said. He thought of the quatrain.
A small castle guards treasure beyond price.
"Show us the small one, Ahmed."
"We must walk through the city," he said. "Perhaps you would like something to drink? There is a stand not far away. My uncle runs it."
They bought cans of soda at the stand and walked past more of the impressive carved tombs. The castle was set off from the main part of the city, in a barren area. Ahmed guided them over rocky ground until they came to the building. It wasn't really a castle. It was an outpost of the larger Crusader ruin on top of the mountain.
Ahmed gave them the history. The fort had been built in the twelfth century and manned by fewer than a dozen men. Turkish soldiers had disguised themselves as villagers and surprised the Crusader knights as they came out of the chapel. All had been put to the sword. Ahmed seemed to take particular delight as he described the ambush and slaughter.
The fort was in good shape, considering. The walls still stood. The roof was gone. They climbed over rubble and entered what had been the chapel.
Selena stepped around the fallen stones. She came to a stop and stood looking at one of the walls. Nick joined her. Carved on the wall was a faint cross. Next to it was a faded, dome-like shape.
"The cross and the dome," she said. "That's a Templar cross. Those are Templar symbols."
"The Knights Templar?"
"The dome was a symbol for the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, or possibly the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It was used on the Templar seal, along with two knights riding on one horse."
"Why only one horse?"
"It was a symbol of poverty."
Ronnie and Lamont came over. They heard what Selena said.
"The Templars weren't poor," Ronnie said. "They had lands, money, gold. Everyone knows that."
"They didn't start out that way." Selena peered at the wall.
"No one ever found their treasure, though," Lamont said.
"There's something else here," she said. "You can just make it out." She still had some soda in the can. Now she splashed it on the wall. Letters appeared under the cross, so faint that no one would likely notice them.
La maison de cinq arbres
"It's French."
"What does it mean?"
"The house of five trees."
"Five trees, again."
"We were wrong," she said. "The quatrain wasn't about the mountain where Moses got the Commandments. It was about this fort and this inscription. Nostradamus is pointing us at the Templars. We need to get back to the hotel and my computer."
"What have Templars got to do with the Ark?" Ronnie asked.
"They occupied Jerusalem during the Crusades. The Dome of the Rock was their headquarters. There are legends that the Ark was hidden in a secr
et chamber under the Temple Mount, and that the Templars took it with them when Jerusalem fell."
"The Templars." Nick shook his head. "Now it's the Templars as well as the Ark. Why is nothing ever simple?"
"Where's Ahmed?" Ronnie said.
"Probably taking a leak," Lamont said. "Here he comes." The guide came out from behind some rocks. He was putting a cell phone away.
"You wish to see the other castle?" Ahmed said.
"No. We're done."
"Then there is a shorter way to the visitor center."
Nick's ear began itching.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It was late in the afternoon when they arrived back at the Visitor Center. The parking lot was almost empty. Nick gave Ahmed another 50 Dinar note. The guide seemed nervous. He thanked them and scurried away.
They walked over to the Land Rover. Nick's ear began to itch and burn. He pulled on it, hard.
"Oh, oh," Ronnie said.
"Something's wrong," Nick said.
They looked around. Everything seemed normal.
"There goes Ahmed."
Selena pointed at a white pickup speeding out of the lot. The guide was in the passenger seat. He didn't look back at them. The truck drove away fast, trailing plumes of dust.
"Kind of in a hurry," Lamont said.
"Remember when we were in Kabul?" Nick said to Ronnie. "That IED?"
"Yeah."
"I had the same sensation then."
"I don't see anything," Lamont said.
There was nothing in the area, no garbage bags, trash cans, packs, boxes, nothing that would conceal a threat. The nearest car was parked some distance away.
Lamont got down on his knees and peered under their truck. A black, oblong shape was stuck under the driver's side. A digital counter was marking down seconds in red. Lamont watched the numbers move past 20 to 19 to 18.
"Bomb!" he yelled. He scrambled to his feet. They ran.
They were more than a hundred feet away when the bomb detonated. The force of the blast knocked them to the dirt. Nick went sprawling. Pain jolted his spine. Chunks and pieces of the Land Rover fell around them. The hood crashed down into the parking lot ten feet from his head. All that remained of the truck was a jagged tangle of metal that burned with bright, hot light, sending a dense column of black smoke spiraling into the clear afternoon sky.
Nick got to his feet. He looked at the burning wreckage. Lamont came over to him.
"Smells like Semtex."
"Ahmed," Nick said. "Our friendly guide."
"Maybe you should have tipped him more," Lamont said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The sat phone connection was good. "Everyone is all right?" Harker asked.
"Yes."
"No trouble about the guns?"
"No. The Jordanian cops are treating it as a terrorist attack on Western tourists. They never searched us. Selena distracted them. They even gave us a ride back to the hotel."
He shifted in the chair. His back was locked up tight.
"I'd like to get my hands on that guide. The bad guys just upped the ante."
"What's your plan now?" The connection sounded clear but far away.
"Selena is in the other room on the computer looking for something that ties into that inscription we found. We need to know where to go next. The inscription is the only lead we've got. If there's something there, she'll figure it out."
"I've been looking at Cask and Swords," Harker said. "Getting a membership list was next to impossible. People in this group are a who's who of American power. If they're behind this, we have a problem."
"We always have a problem."
"What I don't know is who is part of the core group Adam warned you about. There are a lot of people who would profit if there was another war. I'm working on narrowing down the list."
She paused. Nick heard her pen tapping in the background.
"There are several members who advise President Rice."
"You think Rice is involved?"
"No, I don't. He's not a member and everything he's done points the other way. But some of the people around him are. The Secretary of the Treasury, for example."
"Are you going to tell Rice about this?"
"Not until we have something concrete. I can't go to the President on the basis of what Adam told you. We don't even know who Adam is."
"You have a lot of credibility with Rice."
"Not that much. Follow up on what Selena finds out. Keep me up to date."
In Virginia, Elizabeth put down the phone. She looked through the bullet proof windows at the flowers growing over the underground rooms. The day was clear, sunny. She could have been in an average home almost anywhere in America. Project headquarters was anything but your average American home.
She looked at the list she'd compiled of Cask and Swords members. Who were the conspirators? She had no reason to doubt what Adam had told Nick. He'd been right in the past. His intel had prevented millions of deaths and probable war.
Elizabeth glanced at the picture of her father on the desk. She remembered a conversation with him from when she was fifteen. She'd had a complicated school science project due by the end of the week and hadn't been sure what would make it work. Her father had been in his usual chair, the big green one near the fireplace. It was a warm spring on the Western slope of the Rockies. The fire wasn't lit. The bourbon in his glass was warmth enough.
"I don't know where to start," she'd said.
"Have you made a list?"
"Yes, but there are too many things on it."
"What are the criteria?"
"Well, it's about the rate of gaseous diffusion in..."
"That's not what I asked. It doesn't matter what it's about. What matters is the critical thinking you apply to the problem. Whenever there's too much information you have to narrow things down. Sort out what's important and what isn't."
"How do I do that?"
"You have to ask yourself the right questions."
What were the right questions? She looked at the list. What would someone gain from starting a war? People who wanted to control things were usually driven by love, power and money. Elizabeth didn't think love factored in here, though some seemed to love war.
Power and money. The list had plenty of people on it who had both. She decided to pick out the top ten. Who had the most wealth, the most toys? In a hierarchy of Alpha males, that person would have serious clout. Who would benefit the most from war? She could find out. Almost everything that mattered was in the computers somewhere.
It was a scary thing to contemplate, the power of electronic surveillance at her fingertips. The government's fingertips. With that kind of power, it should be no problem to learn everything necessary about the members of Cask and Swords. She began searching, using a program Stephanie had written that made Google and the other search engines look like something out of the Stone Age.
It didn't take long for a pattern to emerge. It should have been easy to find what she wanted, but it wasn't turning out that way. She kept running into conflicting data and broken links. She entered a new search focused on a prominent Cask and Swords member.
Several hundred miles north of Virginia, a string of characters appeared on a monitor screen with the location of the Project computer. The server was programmed to respond with code designed to worm its way into the computer of any curious person looking for a particular kind of information.
In Virginia, Stephanie hurried into Harker's office.
"Director, shut your computer down."
Elizabeth turned it off. "What is it, Steph?"
"Someone just tried to break through our firewall while you were on the system," she said. "I blocked it and sent a trace back. What were you looking at?"
"One of the Cask and Swords members. He hosts an annual retreat for them at his summer home in Maine."
"You were using the program I wrote? Not Google?"
"Yes. I wanted a deeper layer."
"It's not a standard security response?"
"No way. My program is transparent. I designed it to get through the firewalls at the Pentagon. A normal security program wouldn't respond to it."
"Will they know it was us looking?"
"Yes. To send something back they had to isolate our location, which is almost impossible. I'd like to meet whoever wrote the program."
There was grudging admiration in her voice. Stephanie was a legend in the small world of extreme hackers, where she was known only by her screen name, Wonder Woman. She'd worked for NSA before Elizabeth recruited her.
"This man heads up the richest private investment bank in America," Elizabeth said. "Maybe that explains the security."
"Maybe."
On the list of Cask and Swords members, Elizabeth put an asterisk by the name of Phillip Harrison III.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Selena came into Nick's hotel room with her laptop under her arm. They were sleeping in separate rooms and separate beds. It had nothing to do with being in a Muslim country. Until Nick got a handle on his nightmares, it seemed like a smart move. Neither one of them was happy about it.
"What did you find out?" Nick said.
"What do you know about the Templars?"
"Not a lot. I know they conquered Jerusalem and that they were knights that fought in the crusades."
"The Templars protected the routes to the Holy Land. They invented a banking system as a way to keep pilgrims from being robbed along the way. You gave your money to them and they gave you a piece of paper that was like a credit card. You could use that at Templar stations during your pilgrimage to pay for things. If you were robbed, it was worthless to the robbers. The Order charged interest. It made them wealthy, along with donations of land and money from the nobles and the Church."