The Black Madonna (20 page)

“I see them.”

Saleem's brother-in-law had none of the driver's cordiality, mobile features, or flab. He was a lean blade, his cavernous cheeks covered by a burglar's growth. His gaze was flat and tight and measured them fully as Emma stopped before the table and said, “Thank you, Saleem. We are in your debt.”

“No debt,” the stranger said. “This is cash-only business.”

Emma ignored him and addressed Saleem. “Trusting us like this means a lot.”

Saleem was reduced to nervous silence by the smuggler's presence. The stranger smirked at Emma's words. “I think maybe my cousin is soft in the head.”

Emma kept her gaze fastened on Saleem. “Would it be all right with you, Saleem, if we sat down?”

“Sure, sure, why not? Sit.” The stranger kicked an empty chair toward Emma. “Take a load off. That is what you say, yes?”

Harry stepped forward. “Mind if I take over here?”

The stranger smirked more broadly. “What you know. The boss man speaks.”

“You got that wrong, bud. The lady is the real boss. She's also the one who'll pay out if we strike a deal.” Harry winced as he eased himself down. Even so, he felt a genuine pleasure in being back in the game. Dealing with a man he totally understood. “But the lady doesn't realize you're playacting. How this is just your windup to naming the price. See, she thinks you're serious. She thinks you're as nasty as you're pretending. And there's a problem with that. You keep it up, she'll probably hand you your teeth.”

“You try something, I give you some serious trouble.”

Harry made as if to wave flies from his face. “You and I, now, we crawled out of the same hole. You're a smuggler, and I'm your buyer. I've known you all my life. So right now, it's just you and me.”

Harry waited. Between the plaza and the lazy waters of the Gulf of Aqaba was a playground in the sand. A dozen or so children played on rusty swings or built castles in the sand. Their laughter drifted in the salt-laden air.

The stranger signaled to a passing waiter. He said to Harry, “You like tea?”

“Sure thing. So would the lady.”

When the waiter departed, the stranger watched as Emma pulled over a chair and seated herself. “I am Ahmed,” he said.

“Harry Bennett. This is Emma Webb.”

“What Saleem says is true? The lady is from American government?”

Emma set her leather portfolio on the table, badge up. The man glanced briefly, then sniffed, “Aqaba is long way from Washington.”

“Tell me,” Emma said.

“Your buddy Wadi Haddad will be very happy to hear that Emma is with me,” Harry replied. “She's his ticket to ride. Wadi will be delighted.”

“You know Wadi so good, you can tell me what he thinks?”

“About this one thing,” Harry said, “absolutely.”

The waiter returned with a hookah as high as the table. The pipe leading to the stained bone mouthpiece was covered by a knitted cloth that had been worn away by many hands. The waiter settled a gleaming coal carried in silver forceps on top of the brass bowl. Ahmed's bearded cheeks hollowed with the effort to get the hookah bubbling. When the smoke poured from his nostrils, he said, “So, my new friend. Tell me why Wadi Haddad needs to speak with you.”

“You know or you wouldn't be here,” Harry said. “Wadi and I were doing business in Hebron. There was a bomb blast. I saved Wadi's life. Emma and I are here to do it again.”

“Proof,” Ahmed said. “It's such a nice word.”

“I don't have any.”

“Then we have no business. The only people I see hurting Wadi are you and the American lady.”

“If that was the case, you wouldn't have your two guards skulking around the perimeter—”

“Three.” Emma corrected him, nodding her thanks as the waiter set a tulip glass of mint tea before her. “There's another guard outside the café.”

“Three, six, twenty, they won't mean a thing,” Harry said.

“My men are good.”

“They're nothing compared to the guys who stalked me at Mount Nebo.” Harry sketched out his welcome committee at the Moses church. When Harry finished, Ahmed continued to smoke and watch sailboats drift lazily across the horizon. Harry
said, voicing a guess, “You already know all about these guys, don't you. They've been sniffing around. Which is why you agreed to this meet.”

Ahmed toasted Emma with his glass. “Good tea, yes?”

Harry said, “You and Wadi are smugglers. You survive by being invisible. The people after us are not going to give up. Sooner or later they're going to track Wadi down. When they do, your operation will vanish like smoke in a sandstorm.”

Ahmed smirked across the table. “You and the American government, such great hearts. You travel all this way to save my friend.”

Harry eased back in his chair, certain now the deal was done. “What I need in return is between Wadi and me.”

THEY LEFT AQABA IN TWO
Suzukis, a pickup and a four-by-four, both of which had seen a world of better days. Harry sat beside Emma in the rear seat. The driver wore a Glock nine-millimeter up high under his right arm. The holster was dark with generations of sweaty treks. Ahmed nestled a Nambu machine pistol between his legs, the retractable shoulder-rest fully extended. The Suzuki's rear was jammed full of supplies, as was the pickup ahead of them. A guard sprawled by the pickup's rear gate, nestling a Mauser, his headdress fluttering in the wind.

The road to Jabal Ramm paralleled the main Amman highway for the first ten kilometers. Harry knew this because when they crested a rise he thought he spotted Saleem's Mercedes tucked in between two big trucks, powering north toward Amman. Then they turned west and entered the Hashim highlands.

They were still less than fifty kilometers from the Gulf of Aqaba, but it might as well have been a million miles. The deserts of Sawwan and Hunab were realms carved by wind and sand and time. The road traversed a canyon whose surrounding walls weaved like stone serpents and revealed a billion
desert shades, all of them ochre. When the canyon ended, the road scaled switchbacks, then crested a rise that looked ironed flat. The heat weaved so violently on the horizon that it erased any separation between earth and sky. Harry nudged Emma and pointed out a camel caravan that appeared and then vanished again, lost to the shimmering heat. Then the road dipped back into shadows and orange-red valleys, and the horizon closed in from infinity to a smoothbore wall Harry could reach out and touch.

Beyond the village of Ramm, the road signs were written in Arabic only. Which really didn't matter, since Harry had no idea where they were going or how to get back. To the south rose the Jabal Ramm, a lone mountain whose yellow spine climbed to almost six thousand feet. They traversed a plain so hard and level the road simply disappeared. They followed other tracks and the occasional pile of rocks and rusted road signs. The driver dropped to fifth gear and hammered the gas right to the floor. The Suzuki possessed an A/C in theory only. The windows were all down and the wind was so dry Harry could feel the sweat sucked off his skin. An hour from Aqaba, his shirt was a patchwork of dried salt.

Emma noticed Harry's grin and demanded, “What's with you?”

Harry took her hand. “Try to tell me this isn't the life.”

Ahmed shouted something to the driver, who grinned at Harry in the rearview mirror, then switched on the radio. Arabic music blasted from a broken speaker. The driver started singing along. Ahmed tapped out the beat on the Nambu.

Emma turned to Harry and said, “You realize they might just skin us for the price of our hide.”

Harry's grin widened. “Welcome to my world.”

TWO HOURS PASSED. THE DESERT'S
intensity grew with each breath. The sun began its descent behind them. They left the
plain and the road reappeared. The asphalt was cracked and rutted, as if the highway had been plowed by time. The road ahead took a sharp turn north, and a pitted track branched off south. They went south.

Harry figured they were maybe seventy klicks from the Saudi border. They trundled over road that was little more than a gravel strip. Finally the pickup ahead slowed and stopped. There was no need to pull off the road. The world was empty.

Both drivers cut off their engines. Harry eased out in sore stages. Ahmed climbed on top of the Suzuki's roof and scouted in every direction. The guard riding in the back of the pickup did the same. The loudest sound was the scrape of sand blown against the vehicles.

Ahmed hopped down, opened the Suzuki's rear door, and pulled out a box of PowerBars. He handed several to Harry, followed by a bottle of Evian and salt pellets. They did not speak as they ate. The desert claimed all sound and stole it away.

At a hand signal from Ahmed, they resumed their positions and the drivers fired up the engines. Ahmed turned in his seat and studied Harry carefully. He said, “You understand what is happening?”

Harry replied, “We're headed into territory that doesn't exist. What we see goes on no report. We don't ever talk about it because we haven't seen it.”

Ahmed said, “We travel the Jibal al ‘Adhiriyat. My grandfather and his before him, they come here. My family before time. Wadi Haddad says I can trust you. But I must answer to my grandfathers.”

Emma replied, “We will come and we will do our work and we will leave. Our footprints will get filled by the wind. And the secret stays buried.”

Ahmed turned to the driver.
“J'allah.”

The driver beeped his horn. The pickup jolted forward, turning off the road. Into the empty reaches.

They drove across a field of black rocks ranging in size from
pullet eggs to land mines. The surface of the stones looked wet-slick, polished by eons of wind and sand. The rocks reflected sunlight like a billion black mirrors, and the heat turned fiercer still. The vehicles crawled forward, dipping and rising like boats in a swelling sea. Harry had no idea how long the field of rocks continued. Long enough for him to finish drinking the blood-warm water and have it all dissipate in sweat.

The rocks ended and the vehicles sped up, racing the descending sun. Ahmed continually searched behind, showing worry for the first time, urging the driver to even greater speeds. Ochre walls rose up to surround them. The vehicles strained to climb a hill of loose sand, up out of the canyon. Harry then understood their need for haste, for up ahead loomed a sheer-sided cliff, maybe fifteen hundred feet high. They started climbing, following a goat track in some places, a fragment of trail, a broken bush. The trail narrowed until it was simply a ledge jutting from the cliff face, scarcely broad enough to support their outer tires. The driver scraped his door on the rock face. Harry heard the continuous fall of rocks off behind them, even over the engine's high-pitched strain. The sunset illuminated precipitous drops over endless empty vistas. Emma shut her eyes.

Then they crested the rise, and Harry took a long breath. “You've got to see this.”

“I can't look.”

“Emma.” He nudged her. “This is too amazing to miss.”

Their ridge formed one of two sides of a bowl. The opposite cliffs were even higher than the one they had just mounted. Below stretched an oasis, the central lake perhaps a hundred feet long and fifty wide, surrounded by date palms and stunted pines. Harry smelled the biting freshness of eucalyptus and desert sorrel. Beyond the oasis, fingers of rock caught the sun's final rays and became alive, great behemoths of fire and strength, guardians against the approaching night.

Their descent was much easier, a steady slide down sand and shale. They reached the oasis floor and were welcomed by the
brays of donkeys and bleating sheep. They followed the pickup around the lake's southern edge and entered a cave with a mouth only inches broader than the vehicles. Inside, however, the cave extended in every direction until the sides and roof were lost to shadows.

Ahmed climbed down and greeted several men who inspected Harry and Emma with fierce concern.

Finally Ahmed walked over and said, “My friends, they say you must die for what you have seen.”

Harry made a process of testing his ribs and did not reply.

BUT WADI HADDAD WAS NOT
to be found. Ahmed led him about the oasis. There must have been fifty or so people involved in Ahmed's little operation, an equal number of men and women with a host of children. Several men showed genuine anger at Harry's presence. Ahmed tried to hide it, but Harry could see that not locating Wadi Haddad troubled the smuggler. And anything big enough to turn their lone protector skittish set Harry's gut to crawling.

Ahmed tried to draw a response from a nearby woman tending a washing machine sheltered beneath a palm-thatched lean-to. She pretended that the diesel generator powering her washer made it impossible to understand him. That was when Harry spotted the reception committee.

They numbered about ten. Two outriders and a bear of a leader, all of them pointing various guns straight at old Harry.

Ahmed started to pull a pistol from his belt, but Harry gripped the man's arm. “Too late for that. Check out the cave up to your right.”

Three men stood on a ledge about thirty feet above the oasis floor. One of them had Emma by the hair, a revolver jammed into the base of her skull. He was wearing Emma's sunglasses and grinning hugely. The other two were barely teens, but they held their carbines like they knew what they were doing.

Ahmed shouted in rapid-fire Arabic while advancing toward the burly man. The bear heard him out for about thirty seconds, long enough for Ahmed to get in close enough to wave his arms in the man's face. Then he reversed his pistol and hammered Ahmed once between the eyes. Ahmed staggered but refused to go down.

As the bear took aim for a second blow, Harry stepped forward and said, “I think my pal's got the picture.” He gripped Ahmed by the arm and turned him toward where Emma waited. “Marching up there is the only real choice we've got.”