The Prophet Conspiracy (3 page)

For a long time, Siobhan simply wandered the Jewish market. She understood she was safe and free because she had disappeared into the crowd, so she felt reluctance to leave it. Her red hair stood out slightly, but the ball cap helped cover that. She let the flow of traffic carry her down the dimly-lit streets, just trying to make the day’s events fit into her head.

Around her, a river of conversation swirled into uncountable eddies and currents. She remembered enough college Hebrew to understand occasional words, or even a sentence here and there, but not much. She felt completely immersed.

She had seen two people murdered. She couldn’t get the archeologist’s bespectacled face out of her mind. Killed right in front of her, he no longer existed on the earth now.

In this city of faith, imagining the essence of him carrying on somewhere came easily. Either Heaven or Hell - but she didn’t really know how that worked, or which one was real, or which he would have wanted to go to anyway.

Scandalous thoughts for a church secretary. 

Several years ago, Siobhan McLane had been in earnestly studying for a master’s degree in archeology. As a young girl, she had loved the original Tomb Raider video games when they had come out, and she grew up dreaming of herself in the heroine’s role discovering artifacts of mysterious power buried under the sands of time. Of course, she learned the foolishness of hoping to find supernatural relics of Atlantis long before she attended her first freshman lecture; however, the fascination lasted, and she had looked forward to a career on archaeological digs right up until the moment it all had come to an end.

She wrote a paper her second year proposing several possible locations in Jerusalem where it might be possible to unearth physical evidence of whether Muhammad truly visited the city. The idea lay near the heart of what Muslims believed about their prophet: he had been supernaturally transported to Jerusalem during a miraculous night journey that also carried him to paradise.

Her theory had been groundbreaking. Groundbreaking enough that an unscrupulous professor stole it from her and had delivered a lecture advocating her theory. The idea and the evidence for it were way too academically sound to have come from a mere master’s candidate or so the man claimed. His colleagues took him at his word.

Siobhan found herself expelled from the degree program for “stealing” her own idea. Allegedly, she had plagiarized her professor’s paper on the subject instead of the other way around. And just like that, she was out on the streets with no degree, no workable path to the career of her dreams, and not many prospects for any kind of career at all. With an official charge of plagiarism on her academic record, schools weren’t eager to have her as a student. When they did, there were no scholarship committees interested in funding her anymore. Even finding a job was hard when every background check revealed the plagiarism charge.

She fought the accusation every step of the way. She tried submitting all the “date created” and “date modified” records from her computer as evidence in her favor. But somehow or other the paper had been stamped as received by an archeology conference two weeks before she had actually finished it. That evidence, supposedly from a neutral party, outweighed hers with the Dean.

The experience changed her. It changed her outlook on life. She had started out eager for discovery and fascinated by history. Now, Siobhan kept the official expulsion letter from the Dean’s office. Meticulously, she had folded it and refolded it until she had it down to the size of a business card. Then she had stored it in a metal business card holder her parents had gifted to her when she had started grad school.

That case and letter now resided in her back pocket. It was a reminder every time she sat down: she intended to prove them wrong.

While she’d been moping about and entertaining angry daydreams of Professor Kendrick begging her for forgiveness, a local pastor had offered her a job. Church secretary for the small-town congregation didn’t pay much, but it beat the pants off the zero dollars a month she had been earning. The pastor shrugged at the allegations against her and never even asked her if she really did what the university said she did. The only mention of it came when Siobhan brought it up.

She remembered the moment well. She had told her boss one day, “Someday, I’ll be back in archeology. Someday, I’ll prove him wrong. Someday, I’ll make him admit it was my idea.”

Her new employer had smiled, clapped her on the shoulder, and said, “I absolutely believe you’ll be back in archeology someday, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t tell you to think about reaching out to him, rather than getting back at him.”

She never mentioned Kendrick at work.

Slowly, she had adapted to the narrower horizons of her new life. Unfortunately, the tiny little community’s paychecks barely kept her afloat, with nothing left over to get her life back on track.

When, a couple years later, the church organized a group tour to Israel, and earned a free seat from the tour company for getting so many paying guests, the elders of the church had voted to give the seat to Siobhan to make up for the meager wage they were paying her, and the young woman had saved every paycheck she could from the moment she had heard about it to pay for one extra day in the Holy Land and the chance to be part of the Dig For A Day program.

She had carefully sorted through the locations of archaeological digs going on in Israel and had come across one that closely matched one of the locations she had put forward in her paper. She had gone with the desperate hope she could turn one day on a volunteer program into a rebuttal.

And it had worked! She really did find something. She really did make a discovery. The lead archaeologist on the dig had said it was historic.

But it had all gone so horribly, terribly wrong. Two people were dead and, somehow, the army wanted to arrest her for it.

Instead of proving her abilities as an archaeologist and balancing out, if not erasing, the black mark on her record, she was pursued by men with guns.

Worst of all, she didn’t even have anyone she could ask for help. The pastor she worked for and all the church people on her trip had already gone home. The only two human beings anywhere in Israel she knew at all were the tour guide who had shown them around the country and Professor Kendrick.

The tour guide she would love to see again. He was a smart man who knew her subject as well as she did. More, he recognized her background and treated her as a peer. And it didn’t hurt that his eyes were dark and sad, his build lean and muscular, and his smile eager and bright.

But she didn’t know where to find him.

She did know where to find Kendrick. He had come to Israel years before her, but he was doing a terrible job of it. He worked at a dig site far from Jerusalem in the southern Negev desert. True, there was ancient mosque crumbled into dust there, but there was no less-likely site for Mohammed's night journey. It just proved he never had any real understanding of the idea he had stolen.

But Siobhan didn’t think she could get from Jerusalem to the desert. She could read a map, of course. It was a two-hour drive. However, she barely scraped by financially even before this trip, let alone after a week of being a tourist. Even if she had any experience with renting a car in a foreign country, she had no money to do it.

She put all of her hope in what seemed like a much simpler plan. Tomorrow afternoon, an El Al 747 would carry her back to America. No more crazy archaeologist. No more men with guns. Safety. Security. Home.

The idea of getting back to the U.S. looked like her one and only way out, and Siobhan couldn’t wait.

But as the crowd in the Jewish market thinned out and the sun drew near the horizon, Siobhan had a scary revelation. Originally, this place had offered safety because of the overwhelming, bewildering crowd.

When the sun went below the horizon, all the observant Jews would leave to go home and honor the Sabbath. She would be the very last person here. That would not be quite so safe. She began walking toward her hotel, thinking longingly of that secure, comfortable space.

Some of them wore long beards. Others were clean shaven. Some of them had the dark hair and brown eyes common to the region. Others had hair entirely of gray or white. The whiter the hair, the more likely the man was to be missing a finger. Or five.

They were gathered around a table in a private home. There were about ten of them. Every time they met like this, they risked death. If the Shin Bet — Israel’s internal security service — got any wind of the meeting, a 500-pound bomb would drop through the roof before any of them knew it.

The leadership of Hamas would be eliminated in a single strike.

But the meeting justified the risk and so far no bomb had come through the roof.

Haaris Toma stood at the front of the group. He had black hair, brown eyes, the powerful build of a man who used his muscles for a living, and a jagged scar under his left eye where an Israeli bayonet once came too close for comfort.

An old man with one eye and a white beard at the far end of the table said, “You speak loudly about the faith, Toma. But is it in your heart? This task is too important for someone who believes with his mouth only.”

“I submit to having my faith questioned because I honor my elders. From anyone less respected, my reply would be more violent. But yes. I believe in my heart. I love the Prophet too much to let this be publicized.”

The old man nodded.

“We assigned you to the dig because you have experience killing, and you did it. But not well enough.”

Anger flashed across Toma’s face, but it never reached his lips.

“She will die and so will her photograph.”

“And the ruin itself? It is worse than the American girl and her picture. I think we should destroy it first, then her. If you can find a way to do it without any of our people having to see this heresy, so much the better. As I said earlier, this is not a mission for anyone whose faith is weak.”

“I disagree,” Toma replied. “The girl might do anything. For all we know, she might already be uploading the picture to social media. I have a plan that will seal the ruins off. No one will know. No one will get in there to see. But the girl? We can only assume Allah favors our cause if she has not already shared the photograph. She should die first.”

The old man shrugged.

“As you say. But whatever you do, it is better if fewer of our own men see this. It is a very great heresy. It might weaken the faith of the brothers. I want no Muslim to see that inscription.”

Toma replied, “My plan can, indeed, keep most of our own people out of it. You will not be disappointed.”

“Do you plan to make a bomb to destroy it yourself then?”

Toma shook his head.

“Oh no. I lack that skill. My idea is much, much more entertaining. When you see how I get the bomb, you will laugh.”

Once again, the elder shrugged.

“Just do not fail. Desecration like this cannot be tolerated.”

“If the inscription says what our source thinks it says, it is a trick of the devil. It will not come to light. I will not fail.”

**********

Thoughts of escaping across the ocean paraded through her head as she walked back to the hotel. She remembered Ben Gurion Airport as being no different from most American airports except for the painfully long customs line. She remembered the transatlantic flight as long, uncomfortable, and impossible-to-fall-asleep-during; however, at the end of it waited her old job, her nice safe front desk in a small town church, her same kindly old boss with his sage advice, and her basement apartment in her mother’s home.

It felt wrong to leave the country since she witnessed a murder. It seemed like she should be telling the authorities what she had seen, but the authorities seemed to be in league with the killer, and she wasn’t sure how to safely tell them anything.

Under those circumstances, what was a better solution than going home?

One last night in Jerusalem, and then the adventure would be at an end. She’d always have the memory of how it felt to unearth something of real archaeological importance. The horror that had followed tainted it, true. But those first moments of seeing the writing and being hearing it called a historic find… those recollections would always tell her she could have been good at archeology.

What did it say? What was inscribed on that wall? She’d probably never know but at least she knew how it felt to see something like that for the first time.

The hotel’s white exterior rose ten stories into the air. Tourist busses usually clogged the driveway, but now it was clear except for a single black SUV with tinted windows. Friday evening, she figured, must mean a reduction in tourist traffic. Gift shops lined the path up to the lobby, and Siobhan eyed the expensive clothing and jewelry displayed there.

Arriving at the last place she’d felt safe felt like seeing a drinking fountain after a long hot day of walking through desert climates. She took her hat off and pulled the hair band out of her pony tail. She took a deep breath and smiled.

Inside, marble floors stretched out to a much greater space than one might expect from the outside, with arches opening into paths that led to the dining room, to the bar, to the elevators, or to more gift shops. Two young men with the deep olive skin common to people who lived in this region manned the front desk, answering questions from an irate American tourist about charges to his room.

A man in a dark suit sat in one of the guest chairs scattered around the lobby. He read a newspaper and casually turned the page.

To Siobhan’s left, another man in professional clothes leaned against the lobby wall. He had a pair of sunglasses tucked into the pocket of his suit coat. His short dark hair lay tight against his skull like a soldier. Casually, he lifted his arm to glance at his watch.

A woman in a solid navy pantsuit emerged from the arch that led to the dining room, smiling broadly and walking toward Siobhan. Her hair, lighter than usual for the area, bounced slightly in a short bob. She looked almost like one of the hotel staff walking up for a greeting and an offer to upgrade her room.

“Miss McLane?”

Siobhan backed up a step. She had no idea who this woman was and although she looked like she might be from the hotel, none of the staff had gone out of their way to greet her by name before. The day’s events had made her paranoid.

The woman held out a black leather wallet, letting it drop open to display a badge and an ID card with her picture on it.

“I’m with Shin Bet, Ms. McLane. We need to talk to you about your experience at the dig today.”

“What’s Shin Bet?” Siobhan replied. The woman asking her about the dig made it feel like maybe she could finally talk to the authorities about it. But, still, her experience with trying to run to soldiers earlier had made her paranoid.

The other two men in suits moved from their positions to stand behind Siobhan to her left and right, close enough to be protective but far enough to avoid making her feel hemmed in.

The woman in front of her said, “We’re the internal security agency of Israel’s government. Like the FBI in America. As you know, a major crime was committed today. We’re working to arrest the perpetrators, but we really need to hear your account of what happened in order to make an arrest.”

Now this was how interacting with the government was supposed to go. Siobhan breathed a sigh of relief and said, “I’m so glad to finally hear from you.”

“We’re glad to talk to you, too, Ms. McLane. Please, come with us. We have a car waiting outside.”

Siobhan nodded gratefully and followed as the woman in gray led the way outside. The two men followed.

“Siobhan!”

A familiar and delightful voice called her name. Cameron Dorn, her old tour guide, beamed her a broad smile as he walked up, waving.

He wore cargo pants, hiking boots, and a lightweight shirt with many pockets. A camouflage fitted baseball cap covered his curly dark hair, and five o-clock stubble decorated the scar on his chin. However baggy and pocket-covered his shirt, it failed at concealing the broad, muscular chest of a man who knew his way around a bench press. His rolled up sleeves revealed the strength in his forearms.

She felt better about her day with just one look at him.

His eyes made contact with hers, and she felt the heat of her face flushing. He held the eye contact long enough Siobhan found it hard to think about anything else.

She stopped in her tracks, bringing the procession of government agents to a halt.

“Cam!” she exclaimed. “I’m so glad to see you again. What are you doing at my hotel? That’s an amazing coincidence. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

At once, Siobhan regretted the “afraid I’d never see you again” bit. Too much. She was never going to see him again, after all. Not once she got on the plane to America.

She discovered her right hand toying with her hair, entirely of its own volition apparently. She made it move back down to her side.

“Not much of a coincidence, Siobhan. This is the biggest tourist hotel in the country. Since I became a guide, it’s halfway to being my office. I’m here four times a week. I’ve got a new group from a college in America staying here tonight. I took them out to the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock today, just like I did for all of you. Why are you still here? Your group left two days ago.”

He got close enough to shake her hand, and Siobhan enjoyed the feel of his big, strong grip.

She smiled at him and said, “I extended my stay for a couple days so I could try this ‘Dig For A Day’ program…”

Before she could enjoy the moment too much, one of the agents said, “Miss McLane, we really need to get going.”

“Cam, I’m sorry. I have to go with these people from Shin Bet. I… I wish I could tell you everything that happened today…”

“The Shin Bet?” He paused, and looked at the people around her. “Um, Siobhan, I don’t think…”

“You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through today,” she said.

One of the government agents nudged her shoulder hard enough to move her toward the door.

“Miss McLane, we need to move.”

They hurried her forward. She looked over her shoulder to wave at Cam and called out, “I hope I see you again!”

Once outside, one man entered the driver’s seat of the SUV. They urged Siobhan into the back seat. Then the other man and the woman went through either rear door, nestling the American woman uncomfortably between them.

They pulled away from the curb.

The moment they did, the woman drew a pistol out of her blazer and aimed it straight at Siobhan’s face.

At the same time, the man on the other side of her slapped handcuffs around her wrists and locked them into place.