The Prophet Conspiracy (6 page)

Cam lived in a high rise apartment building. As he unlocked the door and held it open for Siobhan, she observed at once he was among the rarest of creatures: a bachelor who took care of his space. Black and white landscapes of the Negev desert adorned the wall. Potted cacti decorated corners. A light tan carpet and black furniture completed the theme.

Inside, she saw the kitchen neat, no dishes in the sink, and a personal space completely in order. A small bar separated the kitchen area from the living room, and two stools were parked in front of that in lieu of a table.

Cam shut the door behind her and said, “Whoever they are, they have no idea who I am yet, so they’re not going to come looking for you here right away. We’ve got at least a night of safety. You can have my room. I’ll sleep out here on the couch.”

She replied, “I can take the couch, Cameron. I don’t want to put you out of your bed.”

He shook his head.

“Siobhan, it’s highly unlikely we’ll be bothered tonight. But if we are, the only way in is the front door, so any danger would have to come through there. Which means I sleep in front of it, not you.”

She just looked at him for a moment, and then smiled.

“Cam, there is so much more to you than I imagined when I first met you. You’re supposed to be a tour guide, not a karate-chopping, motorcycle-riding, knight in shining armor.”

He looked away from her at the knight in shining armor comment, and then said, “I could say the same thing about you. You’re supposed to be an innocent American tourist who happens to know a lot about Middle Eastern history. Why do I find you being kidnapped by fake Shin Bet agents?”

“You said that a bit ago, too. You knew they weren’t with Shin Bet. I didn’t figure that out until they pointed a gun on me and put a bag over my head. How was it so obvious to you?”

Cam stared out the living room window and over the Jerusalem skyline. The lights of houses dotted the surrounding hillside. He waited a long time to speak, and Siobhan let the silence grow, surprised to have stumbled into something that obviously held meaning for him.

“I used to work there,” he said, without looking back at her.

Siobhan took a while to process that. It certainly explained his fighting prowess and his tactical approach to their situation. But it raised a whole new list of questions.

“So it was just, ‘I don’t know these guys from the office, so they can’t be Shin Bet?’” she asked.

Cameron turned back to her and shook his head.

“Of course not. Hundreds of people work there; you can’t know them all by sight. Besides, I left a couple years ago. But if they were pulling someone off the streets for questioning, they would identify themselves differently. Shin Bet is an acronym; Shin and Bet are two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. For English speakers, we would say Israel Security Agency.”

Siobhan nodded, let the silence grow again for a moment, and then asked, “So how did you get to be a tour guide?”

Cam shrugged and looked away from her again.

“I had a…”

He paused, obviously searching for words.

“Well, I had a disagreement with a superior officer. I was part of the Division for Countering Terrorism. We had what I considered a unique opportunity. There was a terrorist; he rose up fast in the Al Qassam Brigade, the military wing of Hamas. His name was Toma, Haaris Toma, and we had developed some intelligence that he wanted to expand their tunneling program.”

Siobhan nodded. She had heard about the tunnels on the news and during her earlier tour. They were efforts by Hamas to dig tunnels under the Israeli border so they could sneak terrorists in and kidnap people.

“Well, Toma wanted to take the same technique and apply it in Jerusalem itself. He wanted to dig out from the Arab quarter — from the temple mount, where the Dome of the Rock is located — into Jerusalem itself. He wasn’t satisfied with kidnapping Israeli citizens; he wanted to start kidnapping tourists.

“The more intel we turned up on him, the more I cared about catching him and bringing him in. He’s a very violent man. In America, you’d call him a serial killer. Here, we call him a terrorist.”

Cam paused and looked out the window at the Jerusalem skyline. Then he said, “I remember you asked about Professor Kendrick when you were with your tour group.”

Siobhan fought back all the old feelings and looked out the same window Cam had just been looking out of. She didn’t say anything.

When the silence grew awkward, Cam said, “Well, anyway, Kendrick came to the government here looking for funding for a dig. Normally, that just doesn’t happen. The government doesn’t fund archeology. But in this case, he said it had national security implications for Israel, so the Prime Minister’s office at least heard him out. They sent the question over to us, whether Kendrick’s research might really affect security.

“I was a big proponent of funding Kendrick’s dig. I didn’t know so much about whether he could really find evidence of Muhammad’s night journey. I just knew some of the locations he proposed for his dig would give us a direct approach to the places I expected to find Toma’s Jerusalem tunnel. If Kendrick’s dig happened, I thought we could use it to catch Toma in the act.”

Cameron paused for a long time. When he continued, it was in an emotionless monotone.

“My boss was a woman named Maya Godwin. She overruled me. No dig funding. Not from Shin Bet and not from the Knesset — our parliament. We were at a meeting with the Knesset’s Foreign and Security Committee when she announced we had determined there was no security reason to fund Kendrick. I argued with her. She wouldn’t budge. I got a little heated. She still wouldn’t budge. I lost my temper. She fired me.”

There was a moment when he could have been done speaking. He could have left the explanation there, and it would have been enough. But then he went on.

“I grew up in the states, obviously. It’s not a surprise to anyone who hears me speak. There’s an organization called Birthright. They give Jewish young people a free trip to Israel to see the country that… well, to see the country that’s their birthright. I jumped at the chance right after college. I was bullied a lot when I was a kid for being a Jew in a Catholic school. After a bunch of punks punch you in the back shouting about being Jewish and crap like that, being a Jew becomes kind of important to you. I paid a high price for my ancestry. That makes it valuable to me.

“Anyway, Birthright got me over here, and I fell in love. I started asking about how to emigrate, and it seemed like I was getting no results. Then, one day back home in the states, a recruiter from the Mossad came and knocked on my door.

“In comparison to America, Shin Bet is the FBI, and the Mossad is the CIA. The Mossad actually wanted me to work in America. To them, it’s not spying. To them, they have people who help them understand what’s going on in their main ally. But to me, it felt a bit too much like spying on my own country.”

He shrugged.

“So I wound up in Shin Bet instead. But the thing is I came because I love Israel. I love the idea of Israel. I love the cause of Israel. After the Holocaust, Israel set out to be a place where Jews would always be safe. It’s a democracy surrounded by a nest of dictatorships. It’s a force for good in the world, and I wanted to be a part.

“I lost my job at Shin Bet, but I didn’t lose my love of Israel. Tour guides do important work. They help tourists — usually Americans — understand Israel. They help our main ally know us better and give them more reason to see us as good friends to have.

“I have a really good friend named Ibrahim. He’s my father’s age. He’s been almost like a mentor to me since I came to Israel. He did some time in the IDF but now works as a tour guide. When I was feeling like my world ended after I got fired, he came and told me all that stuff about guides I just mentioned. He suggested it was a way to still serve the country I loved.

“I became a tour guide because it was a way to do what the Mossad originally wanted me to do: strengthen the ties between Israel and America by helping both understand each other better.”

He lifted the left half of his face into a partial grin.

“Now it’s your turn. How does an American tourist wind up tangled in a conspiracy involving fake Shin Bet officers and her cell phone?”

She told him the whole story: staying for an extra day to dig, finding the wall with an ancient language carved into it, the murders, the chase, the bad encounter with the IDF troops — all of it.

“So that’s why you didn’t want to go visit the police tonight. Well, given they faked being Shin Bet officers, it wouldn’t surprise me if they faked IDF soldiers too. Everything you described about them is wrong. They would have been kinder to tourists. They should have spoken better English. Those are standard IDF procedures - for the same reason I became a tour guide. American tourists are the best relationship-building opportunity we have. Most importantly, from what you described about their weapons, those were AK-47s, and the IDF uses M-4s.”

Cameron saw the blank look on her face and said, “Names of different guns. Not important right now. Just take my word for it, they weren’t the IDF.”

The conversation drew to a close, and Cameron got up to go prepare his bedroom for her. Siobhan tried one last time to persuade him she would be willing to sleep on the couch. His point was a good one, though. Better to have him covering the most likely point of entry.

While he was out of the room, she walked over to his bookshelves and knelt down to study what he read. There were so many titles about Middle Eastern history there, she felt instantly at home. Many she had read, others she hoped to read someday. She remembered the conversations they had had when he was her tour guide. He knew this subject at least as well as she did — maybe more.

And then she saw the book by Professor Kendrick. Siobhan sighed. After all this time, it still came so easily to the surface. The mixture of anger and grief for the lost career felt half boiling hot and half simply empty.

Kendrick had adapted her paper into a little book; she’d known it for a long time but seeing it on Cameron’s shelf nearly set her off again. She tried to remember what her boss at the church said about letting go of it. She tried to turn her mind to other things. Gradually, the anger at Kendrick receded.

She heard Cameron return to the room and rose to her feet. By the time she was standing, every nerve in her back prickled with awareness of his physical presence near to her. There was so much strength in him; she thought she could feel it even without touching.

She said, “I love your books. There are quite a few of these sitting in my own ‘to be read’ pile back home.”

Cam smiled at her.

“Take any of them you want if you need something to read to help you fall asleep. Tomorrow, we’ll get you to the airport and get you home to the states. This is almost over, Siobhan. Once you’re on that plane, you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

The two men greeted each other with hopes for Allah’s favor, ignoring the irony of the fact that they did it in a bar. They occupied a table in a back corner, sitting so each of them could have their back to the wall. They both ordered soft drinks. Toma wore a scowl, and it pulled the scar under his eye into an even more grotesque shape.

“What happened?” were the only words out of his mouth.

The other man was a fellow member of the militant arm of Hamas. He was a foot soldier — a thug. His job was to commit violence on orders.

His voice quavered, and he wiped sweat from his brow as he replied.

“We had her. We were just getting started wiping her phone when someone rescued her. She's gone.”

“Who rescued her?” Toma asked.

“We don't know, yet. He was trained, whoever he was. He took out one of our men in a way that left no doubt he was trained in hand to hand combat.”

Toma pressed his line of questioning.

“Should we assume the Israeli government knows what's going on, then?”

The other man shrugged.

“I don't think so. I think if the Shin Bet had her, they would have already swooped down on that dig with three hundred soldiers. I think she's still on the loose somewhere.”

“Why do you think so?” Toma asked, leaning forward toward his compatriot. He was in the other man’s personal space, a looming presence of menace. “I don't believe in coincidence. If a trained operative interfered with our work, we should assume the worst. We cannot fail at this. The girl threatens Islam itself!”

“It doesn’t have to be that bad!” the hired muscle replied, trying not to let his voice squeak. “In this country everyone serves some time in the military and gets elementary Krav Maga training; that would explain the hand to hand combat. It could have been a boyfriend. She’s an American citizen, so it could have been the CIA. In any case, if the girl were in Israeli hands now, they would already have dropped a bomb on us.”

Toma shrugged and said, “I am not convinced, but I pay you well, so I ought to use your opinions. You live. For now.

“Now we must reacquire her. She's not in her hotel room, she's not at the dig, and we're watching Ben Gurion to see if she shows up there tomorrow to try to get back to the States.

“But I say we take the simple way. If she stole her phone back, then we can track her. Phones are like bugs people do us the favor of carrying without us having to plant them.”

The henchman nodded. The Al Qassam Brigade had already acquired cell phone spying software from Russian hackers. They had gotten the necessary data from the American woman’s phone when they had it. It would be easy. He nodded again.

Toma said, “When you find them this time, we no longer care about holding her or interrogating her or preventing any American interest. Kill her. Destroy the phone. Defend the faith.”

“With pleasure,” the terrorist replied. “With great pleasure.”

**********

The sun edged above the mountains in the east. Siobhan emerged from the bathroom with her hair still wet. The shower had been wonderful. Even though her khaki pants and white t-shirt were the same as she had worn yesterday, she still felt like she’d washed away a week’s worth of dirt and sweat. She walked down the hall to find Cameron sitting on the couch, sipping a cup of coffee. He nodded at the counter, where an empty cup waited for her beside the pot. Siobhan filled it, and then took a moment to look at him.

Cam was dressed very much the same as she was: tan cargo pants and a t-shirt, though his was gray. However, this was the first time she’d seen him without a baseball cap. The yarmulke over his curly black hair caught her by surprise.

He noticed her looking and smiled.

“You can’t be surprised I’m Jewish,” he said. “I mentioned it once or twice when I was your tour guide and last night.”

“Of course not. I’ve just never seen you without a hat before. A normal hat, I mean. Oh! Not that a skullcap is abnormal…”

He laughed.

“Don’t worry, Siobhan. I’m a guide, remember. I deal with questions about Israel for a living.”

She sat down beside him, sipping her coffee. She leaned in toward him a little bit as she said, “So, you’re pretty serious about your religion?”

He shrugged.

“To me, it’s not just about religion; it’s about history and ancestry. Being Jewish is a race, too, not just a religion. I know I was born into a people who consider themselves God’s chosen. What’s important to me is the experience of being Jewish in life. I know persecution, I know constant low-intensity war, and I know the rest of the world can’t be trusted to keep us safe.”

She nodded.

“I know what you mean. Right now, I don’t trust anyone but you to keep me safe.”

At once, she realized that might have sounded over the top. What she meant was she had spent all of yesterday being chased by a killer and kidnapped by some kind of mysterious conspiracy, and that made it easier to understand what Cameron said about Israel. But the way she’d said it…

“Anyway,” she covered. “I also need to worry about getting to the airport in Tel Aviv before four this afternoon.”

Cameron sat for a moment, and she was afraid he was still processing her “I don’t trust anyone but you to keep me safe” comment. Finally, he said, “I already called my agency about sending a substitute guide to my group today, so I’m free. I’ll give you a ride there, don’t worry.”

After, there was an awkward pause in the conversation until Siobhan pulled her phone out of her pants pocket.

“Let me show you the picture,” she said. In her eagerness to change the subject, she forgot flashing it in front of him last night when they were escaping.

Siobhan sat closer to him on the couch. Being close enough to him to show him the phone was also close enough to smell him. He was fresh from the shower he had taken not long before hers. The smell of his just-ground coffee twisted around a sharp cologne to make an intoxicating blend of scents. She breathed in and reminded herself her home was seven thousand miles away from him.

Pulling her head back to reality, she tapped on her phone a few times. There it was: the image of a wall made out of tan stones hewn square and true. There was dirt piled up around it, exposing only a few feet of the wall. But in those few feet, Siobhan’s patient brushing away of dirt had revealed regular lines, loops, and swirls. Carved into the stone itself, they were obviously letters. The regular spaces and lines meant it had to be a language, but Siobhan had known since she first saw it, it wasn’t Hebrew or English.

She held the phone out for Cameron to take a look. His eyebrows went up, and he peered intently at her phone for a while. Finally, he spoke.

“You located this on a Dig for a Day program? All by yourself?”

“Well, one of the archaeologists came in and helped me when I had about half uncovered.”

Cam nodded. “From what you told me, it sounds like you know this already, but that’s a pretty big deal Siobhan. Ancient writing is something you don’t find every day. That’s a major find. Under normal circumstances, they would want articles about you for archeology magazines.”

She sighed and said, “Yeah, but everyone who knows I found it is dead.”

Cam said, “Exactly. So why? Why are people impersonating the government, shooting people, and trying to kidnap you?”

Siobhan shrugged. “The obvious answer is it has something to do with that find.”

Cameron replied, “It’s possible, but I want to know a little bit more before we jump to conclusions. Where did you find this?”

She described the dig site for Cameron: just outside the City of David, near Hezekiah’s Tunnel.

He stared at her. “Siobhan, that’s the dig site I was interested in when I was at the Shin Bet. That’s the one Kendrick was most interested in digging at. It’s the one that would have given me a chance to catch Haaris Toma in the act of digging a tunnel under Jerusalem.”

She managed not to say anything about Kendrick.

“So you think that’s why some psycho murdered two people there? And tried to kill me?”

“It has to be. The coincidence is too big to ignore. Toma was really working on that tunnel, and that dig site interrupted his work. It’s the only logical explanation for this much violence to come out of that place.”

Siobhan asked, “Do you think the actual find could have anything to do with it?”

“Well, maybe, but I’m not sure how. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine Hamas killing you if they saw you as a threat to their activities. They kill people all the time. If you ran into them, even without knowing it, all of this makes perfect sense. Maybe there was something at the dig site that gave evidence of their tunnel, something you might not know you saw. If they think you know they have a tunnel inside Jerusalem, they will kill to prevent you from telling anyone.”

“But I don’t know. I never saw anything like that.”

Cam nodded. “But they killed everyone else at the dig. Maybe you’re just a loose end. I can go to my old employers at the Shin Bet and tell them this. It might help me get back in.”