The Artifact (19 page)

Mitchell had been shaking his head back and forth, staring at the floor. When he looked up, the pain and anguish in his face was palpable. “I killed him.”

“How, Father? What happened?”

Mitchell was silent for several moments, his eyes seeming to reflect inwards. “Gannon, our forward scout, sprained an ankle in the jump. She wasn’t even supposed to be there, but we needed a medic, and she volunteered at the last minute. Just before the windstorm, a trooper thought he spotted movement against a dune to the north. I didn’t want a firefight at dusk, and we needed to find a depression or wadi to make cover. I deployed the rest of the squad behind and close beside the Hummer trying to pick up insurgents or Nomads through the blinding sand.”

Mitchell pressed his chin to his chest and wrapped his arms around his scrawny body, shoulders heaving in remorseful agony and guilt for several moments. Sammy placed a hand on the man’s knee until the troubled soldier lifted his head and continued as though there had been no hiatus in his recitation.

“With Gannon sitting behind me almost in tears, the sweeper between his knees, we had no forward scout searching for mines or IEDs. I was just about to pull a man off the machinegun team to scout ahead, when she grabbed the sweeper and ran out ahead of the vehicle, oblivious or ignoring my orders to come back. She might have understood the general principal s of operating the device, but stopped a couple of times to adjust it, like she wasn’t satisfied with its readings. I climbed out of the Hummer, running toward her, when….”

A soft groan escaped from Mitchell’s lips, his fists beating against his thighs, his body rocking back and forth in indescribable anguish. Then he stood and moved to the window, grabbing the bars with both hands through the thin curtains, pounding his head against the metal restraints.

Andrea asked, “She? Who was
she
?” Sammy stepped over behind Mitchell, placed both hands on his shoulders, leading him gently back to the cot. The man was weeping silently now, wiping his leaking nose on his sleeve, his breath drawn in ragged gasps as Sammy lowered him down on the mattress, sitting beside him, an arm clasped around Mitchell’s shoulders.

Sammy looked at Andrea. “Enough,” he told her. “Whatever he’s done or knows, this is a very sick man. The story we want is probably buried so deep in his mind that he may never be able to face the reality of it.”

Mitchell seemed to have composed himself, allowing a little smile to form on his lips. “I killed them all. Our sacrifice to the demanding God of the Old Testament.” He slipped out of Sammy’s loose embrace and stood, reaching his arms out high above him, his eyes suddenly wild and wide, straining at the ceiling as though he had the power to bore straight up through the roof to confront his Maker. When he spoke, his voice was loud enough to arrest His attention.

“A God who even demanded the death of His only begotten Son. They, too, will rise again as the Lord Jesus Himself, at whose bidding reclaimed the life of the dead Lazarus from his eternal rest to live again and walk among us. Resurrected!”

Mitchell lowered his arms, eyes and voice to address them in a normal tone. “They will rise and walk the earth again just as I do, in the name of Jesus.”

“Some will not rise,” he answered, getting to his feet and moving again to the single window his gaze attempting to penetrate the drab curtain. “So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in blood; it is raised in innocence.”

“The treasure your men dug out of the sand,” Andrea persisted, “the men who killed the nomads. What were their names?”

“They will perish at the hands of the righteous, never to rise, yea, even to the end of the earth, cursed to perdition for all eternity.”

Mitchell spun from the window, his expression furious, shaking a fist in the air. “Every one! Yet she will rise!”

“Who?” Sammy asked hesitantly, unsure how to phrase his question, afraid that the wrong words would send the poor man back to his biblical ranting. “Who will rise?”

Mitchell flung an outstretched arm at Andrea. “They will be cast into the lower depths amid the agony and gnashing of teeth for all eternity.” The horrible visage of the deranged ex-soldier blazed with hate. “Emissaries of Satan, wicked agents of the anti-Christ.”

Andrea assumed her most persuasive tone despite the shiver that ran up her spine, her professional voice an amalgam of innocent curiosity and concern. “Why won’t they rise?”

“I have told you all that I can,” Mitchell said. “The sacrament of Reconciliation is inviolate.”

She cast a look of exasperation at Sammy, who took a different tack. “Surely you can tell us what happened after you..., Mitchell ran ahead of the Hummer to the soldier with the mine detector.”

Mitchell shook his head in silence.

“When they discovered the ancient treasure, did you intercede in the firefight with the Arab Nomads, or oppose smuggling it back to the States?”

Andrea retrieved a digital camera from her carry bag and snapped a flash photo of Mitchell, who frowned, then calmly returned to sit on his cot.

Yank had taken a motel room on the Days Inn on Connecticut Ave. in Wakefield, a few miles north-west of Georgetown. Prior to his arrival, the young African-American had transformed his appearance from his usual Manhattan persona of suave male model and bit-part actor affecting cashmere blazers, open-necked hand-made shirts and Gucci kiltie loafers, to low key businessman attired in an off-the-rack suit, muted tie, brown wingtips and Samsonite briefcase. After two days of calling on retail stores, companies, homeowners and tenants selling KTP security systems, his purposeful stride through the Georgetown neighborhood and environs was unremarkable, blending in to the largely black population of shoppers and residents.

He passed Andreas’ condominium building each of the first three days on surveillance, occasionally pausing for coffee at a donut shop or lunch at a deli on the opposite side and a half block up and down the street from her address, taking note of her comings and goings with her husky, ever-present male companion. He had learned from the doorman that no security system had been installed in the building, nor was one needed, due to the 24/7 presence of himself or one of his coworkers, plus a 9 to 5 weekday building supervisor and janitor. Iron bars secured individual street-level condo units and those with metal fire escapes. Yank offered the building superintendent a free security inspection, including a report that would grade the safety of the entire structure on illegal penetration that could support any burglary claims or loss to their insurance company. When they came to the double-wide delivery and personnel doors at the rear of the building that opened onto the back alley, Yank complemented the Super on their foresight at mounting two-by-four crossbars to secure them, avoiding the mistake of installing locks, all of which were vulnerable to professional thieves.

On his fourth day observing Andrea’s building, Yank was relieved to see her and her body-

builder friend get into a taxi with luggage, evidently off on an overnight trip. That evening he

donned a black ski hat, badly worn trousers, coat and shoes he had purchased at a secondhand clothing shop. He appropriated a grocery carriage from a supermarket replete with black trash bag stuffed with old newspapers, rags and several tools. His image of a benign homeless person scrounging dumpsters and garbage cans was unmistakable, not a threatening individual by any means.

Yank entered the alley and pulled a small step ladder and cordless drill from his shopping cart. He wrapped a towel around the drill do deaden the noise, and in the narrow beam of its penlight, used a holesaw to bore an irregular rectangular slot at the top of the personnel door and upper jamb. There were other means of illegal entry, of course: bluffing his way passed the evening doorman as an emergency tradesman or fire inspector, cutting through the bars on a side basement unit, rappelling down from the roof, convincing some elderly occupant to allow him to visit their condo—but all of these would entail either elaborate preparation or unacceptable risk.

He dropped a grappling hook tied to a rope through the rectangular slot, tugged it against the

crossbar and lifted it out of its brackets, inserting a crowbar against the rope to swing the beam

away from the door, and lowered it gently to the floor; then used the crowbar to pry the door open. Once inside, he replaced the crossbeam in its brackets and hid the hook and rope in a corner. When he left the condominium, he would reverse this access procedure, lowering the thick wooden beam back in its brackets from the outside and be back in his room at Days Inn before midnight. Satisfied that he had left no evidence of his entry and was set for a quick retreat, Yank jogged silently on ragged running shoes up the service stairs to Andrea’s floor and was inside her unit seven minutes from the time he propped the ladder against the rear door of the building.

A thorough search of her entire condo and computer produced nothing related to the artifact

mystery except a scribbled list names, and the address of a Veterans Administration Hospital in

Arizona he found on a crumpled sheet of paper at the bottom of a wastebasket under her escritoire.

Puzzled and uncertain of it’s value, Yank called Brit on his cell phone to report his findings. The Englishman was no more certain of the significance of the list than Yank, but instructed him to call back from his motel room that night with the information so all of their fellow conspirators could work at determining if any of the men on the list were patients at the VA hospital.

Although Mohamed Massoub had ordered his two young henchmen to tail Andrea wherever she went, they had arrived at her condo too late on the morning that she and Sammy left in a taxi for the airport and their flight to New Mexico, so had no idea where she was. Furious with their incompetence and more as a punitive measure than lesson on surveillance, Massoub told them to observe her residence until she returned from wherever she had gone.

On the night of Yank’s intrusion, Razzaq had walked to the alley behind Andrea’s condominium to relieve himself of the hot tea he and Samarri had been drinking all day. Just as he finished his business behind a large green dumpster, he noticed a shadowy figure on a stepladder at the rear of Andrea’s building, halfway down the alley. Razzaq rushed back to inform Samarri in their vehicle out front, who in turn notified Massoub at their motel in Alexandria. Alerted to the possibility of activity in Andrea’s condo, Massoub activated the wiretap secreted in her phone and listened to Yank’s call to Brit.

“Take the intruder and get the list,” the al Qaeda leader told his minions in Farsi. “Do not bungle this assignment.”

Samarri closed down his cellphone and started the car. “We will show Mohamed what we can do,” he said, pulling away from the curb and parking at the head of the alley with lights out, engine running. They had to wait less than fifteen minutes until Yank emerged from the building and stood on the stepladder to replace the crossbar. Samarri threw the car into drive and stepped on the accelerator, burning rubber, speeding the eighty feet down the narrow alley, straight toward Yank as he turned with an expression of wonder and fear toward his ultimate demise. The front bumper of the car smashed into the ladder, tossing him into the air, over the hood and roof of the car onto the pavement behind them. Samarri looked in the rearview mirror at Yank sprawled immobile amid pieces of scattered refuse, shifted into reverse, running over the inert body with rear and front tires.

“Get the paper, Amar,” Samarri said with a satisfied grin.

When Brit did not receive the expected call from Yank that evening or throughout the following day, he began calling the American’s cell phone at regular intervals. When a DC police detective finally did answer, he questioned Brit for several minutes, initially reluctant to offer any information regarding Yank’s whereabouts or why the police were in possession of his cellphone. When Brit told him he was Yank’s cousin calling from Australia, the policemen became more informative: Yank had been the victim of a hit and run accident after breaking and entering a high-rise condominium complex. He had no identification on him, there was no evidence pointing to which units he had entered and no loot or anything whatsoever on his body. Having gathered all the details he would probably ever get, Brit broke the connection, removed the sim card from the

one-time use cellular phone and threw it into the trash.

“Someone,” Brit told his coterie of art thieves during a subsequent conference call, “is watching the Madigan woman at home and away.”