The Brotherhood Conspiracy (37 page)

“Fool. You look only on the surface. I thought you were a scientist.”

Johnson winced at the rebuke, but his eyes remained on the old man’s face while his fear was fueled by the unmoving shape in the shadows. There was no chance of escape. He was trapped.

“You seek a tent. A childish quest. You pursue something long destroyed by the decay of time.” The old man picked up the smaller book and opened it where a marker was placed.

“We seek to regain the key to a greater treasure. A key that is hidden, even from you and your associates. A key that will determine the future of humanity. It will lead us to the final Caliphate—the rule of Islam over the breadth of this earth. It will herald the death of everything that is revered by the godless in this modern world. The key—the hand of God—that will bring all of you to your knees.”

Johnson’s pulse beat a brisk tattoo through his temples. His chest squeezed against his lungs.
Oh, God.
“This is madness.”

“Madness? I will show you now what you should not know. Then you will tell me if our dream is madness. Here . . . learn.”

As Johnson listened, the old man shared a story of this ultimate secret. Working his way through the text of the book, and its many notations in the margins, the old man revealed an impossibility that now made so much sense; a dime-novel tale that now presented a monumental threat to millions. And
Johnson accepted with finality that he would never leave this room alive.
I have helped make history, and I thank God for that. I only wish I could have seen . . .

The old man finished speaking. Johnson’s thoughts cleared as he saw the old man rise from his seat, reach into the folds of his kaftan, and withdraw his hand.

Convinced as he was of his inevitable fate, Johnson’s heart still twisted in his chest as he looked into the old man’s outstretched hand. “Oh, my God,” he whispered.

Rizzo found the stairs leading to the top of the wall, but when he reached the flat rampart he forgot about hitching a ride in the bucket. He saw the faintest contrast define the arch of the horizon to the east. Above his head, ten million stars shone just for his eyes. This was the rim of the world, and Sammy was balanced on the edge of eternity. How long he sat there, only the stars would know. He was getting colder when . . . he felt the movement more than saw it. When he looked along the length of wall to his left, there was nothing—an empty rampart with a small, round turret about one hundred yards away. Something stirred in the shadows of the turret. Unbidden, vivid memories flashed across Rizzo’s mind. Doc nearly pushed onto the subway tracks in New York City; Winthrop Larsen’s body blown all over 35th Street; Bohannon’s daughter nearly kidnapped from Fordham.

In the dead silence of the desert, the total darkness broken only by starlight, Rizzo could imagine anything. But he wasn’t imagining this—a large man leapt out of the blackness inside the turret and started running toward him.

Rizzo jumped to his feet and, leaving the blanket in his wake, ran for the stairs to his right.

He might be small, but he was fast. He burst onto the top of the stairwell, grabbed the metal leg of the railing, and swung his body down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs he hesitated, listened.

A faint footfall to his right.

Clinging to the shadows, Rizzo sprinted left along the monastery’s wall and darted behind the corner of a building that jutted out close to the wall’s inner surface. He ran headlong down a narrow alley and ran through the next intersecting alley, chased by the sound of footfalls behind him.

The monk’s dormitory was still one building away when he heard the running feet stop, but Rizzo didn’t slacken his pace. He sprinted to the arched portal of white stucco, pulled hard against the heavy, wooden door, and threw the bolt when he got the door closed again.

Rizzo crouched behind the closed door, hands on his knees, as he gulped air into his pleading lungs. He had to warn Doc.

Racing down the corridor, he stopped in front of Johnson’s cell, debating whether to knock, and then noticed the door was ajar. He pushed against it, and the ancient hinges screeched in protest. Doc was still in his bed, buried under his blanket.

“Yo, Doc.” Rizzo crossed the floor with urgency. “C’mon, get up. I think we’ve got unwelcome visitors here. C’mon, get up.”

One of the candles, low and guttering, remained lit. Rizzo pulled it across the small table, away from a small, leather-bound book, and turned to the bed. He reached out his hand, touched Johnson’s shoulder, and gingerly gave him a shake. “Get up—”

It was the blood on the top hem of the blanket that stopped him.
Cut himself shaving?
Rizzo shook Doc again and the blanket pulled away. He stumbled backward, tripped over the blanket, fell against the table, and knocked the candle onto the floor. The candle’s flame sputtered against the stone floor, but Doc’s waxy, white face . . . blank, staring eyes . . . and bloody, punctured neck told a tale that needed no illumination.

Rizzo felt his stomach turn, a brackish bile rising in his throat. Rapid, shallow breathing; pain in his chest; doubt, fear, alarm torching his emotions.

A trio of large, scaly scorpions crawled across Doc’s face and neck like sentries guarding their prey. But they no longer hunted for food.

Sammy sat on the floor. The weight pressing on him felt so heavy he might never get up. Emptiness engulfed him. He felt as if he were sitting on the deck of the
Titanic
, watching its bow slip under the waves. The adventure movie ended. Reality, finality, Doc’s lifeless body, numbed both his heart and his bones. Sammy needed to convince himself to breathe.

He sensed movement by the door. No noise, but they were there.

There was no running this time. Rizzo set his jaw and tightened his muscles.

A hand reached for his arm, gently, urging him to get up.

“Come . . . please.”

Rizzo’s gaze didn’t leave Johnson’s contorted death mask. He no longer felt fear. But rage erupted like magma on a mission.

His left hand closed around the pewter candlestick lying beside him on the floor and he swung it across his body with all the force he could leverage.

“You, bas—” A strong, calloused hand caught his wrist.

Sammy pushed off the floor, throwing himself at the man to his right. A second hand grabbed his shoulder and forced him back to the floor.

“I’ll—you—,” Rizzo sputtered, flailing blindly against the force that held him in place.

“Mr. Rizzo. Please, we must leave, now.”

It struck him that the man kneeling at his side spoke to him as a servant trying to rouse his master. Courteous killers?

Sammy’s hands latched onto the cloth of the shirt on the man’s arms, heroically wrestling to free himself. But, now, the fire left his mind and his eyes cleared. Next to him was kneeling a vision from an old B movie. A red checked kaffiyeh, held in place by two black ropes, framed the face, its ends trailing onto the leather vest the man wore over a white muslin shirt. Well-worn, blousy blue pants were tucked into calf-high leather boots, kept in place by a wide, red sash that now trailed on the floor. If it wasn’t for the gleaming rifle slung over one shoulder, the bandolier of cartridges strapped across his chest, or the vicious-looking short scimitar tucked into the sash, Rizzo would have been arrested mostly by the man’s face. A black mustache exploded under his prodigious nose and dropped off each side of his mouth to frame his chin. His eyes were black, but filled with the fire of life and a gladness of spirit. A ragged, screaming pink scar ran from his left cheek, across the eyebrow of his left eye, above his nose, and sliced across his brow until it disappeared beneath the kaffiyeh.

“Who? . . . What? . . .”

“The Prophet’s Guard killed your friend. We didn’t get here quickly enough, though we came as soon as we heard you arrived. But we must leave. You are not safe here.”

A second man, dressed identically, was standing just inside the door. He crossed the room in two steps, swept the scorpions from Doc Johnson’s chest with the back of his hand, and ground each one to oblivion with the sole of his boot.

Rizzo’s eyes were blinking as fast as his mind was turning. Whoever they were, they weren’t the enemy. “Who are you? Why should I trust you?”

The man reached under his thin muslin shirt, pulled out a chain, and showed Sammy what hung from it—a Coptic cross. “But no lightning bolt,” the man said, searching Sammy’s eyes.

“I will ask for your faith. My name is Hassan. That is my cousin. We—our families for generations before us—are members of the Temple Guard who once guarded the mezuzah and the message of the priest, Abiathar. But the others, those who seek to destroy us and destroy you—those with the lightning bolt desecrating the cross—have not completed their work this night. Come . . . we must leave.”

The man stood to his feet and held out his right hand. Sammy searched the face. He could discern no trace of treachery, no sign of deceit. It was a risk. But staying here was also a risk. He took another, final look at Doc’s waxy, white face, grabbed Hassan’s hand, and pulled himself to his feet.

“Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Wait. Where are we going?”

“To the answer.”

Hassan swept up the book and motioned to his cousin, who sidled up to the door, listened, stole a glance around the corner, nodded his head, and was out the door and to the right like a bullet.

“Follow him. Quickly. Silently.”

Three doors down the corridor, the first man stood at the threshold, his face turned to the length of the hallway, his left hand waving behind his back, directing Rizzo through the open door. His two guardians followed, closed the door, and moved immediately to the open window. Hassan led the way, feet first, through the window, dropping to the ground outside without a sound. Rizzo followed, getting a boost through the window, and Hassan grabbed him at the hips as he cleared the ledge. The other man slipped out the window like a moon shadow. They turned away from the brightening sky and all three fled into the retreating darkness.

Jebel Kalakh, Syria

Bruised from the hard, wooden seats, covered with the ocher stone dust of the desert that billowed through nonexistent windows for the six-hour trip through the Homs valley, Tom Bohannon thanked God that he finally escaped from the ancient green bus that now belched and bumped its way down the steep slope.

Rodriguez had gotten the better of the deal.

Bohannon was caked with desert grit, withered by the sun, and still had a six-hour bus trip back to Tripoli to endure.

He removed the handkerchief he had desperately wrapped over his nose and mouth to minimize the damage to his lungs during the interminable trip. He pulled a plastic bottle of water from his backpack, soaked the handkerchief, and rubbed at the dust coating his face and neck as if it were a carcinogen eating away at his skin.

It was only then, wiping the grit from his eyes, that Tom looked at the walls towering above him.

The mountain of gray stone stretched to the azure sky that spread from horizon to horizon, dwarfing the vistas that loomed in all directions.

Krak de Chevaliers—“the perfect castle” according to Lawrence of Arabia—guarded the heavily traveled trade route between Antioch and Beirut . . . from the Syrian interior to the Mediterranean Sea. The limestone fortress, first constructed in 1031 for the emir of Aleppo and later the impregnable keystone of Crusader power, rested atop a steeply sloped hill, twenty-three hundred feet above the floor of the Buqai’ah Valley, with a sheer drop on three sides. Overrun by local villagers for hundreds of years, the castle was rescued by the French Department of Antiquities in 1934, restored over the decades, and declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2006. And it was huge.