The Prophet Conspiracy (11 page)

The location had a wire fence around it bearing signs at frequent intervals. They read, “Do Not Enter. Archaeological Dig” in both Hebrew and English. Trailers and a few tents dotted the landscape, and people bustled from shade to shade. Beyond the fence, desert stretched out in all directions.

Siobhan sat still for a long moment in the car after Cameron parked. She breathed deeply, staring out the windshield a little bit. She prayed a little bit, tried to clear her mind, and silently gave herself a pep talk.

Cam waited in the seat beside her, despite the fact that the car grew uncomfortably hot the moment he shut off the engine and air conditioning.

“I know we can find someone else if you want, Siobhan.”

She shook her head with her lips pressed tightly together and got out of the car. As Cameron also exited she said,

“We’ve been over that once before. Too much risk of getting caught. I want answers, and this is the only way to get them.”

He came around and gently gripped both her arms while he looked her in the eye.

“In the past day I’ve seen more in you than I ever imagined. You’re strong. You can do this. He’s nothing compared to you.”

She smiled at the encouragement.

“Thanks Cam.”

They were about to walk further into the dig site when a passing worker flagged them down and asked, “Something I can help you with?”

“I’m looking for Wilson Kendrick,” Siobhan replied.

The worker pointed toward a trailer about a hundred yards away, and Cameron set out for it with her following close behind.

Her boots crunched the barren earth with each step. Siobhan tried to imagine what he would say when he saw her. Would he apologize? Would he be curious about the inscription? Maybe even a bit envious? No one else alive had seen it or knew where it was. Among the living, only she and Umar had seen it. If Kendrick wanted a glimpse — if he wanted to lay his eyes on historical proof of Muhammad’s presence in Jerusalem — he would have to rely on her. There was no one else.

Was there anything at all he could say that would make things right?

The trailer was outside a narrow, small hole dug into the ground. The wire fence from the exterior of the dig site was repeated around the hole, as well as the “Caution!” signs. A work table stood between the hole and the tent.

Down the hole, Siobhan knew, would be a vast supply of picks and buckets. In fact, a few of them were lying around the edge of the hole. Someone had been sloppy about cleanup.

She didn’t know how deep it went, but she had been to enough scenes like this one, she knew what to expect. That was the actual dig. That was the place from which Kendrick was — foolishly — hoping to pull out the evidence she might have already found. There would be a ladder, some signs to watch your head, and down at the bottom there would be lights strung up on the ceiling to guide the workers.

It would, in other words, be almost exactly like the place where she had started this whole nightmare.

Kendrick had his trailer right next to the work site, apparently. It seemed just like him. He would be too lazy to walk very far.

She tried to think of what she might say when she saw him. Possibilities like, “I’m here about my paper,” crossed her mind.

Cam interrupted her thoughts with a warning.

“If we turn your phone on to show him the picture, we’re going to want to leave pretty quickly. I don’t know how far away either Shin Bet or whoever’s chasing us are, but we need to be done in no more than half an hour, tops.”

Siobhan just barely had time to nod before she heard it. Behind her was a voice she hadn’t heard in almost five years. She recognized it immediately.

“They tell me you’re looking for me. Can I help you?”

Apparently, he had been somewhere else in the dig, rather than in his trailer, to be approaching from behind her.

She didn’t turn around at first. She froze, staring at the trailer and beyond it, out over the vacant desert. When she turned, it was slowly.

Recognition dawned across his face the moment he saw hers, followed closely by surprise. His mouth almost fell open, but he seized control of his facial expression just in time, and it became a defensive grimace.

“Miss McLane. I never expected to see you again.”

“Professor Kendrick.”

Neither said anything more, and the silence grew and sprouted long branches. Siobhan was surprised at how much older he looked, as if dishonesty had a visible effect on the body. The tied-back long hair that had once made him look like such a hip academic now simply made him look like an old man pretending to be young.

Finally, Cam stepped forward.

“Cameron Dorn. We’ve never met, Professor, but I investigated your requests for support from the government when I used to work at Shin Bet.”

Siobhan could see Kendrick wanted to beam with pride at being recognized but was afraid to show any expression around her. She still didn’t know what to say to him. The adjudication hearing and the humiliation of getting expelled dominated her thoughts. How to even start?

Unconsciously, her hand touched her back pocket.

Kendrick said, “The radio tells me you’re a terrorist now, Miss McLane. Is this the next place you’re going to plant a bomb?”

She almost flew at him. She started to swear at him, but she felt Cam’s restraining hand on her shoulder. Somehow, she managed to keep her words civil.

“I need your help.”

“Why should I help you? You tried to steal—”

“Don’t. Just don’t.”

She cut him off mercilessly, staring right into his eyes. She knew she must be snarling, so she tried to make sure her face was under control. She felt Cam squeezing her shoulder.

“It’s just you and me here, Kendrick, and we both know the truth. Lying to the Dean at least had some upside for you. But there’s no one here. There’s no one to persuade.”

He didn’t reply. The silence grew for a moment, and Siobhan realized Cam might seem like someone to persuade from Kendrick’s point of view.

Apparently, her friend realized the same thing because he picked that moment to speak.

“I don’t know you, Professor, but I do know Siobhan. We’re here to ask for your help, but I’m not going to lie to get it. I know there’s a history between you two, and I believe Siobhan’s side of it. Don’t hope to convince me otherwise.”

Kendrick turned away from them.

He walked away, leaving Siobhan and Cam standing in front of his trailer. He passed the work table and the fenced-in entrance to the hole.

Siobhan shouted after him, “I have what we both want, Professor. I have the evidence.”

He stopped. He turned back. He stared at her.

“Does that have something to do with why you’re setting off bombs now?”

Again, she had to fight the urge to swear at him.

“Professor, you know what’s between us. You know how bad you hurt me. If it were really true that I’m a murderer now, do you think
you
would still be alive? If the things they’re saying about me were true, wouldn’t you have gotten the first bomb?”

He gave her a dirty look and said, “You’re going to insult me and ask for my help at the same time?”

Then he moved as if to leave again.

Once again, Cam gripped her shoulder. Under his breath he said, “I know you can do this.”

“Look, Kendrick,” Siobhan said. “I have a picture of an inscription carved into the wall at a ruined, thousand-year-old mosque. It’s from the site
my
paper gave as the most likely place to find evidence of Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem. It’s from a site where we were pulling up stuff from the 7th century, and it’s in Middle Persian, which I know you can read. I’ll let you see it if you tell me what it says. You can keep on playing your stupid game with me pretending like there’s anyone here who believes you wrote that paper, or you can actually see the evidence we’re both looking for.

“I know you care about this as much as I do, Kendrick. It’s why I looked up to you, back in the day. But if you’re just going to play games, we’ll find someone else to translate.”

He stepped toward her. He paused, and then took another step.

“OK fine,” Kendrick said. “Let me see this inscription.”

“Your word, Kendrick. We share the credit. Convince me I can trust you.”

“Fine, OK? Fine. Whatever. You have my word. Share the credit. Just let me see if this whole thing really, finally paid off.”

Siobhan looked at Cameron. He shrugged as if to say, “You know him better than I do.”

Siobhan looked back at Kendrick. She imagined reading his face like a poker player, but she didn’t know how. The man lied. He had lied about her paper. He had hurt her worse than anyone else ever had. His mumbled half-promise wasn’t very convincing. But at the end of the day, she didn’t even know where to start looking for someone else to translate her picture.

Siobhan took out her phone.

She pushed the power button.

She remembered Cameron’s warning: they should leave the dig site within a half an hour of turning on the phone or else Shin Bet or their pursuers would catch them here.

When the phone finally powered up, Siobhan tapped and flicked until the picture of the dig site was there in front of her. Once again, she looked at the ancient stone wall with the writing on it. Once again, she looked at the mysterious lines. People had died over this picture. Her whole life was in danger because of this picture.

Keeping a firm grip on the phone, she turned it around to face Kendrick and held it out to him at eye level. She held it with all the fingers of both hands, determined not to let him steal it.

Kendrick came closer. He looked at the phone, and then stepped even closer, leaning in until his nose was almost touching the screen.

Siobhan could see his eyes. They went wide, and she heard him suck in his breath.

Then he consciously blanked his expression. He backed away from the phone.

“Sorry, I can’t read it,” he said. “I don’t know what language that is, but it’s not Middle Persian.”

Siobhan almost lost it. She yanked the phone back hard.

“You liar!” she shouted. “You read it. I saw you read it. You gave your word!”

Kendrick made no reply. He simply turned away and took a step to leave.

Siobhan swore. She used several words that would have burned the ears of her employers at the church back home.

She was about to step toward him and grab his arm when a fourth person walked out of the trailer in front of which they’d been standing.

“Nobody move. The first one who does, I blow their head off.”

Siobhan’s head whipped to her right when she heard the words. Her mouth dropped open.

“Umar!”

Even as she said it, Cam shouted, “Haaris Toma! I’ll kill you!”

He reached for his pistol, but he wasn’t fast enough.

“Not if I kill you first,” was the reply. The gunman’s aim shifted directly onto Cameron, and a cruel smile spread across his lips. The way he spoke made the scar under his eye twitch.

“Just give me a reason to pull the trigger, Dorn. Move your hand just a little bit more.”

Cam froze in place, with his fingers touching the grip of his pistol but not drawing it. Reluctantly, he put his hands in the air.

Once Cameron gave up, the gunman moved the barrel of the gun halfway between the two of them, smiling.

The terrorist’s eyes flicked over to Kendrick, who was blatantly eyeing an escape route. Toma waved the gun in his general direction.

“Professor,” he said. “You can probably live through this, as long as you don’t do anything foolish. Stay right there.”

The words about living through this gave Siobhan a little bit of hope. The last time she’d seen this man, he’d tried to murder her. But maybe not this time.

Whatever his intentions, she had no idea what to say. This was the man who had started the whole thing. He had murdered two people right in front of her. He had tried to murder her.

Calmly, Umar — or, apparently, Haaris Toma — stepped up to her and plucked the cell phone out of her hand.

“I’ll take that, thank you very much,” he said. “No more heresy. No more dishonoring the Prophet with lies about where he came to Jerusalem.”

He saw Cameron tense up and added, “Don’t move, Dorn. I’d love to have an excuse to kill you painfully. But then, you know that already.”

Without dropping his gun hand, Toma threw the cell phone on the work table between Kendrick’s trailer and the hole in the ground where the archaeologists were digging.

Kendrick stood to the side, staring at the terrorist’s handgun as though mesmerized.

Toma crouched down, still pointing his gun at Cam, and grabbed one of the small, dirty, old picks lying in a pile outside the hole.

Siobhan’s hands flew to her mouth and she shouted, “No!”

Mercilessly, Toma drove the sharp point of the pick down into the glass face of her phone so hard it came out the back and embedded itself in the dry, peeling wood of the table.

For good measure, he pulled it back out and stabbed the phone a few more times.

“Farewell to that problem,” he said. “No more threat to the Dome of the Rock.”

Siobhan felt hot tears running down her cheeks. She had been through so much over that picture. She had come so close to learning its secrets and now the only proof she had was gone, and the only person who had any idea what it said was Kendrick.

“You’re a disgrace to your religion, Toma. I knew a man who was a hundred times better Muslim than you’ll ever be!” said Cameron.

The terrorist shrugged and showed Cam his teeth.

“Yes, and I killed him. And I blamed you for it. A fitting end for someone who calls himself a follower of the Prophet, and then defends Israel and aids those who are trying to dishonor him. He should have chosen death a hundred times rather than let the Prophet be dishonored by that inscription.”

Cam took a step toward him, balling his fists. Toma waved the pistol barrel in a small circle without it ever veering too far away from Dorn’s head.

“It’s up to you, which of you dies first. I was going to shoot the girl first but if you take another step, you can just as easily go to the head of the line. Do you think she’ll like it — your death being the last thing she sees?”

“You can kill me, but you can’t kill the truth!” Siobhan spat out as she dried her eyes. “The ruins are still there, back in Jerusalem. Someone else will go there eventually.”

“Suppress the truth? The Prophet came to Jerusalem. He ascended to paradise from the Noble Sanctuary. That
is
the truth, American. When we blow that dig apart, we won’t be suppressing the truth. We’ll be protecting it.”

He sneered.

“And, of course, protecting the truth means silencing anyone who might try to cloud it with lies. Starting with you two. Now to end the rest of my problems.”

He pointed the gun at Siobhan’s head.

She screamed.

And then a massive weight slammed into her side. She was knocked over and carried to her left.

She screamed again as the weight of her body knocked the wire fence off its posts, and she tumbled into the open tunnel mouth of Kendrick’s dig. She had no chance to grab the ladder going down or get her footing. She just fell down until she hit the dirt floor with a thud.

She wanted to just lay there recovering from the full-body pain of her impact, but a voice beside her whispered, “Hurry, get up!”

The voice was Cameron’s but in the dark her eyes couldn’t confirm that. The lights inside the cave were unlit, and the thin rays of sunshine coming down through the hole were not enough to recognize faces.

“What hap—”

“No time, Siobhan. Get up. Run. Crawl if you have to.”

She tried to do as he asked, but she gave up the moment she put any weight on her left ankle. She winced.

“I can’t! I think I hurt my ankle.”

Cam was following his own advice, crawling, and he grabbed her by the ankle she wasn’t holding and pulled her physically away from the hole.

Just in time. They heard Toma’s gun barking behind them, and fountains of dirt kicked up where they had lain, further obscuring the sunlight.

Siobhan made it onto her hands and knees and crawled, resting all the weight of her left side on her hand and knee.

Behind her, Cam whispered, “This way.”

She replied, “No, you follow me. I don’t know how deep this dig goes, but they’re going to have laid down a wood walkway as far as they can to help people not step on finds. That’s how it works on dig sites. If there’s a second way out of here, that wood walkway will lead us to it.”

She crawled through the dirt and clutter of archeology, scraping her hands on picks which had been left lying around and getting splinters from various boards and pieces of wood the archaeologists had been using to build their walkway or shore up the walls.

Sure enough, she soon laid her hand on a wooden board fixed to the dirt, as well as others beside it. Siobhan picked the direction heading away from the light and began crawling that way. Remembering her painful experience in Hezekiah’s tunnel, she tried to stick a hand out in front of her each time she moved an arm or a leg forward.

Kendrick had been digging here for years. Their crawl went on a long time.

********

Haaris Toma was forced to make a decision. The most obvious choice was to go after Dorn and the American. That would leave Kendrick as a loose end, so the obvious choice was to kill him.

The fly in that ointment was Maya Godwin. She insisted on proof the dig was what he said it was before she would help him destroy it. He could just follow through on his blackmail threat, but that just pointed out the fundamental weakness of blackmail: once the threat was executed, the mark had no more reason to obey you.

He could get a Hamas bomber to do it, of course. They had many of them. But he had been very boastful with the elders about his ability to shield their own true believers from the wickedness. Hamas was not an organization where failing in one’s boasts led to a long life.

To keep his promises he needed Maya. To get Maya’s cooperation he needed Kendrick. And without her phone, the American girl was no more a threat.

He dropped the magazine from his pistol and slammed another home in a smooth, practiced motion. He swung the weapon around to Kendrick.

The professor’s mouth hung open, and he stared at the gun as if he could read the barrel.

“Just as I promised you, professor. You live.”

********

Professor Kendrick sat in the passenger seat of a car, breathing through his nose. Silver duct tape held his lips together. Zip ties held his hands and feet together. A black bag over his head kept him from seeing where they were driving. Beneath him, the seat felt like leather. The air conditioner blew blessedly cool air on his face, though he could feel the sun’s heat through the window to his right.

It had all gone so terribly wrong.

He had kept his promise to himself. When the chance came to take a step toward turning his failure into triumph, he had seized it. He read the inscription in Siobhan’s picture. And it was everything of which he had dreamed.

The theory was correct. Siobhan’s paper —
his! —
was correct. The inscription was exactly what both of them wanted.

“In Muhammad’s dream, the steed Buraq carried him here and in that dream he ascended to paradise. He told me himself. He named this place and described it perfectly. I heard it, and I recorded it.”

It was exactly what he had been digging for for years. And at the moment of his triumph — when he knew of success and she did not, when she was wanted by the government on an obviously trumped up charge of being a terrorist and couldn’t get back to America — at that moment, this madman with a gun had shown up.

The girl and her companion were probably dead. They had dived into the dig, but the terrorist had emptied his pistol down the hole right after them. In all likelihood, he would never hear from Siobhan McLane again.

He had never wished that on her. He had always hoped she would go on to some other career outside of archaeology and have a good life.

But her fate wasn’t his concern. Whatever befell her faded into nothingness when held against the bright, shining light of real academic success.

All he had to do was find where she uncovered the wall, go there, take another picture, and he would be set forever. He could look forward to a named chair. His book about the find would reach beyond the academic press and gain popular acclaim.

All of it had been his, until this psycho had tied him up and covered his eyes.

There was a verse in both the Bible and the Torah about vengeance belonging to God.

To Kendrick, the words would normally mean nothing. All the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions were simply source texts to him.

And yet, as he was kidnapped by an armed man and dragged toward a fate that grew more terrible with every imagining, those words kept coming back to him.

There was no question he had done wrong to Siobhan. He justified it with the belief she would go on and find another career outside archeology but now she was probably dead, and he was a prisoner of a terrorist.

What if this thug with his ugly black handgun killed him?

Kendrick had never had a gun pointed at him. He had never even seen one in the real world. His newfound knowledge of what it felt like to have the barrel of one touch his neck weighed heavily on his thinking.

He had never been this close to death before.

Outside his pitch-black hood, he could hear his kidnapper talking on the phone.

The words were in Arabic. Kendrick read it well, but speaking it was a challenge. Understanding it when it was shouted at high speed by an angry man was something else entirely. He made out a few words – threat, kill, and a few profanities. But the real message rose from the volume and the tone of voice.

The man beside him wanted to lash out and cause pain.