The Prophet Conspiracy (14 page)

They paused just barely inside the tunnel to remove their outer clothes. Siobhan had the stolen swimsuit on under her cargo pants, and she peeled down to it quickly. Her last experience, coming out of Hezekiah’s tunnel completely drenched up to the waist, was still fresh in her mind. She didn’t like stealing from the workers at the dig, but it was better than trying to run through Jerusalem with wet boots and pants. Until that experience, she had never imagined how much heavier wet clothes were than dry ones.

Siobhan tucked her white t-shirt into one of the pockets of her cargo pants, and then tied the legs of the pants around her neck like a shawl. Cam did something similar.

This time, Cam had a tiny penlight, so they weren’t navigating completely in the dark. He would only turn it on for a few moments at a time, though.

“The light can give us away if we’re not careful,” he explained when Siobhan asked.

Passage through the tunnel seemed much quicker this time. Eventually, they reached a fork in the path that led to the back entrance to the dig.

They had to lift themselves up to get out of the tunnel and into the dig site. But once they did, they were on completely dry ground. She and Cam untied and unpacked their clothes and boots to hurriedly get dressed.

“I’m counting on you now, Siobhan,” he whispered. “I’ve never been in this dig. Toma and Kendrick are sure to be at the inscription you unearthed. You just need to lead the way there.”

“I can do it,” she replied, trying to inject confidence into her voice. She had only been here once before, after all. However, she resolutely set out in what she thought was the right direction, with Cam walking as closely beside her as the cave would allow.

Kendrick edged carefully away from the steep drop. Whoever had roped it off had done a terrible job. Rather than a safety feature, the rope was a tripping hazard. His captor saw him move and casually waved his pistol. Kendrick got the message loud and clear and froze in place.

The terrorist appeared completely unconcerned with the passage of time. He leaned against the crumbling old wall casually, not caring if he damaged it. He held his gun on Kendrick without letting it drift even a little bit. And he said nothing.

Kendrick tried to engage him in conversation a few times. He knew now that his entire dig, from the very beginning, had been doomed. It had all been misdirection from Islamic terrorists who just wanted to prevent any blasphemy about their Prophet. He had dedicated the last few years of his life to a lie.

He wanted to get Toma to talk to him about that. Somehow, he felt like the loss could be redeemed if he could only learn more about it.

But every time he opened his mouth, Toma simply waved the gun at him and said nothing.

Finally, a dark-haired woman walked into the room. She carried a large briefcase. Her professional dress and brown leather case made her look sorely out of place in the dim light beneath the earth.

She said, “I’ve got people keeping an eye out for Dorn. Nothing’s going to stop us — if we decide to blow it. But I want my proof. If I don’t get it, you’ll find those soldiers can deal with you just as well as they can with Dorn.”

Toma smirked.

“You keep trying to act like you have any power in this relationship, Godwin. You can have your soldiers ‘deal with me’ all you want. It’ll just let every member of the Knesset know about your bad habit. If you kill me, I can’t keep clicking the button which stops my email from being sent.”

She clenched her jaw for a moment, and then said, “Just show me the proof. I have to know this really is what you say it is before I’m willing to plant a bomb.”

At that, Toma turned back to Kendrick.

“No tricks now, Professor. No lies. Remember what I said. If I feel like you might be lying, I will shoot you. Tell Godwin what the inscription says.”

Kendrick looked at the woman, then back at Toma. He felt like the right thing to do would be to tell some kind of lie, but the menace in Toma’s voice was too much for him. He knew they were going to kill him anyway. But confronted with the choice between dying immediately or living for a few minutes more, he chose those extra few minutes.

He looked at the ruins again, just to make sure. Siobhan’s picture had been accurate. The inscription was exactly the same.

Aloud he said, “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.”

Godwin sighed. “It’s as bad as you said. Not only does it call into question the legitimacy of the Dome of the Rock, it raises questions about whether Muhammad ever really came to Jerusalem at all. The extremists on both sides would go nuts over this. I don’t think the Shin Bet could keep them apart.”

With another sigh she added, “Very well, I’ll do it.”

She knelt beside the stone artifact and opened her leather briefcase. She began to unpack the contents, which included several one-kilogram bricks of plastic explosive.

********

They backtracked, walking upright in the high-ceilinged room. That was how Siobhan knew they were going the wrong way. The back entrance to her old dig site had a much lower ceiling. When she reached the intersection, she turned right instead of left and was at once rewarded with a small hole in the wall. She had to get on her knees and crawl through the dirt to enter.

This was the way.

Cam had schooled her in holding her palm over the flashlight to limit how much light got out, and he would only let her leave it on for a second or less. Any longer and he growled at her. It didn’t give her much light to find her way, but he was adamant anything more would give them away.

Crawling on hands and knees, sometimes only knees when she used the flashlight, required more exertion than she ever would have thought before this adventure began. Fat drops of perspiration made tiny mud spots constantly in front of her.

They turned the corner, popped out of the tunnel, and Toma stood right in front of them.

The moment hung there frozen for a moment, as if Siobhan’s perception were moving too fast for events to keep up.

Behind Toma, a woman was getting to her feet, leaving a brick of grayish clay at the feet of the age-old stone wall Siobhan had uncovered. Siobhan remembered this place all too well: the crumbling rock of the ancient mosque with its fateful inscription; opposite, the harrowing drop of the deeper excavation. The rope fence beside it seemed far too low for safety. The widened pathway between the two led out toward the main entrance, once you got past Toma and his companions.

When she saw Siobhan, the woman behind Toma bolted to her feet right next to…

“Kendrick!”

It was as if Siobhan’s shout broke the moment. What had been frozen accelerated to lightning speed.

Toma had a pistol in his hand. He’d been aiming it at Kendrick. Now he swung it around toward her. With an eerie sense of déjà vu, she saw almost exactly the same thing as she had last Friday. The same man pointing the same gun in her direction.

Cam shoved her to the ground.

Once again, her ears hurt from the painfully loud sound of gunfire in an enclosed space. Once again, she felt stone and dirt crumble onto her from where the bullet hit the wall.

Kendrick tried to bolt, but he was caught between Maya Godwin behind him and Toma and Cameron in front of him. His attempt to dodge past Godwin and head for the main entrance to the dig resulted in her arm around his neck.

Toma and Cam struggled for the gun Toma had been holding. Cam had his right hand locked around the slide, barely away from the deadly muzzle. He was trying to force it backwards, toward Toma. The terrorist fought with all his strength to keep that from happening.

Siobhan wanted to help Cam, but the two men were locked so tightly together she was afraid she’d do more harm than good by restricting Cam’s freedom of movement.

Cam twisted the handgun as hard as he could to the left, catching Toma’s finger inside the trigger guard. He screamed as it was broken, then Cam pulled it away.

Before the former Shin Bet agent could wrap his own hand around the barrel, Toma kicked hard, hitting Cam’s wrist. The gun flew over the edge of the drop and was gone.

The woman looked like she was trying to reach for a gun but when she shifted her grip on Kendrick, the professor struggled mightily to get free. She had to turn all her attention to him to keep him from escaping.

Toma blocked and dodged as Cam threw a merciless rain of punches. Siobhan stared in awe at how fast the two men moved. Toma would block a punch and Cam would be throwing a second one before she had properly processed the first punch.

Since Godwin couldn’t find any other way to affect the fight, she shouted, “Dorn, give this up! It’s pointless; we’ve rigged this place to blow. I set the detonator myself, and you know how good I am at this. You can’t stop the bomb, but we can all still live if you quit this and just run!”

Cameron ignored her and kept his eyes locked on his opponent. Toma threw a left jab, which Cam slapped down while he hopped back. Then came a big, sweeping right hook. Cameron ducked in close to avoid that and then pounded his enemy’s ribs with two hard, fast uppercuts.

Siobhan leaned far back over the wall of the ruins and tried to go around Cam so she could attack Toma from behind. Her friend’s response was immediate.

“Siobhan, no!”

She wasn’t sure how Cam saw her since he never took his eyes off his opponent. The two kept trading blocks and punches. Occasional flurries of strikes were punctuated by panting, gasping intervals where they eyed each other warily, bouncing on the balls of their feet, waiting for the other to move.

While she was watching the fight and trying to find any kind of opening to attack, she saw a sixth person enter the cavern, which was already crowded. Siobhan couldn’t quite place him, though he looked vaguely familiar. He was tall, overweight, and sweating profusely. He wore blue jeans and a t-shirt. She saw his eyes dart from Godwin to Cam and Toma as they traded kicks and blows.

Before she could even figure out whose side the newcomer was on, the man grabbed Godwin and shoved her into the ruined stone wall with the inscription. Her head slapped against it hard, and she fell to the ground.

Cameron had kept his eyes locked on Toma for the whole fight but when the newcomer threw Godwin down, he looked up.

“Eli?”

When she heard the name, Siobhan remembered him from the coffee shop but didn’t know what she could do about it. Cam was still between her, Toma, and Eli.

The terrorist used the distraction to tackle Cam, dragging him to the ground and punching him in the face.

Kendrick seized that moment to make his break. He turned to run out the main entrance to the dig.

Eli tried to grab him and stop him from running but only got a partial grip on Kendrick’s sleeve. It altered his balance. The professor tilted dangerously and staggered to the side.

Siobhan saw what was happening as if it were in slow motion. She screamed out Kendrick’s name at the top of her lungs.

Kendrick tried to shift his leg out to get a wider stance and get his feet securely planted after the grab.

His leg hit the rope fence intended to protect people from the drop off into the deeper area of the dig.

He tripped and flailed his arms in wide circles in the air, trying to recover his balance.

And then he went over, screaming as he did.

The start of a sob slipped out of Siobhan as she saw him fall but at the last minute Kendrick’s hand reappeared, grabbing the rope. Below the ledge, out of sight, he screamed in fright, but his grip held.

Siobhan stared at that hand clinging to the rope for dear life. The sound of the shout distracted the terrorist, and he whipped his head around.

The moment Toma looked away, Eli leapt forward onto the two fighters grappling on the ground next to the ruined stone wall. He grabbed Toma mercilessly by his hair and slammed the side of his head against the inscription.

The terrorist groaned and passed out.

“Did you see how I solved that problem
without
leaving my old partner puking on the ground?” Eli Segal asked.

Cam didn’t even respond at first. He crawled to his knees beside the ugly tangle of wires and plastic explosive, examining the detonator, the power source, and the timer, which read one minute and seven seconds.

“Maya was always a genius with fail-deadly wires,” the exhausted Cam said between ragged gulps of air. “One of these wires will set it off if current from the power source is interrupted, but I can’t tell which. We better run. If we’re fast enough, maybe the cave in caused by the explosion won’t catch us.”

“No!”

The scream came from over the edge. Kendrick shouted, “Don’t leave me here! I don’t want to die!”

Siobhan’s head turned to look at the direction his voice came from. Only his hands were visible, clinging desperately to the rope along the edge of the drop off.

The man had ruined her life. If it weren’t for him, she might have been running this dig instead of just being a Dig for a Day volunteer.

“There’s no time, Siobhan,” Cam said. “If we pull him up, we’ll all die. If we run now, we might make it.”

Segal nodded vigorously beside Cam as both stepped toward the path that led back to the main entrance.

“Please!” Kendrick shouted. “I watched them set the bomb! I know how to turn it off safely!”

Her mind zipped at once back to the dig in the Negev. She saw Kendrick looking at the picture on her phone, clearly reading the inscription, and heard the words again: “I can’t read it.”

Lying for his own advantage. He had a history of it. He had a lifetime of it.

Obviously, Cam’s memory went to the same place. He shouted, “Don’t listen to him!”

He was already at the door when he shouted. He was halfway out, hopping from foot to foot as he looked back over his shoulder at her.

“Siobhan come on! Fifty-five seconds now!”

Sighing, she ran over to the rope. She kept her eyes away from the drop itself, not wanting to set off her fear of heights. She knelt down beside the rope, wrapped both hands around Kendrick’s forearm, and pulled as hard as she could.

With his other hand, Kendrick pulled on the rope, but they weren’t making much progress.

Cameron swore behind her and then she felt more than saw him kneel beside her. He grabbed Kendrick’s other hand. With his added strength, the professor made it up. He got a knee over the edge and pitched himself forward, flopping face first down into the dirt.

The professor panted and sobbed, blubbering out thanks in between.

“Never mind that, old man! If you do know how to disarm this, do it! Otherwise, pulling you up was useless. We’re all about to die.”