The Prophet Conspiracy (4 page)

In the hotel lobby, Cameron paused. A disjointed parade of memories and thoughts flashed through his head in seconds as he worried his lower lip with his teeth.

Siobhan. Siobhan. When she’d been in his last tour group, he’d struggled to be professional around her. As a single man, her beauty pulled at him powerfully. Simple human nature raised obstacles to remaining aloof. When one threw in her clear passion for the history of this place, and her knowledge of subjects dear to his own heart, the problem only grew worse.

His old mentor Ibrahim would have told him to never fool around with someone in his tour group. However, keeping that advice had been hard when he was leading Siobhan and her church group around Jerusalem.

Of course, there was no future in it. None. She was very attractive, but she was off limits. It was one thing to tell himself that, though. It was quite another to walk it out when the woman in question had so bright a smile, eyes that always seemed on the verge of winking at him, and who radiated beauty from her head to her wool socks and Columbia hiking boots.

He came to Israel because being Jewish meant something to him. A wife who shared that meant just as much to him. Even if she weren’t heading back to the States, she still wasn’t a good candidate for him to pursue.

Since coming to Israel, this problem had mostly gone away. But now it was back full force. It was just hard – blazingly hard – to be a single man and walk away from a woman who was smart, attractive, and interested in him.

Siobhan was no longer his client. He no longer had an entire tour group deserving of his attention and paying special attention to her was no longer a cause for feeling guilty. But she didn’t share his history and culture.

Right now, there was a much bigger issue. She had said she was going somewhere with Shin Bet agents. Those words were like open flood gates to Cam’s memory, but he forced himself to think about the present instead of the past.

Supposedly, this American tourist was going off with Shin Bet agents. Why? What could it mean? But whatever else might be going on in Siobhan’s life, Cam knew one thing for a fact:

Those people were not with the Shin Bet.

Ibrahim al Aziz had been his teacher when Cam was learning how to be a tour guide. The man taught him many things about the history of his adopted country, the politics of the region, and more. But foremost in Cameron’s mind that moment was Ibrahim’s simple advice about leading a group of people.

“They’re your charges. Take responsibility for them. Their safety affects your honor. Show them, teach them, have fun with them, but above all keep them safe.”

Ibrahim would want him to call the authorities and report his concerns, but there he couldn’t follow his mentor’s advice.

Never mind how much it would hurt to have to talk to Shin Bet Agents again. The bigger problem was he was right here, while it would take them at least ten minutes to get here.

Cam dialed the Jerusalem district’s number from memory. He told them the name of the hotel, a basic description of Siobhan and the pretenders, and then he ignored the requests for his name and the requests that he remain on the scene until agents could be dispatched.

He darted out the door of the hotel to follow them.

**********

In a dimly lit room, a long row of men and women sat at small desks. Pressed close together, each of them wore a large pair of headphones covering their ears, and each held his or her hands hovering over a computer keyboard. They didn’t speak to one another. Although each of them, from time to time, looked away from their computer monitors to stare at the wall, it never lasted long.

One of them burst into furious typing. He rattled the keyboard in front of him like a jackhammer, and words raced across the screen. The moment the typing began, a light went on over his station.

Eli Segal walked toward that station.

Extra pounds pushed against the boundaries of his belt, and the last few strands of his hair fought a losing rearguard action against baldness. Eli walked with his back straight and his eyes forward. It was a new habit. He had always walked with a stoop, until he came here.

He read over the other man’s shoulder — the one who was typing. The words on the screen were in a large-enough font for him to read.

“…amazing… turn … stupid … shin …double … great!”

It was only a few words because frequency switching radios made it hard to overhear entire conversations.

Segal worked in the Division for Countering Terrorism at the Shin Bet. He was the supervisor of one of the wiretapping desks — the one responsible for the Arab quarter in Jerusalem.

Across Israel, satellites, balloons, aircraft, towers, and more were dedicated to overhearing the conversations of terrorists and stopping them before they could strike. Those conversations came here, to this room, or one of many others like it. Clerks listened and flagged items of interest. When they flagged something, it was the supervisor’s job to determine who should be alerted.

“What do you think we ought to do with that one?” Segal asked the clerk who had transcribed it. Technically, there was no requirement he ask the clerks’ opinions on anything, but Eli was only in this room because his superiors had not asked his opinion, and he wanted to be a better person than they.

The clerk took off his headphones and said, “I don’t think we can do anything with it. There aren’t enough words to know what it says.”

Segal nodded.

“You would be correct except for three things,” he said. “First, the number is one that has been linked to one of the leaders of the Al Qassam Brigade. It’s not the man himself, but that phone often transmits information that winds up in the hands of Haaris Toma.

“Second and third, the words ‘double’ and ‘turn.’ Those have specific meaning to those of us in the intelligence community. I believe the message should go to Internal Affairs with a flag for attention. Hamas is possibly in the process of making one of our people into a double agent. IA should know if that’s the case.”

The clerk nodded and put his headphones back on. Segal sighed. Maybe his efforts to make the clerks feel valued by asking their opinion were just an annoyance to them. Maybe IA would be annoyed he flagged this for their attention. But he would do it anyway. His old partner had taught him to trust the nagging suspicions that rose up in the back of his head from time to time.

Even if his old partner had gotten fired for it, it was still good advice.

Segal sat down at his desk and brought his screen to life. A copy of the clerk’s transcription was already in his inbox, and he forwarded it on to Internal Affairs. That left him free to think about Cameron Dorn for a moment.

Segal still missed him. They had made a good team. Segal did the thinking; Dorn did the punching and kicking. Dorn had introduced him to fine coffee and had shown him some of the places in Jerusalem where it was possible to get it freshly ground and hand-pressed. It was, apparently, a taste the immigrant had brought over with him from America. Their relationship had begun as a professional assignment but soon had become a friendship.

In the end, Dorn had hewed to his own advice a little too closely. He wouldn’t turn away from listening to his nagging suspicion about Haaris Toma and tunnels. He had ticked off the division’s rising star and had lost his job.

Segal sighed. His partner’s disgrace had been so thorough he, too, had been taken out of the field and assigned here. It was hard to blame Dorn and yet equally hard not to. Last he heard the man was working as a tour guide now. Part of Eli Segal was glad Dorn had at least suffered a worse demotion than he had, but the other part of him still missed his friend.

**********

The moon hung in the cloudless night sky of Jerusalem as Haaris Toma waited in a windowless corner on the fourth floor of a darkened parking garage.

He was tall and powerfully built. He was the kind of man who looked like he’d been born with a thick chest and big arms, rather than having had to work for them. His hair was dark and the scar below his left eye left little doubt about his life of physical conflict.

He sometimes used the name Umar because he had an excellent cover legend set up under that name. Umar had a Jordanian passport, travel documents to be in Israel, a job back home, etc... Umar was a complete human being, except for the pesky fact about not being real.

Umar was only one of his legends. He also had full sets of identity papers for Jakob Ben Chaim, Yuri Pavelovich Akulov, and more.

His real name was Haaris Toma. Technically, he had patronymics in his name connecting him to his father and grandfather. He didn’t use them. He wasn’t proud of his family.

His weakling father had owned a shop in Jerusalem that sold tourist baubles, and the Israeli propaganda artists who went by the term “journalists” had frequently trotted him out like a trained dog for stories about how many Arabs living under the Jews actually liked it. It had been humiliating when he was growing up, and other boys had made fun of him, until he dealt with that with his fists.

Skill at fighting had only carried him so far. He could beat anyone who made fun of his father, but they did not respect him afterward. They simply mocked him behind his back.

It took him a year or two to discover the cure.

If he shouted Allah’s name when he was beating people, suddenly everyone looked at him differently. If he made a show of praying whenever the muezzin called, or when he was going to the mosques, or when he was carrying a Quran, suddenly his violence became more than violence. Suddenly, people around him saw it as a cause.

In Gaza, a young man who enjoyed the application of violence often came to the attention of Hamas. Someone who was more than just muscle — someone with skill, timing, and cunning — might go from there into the Al Qassam Brigade, the militant arm of Hamas.

Someone who could plan and see the big picture… that person might become a leader in the Al Qassam Brigade of Hamas.

That was Haaris Toma.

Now he stood at his ease in a parking garage. By throwing rocks at them, he had put out every light in the area so he could meet in total darkness. He had been surveying the meeting place for hours. His quarry was going to show up sooner or later. If he had read her right, it would be sooner. And when she did show up, Toma was going to change her life.

A brief prayer crossed his mind. As a boy, religion had been for show. But in Hamas, he had lived in the environment so long now he even prayed when there was no one to see it. He prayed to hurt his enemies.

He liked hurting people. Jews who made men like his father into pets, Arabs who reminded him of his father, Americans who acted like the whole situation here was entertainment — Toma liked sending bombers into markets where all of those people would die. Whether the bombers actually did end up in paradise was immaterial so long as the people who humiliated him suffered.

Much less satisfying was the act of shooting a few random archaeologists under the surface of the earth.

Much more satisfying — much more — was the act of turning a Division Director in the Shin Bet and making her betray her country and people. That was very satisfying indeed, and Toma looked forward to it.

It was enough to reinvigorate his faith.

Siobhan McLane saw nothing but black. A hood of thick black cloth covered her entire head. She was in a chair. She felt the hard, angular metal against her back, rump, legs, and arms. The latter two were fastened to the metal chair with zip ties. Her lips were held closed with duct tape.

She had cried liberally once they left her alone in here. The moisture of her tears had loosened the duct tape a little bit, which made it easier to breathe. Being tied up and left alone was so bizarre, her mind couldn’t even process it. She was afraid but more than just afraid. This was a foreign country, she didn’t understand her captor’s speech, and she knew somewhere in the depths of all this was Umar with his gun and his complete lack of restraint when it came to ending human life.

When her emotional state fell to its lowest point, she began to blame herself. If only she had just let go of that paper, none of this would have happened. It wasn’t that big a deal.

But it was smart work as well as an interesting idea, and Siobhan wanted to know if it was real. It had been fraught with everything that drew her to archaeology in the first place – ancient mystery, history-making possibilities, and a generous dollop of wonder. She had to know. She couldn’t just turn her back on the idea and give up.

And so she came to Israel and wound up in… something. It was obviously way beyond a crazed workplace shooter. In this part of the world, terrorism obviously suggested itself. Were they going to hold her hostage and demand the American government free some Al Qaeda captives from Guantanamo? It seemed crazy. She was nobody.

In the distance, she could hear the city sounds of Jerusalem, mostly honking and sirens, but there was very little other sensation to occupy her mind. The cords on her wrists and ankles hurt. Beads of sweat trickled down her face under the hood. The hood kept the air around her head from circulating or being refreshed.

No voices. No talking. Nothing nearby.

She felt the tears starting up again and made a conscious effort not to give in to her earlier panic.

Whatever had happened to her, she was clearly not under arrest. This was not what arrest looked like. Arrest meant a jail cell, paperwork, a mug shot, and more. Sometimes, the Israeli government came off looking pretty bad in the news but not so bad they would cover someone’s face in a hood and tie her to a chair.

Obviously, the people who accosted her at the hotel were not really officials of the Israeli government — Shin Bet, or whatever they said.

The only major events in her life today consisted of the findings at the dig, the murders, and the aftermath. She couldn’t see how making a centuries-old archaeological find resulted in people trying to kill her or kidnap her, but it was the only logical possibility. Other than the dig, nothing else had occurred that might have caused this. She didn’t know what the writing said, what it meant, or even what language it was in, but ever since she saw it, people with guns had been chasing her and had finally caught her.

Which made the worst part of her current circumstances even worse: they took her cell phone. That phone stored Siobhan’s picture of the ruined stone wall with the inscription. She pulled it out and snapped a photo when Reiter said it was a significant find. She wanted proof. Now, it held the last evidence of everything that had happened to her. The fact they had that phone sent fear pulsing throughout her body.

There was no way to tell how much time passed, but it felt like an hour since they brought her from the black suburban into this room. Her phone had a pin and a fingerprint code but she had no idea whether her captors knew more sophisticated ways of gaining access to a phone and deleting the picture. Somehow, she didn’t think ordinary measures would keep her picture safe for long.

Would they delete the file? Or would they keep it and use it for something? Was she crazy and paranoid and none of this had anything to do with the phone?

The sound of a door easing open interrupted her reverie.

**********

Maya Godwin arrived early. It was a habit of hers, anyway, but its importance ratcheted up by triple on a night like tonight. Her career hung on the line. Her hoped-for promotion to Director of the Shin Bet hung on the line. Possibly, her life itself hung on the line.

Beads of sweat made a few loose strands of her hair adhere to her forehead. Her heart pounded faster and harder than a boxer hitting a speed bag.

She had changed into black jeans and a black t-shirt for this, the better to be covert. Had she wanted to, she could have requisitioned a night camouflage utility uniform which would have been better for concealment than simple black clothing. However, it would also have raised questions about why she wanted it. Senior management officials didn’t go into the field. They had no need to lurk in the darkness.

Unless, of course, someone tried to blackmail them.

Complete blackness enshrouded the parking garage. Poorly illuminated failed to describe it; literally zero light relieved the heavy dark. In the interior corner where she’d been told to wait, it was almost impossible even to see.

An experienced field operative might have asked why. Why were there no lights? Who removed them?

But Godwin wasn’t a field operative. She was a manager. She just assumed poor maintenance explained why the lights were out.

To some extent, she came prepared for this. The tiny wireless cameras she carried were meant to capture infrared imagery, not visual light. Once she learned the meeting was after midnight, she bought the gear specifically for this purpose.

Thinking of the cameras, her mind wandered back down the path that led her here.

After receiving the fateful photograph in her apartment, Godwin waited long enough to get her stress under control and re-acquire the ability to act normal. Then she returned to her office and pulled the case files on a few previous attempts to blackmail Shin Bet agents. She had been both successful and unsuccessful. She read the files looking for tips about how to fight back against her unknown tormentor and became more and more nervous with every passing moment. She nervously licked her lips. She reached into her purse for lip balm. Only then had she realized someone slipped a note in there without her knowing.

The classic method for sending messages covertly when one or both parties might be under surveillance was a brush pass: wait for the operative to be in a situation where there was a large crowd, which made it natural for people to come into physical contact. Hands could meet and a note be exchanged. Or, as in this case, something could be slipped into someone’s purse.

Godwin discovered a slip of paper with a meeting time and place tucked into the side pocket of her purse. It directed her to this parking garage at four in the morning.

Her plan hinged on arriving at two in the morning instead of four. She meant to plant some covert surveillance around the meeting area and hopefully capture everything on tape. If she captured the blackmailer’s face and voice print in an electronic file, she could do a lot with it. Perhaps she could turn the tables and blackmail him. Or perhaps it would protect her enough to confess to her own organization. Yes, she had been stupid once in college, and Hamas had photographs of it, but she also had gained valuable intelligence data on an unknown operative.

Maybe.

Whatever she might gain from the video and audio surveillance, it would be better than the cards in her hand now. She had nothing.

She began the delicate process of mounting one of the tiny cameras on the side mirror of a vehicle near the meeting place. A couple zip ties secured it to the mirror. From there, the cameras were all motion and sound activated. They would come on when the meeting began. She had only to mount the device in such a way that it had an unobstructed view of the meeting place.

The gun barrel held to the back of her head changed everything.

Godwin froze in place.

A voice behind her said, “Maya Godwin, Director of the counter terror division at the Shin Bet. Such a pleasure to meet you.”

All her plans were gone. All her hope of somehow escaping the blackmail situation evaporated like dew under the Middle Eastern sun. Godwin feared she’d cry if she opened her mouth, so she said nothing.

First, the camera she so carefully mounted was plucked from its place on the car. Then, a hand thoroughly frisked her and plucked the 9mm Jericho 941 pistol out from the waistband of her black jeans.

“Were you planning to do me harm, Maya? I’m so disappointed.”

Still, she didn’t speak. She had been caught so easily it seemed like a game. Her grand plan to save her career and reputation had apparently been no sneakier than a child hiding behind the curtains. Godwin gritted her teeth together, determined not to lose whatever dignity remained to her by crying.

“Nothing to say? Would it help if I gave you some cocaine? It’s quite easy for us to get. It comes directly from Columbia. Very high quality.”

She couldn’t help herself. She swore violently, and then clamped her jaw shut before a sob could slip out.

The voice behind her laughed, and she felt the gun barrel hit her in the back of the head.

“So much anger! Here I am offering to reconnect you with the interests of your youth.”

Clenching her hands into fists, Maya managed not to reply.

“Very well, Maya. Enough chatter. Turn around.”

She did as instructed — more because she was curious than because she had been ordered to. In the dark, the shadowy face she could almost see meant nothing to her.

“You don’t recognize me? It’s not a surprise. The Shin Bet has only the one picture Cameron Dorn took with a telephoto lens from such a great distance. And given how things stand between you and Dorn, it would not surprise me if you never looked at it.”

She couldn’t help herself.

“Dorn… you’re Toma!”

“Exactly. And I am completely undeserving of the profanity you’ve directed at me so far tonight.”

Godwin didn’t respond.

“Maya, Maya, Maya. From the woman who saved me so much trouble by keeping Dorn out of my affairs, I really expected a friendlier reception. Especially given what I’m offering you.”

Again, she said nothing.

Toma shrugged. Maya could barely see the motion.

“It’s nothing to me. I care very little who the Director of the Shin Bet is, but it seems to matter to you, so I’m here to offer you that. Yes. I can make you Director. And I can do it by helping you prove you were right and Cameron Dorn was wrong. Are you sure you don’t want to talk to me? If you don’t, naturally, the pictures go to… well… everyone. I have that email set up on an automatic script, by the way. If I ever fail to check in, the pictures go out. So even if I didn’t take your pistol, you’d be very unwise to use it. Which will it be, Maya? Are we going to work together to deepen Dorn’s disgrace or will all of Israel learn about you and the nose candy?”

She fought her curiosity. She tried not to respond. However, when Toma turned his back as if to walk away, the words just slipped out.

“Fine! Fine. What do you want?”

“Two things, Maya. First, there is a dig near the City of David. I need the Shin Bet to close it off. No archaeologists go in, not even if they work there. No tourists either. No one.”

“Easy enough,” she replied. “If the Shin Bet knows anything, it’s how to keep people out of classified sites. What’s the other part?”

“Before you rose to your current rank, Maya, you started your career in the Shin Bet as a demolition expert. I have a project for you.”