The Prophet Conspiracy (5 page)

After being kidnapped, tied to a chair, robbed of her phone, hooded so she couldn’t see, and left alone, Siobhan’s senses tingled on hair triggers, waiting for the tiniest stimulation. She was keenly aware of any change in her environment. A slight creaking as a door opened made her wonder what her captors planned to do with her next.

Siobhan sucked in her breath. Were they going to torture her? Was she finally going to be shot and killed, as Umar had tried to do at the dig site? Would they ask her to use her thumb to open the phone?

Hands loosened the cord of her hood, and she felt it drawn up off her head. The sudden exposure to bright light burned her eyes, and she squeezed them shut. Gradually, she tried to adjust to opening them until she could see. When she could, she would have screamed except for the duct tape over her mouth.

Cameron Dorn stood in front of her.

Cameron Dorn, the tour guide.

Cameron Dorn, who she had expected to leave behind forever when her guided tour had come to an end.

Always before, Siobhan felt herself drawn to his strength and his knowledge. But after being kidnapped and held against her will, he grew twice as attractive. A friendly face in the midst of all that fear was like air conditioning after the desert.

His dark curly hair was still mostly covered by a camouflage baseball cap. He pressed his forefinger to his lips. In a whisper he asked, “Can you keep absolutely silent if I pull that tape off?”

She nodded vigorously. She didn’t even take time to think about the question; she wanted the tape off so badly.

However, when he yanked it off in one swift motion, she almost screamed with the pain, except the flat palm of his hand came down over her lips less than a second later.

“Quiet,” he whispered again, then took his palm off her mouth.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered back.

He pulled a frightening knife with a four-inch blade out from inside the waistband of his baggy pants. He spoke as he began cutting her zip ties.

“When I saw you in the hotel lobby, I knew those people you were with weren’t from the Shin Bet, so I followed you to see what was going on. I saw them bring you in here, handcuffed and hooded, so I figured you were in trouble.”

“How did you know they weren’t with the government?” Siobhan asked as the last zip tie snapped apart and she stood up from the chair.

Cam whispered, “Let’s have that conversation somewhere safer,” and turned towards the door.

That’s when one of the men from the SUV came in. Tall with crew cut hair, his chest and upper body made him look like a solid wall of muscle.

He swore when he saw Cameron there. His hair bristled as his face drew into a scowl. He moved his bulky right arm down to his waist with surprising speed, reaching for the grip of a pistol protruding from his waistband.

Siobhan’s mouth dropped open to scream. Her rescuer moved before she could get a sound out.

Cameron stepped to the man’s right. With his right hand, he grabbed the attacker’s wrist as he brought the gun up. It all happened so fast Siobhan couldn’t really tell what was going on, but it looked like martial arts from the movies. Cam must have done something to the attacker’s arm because he screamed and dropped the gun. Cameron punched him in the jaw, and the man collapsed to the ground.

Siobhan stared at Cameron as she whispered, “What did you just do?”

“They heard that scream for sure. Come on!” he replied, extending his hand for her. She grabbed it, and he pulled her out of the room into a hallway.

Siobhan followed Cameron down the hall towards what she hoped and assumed would be freedom. In the distance, Siobhan could hear footsteps and shouts of alarm. Her captors heard the struggle between Cameron and the man who’d come into her room and they were surely on their way to investigate.

Cameron quickly passed one door then reached for the handle of another. He threw it open and a blast of fresh air from the night outside hit Siobhan like having water thrown in her face.

Cam stepped outside, but she pulled back.

“Come on!” he whispered urgently, pulling on her arm.

“My cell phone. They’ve got it.”

“I’ll buy you a new one. Come on.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she whispered back. “There’s a picture on it. A picture of what I uncovered at the dig today. I think that’s why they’re chasing me. I need it if I’m ever going to figure out what’s going on.”

“No time. They’re coming,” Cameron replied.

“Please!” Siobhan begged. “I’ve got to know what happened to me today, and that picture is the only clue.”

Cameron stared at her. He looked desperately out into the night and at their chance for escape. Then he looked back at her.

“This is crazy,” he said as he came back inside.

Siobhan was about to shut the door behind him, but he said, “Leave it open. Hopefully, they’ll think we went out the back.”

He went back to the door they had passed. It was a closet.

“In here,” Cameron whispered.

Siobhan went in. He followed and pulled the door shut.

“Stay behind me. Don’t even breathe; we can’t afford the noise.”

Soon a clamor of running footsteps reached their ears, and they heard words shouted in a language Siobhan didn’t understand. The footsteps grew terrifyingly loud as they went right past the closet. There was more shouting, and then the sounds disappeared in the direction of the door she and Cam had left open.

After a second, Cameron opened the door a crack. Then he opened it wider and stepped out into the hallway.

“We’ve only got a minute or so. That trick won’t fool them for long,” he whispered.

With that, he strode purposefully down the hall. Siobhan followed him. She was about to open the first door after the room she’d been held captive in to see if her phone was in there, but Cameron stopped her.

“The noise of them coming after the scream came from further away. They probably had the phone in the room with them, if it actually is important like you think. Also, when they heard their guy scream, they came right away; they probably didn’t stop to close the door behind them.”

She followed him past another closed door and when they finally reached a third door — almost to the other side of the building — it was hanging wide open. Cameron went in, and Siobhan followed. Inside was a desk with a chair behind it and two guest chairs in front of it. Some motivational posters with the text in Hebrew but the pictures familiar from their American versions hung on the wall. A laptop computer sat in the center of the desk.

And Siobhan’s phone sat beside it, plugged into the USB port.

She darted over to it, yanked it off the cord, and quickly opened it with a thumbprint. She tapped and flicked, and then breathed an audible sigh of relief. She held the screen up for Cameron.

“My picture,” she whispered.

He glanced at it briefly. Then both their heads turned towards the door as they heard voices from back down the corridor.

“This time, we need to go,” he said, and Siobhan did not argue.

They slipped out the front door instead of the back and onto the streets of Jerusalem. Siobhan was shocked by how normal it seemed after what she had been through these past couple of hours. People were walking down the streets. A car went by. A cat scurried away as they walked near it. They hurried a couple blocks down the street.

Cameron nodded at an old Honda motorcycle wedged in between two sedans by the side of the street. He fiddled with a couple of things on it, swung his leg over it, pulled it out into the road, and then kicked the starter just once. The engine purred to life.

“Climb on the back,” he said. “Let’s get you to the authorities.”

Remembering her encounter with the Israeli soldiers earlier, Siobhan replied, “I’m not really big on the authorities right now. Is there somewhere else we can go?”

**********

Supervising the dig workers was becoming too frustrating to manage. Sorting through the endless stream of pottery shards and goat bones depressed him. The heat never let up and neither did the boredom.

Wilson Kendrick tried to keep his thoughts in productive places, but it was almost impossible. Pondering the subject of ultimate justice only made everything seem worse, but keeping his mind away from it proved too great a task. At this wretched dig, it was just too easy to feel like he was getting what was coming to him for the way he had dealt with Siobhan McLane’s paper.

When she enrolled in one or more of his classes each semester, he simply appreciated the feeling of validation that comes with students who really look up to a teacher. She possessed a kind of girl-next-door beauty; more than a few of his colleagues might have taken advantage of her obvious respect. Kendrick wasn’t that kind of man. In those days, he congratulated himself on his ethics… until her paper crossed his desk.

Anyone who came near the world of academia heard the phrase “publish or perish.” Back then, Kendrick had been no exception. Whatever Siobhan may have thought of him, his colleagues formed their own opinion. They believed him lazy, unintelligent, and occupying a professorial chair that should have gone to a better man. His prospects for advancement seemed dim indeed. The other members of the department didn’t take him seriously.

He had been passed over for a full professorship many times by then. And as the brass ring came around again, he knew what was coming. None of his research went anywhere. None of his grants received funding. He offered no new finds or contributions to the field in years. He was going to be passed over for a full professorship again.

And then an unknown grad student handed in the most incredibly-researched paper he had ever seen. She connected disparate facts about the Quran, secular history, and more, then injected them into an idea no one would have believed.

Did Muhammad really come to Jerusalem? What if he left evidence behind?

On its own, the theory would have been useless. However, Siobhan had done more than just put forward the idea; she had compiled a list of locations most likely to produce such evidence.

Kendrick remembered the moment well. He sat in the tiny cubicle that passed for his office. He daydreamed of the full professorship that would never come as he half-heartedly marked grades between B- and A+ on the spoiled children’s papers. He had been ready to attend an archaeology conference where he was scheduled to present another boring paper on a theory that would attract no interest.

His mouth fell open as he read the one paper that had changed everything. It was brilliant. The analysis of why each potential dig location could contain evidence was perfect. No one would believe it had come from someone so unknown.

If he presented them with a more likely explanation… they would believe it.

His face burned so hot when he stood at the podium and read Siobhan’s paper as his own. He cried when he wrote out the allegations of plagiarism against her for the Dean.

He planned to build his career on that paper. He felt like he needed a shower afterwards, but at the time, completely discrediting her seemed necessary. If she hung around the university while he was off getting famous based on her work, there would have been too much opportunity for her to cause trouble. He still hated the memory.

But it all proved worth it. Everyone loved the paper. He won his professorship. The University paid to send him to Israel to seek the funding for a dig.

And the lady from the Fund for Mideast Harmony drove up to his hotel in a black Mercedes sedan with red leather trim, took him out to a fine dinner, and offered him the kind of funding he’d never seen in his whole career.

Getting there had been nerve wracking. He danced along the edge of failure the whole time. He pitched the theory —
his
theory — to the Israeli government, but that went nowhere. He pitched it to a young official at the UN, who promised to show it to the head of the mission. But then he never heard from them again.

The call from the Fund for Middle East Harmony seemed like a miracle. Being in the Holy Land made it easy to believe in such things. He could not figure out how they could possibly have heard of him or have been aware he was in Jerusalem seeking funding for a dig. They claimed they heard of his presentation at the conference, but it was hard to believe. He had never even heard of them until they called his cell phone out of the blue.

The ride around Jerusalem in the luxury car had been wonderful. The wining and dining exceeded his wildest dreams. And the exorbitant financial offer impressed him so much he set aside his better judgment about a dig location.

Now, he was stuck digging in a place where nothing was likely to be found — at least, nothing remotely related to his —
his!
— theory. The cold shadow of that same failure which had driven him to steal the idea now loomed larger than ever.

Kendrick didn’t know what it would take to salvage this situation but of one thing he was sure: whatever he had to do to turn this into a success, he would do it.