The Temple Mount Code (21 page)

What did any of this have to do with Thomas Lourds?

As she touched the figure of Iblis, she thought of where she’d last seen a figurine like this. Lev Strauss had had one at his flat in Jerusalem. Only it had been his grandmother’s flat at the time. The Iblis had been one of his first pieces.

Curious, Alice lifted the figurine and gazed at the bottom. There, on a piece of masking tape worn and faded with time, was the legend IBLIS, and it looked like Lev’s strong, sure hand. She replaced the figurine and went to one of the computers on a desk. She didn’t dare use her personal notebook computer because Klaus had loaded it with spy programs.

The computers in here had been left up and running. She went to the Internet and Googled Lev Strauss’s name. She saw his handsome face, a touch of gray in his hair and beard now, and read the headlines that declared he’d been killed in a tragic terrorist attack on July 28.

Tears filled her eyes as she remembered the beautiful young man he’d been. For a time, after she and Thomas had parted ways, Lev had kept her company. She’d known he cared for her, but she was unable to return his interest. Every time she’d thought of him, she’d thought of Thomas.

In the end, not only had Alice lost Thomas to his treasure hunt for the Library of Alexandria, but she had lost a good friend, too. Now she’d lost him forever. How had she missed this story?

She knew the answer at once. Klaus kept her away from the world for the most part. She wiped the tears from her face. For just a moment, a piece of that drugged night of wanton sex surfaced in her mind.

Is Lev in Jerusalem?

She was certain that Klaus had asked her that.

And now Lev was dead, with his things somehow in her husband’s control.

Desperate, she returned to the computer. If Klaus was going after Thomas next, he needed to be warned.

27

Central Bus Station

Jaffa Road

Jerusalem, the State of Israel

August 5, 2011

Walking like a man who belonged there, trying to ignore the little voice in the back of his mind that insisted he was stepping into a trap, Lourds entered the modern eight-story building that had replaced the old bus station in 2001. The building had five floors of office space above the three main levels and two levels of underground parking.

The new bus station also had a shopping concourse and a food court that had stirred up considerable strife among the Haredi community. Rabbis of the superconservative Orthodox Judaism had protested vehemently against adding more than coffee shops and magazine racks, the way things had been in the past.

Lourds missed the old bus station as well. He preferred it to the gleaming monstrosity that sprawled out around him. Getting big and modern had taken a lot of character out of the neighborhood. People had once been able to find small places and corners to talk over coffee and the newspaper, and even felt like they had some privacy. Now the food court was in plain sight, and everything felt hurried.

He took the bus locker key from his pocket. He’d retrieved it from inside an old prosthesis Lev kept in his closet as a hiding place. After all, who would think to look there?

Earlier that morning, Lourds had slipped into Lev’s building through the back way, awakened Mrs. Hirsch, and listened to her complain about her bad hip the way she always had, even though it hadn’t appeared to get any worse since the last time he’d seen her. She’d opened Lev’s door with her spare key. Someone had to water the plants when Lev was gone. Mrs. Hirsch wasn’t moving, so she’d been a good temporary flat sitter. They had consoled each other briefly over Lev’s death, then Lourds had headed to the bus station.

At the locker area, aware that he was being watched by closed-circuit television, Lourds took note of the lockers and the way the numbers ran. The IDs held Hebrew and English markings.

He found B-34 with ease. He put the key into the lock and turned it, almost expecting someone to jump out of the small square space and shoot him. Relief filled him when he saw only a bound notebook inside.

Picking it up, he looked around to see if anyone was taking undue interest in him. Satisfied that he was safe for the moment, he walked out of the bus terminal. He hadn’t slept a wink all night, and now – with adrenaline fueled by the discovery of the notebook – he was more awake than ever.

Dear Thomas,

If you’re reading this, something unseemly must have happened to me. If I am captured, hurry and come save me because the people looking for Mohammad’s Koran (more on that in a moment) are desperate to find it and bloodthirsty as well.

If I am dead – well, i hope it was quick. You know how I dislike pain.

Tears welled in Lourds’s eyes as he read the last, but he chuckled as well. That was Lev, always a jokester. But the message reminded Lourds that he could be in danger as well.

He glanced around Jaffa Road as he sat in a coffee shop down the street from the bus station. He didn’t see anyone watching him, and he felt quite certain that if anyone had been watching, they would have grabbed him when they saw he had Lev’s book.

He resumed reading.

I’m not going to go into the whole story at this moment, but it’s a great one, trust me on that. Rather, I’m asking you to try to find what I haven’t been able to yet. Or quite possibly to find what I found that got me killed.

I found a most wondrous book in a little shop in Cairo. I know you and I’ve been there together before, and probably either hungover or chasing women. Perhaps that’s why we never found this book before, or perhaps the book didn’t arrive till after we had gone.

I truly feel that I was fated to find this book and discover the truth of the legend in its pages. Even though i have had to call on you for help.

I was puzzled by the book because it was written in a dialect of Arabic that looked familiar, but that I couldn’t quite decipher. Better minds than mine are obviously required.

So I thought of you. Not as a better mind, but as someone who might know one.

All kidding aside, as I’m sure I’m in dire jeopardy or dead at this moment and you’re probably worried or grieving –

‘If you only knew how much, old friend.’ Lourds blinked to clear his eyes and focus on the page.

– I’ll get to the problem straightaway.

The author of this book claims to know where Mohammad’s personal Koran, written by him as God spoke it, is located. There’s also talk of a scroll that foretells the future of the Muslim people. And of the need for all Muslims to join and raise a great Jihad that will strike down all who oppose them.

Pretty heavy stuff. Apocalyptic, even. It even sounds comic bookish, but maybe that’s because we tend to trivialize that which will destroy us. Foolishness or a survival mechanism? I don’t know. However, the problems of a unified Middle East cannot be overlooked.

Mohammad’s Koran promises a way to provide that unification of the different Muslim faiths by delivering the true word of the faith. The scroll will describe a way for it to be done, though all these centuries later I have to wonder about that.

I translated that much of the book, but the location of the Koran and scroll evades me. I’m frustrated and stuck, and if anyone can think of something I haven’t, it’s you.

I’ve left you a message on the bottom of the ‘gift of the magi’ you gave me as a Christmas present one year. Your idea of a joke, which was pretty lame at the time, but I kept it anyway. I also hollowed out a section of it to keep messages in. Don’t burn it!

I didn’t want these two messages (the one in the mikveh you thought we’d never use!) to fall into the wrong hands at the same time.

Don’t fail me, Thomas. I know you can do this, and it pains me to ask.

Love

Lev

The Magi’s gift had been a candelabrum, given at Christmas, but in celebration of Hanukkah. It was intended as a joke, a holiday present wrapped in the most garish wrapping paper Lourds could find – a naughty Santa showing his north pole to a group of young
Penthouse
-worthy women. The candelabrum was an artifact Lourds had received from one of the projects he’d worked on, not worth much more than sentimental value, but he knew Lev would appreciate it.

Evidently Lev had also worried that Lourds might have forgotten what it was, which was why he’d offered the ‘burn’ clue.

The thing that troubled Lourds most was that the candelabrum was among the artifacts missing from Lev’s flat. He closed the book and placed it in his backpack.

Covert Operations

Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations (Mossad)

Tel Aviv, the State of Israel

August 6, 2011

Sarah Shavit picked up the ringing phone and tried to organize her thoughts in the space of a drawn breath. That was usually all the time she had to move from case to case. She placed the agent’s identity number as one of the team currently riding Professor Lourds’s coattails in Jerusalem.

‘Our charge has evidently read whatever was written in the notebook he recovered from the bus station.’

Sarah opened the Lev Strauss file on her computer and made a note. She also made a note on Miriam Abata’s file to check on her. The young woman was going through her psych eval this morning. Sarah wanted to handle the exit interview personally.

‘What is he doing now?’

‘Nothing. Sitting in a coffee shop. Do you want us to bring him in?’

Sarah thought about it, then decided against that. The Jerusalem police had already taken a run at Professor Lourds and come up empty. ‘No. Stay on him. If he knew something, he would be up and moving. This isn’t a man who sits around waiting for grass to grow. He’s drawn by his own passions. Give him rope and give him time. See if he can produce anything if he’s left on a long leash.’

‘Understood. But perhaps our people would know more about whatever’s in that journal than he does.’

‘If this weren’t that man, if this weren’t tied to antiquity, and if the matter weren’t so important, I’d agree with you. But it is that man and it’s tied to a history that we’ve all but lost, and this is something that can potentially change the world as we know it. You have your parameters.’

‘As you wish. It’s time for a stress-free assignment anyway.’

The man’s cockiness irritated Sarah. She made a note in his personal folder. ‘I’d like to point out that the last agent assigned to this task left two dead men in her wake. Don’t be too stress-free.’ She broke the connection.

Acid burned in her stomach. Over the years, she’d learned to pay attention to that feeling. It was a manifestation of some sixth sense that let her know when a mission was about to turn critical in the worst ways.

She felt like she was on fire now. The pieces for this mission were scattered all over the board. Even Melman only had passing knowledge of what it was they were hunting, and no one knew if it truly existed.

Her secretary buzzed for her attention.

‘Yes, Ben.’

‘Agent Abata is about to be released from psych.’

‘Thank you.’ Sarah closed her files and went down to talk to her young charge. She hadn’t been much older than Miriam Abata when she’d killed her first person, a man she’d been hopelessly in love with at the time. She thought she might have a unique perspective on the situation and repercussions and surviving the trauma that the psychologist couldn’t deliver.

David Citadel Hotel

King David Street

Jerusalem, the State of Israel

August 6, 2011

The ringing phone dragged Lourds out of a deep sleep. Groggily, he brushed aside the pillow he’d used to block the light that even the drapes couldn’t adequately filter. He had a headache and his face hurt.

‘Hello.’

The voice at the other end of the connection brought him to full wakefulness quickly. ‘Thomas?’

‘Alice?’ Not believing he was hearing her voice after so many years, Lourds sat up.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. Just surprised to hear from you. You’re not the last person I expected to hear from, but you would have been near the top of the list.’

She laughed and the sound was so pleasant it wiped away a decade and placed him at picnics and dig sites he’d gone to while at university in one country or another.

‘I can’t believe you recognized my voice so easily.’

‘I will never forget your voice, my dear.’ After losing Lev so suddenly and so brutally, being contacted by someone else from his past buoyed Lourds up for a moment. Then the probability of both things happening out of the blue brought him crashing back down. If he was having that kind of luck, it was time to go to Monte Carlo. ‘How’d you get this number?’

‘It wasn’t easy. I managed to get hold of one of the film crews still in the mountains, then asked them to let me speak to Professor Hu. They did. I explained to him that I needed to speak to you on a matter of some importance and he helped me. Terribly nice man.’

‘David’s one of the good ones. So he gave you my number?’

‘Yes. Thomas, I’m calling you about Lev.’

Lourds stood and paced. ‘I’d only gotten the news yesterday.’